Planet Interactive Fiction

I have finished the game. You can read all my entries in order here.

I should preface a little, for the benefit of those who normally don’t read this blog and are here just for this game: this isn’t really a “review blog”, even though you can interpret what I write that way. I’m trying to understand the full span of adventure games, and extract what knowledge I can and place it in historical context. That means some elements of a game may be bad choices, but serve a purpose, or at the very least be “good enough” in a particular setting.

This game was extremely important for Italy, and it had wide enough commercial spread it was some people’s first adventure, or even first computer game of any kind. In this interview with the author from only two weeks ago, in addition to the live comments, there’s this top comment that attests to lasting influence:

Mi sono appassionato alla programmazione proprio grazie ad Avventura nel Castello che giocavo rigorosamente al buio con i miei cugini su un M19. Oggi è il mio lavoro e la mia passione! GRAZIE

I got into my passion for programming specifically because of Avventura nel Castello, which I used to play only in the dark with my cousins using a M19. Today it is both my job and my passion. Thank you!

(M19 refers to the Olivetti M19; Olivetti was one of the big local computer manufacturers; they had started out in typewriters.)

If the game is treated as a place to visit (where you don’t necessarily care about winning) it manages a strong atmosphere; the vast majority of the castle can be reached without solving puzzles, and any new areas are small. So I could see someone playing the game off and on over years, maybe getting to a new place just by sheer persistence, meaning my playthrough is not representative of how people responded at the time.

So while I’m going to be a little hard on this, I’m doing it out of love, but also with the presumption it should be a game played from start to finish without large pauses in the middle.

Source.

Last time I was hopeful that perhaps I could turn things around and not rely on poking at hints every other puzzle.

cough

No, sorry. Things got even worse. There was one nifty trick remaining, but the rest of the puzzles were mean in some aspect. (One of the mean parts was also wonderfully audacious in its cruelty, but let’s just see it in context.)

Let’s get a reasonable part out of the way first — relatively speaking, you have to refer to a thing in the room description again:

You’re in a short room crammed with hunting and war trophies. Fixed to the walls are stuffed animal head of all kinds, weapons, shields, even an entire suit of armour that probably belonged to a rival clan chief killed in battle by the Laird himself.

What are you going to do? EXAMINE ARMOR

It is the armour of Sir Crawford, the valiant warrior wizard who, for many years, held MacCallum IV in check with his prowess and his fearsome arts. The armour still maintains a haughty bearing, and even seems to stare at you, leaning on the sword.

You’re in the trophy room.

What are you going to do? TAKE SWORD

Done!

“Reasonable” is relatively speaking. This is still referring to a “second-order” object — that is, it’s an object that gets referred to in the description of an object, and you have the realize you can try to go ahead and take it. I had this in my head because with some different suits of armor (back in the main hall of the castle) I killed myself trying to grab a pike:

You’re in a large hallway, the floor of which bears the signs of the passage of countless generations. A row of armour is lined up along the wall, each holding a long pike.
Towards the centre of the hallway, there appears to have once been a door, now bricked up.

What are you going to do? TAKE PIKE

You take the pike and pull it towards you, but the armour doesn’t seem to want to let it go. Should you pull it a wee bit harder ? YES
With a firm tug, you finally manage to get hold of the pike.

The armour, unbalanced, wobbles slightly……
and as you step back with the tip of the pike gripped in your hands, the armour falls with all its weight onto the other end of the weapon, piercing you through and through.
This is how it was used in battle!

So I was at least somewhat prepared to grab the sword. The sword is described as having a “spell” on its blade. You can try to read the spell and the game mysteriously asks if you mean to read it out loud.

What are you going to do? READ SPELL

Should you say it out loud? YES

Nothing is happening.

Back down past the ogre that the cat ate last time there are two things: a dwarf holding a diamond, and a chest. (Both locations are marked on the map below.)

The chest is where the spell goes, and yes, it’s very arbitrary:

What are you going to do? OPEN CHEST

The ghost of Malcolm’s faithful squire, Edgar MacDouglas, rises to defend the treasure of his ancient Laird from the foreign defiler.

You’re in the treasure chamber.
I can see a heavy chest.
I can see a ghost.

Yes, if you go back and look at the sword, and specifically the armor, it seems to be someone who defined the Laird family of the castle, so it makes some sense after the fact that the spell on the sword would help oppose a spirit who identifies with the Lairds. It’s still very after-the-fact reasoning, and made worse by an extra obstacle: when you try to read the spell out loud voice is cracked.

Your throat is dry with fear…
You can’t speak…
The ghost takes advantage of this to attack you.

I very briefly mentioned last time some honey milk I fed to a cat; the cat is takeable without giving over the milk. I had unknowingly soft-locked the game. The milk is supposed to be saved so you can use it on yourself, although you have only one turn, the one immediately before stating the spell.

What are you going to do? DRINK MILK

Lip-lickingly delicious!

What are you going to do? READ SPELL

Should you say it out loud? YES

With a long, desperate wail, the ghost returns to the nothingness from which it came.

The honey is sort of a hint about throat control, but this puzzle was, at the very least, kind of mean. The chest, ghost-free, yields up a hunting horn.

It is decorated with hunting scenes that wrap around in a spiral from its mouth. Galloping riders are seen to chase their prey, while large birds circle overhead.

The one after is as well:

You are in the wood store, where dry branches and logs of various sizes are stacked in perfect order.
I can see a wee dwarf with a big diamond.

What are you going to do? EXAMINE DWARF

He’s quite small.

What are you going to do? EXAMINE DIAMOND

The more you observe the wonderful gemstone, the more you become overwhelmed by an unbridled desire to possess it.

You do need the diamond, but can’t steal it away or defeat the dwarf in combat or anything like that. You’re just supposed to GREET (or in Italian, SALUTA) it:

The dwarf is so happy to finally meet such a courteous person that he simply gives you the diamond.

This is one of those puzzles if you run 20 people through, someone is bound to get it just by trying naturally, but it is hard to work out what the natural thought process for a solution might otherwise be.

The game then rather cheekily warns you to be careful with the newly-acquired diamond:

It’s magnificent: the light reflected and refracted by its a thousand perfect facets creates an infinite play of colour. You are fascinated by it, and would observe it for hours and hours. I think it’s of inestimable value, and you should treat it with utmost care.

However, remember: this is not a treasure hunt! We don’t care about treasures. We care about getting out of the castle. Somehow (…magic?…) the bludgeon from down the basement (the one that required using a bone to get) is able to smash the diamond, and we can then get a key.

On the first blow of the bludgeon, the diamond shatters into a thousand pieces.

Conceptually, I see the point here: the narrator has been a little bit off-kilter since the very first puzzle, so the very strong suggestion to treat the diamond with utmost care can be thought of as giving instructions to do the opposite. That doesn’t stop the puzzle from being amazingly cruel.

The key and the horn are the two items needed to escape. We need to head back to the maze, the one I mentioned last time led to nowhere when I mapped it out, but we got an explicit hint I hadn’t applied yet:

‘Only by the good use of sense will you find your way out from the labyrinth’

This is a puzzle we’ve seen before but somehow the phrasing threw me off here. It works both in Italian and in English, and by making that statement, I’ve given the hint that wordplay is involved.

‘Only by the good use of sense will you find your way out from the labyrinth’

We’re not using “our senses” (as I first read it) we are using the word “sense”, giving the sequence south, east, north, south, east. (Without having read the hint first, this just returns the player to the entrance.)

In Italian, the word is SENNO, which might seem like it breaks, but the Italian word for “west” is “ouest”! So S, E, N, N, O is the solution in that version of the game.

What are you going to do? E

You’re in the large secret room, under the castle tower. A current of icy air
hisses through invisible cracks.
I can see a lever.
I can see a stopped old pendulum clock.

I imagine for people who didn’t ping at the walkthrough for items this puzzle was completely stumped; here, I was just mostly stumped. The key is not the kind of key to unlock things, but the kind of key to wind things. You can WIND the clock, causing it to start ticking. It was close to but not right at midnight, and when it reaches midnight:

A stone block shifts, revealing a spiral staircase.

This leads you to the roof, and once again, you have to make arbitrary use of a magic item.

You’re at the top of the tower, where your gaze sweeps above the fog covering the peatland, and towards the distant mountains.
I can see a flag in tatters.

What are you going to do? TAKE FLAG

The old flagpole evades your grip… and suddenly gives way, making you lose your balance. You fall down onto the parade ground.

(Or you can try fiddling with the flag, but that’s a red herring, it kills you.)

You have to use the horn. Now, we hit the one part where the English version is much harder than the Italian version. You would think to BLOW HORN, but no, that verb is not understood. I was completely baffled and checked the required verb in Italian, which is SUONA, which I’d still translate (in the context of using the word on a horn in English) to “BLOW”. But they (Adam Bishop, the translator) translated it to SOUND, like SOUND HORN. This is the first time I’ve had that as a required verb in an adventure game, and it may be the only time I ever see it. Yes, it technically is grammatical, but more along the lines of terminology from a prior century.

What are you going to do? SOUND HORN

The ancient horn sounds across the moor, echoing off the distant mountains. A black dot rises from the mountains and grows larger as it approaches. Quickly it reaches the tower: it’s a large golden eagle that lurches towards you with its claws extended.

What are you going to do?

This is a fake-out; you can’t type anything before being interrupted. Oh also, you needed the parachute here, otherwise you die; theoretically an easy puzzle to resolve after dying once, but someone might have dumped their parachute back in the first room where it would be inaccessible and have to restart the whole game.

You have no chance:
The eagle grabs you, quickly lifting you up to a great height.

The eagle flies for a long time while the landscape races beneath you… … … … … … … … … … … … . .. … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …Loch Ness appears in the distance… … … … … … … … … … … … … . .. … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …Suddenly, the eagle lets go of you.

You gently descend in the dying daylight. Below you are the dark waters of Loch Ness. The wind pushes you towards the centre of the lake. By chance, you land on a small outcrop of rock.
While you fold away your parachute, you look around:

You’re alone and abandoned on a black rock peaking above the icy waters. Let me correct myself, you are not alone: the Loch Ness Monster (Nessie among friends) is there to keep you company.

The Loch Ness Monster is not trying to be your friend.

Depiction of the final area via Oldgamesitalia.

Arbitrary magic is your friend again. This is solvable in a “well, there’s nothing else I can do” sense but not in a logical sense.

The ancient horn sounds across the moor, echoing off the distant mountains. A black dot rises from the mountains and grows larger as it approaches. Quickly it reaches the rock: it’s a helicopter from the Royal Archaeological Service, which throws you down a rescue ladder. You climb the ladder as the monster’s jaws snap shut inches below you.

You are informed the horn is Malcolm the Fourth’s thought to be worth “a million pounds or more”, but upon landing we get charged with crimes.

At least the game compensates you with what I think is the best title for winning a game I’ve ever heard.

Anyhow, console yourself: you have finally earned the 1000 points that give you the right to boast the coveted title of:

THE DEVIL’S LIEUTENANT!!!

Look: I loved original Adventure as a child, but I never came close to beating it. I was able to explore most of it — even the part past the plant, which was one of the easier puzzles — and while I didn’t solve the golden eggs puzzle until I was a grown adult (so had to sacrifice treasure at the troll) I still had a grand time and have many core memories exploring the dense caverns. Similarly, while I’m sure someone will chime in they somehow solved this game without help, I’m guessing a lot of the people this game influenced treated Castle Adventure as a destination to explore, with the fact there were unplumbed secrets making something of a bonus.

And certainly: the text has a great sense of attitude, both in the Italian original and the relatively literal translation. The deaths were amusing and while the softlocks were terrible they weren’t overwhelming either; you also don’t have to bother with a light timer like so many Adventure clones felt obligated to include.

So while I only recommend this for the historically curious (English version here) I’m glad that it exists.

(Continued from my previous post, please read that one first before this one.)

Two of my biggest weaknesses struck me since last time: magical effects that require testing in arbitrary locations, and missing room exits.

Ground floor, from Oldgamesitalia. Includes some new rooms which I’ll be talking about.

Before getting to that, let me talk about my waste of time. Specifically, I decided to try mapping the maze, which I last time described as absolutely classical, but no:

What are you going to do? DROP LUTE

Paths of a twisted gravity snake away in front and behind.

You are in the maze.

If you drop an item for mapping purposes, it goes away to the start of the maze. The start of the maze is the only room that has a unique room description. This means, for many purposes, the maze would be unmappable, but I decided to at least test the exits of all four directions from the start, just to see if there was an immediate route back that could be used to distinguish some of the maze rooms from each other. Here’s a map part-way through the process:

Notice I have two rooms marked in blue; those two were “indistinguishable” based on the information I had at that moment; going north in both cases leads back to the entrance, and I couldn’t tell if they were two separate rooms or both the same room. I also had a few “second step” rooms tossed in there; while I didn’t have a “return exit” for going west from the entrance, I knew going north and then east would return to the entrance, so I wanted to put that information in.

I might have eventually still given up, except I had a breakthrough later here:

I found that going east and then heading south from the room to the west of the entrance would return back to the entrance. It occurred to me the exact same effect could happen with a loop — that is, a room exit that just goes back to the room itself — so I tried assuming it was a loop, and testing the loop once, twice, three times, and four times; that mean that the probably (nothing here is guaranteed) that I was in fact simply looping back to the same room over and over.

The loops were enough for me to start telling the rooms apart, and filling in the rest of the maze, consolidating rooms I knew to be the same.

Now, the grand effect of this was to find a maze with nothing! So either I did something wrong or there’s a gimmick later; I think I’ve found the clue for the gimmick, and it is the sort of thing that doesn’t work until you know about it. I’ll come back to it later. That means this was all likely a “peek behind the programmer curtain” moment; we weren’t supposed to have been able to map this at all, and the maze without the gimmick wasn’t designed with a solution in mind. (Another related moment happened back when we were playing Ferret; we had used the bolt from a weapon dropping as a room marker for mapping purposes, and discovered there was only one “room”. This was a bug because the desert was supposed to swallow up everything dropped. The single room was simply a mechanic to allow a giant desert without having to implement one, so the system could re-use the same place and change the player’s “coordinate”.)

So, with the maze being useless, I plodded around back in the castle proper, and finally poked at some hints, as I was getting especially frustrated at the basement section, which seemed unresponsive to anything I tried.

You are in the castle dungeon, once called ‘The Tomb’. The floor is covered in skeletons.
I can see a hole on the wall.

Trying to EXAMINE SKELETONS gets “It is our common fate. But can’t you think of something happier?” and SEARCH SKELETONS gets “He who seeks finds.” (The latter seems to be standard for typing SEARCH anywhere.) So I assumed I was supposed to be bringing in an outside item, but no: you’re supposed to pick up a bone even though it isn’t described in the room. (The narrator promised it wouldn’t have any more undescribed objects! Naughty!)

With the bone in you can use it to push the button in the hole without having it slice your hand off.

What are you going to do? INSERT BONE

A blade comes down sharply, slicing the bone cleanly in two. Lucky it wasn’t your arm!
A crack slowly widens…..

This leads over to another room with a “studded bludgeon” and then an exit back to the ground floor of the castle. I have yet to put the bludgeon to any use.

While I was mid-way through typing this post out Matt W. managed to figure out the puzzle in the comments, and he had an extra comment worth highlighting:

I remember when Marco Innocenti submitted the first Andromeda game to the IFComp there was a bit of discussion about how the Italian IF scene tended more toward elaborate descriptions and intuitive leaps in the puzzles than the English-speaking parser scene, which led to some agita when some players got stuck early. The unmentioned parachute reminded me of that, though it’s very fairly clued by the try-and-die and doesn’t waste any of your time since it’s the first move.

After some more struggle (and let’s be honest, some loss of trust in the game after the bone puzzle) I decided to peek at what to do next. This was a little fairer, as I missed examining something:

What are you going to do? LOOK

You are in a long room with a high-arched ceiling supported by two rows of tall columns. The columns, though eroded by time, still bear the signs of patient workmanship by skilled masons. In the centre of the room, a shorter stone pillar rests on a low pedestal.

I had already tried to examine the columns with no luck, and mentally I thought that meant I covered the “shorter stone pillar”, but no, that thing is a PILLAR, not a COLUMN.

What are you going to do? EXAMINE PILLAR

On the capital of the pillar is an engraving, bearing, in silvery metallic letters, half of a powerful magical word: ‘ID’

Fair enough. The game being explicit about it being half a word means it immediately occurred to me the other half was the page from the library I had already discovered (“IOT”, making the word either “IOTID” or “IDIOT”). In case you’re curious, the same joke happens in Italian, as “idiota” is the word for “idiot” so the magic fragments are “id” and “iota”. Either way, you put them together backwards:

What are you going to do? IOTID

The sound of the magic word echoes among the ancient vaults…
An entire wall of shelves rotates on itself. I glimpse a large room.

You’re in the library.
I can see a book on the lectern.

This opens up a throne room.

You’re in the ancient throne room, where the Laird used to administer justice and receive subjects. At the sides of the room are two rows of niches where the Laird’s personal guards stood. The imposing wooden throne is finely crafted, down to the smallest details. In front of the throne is a walled-up door, which must have once been the main entrance from the hallway.

The throne has an uncomfortable cushion, where you can discovered a wooden box underneath. You can find a scroll in a language you can’t read in the box, but take it back to the library and the book, which turns out to be a Gaelic dictionary, and TRANSLATE SCROLL WITH BOOK.

What are you going to do? READ BOOK

It’s a dictionary of ancient Gaelic.

What are you going to do? TRANSLATE SCROLL WITH BOOK

It says:
‘Only by the good use of sense will you find your way out from the labyrinth’

I had incidentally tried to do LISTEN while in the maze already (there’s a sound of chains, but it always comes off the same — at least prior to reading this clue). I still intend to go back there, but I haven’t made it yet as I got distracted by another magical word.

You are in the war room, where all the most serious and important decisions were made. In terms of furniture, there’s a round table surrounded by eight chairs.

What are you going to do? EXAMINE TABLE

A wise maxim is engraved on the edge of the table: ‘Not all swords wound with their blades’

(Not this bit — I don’t actually know what it goes to, but since it’s right next to the Throne Room I thought I’d mention it now.)

No, it turns out — again poking at hints — you can take the bagpipes from the music room over to the book with human skin, and play the bagpipes in order to open the book. I have no idea why you’d do this. (The Italian intuitive solution thing again, I guess?)

You are in the Alchemist’s cell. All around are crucibles, pestles, copper stills and bizarre glass containers of extremely contorted shapes. On the shelves are many heavy tomes of magic, alchemy and spells. In the centre of the room is a small table that rests on three legs shaped like the paws of some monstrous animal. On the table is a single heavy volume bound in black leather:

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”

What are you going to do? PLAY BAGPIPES

The volume opens to a page carrying a finely decorated bookmark.

The page gives us the magic word BIGMEOW.

You may recall I already found a cat (who I was able to pick up via the use of milk). BIGMEOW causes the cat to get huge and to eat us.

The ASCII art is also in the original.

So hungry cat needs a target, eh? Well, there’s one more place that I also extracted via hints. I had thought (after testing twice) that the spiral staircases leading to ramparts only led up — all four have the same room description, too — but the one in the southeast, and only in the southeast, also goes down.

What are you going to do? D

You are in a room with a spiral staircase.

What are you going to do? D

You’re in a room with a spiral staircase, and a narrow passageway to the north.

What are you going to do? N

You’re walking along a large tunnel carved into the rock that forms the
foundations of the castle.
I can see a ferocious ogre with sharp fangs.

What are you going to do? BIGMEOW

The cat grows until it becomes huge………….
It watches you carefully………….
observe the ogre carefully……….
The cat devours the ogre and dies of indigestion.

Again, not terribly fair, but I’m still taking this moment to do a “reset” since I’m a little more than halfway through the game (based on the score) and try to avoid hints for a bit longer. Some of the issue is simply vibing with the unwritten rules (like how the “pillar” is part of the main room description paragraph but still important, or the bone can be there and not mentioned even when you try to look, or the extra-down-exit trick, or the arbitrary bagpipe location) so perhaps the back end of this will go a little smoother than the front half.

No guarantees, though!

Fair Warning: this article contains plot spoilers for Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge and The Curse of Monkey Island. No puzzle spoilers, however…

The ending of 1991’s Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge seems as shockingly definitive in its finality as that of the infamous last episode of the classic television series St. Elsewhere. Just as the lovable wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood is about to finally dispatch his arch-nemesis, the zombie pirate LeChuck, the latter tears off his mask to reveal that he is in reality Guybrush’s older brother, looking a trifle peeved but hardly evil or undead. Guybrush, it seems, is just an ordinary suburban kid who has wandered away from his family to play make-believe inside a storage room at Big Whoop Amusement Park, LeChuck the family member who has been dispatched to find him. An irate janitor appears on the scene: “Hey, kids! You’re not supposed to be in here!” And so the brothers make their way out to rejoin their worried parents, and another set of Middle American lives goes on.

Or do they? If you sit through the entirety of the end credits, you will eventually see a short scene featuring the fetching and spirited Elaine, Guybrush’s stalwart ally and more equivocal love interest, looking rather confused back in the good old piratey Caribbean. ‘I wonder what’s keeping Guybrush?” she muses. “I hope LeChuck hasn’t cast some horrible SPELL over him or anything.” Clearly, someone at LucasArts anticipated that a day might just come when they would want to make a third game.

Nevertheless, for a long time, LucasArts really did seem disposed to let the shocking ending stand. Gilbert himself soon left the company to found Humongous Entertainment, where he would use the SCUMM graphic-adventure engine he had helped to invent to make educational games for youngsters, even as LucasArts would continue to evolve the same technology to make more adventure games of their own. None of them, however, was called Monkey Island for the next four years, not even after the first two games to bear that name became icons of their genre.

Still, it is a law of the games industry that sequels to hit games will out, sooner or later and one way or another. In late 1995, LucasArts’s management decided to make a third Monkey Island at last. Why they chose to do so at this particular juncture isn’t entirely clear. Perhaps they could already sense an incipient softening of the adventure market — a downturn that would become all too obvious over the next eighteen months or so — and wanted the security of such an established name as this one if they were to invest big bucks in another adventure project. Or perhaps they just thought they had waited long enough.

Larry Ahern and Jonathan Ackley.

Whatever their reasoning in beginning the project, they chose for the gnarly task of succeeding Ron Gilbert an in-house artist and a programmer, a pair of good friends who had been employed at LucasArts for years and were itching to move into a design role. Larry Ahern had been hired to help draw Monkey Island 2 and had gone on to work on most of LucasArts’s adventure games since, while Jonathan Ackley had programmed large parts of Day of the Tentacle and The Dig. Knowing of their design aspirations, management came to them one day to ask if they’d like to become co-leads on a prospective Monkey Island 3. It was an extraordinary amount of faith to place in such unproven hands, but it would not prove to have been misplaced.

“We were too green to suggest anything else [than Monkey Island 3], especially an original concept,” admits Ahern, “and were too dumb to worry about all the responsibility of updating a classic game series.” He and Ackley brainstormed together in a room for two months, hashing out the shape of a game. After they emerged early in 1996 with their design bible for The Curse of Monkey Island in hand, production got underway in earnest.

At the end of Monkey Island 2, Ahern and Ackley announced, Guybrush had indeed been “hexed” by LeChuck into believing he was just a little boy in an amusement park. By the beginning of the third game, he would have snapped back to his senses, abandoning mundane hallucination again for a fantastical piratey reality.

A team that peaked at 50 people labored over The Curse of Monkey Island for eighteen months. That period was one of dramatic change in the industry, when phrases like “multimedia” and “interactive movie” were consigned to the kitschy past and first-person shooters and real-time strategies came to dominate the sales charts. Having committed to the project, LucasArts felt they had no choice but to stick with the old-school pixel art that had always marked their adventure games, even though it too was fast becoming passé in this newly 3D world. By way of compensation, this latest LucasArts pixel art was to be more luscious than anything that had come out of the studio before, taking advantage of a revamped SCUMM engine that ran at a resolution of 640 X 480 instead of 320 X 200.

The end result is, in the opinion of this critic at least, the loveliest single game in terms of pure visuals that LucasArts ever produced. Computer graphics and animation, at LucasArts and elsewhere, had advanced enormously between Monkey Island 2 and The Curse of Monkey Island. With 1993’s Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max Hit the Road, LucasArts’s animators had begun producing work that could withstand comparison to that of role models like Chuck Jones and Don Bluth without being laughed out of the room. (Indeed, Jones reportedly tried to hire Larry Ahern and some of his colleagues away from LucasArts after seeing Day of the Tentacle.) The Curse of Monkey Island marked the fruition of that process, showing LucasArts to have become a world-class animation studio in its own right, one that could not just withstand but welcome comparison with any and all peers who worked with more traditional, linear forms of media. “We were looking at Disney feature animation as our quality bar,” says Ahern.

That said, the challenge of producing a game that still looked like Monkey Island despite all the new technical affordances should not be underestimated. The danger of the increased resolution was always that the finished results could veer into a sort of photo-realism, losing the ramshackle charm that had always been such a big part of Monkey Island‘s appeal. This LucasArts managed to avoid; in the words of The Animation World Network, a trade organization that was impressed enough by the project to come out and do a feature on it, Guybrush was drawn as “a pencil-necked beanpole with a flounce of eighteenth-century hair and a nose as vertical as the face of Half Dome.” The gangling frames and exaggerated movements of Guybrush and many of the other characters were inspired by Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. Yet the characters aren’t grotesques; The Curse of Monkey Island aims to be lovable, and it hits the mark. For this game is written as well as drawn in the spirit of the original Secret of Monkey Island, abandoning the jarring mean-spiritedness that dogs the second game in the series, a change in tone that has always left me a lot less positively disposed toward it than most people seem to be.

This was the first Monkey Island game to feature voice acting from the outset, as telling a testament as any to the technological gulf that lies between the second and third entries in the series. The performances are superb — especially Guybrush, who sounds exactly like I want him to, all gawky innocence and dogged determination. (His voice actor Dominic Armato would return for every single Monkey Island game that followed, as well as circling back to give Guybrush a voice in the remastered versions of the first two games. I, for one, wouldn’t have it any other way.)

The opening sees Guybrush adrift on the open ocean in, of all forms of conveyance, a floating bumper car, for reasons that aren’t initially clear beyond the thematic connection to that amusement park at the end of Monkey Island 2. He floats smack-dab into the middle of a sea battle between LeChuck and Elaine; the former is trying to abduct the latter to make her his bride, while the latter is doing her level best to maintain her single status. Stuff happens, LeChuck seems to get blown up, and Guybrush and Elaine wind up on Plunder Island, a retirement community for aging pirates that’s incidentally also inhabited by El Pollo Diablo, the giant demon chicken. (“He’s hatching a diabolical scheme”; “He’s establishing a new pecking order”; “He’s going to buck buck buck the system”; “He’s crossing the road to freedom”; etc.) Guybrush proposes to Elaine using a diamond ring he stole from the hold of LeChuck’s ship, only to find that there’s a voodoo curse laid on it. Elaine gets turned into a solid-gold statue (d’oh!), which Guybrush leaves standing on the beach while he tries to figure out what to do about the situation. Sure enough, some opportunistic pirates — is there any other kind? — sail away with it. (Double d’oh!) Guybrush is left to scour Plunder Island for a ship, a crew, and a map that will let him follow them to Blood Island, where there is conveniently supposed to be another diamond ring that can reverse the curse.

The vicious chickens of Plunder Island. “Larry and I thought we were so clever when we came up with the idea of having a tropical island covered with feral chickens,” says Jonathan Ackley. “Then I took a vacation to the Hawaiian island of Kauai. It seems that when Kauai was hit by Hurricane Iniki, it blew open all the chicken coops. Everywhere I went on the island I was surrounded by feral chickens.”

From the shopping list of quest items to the plinking steelband soundtrack that undergirds the proceedings, all of this is a dead ringer for The Secret of Monkey Island; this third game is certainly not interested in breaking any new ground in setting, story, or genre. But when it’s done this well, who cares? There is a vocal segment of Monkey Island fans who reject this game on principle, who say that any Monkey Island game without the name of Ron Gilbert first on its credits list is no Monkey Island game at all. For my own part, I tend to believe that, if we didn’t know that Gilbert didn’t work on this game, we’d have trouble detecting that fact from the finished product. It nails that mixture of whimsy, cleverness, and sweetness that has made The Secret of Monkey Island arguably the most beloved point-and-click adventure game of all time.

During the latter 1990s, when most computers games were still made by and for a fairly homogeneous cohort of young men, too much ludic humor tried to get by on transgression rather than wit; this was a time of in-groups punching — usually punching down — on out-groups. I’m happy to say that The Curse of Monkey Island‘s humor is nothing like that. At the very beginning, when Guybrush is floating in that bumper car, he scribbles in his journal about all the things he wishes he had. “If only I could have a small drink of freshwater, I might have the strength to sail on.” A bottle of water drifts past while Guybrush’s eyes are riveted to the page. “If I could reach land, I might find water and some food. Fruit maybe, something to fight off the scurvy and help me get my strength back. Maybe some bananas.” And a crate of bananas drifts by in the foreground. “Oh, why do I torture myself like this? I might as well wish for some chicken and a big mug of grog, for all the good it will do me.” Cue the clucking chicken perched on top of a barrel. Now, you might say that this isn’t exactly sophisticated humor, and you’d be right. But it’s an inclusive sort of joke that absolutely everyone is guaranteed to understand, from children to the elderly, whilst also being a gag that I defy anyone not to at least smirk at. Monkey Island is funny without ever being the slightest bit cruel — a combination that’s rarer in games of its era than it ought to be.

Which isn’t to say that this game is without in-jokes. They’re everywhere, and the things they reference are far from unexpected. Star Trek gets a shout-out in literally the first line of the script as Guybrush writes in his “captain’s log,” while, appropriately enough given the studio that made this game, whole chunks of dialogue are re-contextualized extracts from the Star Wars movies. The middle of the game is an extended riff on/parody of that other, very different franchise that springs to mind when gamers think about pirates — the one started by Sid Meier, that’s known as simply Pirates!. Here as there, you have to sail your ship around the Caribbean engaging in battles with other sea dogs. But instead of dueling the opposing captains with your trusty cutlass when you board their vessels, here you challenge them to a round of insult sword-fighting instead. (Pirate: “You’re the ugliest monster ever created!” Guybrush: “If you don’t count all the ones you’ve dated!”)

It shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. In fact, this may just be my favorite section of the entire game. Partly it succeeds because it’s just so well done; the action-based minigame of ship-to-ship combat that precedes each round of insult sword-fighting is, in marked contrast to those in LucasArts’s previous adventure Full Throttle, very playable in its own right, being perfectly pitched in difficulty, fun without ever becoming frustrating. But another key to this section’s success is that you don’t have to know Pirates! for it to make you laugh; it’s just that, if you do, you’ll laugh that little bit more. All of the in-jokes operate the same way.

Pirates! veterans will feel right at home with the ship-combat minigame. It was originally more complicated. “When I first started the ship-combat section,” says programmer Chris Purvis, “I had a little readout that told how many cannons you had, when they were ready to fire, and a damage printout for when you or the computer ships got hit. We decided it was too un-adventure-gamey to leave it that way.” Not to be outdone, a member of the testing team proposed implementing multiplayer ship combat as “the greatest Easter egg of all time for any game.” Needless to say, it didn’t happen.

The puzzle design makes for an interesting study. After 1993, the year of Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max Hit the Road, LucasArts hit a bumpy patch in this department in my opinion. Both Full Throttle and The Dig, their only adventures between those games and this one, are badly flawed efforts when it comes to their puzzles, adhering to the letter but not the spirit of Ron Gilbert’s old “Why Adventure Games Suck” manifesto. And Grim Fandango, the adventure that immediately followed this one, fares if anything even worse in that regard. I’m pleased if somewhat perplexed to be able to say, then, that The Curse of Monkey Island mostly gets its puzzles right.

There are two difficulty levels here, an innovation borrowed from Monkey Island 2. Although the puzzles at the “Mega-Monkey” level are pretty darn convoluted — one sequence involving a restaurant and a pirate’s tooth springs especially to mind as having one more layer of complexity than it really needs to — they are never completely beyond the pale. It might not be a totally crazy idea to play The Curse of Monkey Island twice, once at the easy level and once at the Mega-Monkey level, with a few weeks or months in between your playthroughs. There are very few adventure games for which I would make such a recommendation in our current era of entertainment saturation, but I think it’s a reasonable one in this case. This game is stuffed so full of jokes both overt and subtle that it can be hard to take the whole thing in in just one pass. Your first excursion will give you the lay of the land, so to speak, so you know roughly what you’re trying to accomplish when you tackle the more complicated version.

Regardless of how you approach it, The Curse of Monkey Island is a big, generous adventure game by any standard. I daresay that the part that takes place on Plunder Island alone is just about as long as the entirety of The Secret of Monkey Island. Next comes the Pirates! homage, to serve as a nice change of pace at the perfect time. And then there’s another whole island of almost equal size to the first to explore.  After all that comes the bravura climax, where LeChuck makes his inevitable return; in a rather cheeky move, this ending too takes place in an amusement park, with Guybrush once again transformed into a child.

If I was determined to find something to complain about, I might say that the back half of The Curse of the Monkey Island isn’t quite as strong as the front half. Blood Island is implemented a little more sparsely than Plunder Island, and the big climax in particular feels a little rushed and truncated, doubtless the result of a production budget and schedule that just couldn’t be stretched any further if the game was to ship in time for the 1997 Christmas season. Still, these are venial sins; commercial game development is always the art of the possible, usually at the expense of the ideal.

When all is said and done, The Curse of Monkey Island might just be my favorite LucasArts adventure, although it faces some stiff competition from The Secret of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle. Any points that it loses to Secret for its lack of originality in the broad strokes, it makes up for in size, in variety, and in sheer gorgeousness.

Although I have no firm sales figures to point to, all indications are that The Curse of Monkey Island was a commercial success in its day, the last LucasArts adventure about which that statement can be made. I would guess from anecdotal evidence that it sold several hundred thousand copies, enough to convince the company to go back to the Monkey Island well one more time in 2000. Alas, the fourth game would be far less successful, both artistically and commercially.

These things alone are enough to give Curse a valedictory quality today. But there’s more: it was also the very last LucasArts game to use the SCUMM engine, as well as the last to rely primarily on pixel art. The world-class cartoon-animation studio that the company’s adventure division had become was wound down after this game’s release, and Larry Ahern and Jonathan Ackley were never given a chance to lead a project such as this one again, despite having acquitted themselves so well here. That was regrettable, but not incomprehensible. Economics weren’t working in the adventure genre’s favor in the late 1990s. A game like The Curse of Monkey Island was more expensive to make per hour of play time it provided than any other kind of game you could imagine; all of this game’s content was bespoke content, every interaction a unique one that had to be written and story-boarded and drawn and painted and animated and voiced from scratch.

The only way that adventure games — at least adventures with AAA production values like this one — could have remained an appealing option for gaming executives would have been if they had sold in truly massive numbers. And this they emphatically were not doing. Yes, The Curse of Monkey Island did reasonably well for itself — but a game like Jedi Knight probably did close to an order of magnitude better, whilst probably costing considerably less to make. The business logic wasn’t overly complicated. The big animation studios which LucasArts liked to see as their peers could get away with it because their potential market was everyone with a television or everyone who could afford to buy a $5 movie ticket; LucasArts, on the other hand, was limited to those people who owned fairly capable, modern home computers, who liked to solve crazily convoluted puzzles, and who were willing and able to drop $40 or $50 for ten hours or so of entertainment. The numbers just didn’t add up.

In a sense, then, the surprise isn’t that LucasArts made no more games like this one, but rather that they allowed this game to be finished at all. Jonathan Ackley recalls his reaction when he saw Half-Life for the first time: “Well… that’s kind of it for adventure games as a mainstream, AAA genre.” More to their credit than otherwise, the executives at LucasArts didn’t summarily abandon the adventure genre, but rather tried their darnedest to find a way to make the economics work, by embracing 3D modelling to reduce production costs and deploying a new interface that would be a more natural fit with the tens of millions of game consoles that were out there, thus broadening their potential customer base enormously. We’ll get to the noble if flawed efforts that resulted from these initiatives in due course.

For today, though, we raise our mugs of grog to The Curse of Monkey Island, the last and perhaps the best go-round for SCUMM. If you haven’t played it yet, by all means, give it a shot. And even if you have, remember what I told you earlier: this is a game that can easily bear replaying. Its wit, sweetness, and beauty remain undiminished more than a quarter of a century after its conception.

The Curse of Monkey Island: The Graphic Novel

(I’ve cheerfully stolen this progression from the old Prima strategy guide to the game…)

Our story begins with our hero, Guybrush Threepwood, lost at sea and pining for his love Elaine.

He soon discovers her in the midst of a pitched battle…

…with his old enemy and rival for her fair hand, the zombie pirate LeChuck.

Guybrush is captured by LeChuck…

…but manages to escape, sending LeChuck’s ship to the bottom in the process. Thinking LeChuck finally disposed of, Guybrush proposes to Elaine, using a diamond ring he found in the zombie pirate’s treasure hold…

…only to discover it is cursed. Elaine is less than pleased…

…and is even more ticked off when she is turned into a gold statue.

Guybrush sets off to discover a way to break the curse — and to rescue Elaine, since her statue is promptly stolen. His old friend the voodoo lady tells him he will need a ship, a crew, and a map to Blood Island, where he can find a second diamond ring that will reverse the evil magic of the first.

He meets many interesting and irritating people, including some barbers…

…a restaurateur…

…and a cabana boy, before he is finally able to set sail for Blood Island.

After some harrowing sea battles and a fierce storm…

…his ship is washed ashore on Blood Island.

Meanwhile LeChuck has been revived…

…and has commanded his minions to scour the Caribbean in search of Guybrush.

Unaware of this, Guybrush explores Blood Island, where he meets a patrician bartender…

…the ghost of a Southern belle…

…a vegan cannibal…

…and a Welsh ferryman.

He finally outsmarts Andre, King of the Smugglers, to get the diamond that will restore Elaine.

Unfortunately, as soon as Elaine is uncursed, the two are captured by LeChuck and taken to the Carnival of the Damned on Monkey Island.

LeChuck turns Guybrush into a little boy and attempts to escape with Elaine on his hellish roller coaster.

But Guybrush’s quick thinking saves the day, and he sails off with his new bride into the sunset.

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 book The Curse of Monkey Island: The Official Strategy Guide by Jo Ashburn. Retro Gamer 70; Computer Games Strategy Plus  of August 1997; Computer Gaming World of October 1995, March 1996, September 1997, November 1997, December 1997, and March 1998.

Online sources include a Genesis Temple interview with Larry Ahern, an International House of Mojo interview with Jonathan Ackley and Larry Ahern, the same site’s archive of old Curse of Monkey Island interviews, and a contemporaneous Animation World Network profile of LucasArts.

Also, my heartfelt thanks to Guillermo Crespi and other commenters for pointing out some things about the ending of Monkey Island 2 that I totally overlooked in my research for the first version of this article.

The Curse of Monkey Island is available for digital purchase at GOG.com.

Last time, I wrote about a need to create an improved magic system based on the mechanics in Repeat the Ending. As a reminder, that system, which wound up being fairly complicated, was one of the first things I wrote in Inform 7. After I learned more about making parser games, I found many opportunities for improvement.

More than anything, I was bothered by all of the nouns involved. I had nouns for sources of magic in the world, and other nouns for magic “carried” by the player. There was a lot of shuffling behind the scenes to put a noun in the player’s inventory, while omitting it from the inventory output (printed via the *INVENTORY* or *I* commands). There’s a helpful example in the Inform 10 documentation. Code omitting a specific kind of thing from inventory is pretty straightforward. The canned texts associated with printing inventory can be found in the standard rules.

The print standard inventory rule is not listed in any rulebook.

Carry out taking inventory (this is the new print inventory rule):
	now all things enclosed by the player are marked for listing;
	now all magics are unmarked for listing;
	if no things enclosed by the player are marked for listing:
		say "[text of print empty inventory rule response (A)][line break]";
	otherwise:
		say "[text of print standard inventory rule response (A)]";
		list the contents of the player, with newlines, indented, including contents, giving inventory information, with extra indentation, listing marked items only.

Now, this all worked OK. Having a source of magic in inventory is something we can check during action processing. I could and did build rules around that sort of thing. However, there was already a value assigned to the player for magic on-hand. I had nouns that I was tracking for some actions, and values in a table for very similar operations.

siphontype is a kind of value.
The siphontypes are defined by the Table of Diagnoses. 

After defining this value, I committed to the player having a “siphontype.”

The Entropist is a person.
The Entropist has a siphontype.
The Entropist is tinert.

What did the table look like?

Table of Diagnoses
siphontype	diagstring
tinert	"descriptive text to be printed under specific conditions"

Functionally, both the “tinert” value and the absence of magic in the player’s inventory amount to the same thing. From a programming perspective, I was just making problems for myself by tracking multiple situations, sometimes simultaneously, for one effect.

if magic is not carried by the player:

vs

if the player is tinert:

What would it be like to get rid of the nouns? Some things are pretty simple.

Instead of gathering something aphotic when the player is not tinert:
	say "failure message"

But what actually happens after a successful action, if the game isn’t moving nouns around? It’s actually simpler, because we just need to omit code pertaining to nouns:

Carry out gathering the exemplary magic:
	say "feedback text";
	now the thief is amped. [amped is a value in our table of magic states]

Expending the magic is simpler, too.

Carry out xyzzying the real headless statue when the player is amped:
	say "With a gesture, you send the darkness crashing against the stone. It quivers, contracts, then disappears in a murk.";
	now the real headless statue is nowhere;
	now the headless statue scenery is nowhere;
	now the player is tinert.

This seems… pretty easy. I can just assign values for all of this stuff. Everything just works! What could go wrong?

The biggest problem is that players might want to invoke a form of magic in their commands:

*XYZZY THE HEADLESS STATUE WITH THE CRASHING DARKNESS*

Only in this example, the “crashing darkness” is a thing in the world, not a thing the player has. Let’s consider the construction of the “investing” action in RTE:

investing it with is an action applying to two things.
Understand "invest [something] with [something]" as investing it with.

That second [something] is the invisible magic noun the player is “carrying.” I did it this way, back then, so that there wouldn’t be any scoping issues. Since the player carries the magic, it is always where the player is, and therefore in-scope. What if the player gets the magic in one room, then uses it in another? It’s just a bog-standard bit of action processing.

Still, this is redundant, isn’t it? A player can only use magic they have. They can’t use things that aren’t magic as if they were, and attempts to do so require more checks and feedback messages. On paper, it makes sense to just make an action that uses whatever magic is at hand.

xyzzying is an action applying to one thing.

We might even add some nice conveniences. For instance, if the player attempts to use magic that is nearby but not yet acquired:

Check xyzzying when the player is tinert:
	if a magical thing is in the location:
		let the target be a random magical thing in the location;
		say "(first gathering the [target])";
		try gathering the target;
		continue the action;

…and so forth. There probably won’t ever be more than one magical thing in a location (they’re all immovable scenery or backdrops), so randomization should be harmless. Still, since this is a “check” rule, I can always intercede with “before” or “instead,” should a particular situation demand it.

Back to the problem of commands invoking sources of magic, particularly ones in other rooms. I think the only real reason I have to worry about this is because players of Repeat the Ending will be used to something else. Since I welcome return players, I should consider their experiences!

I could add a column of nouns to my table of magic types, linking nouns to states, then convert such commands into the “correct” syntax. Another possibility would be rejecting the command outright. Or as a compromise between the two, we could drop the noun-matching idea and just apply the action to the first noun. In any case, scope will likely come up. Out of the box, Inform doesn’t let players act upon or with things that are not within scope (“visible” or “touchable,” depending on how the action is defined). I can’t just have a player gather magic in one room, walk somewhere else, then try to use it as a noun. It probably won’t be there, unless the noun is a backdrop in multiple rooms.

Cracking open scope for something like this seems like overkill, when the command structure isn’t built around using these nouns anyway. What are the other options? I could treat them as mistakes. Mistakes don’t care about scoping when dealing with verbatim commands, but they do seem to care about scoping when it comes to kinds. Something like this…

understand "xyzzy [something] with [magic]" as a mistake ("error message").

…isn’t going to solve scoping problems, at least not so far as I can tell. Accounting for every possible command, well, that would be a lot of text! I think mistakes are out, as valuable as they are. But I’m not turning back. No nouns in inventory this time! I just need to come up with some good messaging/handling to turn players to the new, simplified grammar.

next.

Letting the player down easy.

We’re putting six of our games on sale today, each one dripping with magic! Play as an illusionist, an infernalist, an archmage, or an apprentice, and watch your power grow—but what will you do with it? Sale ends April 25!

• Choice of Magics. Your magic can change the world, but at what cost? Battle dragons, skyships, and Inquisitors. Protect your homeland, conquer it, or destroy it forever!

• Heroes of Myth. Everyone thinks you saved the world, but it was all a lie! You faked a “prophecy” with magical illusions. But now, your prophecy is coming true.

• Battlemage: Magic by Mail. Will you defend your kingdom with forbidden magic, or backstab the crown? Win tournaments, kiss a prince/princess, or just seize power for yourself!

• Révolution Diabolique. Summon demons to win the French Revolution! Will you uphold the Republic, restore the monarchy, rule France yourself, or lose your head?

• Tower Behind the Moon. You are already an archmage–can you become an immortal? Use magic and cunning to thwart rivals, fight demons, and outwit gods so you can join their ranks.

• The Magician’s Workshop. When your master is murdered, you must uncover the magical secrets of Renaissance Italy, before your rival apprentices expose them first!

Over the past few weeks, we’ve posted dozens of art pieces to our @choiceofgames Instagram profile. We’d love to connect with you there!

This week, we’re posting preview images of the characters you’ll meet in Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names when we release it on April 25th.

We’re building up our Instagram as we transition away from posting on Twitter, in an effort to meet new people who haven’t tried our games before.

It would be a huge help if you’d follow us, like our posts, and comment on them, to help Instagram’s algorithm see that people appreciate us.

Art via Francesco Petroni in the Italian magazine MC Microcomputer, Oct. 1981.

It is in some ways mysterious that we haven’t had more adventure games in languages other than English.

Still, as we’ve seen from Australia and the UK, for adventures to be made there needs to be infrastructure in terms of number of computers in public hands, and companies willing to publish games. So while we have Acheton dating back to almost primeval days, and a single odd 1980 game for the UK101, we really don’t have UK adventures start going until 1981. For Australia, the only 1980 example we have is almost completely plagiarized from a game in a 1979 US magazine.

Alternately (or additively), a country may just not have had exposure to adventure games. They specifically might have missed the “mainframe wave” created by Crowther/Woods Adventure. Japan didn’t really have the adventure game concept “filter in” until Omotesando Adventure in 1982. (As presented in the magazine which printed it, adventures were a “New Type” of computer games.) They started their exposure with Mystery House and other Apple II imports instead of mainframe games.

In the case of Italy, they had local mainframes (even developing some back in the 1950s) and they were already well-established with home computer amateur development by 1980. Yet, it took until 1982 for an adventure game to appear.

A game that is essentially required to be played in English would not necessarily have made in-roads. For one of our authors today, Enrico Colombini, his first exposure to adventures was indeed the classic Adventure, but on a foreign mainframe (or at least mini-computer) and essentially by accident.

Electronics Hall 33 at a 1975 Milan Fair.

Enrico started the electronics store EC Elettronica in 1980 with his wife (Chiara, also a co-author on today’s game) and two of his friends; that same year they were exhibitors at a fair in Milan. They were setup near a Motorola stand with a “expensive looking” computer that was very large, and Enrico wandered over and read the iconic opening from the screen:

You are standing at the end of the road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.

Since the booth workers didn’t mind, Enrico started typing, using his “rough English”. He “persi il senso del tempo”, that is, lost all sense of time. He eventually came to a sword planted in a rock making a humming sound, but had to stop when the fair closed. The sword in the rock is not from Crowther/Woods Adventure, but rather Adventure 550, with additions by David Platt. Once extracted, it actually sings when used on an ogre.

The sword halts in mid-air, twirls like a dervish, and chants several bars of “Dies Irae” in a rough tenor voice. It then begins to spin like a rip-saw blade and flies directly at the ogre, who attempts to catch it without success; it strikes him full on the chest.

However, Mr. Colombini never got to that part, because the adventure program was gone the next day.

MC Microcomputer, September 1981.

EC Elettronica had a PET 2001 to keep track of company stock, which was eventually replaced with an Apple II (and disk drives). The computer was used for recreation in addition to work.

In quel periodo tutto era nuovo, e quasi ogni programma era interessante.

In this time period, everything was new and nearly every program was interesting.

Enrico came across a disk marked Apple Adventure, and found a game recognizably close to the one he had played, so was able (after some hacking to fix the save file mechanism) to play to the maximum 350 points. He credits it with teaching him English.

This is a straight port by Peter Schmuckal and Leonard Barshack, so I haven’t written about it before.

Enrico Colombini and his wife (Chiara Tovena) then embarked on writing their own game, self-publishing for Apple II early in 1982 under the name Dinosoft at a local shop in Pescia, creating “una confezione molto artigianale fatta con adesivi letraset“, that is, “a very artisanal package made with Letraset stickers”.

From the author, and unfortunately the largest image of this we have, but I guess it fits with the “artisanal” part.

Some “firsts” are obscure (like Bilingual Adventure), some are well-known and celebrated. Avventura nel Castello ended up being one of the legendary Italian games, and had multiple reprints: in 1984 for J. Soft (still Apple II), in 1987 for Hi-Tech (for DOS), in 1996 (independently, also for DOS) and finally in fancy modern form in 2021, including a translation into English (Castle Adventure).

Advertising for the J. Soft version. Via eBay.

I’ve been playing the English translation and cross-checking with the first Italian version for Apple II. I can say they are fairly close, and the original is just as wordy as the newer version is. This is Apple II, with a whopping 48K of memory, and the author — clearly thinking directly of Adventure — has the memory space and inclination to be wordier than Scott Adams.

This opening genuinely is duplicating the original opening.

You’re piloting your single-seater over the desolate Highlands of Scotland.
You’ve just flown over Loch Ness…
Suddenly, the engine misfires.
The controls aren’t responding!

You’re plummeting!

You’re supposed to guess the “aren’t you forgetting something” that there’s a parachute, and TAKE PARACHUTE (GET doesn’t work).

What are you going to do? TAKE PARACHUTE

Oh, look. There is a parachute. I hadn’t seen it.
I promise you that, from now on, I’ll be much more careful, and will
scrupulously report all the objects around you.

Anyway, you’ve got it on now.

You’re plummeting!

(This is probably the fairest “get an item that is not described in the room” puzzle we’ve seen in All the Adventures. The text cues what to do quite strongly. See Escape from Colditz for an unfair example.)

In Italian, the game wants PRENDI PARACADUTE.

The conjugation is important. I struggled for a while because I was typing PRENDO PARACADUTE (“I take the parachute”) rather than PRENDI PARACADUTE (“You take the parachute”). This is the “I am your puppet” style perspective where you assume you are a step removed from your avatar. This can differ based on the norms of how a particular language approaches adventure games. I remember having a bewildered discussion with an Italian back in the 90s claiming saying “you” want to do something felt bizarre when “I” was the one in the story, but they were insistent that I was being the bizarre one.

This game also quite specifically wants the imperative. So the next step isn’t SALTO (thinking “I jump” in present tense) or SALTI (“you jump” in present tense) but rather SALTA, in imperative.

Switching back to English:

What are you going to do? JUMP

Just in time!
The plane crashes to the ground, as your parachute opens.
You gently descend in the dying daylight. Below you appears a desolate moor. The wind pushes you towards a ruined castle. You land in the castle’s large parade ground.
While you fold away your parachute, you look around:

You’re on the parade ground: a vast, square, beaten-earth clearing, surrounded by high, grey stone walls.
In the center of the courtyard, a massive slab covers the mouth of the castle’s well.
In the distance, you can hear the howling of wolves.
I can see a raised drawbridge.
I can see a closed door.

There’s not much we can do with the massive slab or drawbridge (I think) so the only way to make progress now is to open the door and go in the castle.

What are you going to do? ENTER DOOR

The door slams shut, without leaving the slightest crack.

You are in a large atrium, immersed in darkness. An eerie phosphorescence emanating from the walls allows you to just about distinguish the contours of the room.
A marble staircase rises upwards, dimly lit by the greenish light, but gradually disappearing into the darkness.
I can see a coat of arms painted on the ceiling.

Here we are trapped, and now our main objective is to escape.

My map so far, just of the ground:

It’s nearly all accessible and peaceful, and even though there’s some vivid descriptions, sort of sparse. This game is not trying to stuff itself with items. That might mean there are enough floors that we get lots of items, or it might just mean there’s hidden things. I’m going with the presumption that anything in the room description can’t really be used and only the items that get listed after are important, but if I get seriously stuck I’ll reconsider.

First, a tour of the ground floor, then a quick trip to the basement, and then I’ll show off the maze on the second floor.

You’re in a large living room, furnished with numerous sofas and comfortable armchairs. In the centre of one wall is a monumental fireplace, built with blocks of carved stone.
Although the fire has been out for centuries, the room still seems to be illuminated by a wavering reddish light.
I can see a cat crouched on the ground.

Using the presumption I just spoke of, the sofas and fireplace don’t need to be fiddled with, but the cat is important. You can feed the cat some milk from the kitchen, and then can pick it up. I haven’t found any birds or mice to sic it on yet, though.

Elsewhere:

You’re in an elongated room without any furniture. The walls are lined with portraits of clan chiefs, lairds and dignitaries who have governed the castle and lands over centuries.
The portraits seem to stare at you with malevolent eyes. One in particular, that of MacCallum IV, seems to follow your movements with a gaze full of murderous hatred.

This feels like it is just meant to be lore. You can’t move the portrait or take it. While I’m at it, though…

What are you going to do? PULL PORTRAIT

Gonnae no dae that. I’d prefer not.

…does the Italian actually attempt the equivalent of a Scottish accent? That’s past my pay grade (or rather, my dimly-remembered college Italian).

Other map highlights include:

• a rampart that you can walk around, where you can see fog and hear “cawing of the crows”
• a mirror room that takes a little while to exit because you can accidentally run into a mirror rather than get out, this seems to be random
• a music room where you can play the bagpipes: “You deserve to be part of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards! (…playing the drums)”
• a library with a book on Ancient Gaelic; inside the book is a sheet with the word “IOT”
• a mysterious bricked-off door
• some “heavy stone balls” in a room with pieces of an ancient war machine that can’t be picked up
• an Alchemist Cell with a book bound in human skin that requires a “tool” to open it

The last one’s a bit spookier than the others, but there’s still no active antagonism going on.

You are in the Alchemist’s cell. All around are crucibles, pestles, copper stills and bizarre glass containers of extremely contorted shapes. On the shelves are many heavy tomes of magic, alchemy and spells. In the centre of the room is a small table that rests on three legs shaped like the paws of some monstrous animal. On the table is a single heavy volume bound in black leather:

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”

Going down, on the other hand, is a bit more threatening. The way down is to look at the seal in the opening atrium.

The clan motto is written there.

“The sassenach will fall”

Suddenly, a trap door opens beneath your feet.

You are in the castle dungeon, once called ‘The Tomb’. The floor is covered in skeletons.
I can see a hole on the wall.

What are you going to do? EXAMINE SKELETONS

It is our common fate. But can’t you think of something happier?

You’re in the dungeon.
I can see a hole on the wall.

What are you going to do? EXAMINE HOLE

It is narrow and deep, and, at the end, there’s something that looks like a button.

You’re in the dungeon.
I can see a hole on the wall.

What are you going to do? PUSH BUTTON

Should you stick your arm through the hole? YES

A blade snaps down, slicing your arm cleanly off.
While you’re bleeding to death, let me tell you that you’ve been behaving rather recklessly.

I assume I just poke the button with something long, but I haven’t found a great candidate yet. Going up from the Atrium gets you trapped in a different way.

What are you going to do? U

You’re at the top of the stairs. The steps end abruptly in front of a smooth stone wall.

What are you going to do? EXAMINE WALL

I cannae see any holds or cracks.

You’re at the top of the stairs.

What are you going to do? PUSH WALL

The wall rotates on itself… and snaps shut behind you.

You’re at the entrance to the immense magical maze, of which it is said that all passages lead to this one room, from where neither man nor thing can escape. There are two skeletons on the ground. On the wall, written in blood are the words:

‘Impossible to get out of here’

This seems to be an absolutely classical maze, as those who derived their games more or less directly from Adventure are cursed to make.

I’ll hopefully have that mapped out by next time, and maybe figure out a use for the cat. As far as how long this goes, I’m not sure; the game lists 1000 points total, but it isn’t a normal rate of score increase. Even without doing much I had around 100 points, so I suspect if we normalized to, say, Scott Adams game length, we’d have a 100 point game. Some of the Scott Adams games took a while to get through, though!

I have finished the game, and as usual, it helps to have read my previous posts.

Via eBay.

So I had a slightly wrong presumption from last time; the ruins I had marked 1, 2, and 3 were out of order. You actually do “ruin 2” last and the other two in whichever order you like, or even skip them.

And yes, the “skip them” implies that what you get from them is technically speaking optional. I’ll explain when I get there. Let’s get back to the action:

Not to the skeletons, but to the phantom where you could just wait out before getting a gold bowl. You were in fact supposed to try to talking to it.

Yes, I looked that up. This hint is sufficient to realize the cursed amulet we’ve been toting around is somehow usable on the skeletons (even though USE AMULET and WAVE AMULET and so forth I tried were useless). You’re supposed to get rather more violent and HIT SKELETON WITH AMULET. Thus I could get away with the silver bowl

Let’s now go to Ruin 3:

Again, I looked this one up.

I had not bothered to SEARCH the various doors (just looking won’t work) so I missed the golden key as shown. Even on a SEARCH frenzy I wouldn’t have thought to apply it to the door. The golden key lets you enter the central area (only one of the doors is needed).

Down the stairs you can run across a slight bit of maze before encountering a pool. LOOK POOL gives you an image, and that’s the only thing you need from the ruin.

It didn’t register to me to pay close attention to the image — I thought this was indicating some kind of blessing / curse was laid down that would trigger (in a useful way) later.

With that taken care of, it was time to try to figure out the fog room past the corpse, where I kept dying and dying. Taking the bowls and putting them into the order mentioned by the corpse, here’s the pictures you get by examining them.

Maybe they’re meant to represents maps?

Remember, the way this game works is: outdoors you go compass directions, indoors you go forward, left, right, or back. Compass directions aren’t understood at all indoors.

Unless… you’re in this one room, and then you can go southwest.

Oh, and we lose our sidekick.

This fails both at the level of being a breach of game-interface trust (by having an exception indoors for a compass direction) and for making any sense (why would we know what direction southwest is)? I checked walkthroughs and none of them explain the connection of the bowls. Perhaps my trusty readers have an idea.

I’m guessing Ultrasoft extrapolated the puzzle from Crowther/Woods Adventure. That game had a much better use of the idea in the “maze of rooms all alike”. You are explicitly told by a pirate (as they steal your treasure) that they’re going to hide it in the maze, so you know there is supposed to be something there. While every exit in that particular maze is N/S/E/W, leading to a pattern, there is never the implication that the interface has really changed, and there’s another maze (All Different) which does include the diagonal directions. Combining those together makes it satisfying to find the one odd exit, northwest to find a chest:

That is, pure use of direction nevertheless built up a puzzle by making the player form an implicit rule that was not not really a rule, and realizing that facade causes a breakthrough. This differs greatly from the case in Mask, where by all appearances (for absolutely everything else in the game, including the moments after) being indoors shuts down the ability to navigate by compass directions for reasons that could not possibly change.

Ugh. Oh, by the way, we’re now on a timed puzzle, just like you’d expect from a later Sierra On-Line game.

It’s unique for this time, for sure. With the game on “authentic” timing it went too fast for me to react and I just had to guess until I got lucky. Getting past, there are faces on the wall:

They demand the word that marks us as an initiate of the sun. And here I have missed something, and it is kind of the fault of the parser, but more the fault of the way the world universe describes itself. We need to go back outside to the idol with the detached head. (Well, not on this save game. This save game is soft-locked. I mean restart with a fresh file and imagine we fast forward.)

Typing LOOK STATUE before repairing it gets “The idol is broken, but it looks like a stylized jaguar.”

If you GET OUT OF JEEP and then LOOK STATUE again, something different happens.

It was not clear to me at all anything was mechanically different here; there’s no visual indicator you’re in or out of the jeep. This isn’t quite as unfair as the fog puzzle — SEARCH STATUE gets the reply it “doesn’t work here” obliquely implying you aren’t close enough — but it still is the case that repairing the statue now causes the clue to be lost forever.

So, fast-forward back to the faces, with the new magic word in hand:

Searching the altar reveals a place you can drop the amulet.

I chipperly grabbed the mask and went on my way, and found myself sealed off. The game even suggests checking the altar for secrets, but it already was sealed off.

You have enough information that you may be able to figure out what happened. I don’t think it’s a good puzzle — this is a softlock moment, here — but it’s an interesting puzzle. Take a moment to think.

Via eBay, for spoiler space.

Back where the image was at the pool, the skull-person was holding two masks, one that had black eyes and one that had blue eyes. What this is meant to imply is there is a second mask, and we have the fake mask. We need to search again after finding the first one.

This is the True Mask. Once you wear it your disease is cured.

All the world colors go funky and it lets you see a secret passage to escape from the altar room.

The rest of the game is mostly straightforward except tedious. You need to wander through the ruin until you escape. There’s one direction that goes to a maze which is entirely useless to bother with. To make any progress you have to first answer a riddle.

Then there’s some wrong directions and more maze rooms and a maze which you don’t have to even map (according to Kim Schuette’s Book of Adventure games) because if you take 52 steps eventually you’ll run across your rival, the one who set off all this curse business in the first place.

He demands the mask. Give it to him.

I hope you got the flute at the very start of the game!

I very much appreciated the “outsider” design, which led to having two major sections that were solely devoted to dispensing clues rather than items. This idea of information as an item isn’t exactly novel for 1982 but making entire sections devoted to just information definitely is. With a single author I’d call they were “enthusiastic and promising” and look forward to what they were doing next. With a whole company, who knows if they can learn from their mistakes, but at least there’s another Ultracode title we’ll eventually make it to.

As far as what we can learn from their “company” model, I did want to give one more quote from that Softline article:

“We do have a number of interlocking teams that generate these products, and we want to give credit where credit is due,” he [Larry Franks] says. “When a single author in a software firm is credited with a product, I really suspect that a lot of essential support is being ignored.” There were five authors listed for Mask of the Sun and seven for Serpent’s Star. “We’ll be sticking to that. The names will change some, as the original core management has gotten out of the production end and into just the tool-designing and business management end.”

In this era we had enough “bedroom coder” types that there often really was only one person involved; I think this quote applies better as prophecy more than ruminating about the years before. However, as games start to get more elaborate with coding and animation, we need to be careful about crediting everything to one person.

More time to play games, right?

It so happens that this month's games are all easy ones. Three of them are short, as well -- one-sitting treats. I'm fine with bite-sized games, of course. I might not have chosen to play three of them in a row, but that's what fell out of Steam.

• Skaramazuzu
• Boxes: Lost Fragments
• Botany Manor
• Between Horizons

Skaramazuzu

• by Bleeding Moon Studio -- game site

A small point-and-click adventure in a spare pen-and-ink greyscape full of creepy little goblins. More clearline than Goreyesque, but in that range. You are a creepy little goblin named Skaramazuzu.

The puzzles are mild once you realize you have to take notes. You will carry a lot of keys. The story is, well, you know all those monochrome puzzle platformers where you're dead? This is that minus the platforming. Souls in an ambiguous purgatory, probably.

The most distinctive element is the narration. You are a primitive animist naif; you talk to everything. Goblins, worms, keys. Hello, key! Would you like to come with me? There's a lot of this. It could get on your nerves. Imagine The Longing done by Alexandre Dumas. Except The Longing was restrained about it, and also made you want to hug its sad little shade. Skaramazuzu is relentlessly helpful and friendly and also says everything twice. It kind of got on my nerves, I guess is what I am saying.

It doesn't help that the fast-roll text setting isn't fast enough and the skip button doesn't work very well. It's a densely narrated world, with neat little asides everywhere -- the dialogue is not limited to the fetch-quest chain. Despite my griping, it's worth chatting with NPCs at random. I enjoyed all their weird little goblin personalities. But someone needs to fix the skip button.

On the up side, you're never confused about what you should do (because Skaramazuzu says it twice!) and the puzzles are pleasant. The art is really very well done; clear and memorable, with delicate animations. You can finish the thing in an evening, and that's about how much of it I wanted.

Boxes: Lost Fragments

• by Bigloop Studios -- game site

Snapbreak Games has a long run of mobile games that I'd categorize as "The Room-lite". No context, no story worth mentioning, just collections of locked doors or shiny puzzleboxes on pedestals.

(Now that I look, I think I'm mixing up the Doors and Boxes games (Bigloop Studios) with Birdcage (Mobiplay OU). Sorry. If one group is The-Room-lite, the other is House-of-Da-Vinci-lite. This one is Bigloop.)

Anyhow, I'm happy to say that Bigloop has scaled up their ambitions. Boxes: Lost Fragments is a credible Room-like, not just -lite. It's still got a lot of puzzleboxes on tables. But as you solve them, you collect widgets -- I mean "fragments". When you've got a chapter's worth of fragments, you can explore the hub area and figure out where each widget goes. That's the transition from puzzle collection to puzzle environment that I've been jonesing for all this time.

Also, the studio's earlier efforts had a lot of hunt-the-symbol puzzles. There are still a few of those, but this game tilts more towards mechanical manipulation. Again, closer to The Room's immersive style. Lots of sliders to drag, catches to unhook, and so on. (What's the fun of USE KEY if you don't get to turn it with your own fingers?)

It's not a particularly difficult bunch of puzzles. I never got stuck for more than a minute -- usually because I hadn't looked hard enough for sliders or catches. And the story is, yeah, not worth mentioning. (There's a magical power source. It's sparkly.) But it's a satisfying evening fiddling with puzzle boxes.

Also, someone has finally asked "What if those awful slider puzzles let you slide the rectangles in any direction?" Turns out it's still a puzzle! But much less annoying!

Botany Manor

• by Balloon Studios -- game site

A small cute logic game about growing plants. I put it firmly in (what I insist on calling) the static deduction genre. There's locked doors and gates, a few of which have escapey-style puzzle locks. But the main thing you do is figure out how to germinate various awesome plants (and fungi). Each plant requires a chain of deductions. Some clues come from reading journals, newpaper clippings, letters and so on. Others must be observed in the world around you, Obra-Dinn style.

Your journal helpfully marks down all the clues you find. You have to group all the clues for a plant to get an acknowledgement. That's usually five or six clues, rather than the genre-traditional "three at a time"; but they're straightforward enough that you won't ever have to guess. Anyhow, clue acknowledgements are strictly optional (c.f. Sennaar). The goal is just getting the plant to pop.

A quibble about the journal: it notes the name of each clue (document) and where you found it, but not what the clue is. If your memory is weak, you're going to have to run back and forth between rooms quite a bit, opening books and looking at posters. This seems like a weird oversight. Surely they considered letting you browse the clues directly in the journal. They're just images. I guess they wanted to pace things out? And make you run around the attractively-rendered house? It is pretty, in a flat-texture fluff-foliage Witness sort of way.

Nothing about this is very difficult, but it's all pleasant garden fussing. The story, such as it is, is a reflection on academic sexism. (It's the 1890s and you're a girl.) Mutton-chopped professors tell you to leave the botany to the real scientists; your aunt hints at your impending spinsterhood. I'm talking background letters here, not cut scenes. On the flip side, women band together to do science and educate girls regardless. Spoiler: you do not let the bastards grind you down. It's heartwarming in a pro-forma way.

You can get through it in an evening, but you'll have a nice time of it.

(I really ought to compare this to Strange Horticulture, the other static-deduction plant-growing game. But it's been a couple of years since I played that. I'd have to refresh my memory. Maybe I will! It's out on iOS now, after all.)

Between Horizons

• by DigiTales -- game site

A sci-fi pixel-art point-and-click mystery. Police procedural? I know, it's a lot of labels. I see I used the same labels for Lacuna, the studio's last outing. This time you're a junior security officer on a generation ship -- the ultimate small-town murder setting. Good thing a murder is about to come along. Plus a bunch of other dangerous chicanery.

As with Lacuna, the investigation is mostly a matter of gathering evidence and then letting the conclusions fall out. You interrogate people but you mostly don't have to pressure them to talk. (The exception is a notable scene, but only once.) And you're mostly not picking holes in their stories. It's all bright-line physical evidence: timestamps on a door, grams of paper in a recycling bin. The answer is always a tidy fit. I only failed one challenge, and I suspect that's because I missed a clue somewhere.

The world is lovely -- a gleaming hybrid of parallax and pixel set dressing. I can't say as much for the world-building. It's not terrible but it's not terribly deep either. The generation-ship trappings are mostly background rather than ideas to be interrogated. (Ordaining everybody's job at birth is... bad? Yeah, bad, I guess.) And the crew is kind of... a spreadsheet. Everybody has a job, and a personality, and as much involvement with the story events as they need to move the story forward. The game doesn't encourage side conversations, anyhow; you can only ask about crime-scene topics.

(Contrast Skaramazuzu, where the NPCs really have a lot to say through the story's brief course. In BH, there's lots of people, but they all quickly run out of dialogue and then stand around for chapters on end.)

As for the story, there's a bunch of it. A chase scene escalates to secrets, politics, chaos, and Big Events. I gather that the ending has a lot of variability, although the bulk of the game is pretty well fixed in sequence. I only played through once, though.

I wouldn't go so far as to call this "static deduction". It's a (tiny) world of people, and you talk to them, and the situation changes. And you are mostly collecting evidence through dialogue (with helpfully highlighted phrases) rather than observing the environment. But it's definitely on the procedural side.

(One day someone will combine "police procedural" and "procedural generation". Has to be a good fit, right? You can tell from the words.)

On the whole: it's a good ride, packed with exciting set-piece scenes and procedural policing. Not a standout, but satisfactory.

I never got any farther based the skeletons than I did last time, but I did scoot by to scout out the rest of the map and the remaining two ruins. My presumption that this is gamebook-style structure is holding out; it is very clear for reasons you’ll see that the ruins need to be done in order, and there is at least one “self-contained” road encounter which could come straight out of a Fighting Fantasy book. Just to give the basic map the game gives again first…

…followed by my own map, where I have squished the ruins into single rooms.

For out-on-the-road encounters, a straightforward early one (if you just head west) on the very first road has a hut with woman who asks for food and gives a flute in exchange. Straightforward as we start the game with food.

This is mid-animation of the woman disappearing.

Nearby there’s an idol with a head removed. You can pick up the head, put it back on, and have a jaguar walk away. Again, really a set piece rather than a puzzle (I haven’t seen the up-shot yet).

This is animated.

Then, City of Thieves style, a man somehow knows I am suffering under a curse, and offers to trade a cure.

This is set up to feel nominally like a puzzle as you GIVE every item in your inventory; the one the man wants is your REVOLVER.

This sort of encounter is not common in adventure games; it is, again, a set-piece, and it is very easy to back out and ignore the man on a re-try. It suggests, yet again, a different philosophical approach to writing the game (at least for the road parts). It is of course possible the scene of getting ripped off is needed for some later scene, but this game doesn’t give me that sort of vibe.

No puzzle even here: you just drive by faster and don’t even have the encounter (I have the feeling I’ll be meeting them after finishing with the second ruin).

Speaking of the second ruin, when entering you get an encounter with a creature who has been kept immortal and gives you a hint about using three bowls (jade, silver, gold) to get through the upcoming obstacles. I only have two out of the three, but it is nice the structure here is so explicit that Ruin 1 leads to Ruin 2.

Immediately after this you are blind in a room with toxic gas. I assume the jade bowl helps somehow but I have yet to puzzle out what to do (it might even be the missing silver bowl I have to use first, so I haven’t been trying too hard yet).

The third ruin can also be reached straightaway, and you can walk around a little, but you are stymied in all directions by doors that need keys. It seems nearly certain that Ruin 2 has the keys to get into Ruin 3 and make it to the end of the game.

I am perfectly happy to get spoilers on the boulder and/or skeletons in the first ruin, although please use ROT13.

Well, that was a pretty good four months.

Prytania Media's first subsidiary has been closed 'without warning'

Prytania co-founder Jeff Strain attributed the closure of Possibility Space to an incoming report from Kotaku's Ethan Gach.

-- gamedeveloper.com, April 12

That "incoming report" is the same one mentioned by Annie Strain -- Jeff's spouse and the other co-founder -- in her post last week. (Wayback link because they yanked it after a couple of days.)

Note that, by their own words, both Jeff and Annie are upset about an unreleased article. In fact, about what might be in an unreleased article. An unreleased article about the closure of Crop Circle games, a studio I did not work for. (Crop Circle, Possibility Space, and a couple of others were sibling studios under an umbrella called Prytania Media.)

Yeah, I have no idea either. Keep an eye out for future journalism on this mess. I'm sure it will be fun reading, in some sense.

In the meantime, I guess I'm available for work again!

Anson says that the company has defined 115 distinct tasks involved in putting out an adventure, and many of those tasks involve creating and refining a story. Everything is planned; frequent meetings are integral to every step of the production. Ideas for the plot of the game, the characters, the puzzles— all are tossed around at these bull sessions.

(Continued from my previous post.)

The manual for Mask of the Sun from the later Brøderbund printing, via the Internet Archive.

So before getting back into the gameplay, I wanted to discuss the game’s parser, which I hinted last time left something to be desired. The Softline article I quoted last time certainly tries to pump it up:

Ultrasoft’s parser is based on concepts of artificial intelligence. In any given message, it eliminates words that don’t make sense and attempts to make sense out of words that are relevant to the situation. This method frees the player from the verb-noun format of the typical adventure’s input. Consider: If you’re in a room with two men, one old and one young, in an adventure with a two-word parser, you might have to make several tries before finding the correct verb-and-noun combination that expresses your wish {as to what is correct, the arbitrary decision of the programmer is final).

In Serpent’s Star, there is just such a situation. But with the Ultrasoft parser, you can type, “Co sit with the old man at the table,” and the parser extracts the operative words “sit” and “old man” and sits you down next to him. Once you’re familiar with what the operative words are, you can just type “old man” and know the parser will understand. Many of the verbal “puzzles” of the two-word parsers are really only hindrances to realistic game play. After all, you can only put up for so long with messages like “I don’t know how to OLD something.”

I can’t comment on Serpent’s Star (Ultrasoft’s second game which we’ll visit in ’83). I will say this game’s parser has serious issues, and their handling of the issue cited above is terrible.

For example, there is a scene early with a jade bowl. You can GET BOWL and the game will react like you’d expect. However, immediately after, trying to EXAMINE BOWL gets:

I don’t recognize an object in “EXAMINE BOWL”.

??? I was seriously baffled for a while until I realized EXAMINE JADE BOWL was what worked. So not only do most actions require the adjective, the game inconsistently requires it, so one scene you can refer to the bowl as a bowl while the next you can’t.

As another example, let me pull up my verb-testing list for the game.

This represents me going through the list and typing each word alone. Sometimes the word genuinely works alone (DIG: “DIG doesn’t work here.”) but usually the response on one of the green-marked words is something like:

I don’t recognize a noun in “CLIMB”.

Fair enough, although I should point out using grammar terms isn’t the greatest way to do this; “you need to say what you want to climb” would be better. It’s better to explain why something went wrong in a game from the perspective of what the player needs to fix rather than from the perspective of what caused the computer to be confused. That isn’t what the main issue is, though. Take USE:

I don’t recognize a noun in “USE”.

This made me think USE OBJECT might be useful in some circumstances, but here’s the response to USE ROPE:

I don’t recognize a verb in “USE ROPE”.

Which straight up comes across as a bug. I’m still not sure what to make of it. Does this mean that USE will work somewhere, but only in a very specific place, just like you can refer to the “jade bowl” as just a “bowl” but only when taking it? This wild inconsistency is far, far, worse than dealing with a two-word parser.

At least two-word parser give you their restrictions up front. Here I’m paranoid about guess-the-phrase showing up, and it isn’t like removing “excess words” like THE is that big a deal (another thing the manual touts).

Enough grumping, let’s move on. Last time I entered a ruin and was cut off in darkness, lacking a match to light my lantern. I missed possibly the most obvious thing to try, which was to check my inventory in case I had something helpful to start.

So we get a box of matches, knife, bottle of pills, ancient amulet, and loaded revolver in our inventory as the adventure begins, added onto immediately by the shovel, lantern, food, rope, and map from the jeep. We’re actually well equipped! (Like you would expect to be true on a real adventure!) I’ve observed before getting a lot of tools to start is pretty rare, even though in a verisimilitude sense it would match better with the situation. I’m wondering if this is a positive effect of the “strategic planning” element of Ultrasoft; that is, they thought about adventures at a “meta level” and wondered themselves why so many of the games start you with nothing.

Of course, because this is the Ultrasoft parser, trying to refer to a the match box is futile, and I mean totally futile.

I don’t recognize a noun in “OPEN BOX”.

I don’t recognize a verb in “OPEN MATCH BOX”.

I don’t recognize a verb in “OPEN MATCHBOX”.

I don’t recognize a noun in “OPEN”.

(Just like USE, yes.) I eventually puzzled out I could just LIGHT MATCH straight up, so even though you don’t see individual matches in your inventory, you can still refer to them. Look, this sort of thing is a nice quality-of-life feature to jump straight to pulling out a match, but that doesn’t mean you get to skip the player being able to refer to the box itself. What if there’s a limit to the number of matches? Maybe there is, I don’t even know.

(Incidentally, back to the inventory, those pills are “your lifegiving pills” and you start with 97 of them. I assume you have moments where your curse-illness strikes, so they’re for lasting a little bit longer. Good atmosphere, that.)

With the lantern lit I was able to enter the first ruin properly, and see what was hissing. What you’re about to see is a series of animation screens, and the animation keeps going as you type. If you wait long enough you’ll die.

The final screen immediately triggers after typing SHOOT; you don’t even hit enter. (Bespoke! So much for their advanced parser. But this time it worked out in practice.)

This leads to a room with a pedestal and a left and right passage. Compass directions are now out. You have to type LEFT or RIGHT or FORWARD or BACKWARD to move, and sometimes the directions are relative (that is, if you enter from the east, going right will be north) and sometimes they’re not and just based on the image that you see on the screen (so the passage on the RIGHT will always be oriented that way in a particular room, no matter how you arrived at the room).

RIGHT and LEFT are both dead ends.

Your companion will lower a rope you can climb, so this is a “cinematic set piece” rather than a puzzle.

If you try to EXAMINE the pedestal the game says you should search further, so SEARCH PEDESTAL instead gets a secret door you can open:

Further in is the jade bowl I was complaining about earlier.

If you pick it a trap triggers and the room brings you down to another level.

In one direction is a teetering boulder, and it is honestly atmospheric as the boulder is animated teetering in real time. I haven’t managed to get it to trigger even on purpose for an amusing death message.

In another direction are some sarcophagi. You can get Raoul to help you open one, revealing a spirit.

Just waiting long enough seems to cause the spirit to go away, leaving a gold bowl.

In a third direction is another branching area. Moving a heavy urn from one pedestal to another opens a passage to the outside, so you can go back to the jeep.

Going to the “right” leads to some skeletons guarding a silver bowl (remember I already have jade and gold). However, the skeletons wake up and defend this one, Harryhausen-style, and even animate kind of like Harryhausen.

This animates as you are typing, just like the snake.

Again, waiting too long kills you, and this time (admittedly as expected) the gun doesn’t work. I’m still not sure how to deal with the skeletons; I don’t know if I’m supposed to be yet. I kind of want the boulder to kill the skeletons but I can’t get it to trigger and based on the map I don’t think it’s a straight shot. (If you run away, the skeletons just resume guarding position, so you can’t lead them over.)

The reason I feel like I should deal with them now is the game has been structured so far more like a gamebook than a standard text adventure. By which I mean: lots of self-contained set pieces, left or right branches that sometimes lead to nothing, and the general feel of “cinematic scenes” akin to Arabian Adventure more than a big looping puzzle-box. I’m not far enough in to be certain, though.

The years from 1991 to 1998 were special ones in which to be a Star Wars fan. For during these years, more so than during any other time in the franchise’s existence, Star Wars truly belonged to its fans.

The period just before this one is sometimes called the “Dark Period” or the “Dark Ages” by the fans of today. After 1983’s Return of the Jedi, that concluding installment in the original trilogy of films, George Lucas, Star Wars‘s sometimes cantankerous creator, insisted that he was done with his most beloved creation. A few underwhelming television productions aside, he stayed true to his word in the years that followed, whilst also refusing anyone else the right to play in his playground; even Kenner Toys was denied its request to invent some new characters and vehicles with which to freshen up the action-figure line. So, Star Wars gradually faded from the mass-media consciousness, much like the first generation of videogames that so infamously crashed the same year Return of the Jedi dropped. But no Nintendo came along to revive Star Wars‘s fortunes, for the simple reason that Lucas refused to allow it. The action figures that had revolutionized the toy industry gathered dust and then slowly disappeared from store shelves, to be replaced by cynical adjuncts to Saturday-morning cartoons: Transformers, He-Man, G.I. Joe. (Or, perhaps better said, the television shows were adjuncts to the action figures: the old scoffer’s claim that Star Wars had been created strictly to sell toys was actually true in their case.)

The biggest Star Wars project of this period wasn’t any traditional piece of media but rather a theme-park attraction. In a foreshadowing of the franchise’s still-distant future, Disneyland in January of 1987 opened its Star Wars ride, whose final price tag was almost exactly the same as that of the last film. Yet even at that price, something felt vaguely low-rent about it: the ride had been conceived under the banner of The Black Hole, one of the spate of cinematic Star Wars clones from the films’ first blush of popularity, then rebranded when Disney managed to acquire a license for The Black Hole’s inspiration. The ride fit in disarmingly well at a theme park whose guiding ethic was nostalgia for a vanished American past of Main Streets and picket fences. Rather than remaining a living property, Star Wars was being consigned to the same realm of kitschy nostalgia. In these dying days of the Cold War, the name was now heard most commonly as shorthand for President Ronald Reagan’s misconceived, logistically unsustainable idea for a defensive umbrella that would make the United States impervious to Soviet nuclear strikes.

George Lucas’s refusal to make more Star Wars feature films left Lucasfilm, the sprawling House That Star Wars Built, in an awkward situation. To be sure, there were still the Indiana Jones films, but those had at least as much to do with the far more prolific cinematic imagination of Steven Spielberg as they did with Lucas himself. When Lucas tried to strike out in new directions on his own, the results were not terribly impressive. Lucasfilm became as much a technology incubator as a film-production studio, spawning the likes of Pixar, that pioneer of computer-generated 3D animation, and Lucasfilm Games (later LucasArts), an in-house games studio which for many years wasn’t allowed to make Star Wars games. The long-running Star Wars comic book, which is credited with saving Marvel Comics from bankruptcy in the late 1970s, sent out its last issue in May of 1986; the official Star Wars fan club sent out its last newsletter in February of 1987. At this point, what was there left to write about? It seemed that Star Wars was dead and already more than half buried. But, as the cliché says, the night is often darkest just before the dawn.

The seeds of a revival were planted the very same year that the Star Wars fan club closed up shop, when West End Games published Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, a tabletop RPG. Perhaps because it addressed such a niche segment of the overall entertainment marketplace, it was allowed more freedom to expand upon the extant universe of Star Wars than anything that had come before from anyone not named George Lucas. Although its overall commercial profile would indeed remain small in comparison to the blockbuster films and toys, it set a precedent for what was to come.

In the fall of 1988, Lou Aronica, head of Bantam Books’s science-fiction imprint Spectra, sent a proposal to Lucas for a series of new novels set in the Star Wars universe. This was by no means an entirely original idea in the broad strokes. The very first Star Wars novel, Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, had appeared just nine months after the first film, having been born as a script treatment for a potential quickie low-budget sequel if the movie should prove modestly but not extremely successful. After it, a handful of additional paperbacks starring Han Solo and Lando Calrissian had been published. But Aronica envisioned something bigger than those early coattail-riders, a series of true “event” novels. “We can’t do these casually,” he wrote to Lucas. “They have to be as ambitious as the movies were. This body of work is too important to popular culture to end with these three movies.”

He knew it was a shot in the dark. Thus he was disappointed but not overly surprised when he heard nothing back for months; many an earlier proposal for doing something new with Star Wars had fallen on similarly deaf ears. Then, out of the blue, he received a grudging letter expressing interest. “No one is going to buy these,” Lucas groused — but if Bantam Books wanted to throw its money away, Lucasfilm would deign to accept a licensing royalty, predicated on a number of conditions. The most significant of these were that the books could take place between, during, or after the movies but not before; that they would be labeled as artifacts of an “Expanded Universe” which George Lucas could feel free to contradict at any time, if he should ever wish to return to Star Wars himself; and that Lucas and his lieutenants at Lucasfilm would be able to request whatever changes they liked in the manuscripts — or reject them completely — prior to their publication. All of that sounded fine to Lou Aronica.

So, Heir to the Empire, the first of a trilogy of novels telling what happened immediately after Return of the Jedi, was published on May 1, 1991. Its author was Timothy Zahn, an up-and-coming writer whose short stories had been nominated for Hugo awards four times, winning once. Zahn was symbolic of the new group of creators who would be allowed to take the reins of Star Wars for the next seven years. For unlike the workaday writers who had crafted those earlier Star Wars novels to specifications, Zahn was a true-blue fan of the movies, a member of the generation who had first seen them as children or adolescents — Zahn was fifteen when the first film arrived in theaters — and literally had the trajectory of their lives altered by the encounter. Despite the Bantam Spectra imprint on its spine, in other words, Heir to the Empire was a form of fan fiction.

Heir to the Empire helped the cause immensely by being better than anyone might have expected. Even the sniffy mainstream reviewers who took it on had to admit that it did what it set out to do pretty darn effectively. Drawing heavily on the published lore of Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game as well as his own imagination, Zahn found a way to make his novel feel like Star Wars without lapsing into rote regurgitation of George Lucas’s tropes and plot lines. Grand Admiral Thrawn, his replacement for Darth Vader in the role of chief villain, was at least as interesting a character as his predecessor, whilst being interesting in totally different ways. Through him, Zahn was able to articulate an ethical code for the Empire that went beyond being evil and oppressive for the sake of it: a philosophy of political economy by no means unknown to some of the authoritarian nations of our own world, hinging on the belief that too much personal freedom leads only to anarchy and chaos and an endemic civic selfishness, making life worse for everyone. It’s a philosophy with which you can disagree — I certainly do, stridently — but it isn’t a thoughtless or even an entirely heartless one.

This is not to say that Heir to the Empire was some dry political dissertation; Zahn kept the action scenes coming, kept it fun, kept it Star Wars, striking a balance that George Lucas himself would later fail badly to establish in his own return to his science-fiction universe. The hardcover novel topped the New York Times bestseller chart, defying Lucas’s predictions of its failure, proving there was a ready market out there for new Star Wars product.

That said, very few of the Star Wars novels that would follow would match Heir to the Empire and its two sequels in terms of quality. With so much money waiting to be made, Lou Aronica’s vision for a carefully curated and edited series of event novels — perhaps one per year — fell by the wayside all too rapidly. Soon new novels were appearing monthly rather than yearly, alongside a rebooted comic book. Then they were coming even faster than that; 1997 alone saw a staggering 22 new Star Wars novels. And so the Expanded Universe fell victim to that bane of fan fictions everywhere, a lack of quality control. By the time Han Solo and Princess Leia had gotten married and produced three young Jedi of their own, who were all running around having adventures of their own in their own intertwining series of books, it was reasonable to ask whether it was all becoming much, much too much. A drought had become an indiscriminate tsunami; a trilogy of action movies had turned into All My Children.

Even when it was no better than it ought to have been, however, there was a freewheeling joy to the early Expanded Universe which is poignant to look back upon from the perspective of these latter days of Star Wars, when everything about the franchise is meticulously managed from the top down. The Expanded Universe, by contrast, was a case of by the fans, for the fans. With new movies the stuff of dreams only, they painted every corner of the universe in vivid colors of their own. The Expanded Universe could be cheesy, but it was never cynical. One could argue that it felt more like Star Wars — the original Star Wars of simple summertime fun, the one that didn’t take itself so gosh-darn seriously — than anything that has appeared under the name since 1998.

By a happy accident, a contract between Lucasfilm and Kenner Toys, giving the latter an exclusive monopoly on Star Wars “toys and games,” was allowed to lapse the same year that Heir to the Empire appeared in bookstores. Thus LucasArts, Lucasfilm’s own games division, could get in on the Expanded Universe fun. What had been a bizarre dearth of Star Wars games during the 1980s turned into a 1990s deluge almost comparable to the one taking place in novels. LucasArts released a dozen or so Star Wars games in a broad range of gameplay genres between 1993 and 1998, drawing indiscriminately both from the original movies and from the new tropes and characters of the literary Expanded Universe. Like the books, these games weren’t always or even usually masterpieces, but their unconstrained sense of possibility makes them feel charmingly anomalous in comparison to the corporate-managed, risk-averse, Disneyfied Star Wars of today.

And then, too, LucasArts did produce two games that deserve to be ranked alongside Timothy Zahn’s first trilogy of Star Wars novels as genuine classics in their field. We’ve met one of these already in an earlier article: the “space simulator” TIE Fighter, whose plot had you flying and fighting for Zahn’s more philosophically coherent version of the Empire, with both Darth Vader and Admiral Thrawn featuring in prominent roles. The other, the first-person shooter Jedi Knight, will be our subject for today.

Among other things, Jedi Knight heralded a dawning era of improbably tortured names in games. Its official full name is Star Wars: Jedi Knight — Dark Forces II, a word salad that you can arrange however you like and still have it make just about the same amount of sense. It’s trying to tell us in its roundabout way that Jedi Knight is a sequel to Dark Forces, the first Star Wars-themed shooter released by LucasArts. Just as TIE Fighter and its slightly less refined space-simulator predecessor X-Wing were responses to the Wing Commander phenomenon, Jedi Knight and before it Dark Forces put a Star Wars spin on the first-person-shooter (FPS) craze that was inaugurated by DOOM. So, it’s with Dark Forces that any Jedi Knight story has to begin.

Dark Forces was born in the immediate aftermath of DOOM, when half or more of the studios in the games industry seemed suddenly to be working on a “DOOM clone,” as the nascent FPS genre was known before that acronym was invented. It was in fact one of the first of the breed to be finished, shipping already in February of 1995, barely a year after its inspiration. And yet it was also one of the few to not just match but clearly improve upon id Software’s DOOM engine. Whereas DOOM couldn’t handle sloping surfaces, didn’t even allow you to look up or down, LucasArts’s “Jedi” engine could play host to vertiginous environments full of perches and ledges and passages that snaked over and under as well as around one another.

Dark Forces stood out as well for its interest in storytelling, despite inhabiting a genre in which, according to a famous claim once advanced by id’s John Carmack, story was no more important than it was in a porn movie. This game’s plot could easily have been that of an Expanded Universe novel.

Dark Forces begins concurrent to the events of the first Star Wars movie. Its star is Kyle Katarn, a charming rogue of the Han Solo stripe, a mercenary who once worked for the Empire but is now peddling his services to the Rebel Alliance alongside his friend Jan Ors, a space jockey with a knack for swooping in in the nick of time to save him from the various predicaments he gets himself into. The two are hired to steal the blueprints of the Death Star, the same ones that will allow the Rebels to identify the massive battle station’s one vulnerability and destroy it in the film’s bravura climax. Once their role in the run-up to that event has been duly fulfilled, Kyle and Jan then go on to foil an Imperial plot to create a new legion of super soldiers known as Dark Troopers. (This whole plot line can be read as an extended inside joke about how remarkably incompetent the Empire’s everyday Stormtroopers are, throughout this game just as in the movies. If ever there was a gang who couldn’t shoot straight…)

Told through sparsely animated between-mission cut scenes, it’s not a great story by any means, but it serves its purpose of justifying the many changes of scenery and providing some motivation to traverse each succeeding level. Staying true to the Han Solo archetype, Kyle Katarn is even showing signs of developing a conscience by the time it’s over. All of which is to say that, in plot as in its audiovisual aesthetics, Dark Forces feels very much like Star Wars. It provided for its contemporary players an immersive rush that no novel could match; this and the other games of LucasArts were the only places where you could see new Star Wars content on a screen during the mid-1990s.

Unfortunately, Dark Forces is more of its time than timeless.^[1]A reworked and remastered version of Dark Forces has recently been released as of this writing; it undoubtedly eases some of the issues I’m about to describe. These comments apply only to the original version of the game. I concur with Wes Fenlon of PC Gamer, who wrote in a retrospective review in 2016 that “I spent more of my Dark Forces playthrough appreciating what it pulled off in 1995 than I did really having fun.” Coming so early in the lifespan of the FPS as it did, its controls are nonstandard and, from the perspective of the modern player at least, rather awkward, lacking even such niceties as mouse-look. In lieu of a save-anywhere system or even save checkpoints, it gives you a limited number of lives with which to complete each level, like one of the arcade quarter-eaters of yore.

Its worst issues, however, are connected to level design, which was still a bit of a black art at this point in time. It’s absurdly easy to get completely lost in its enormous levels, which have no obvious geographical through-line to follow, but are rather built around a tangled collection of lock-and-key puzzles that require lots and lots of criss-crossing and backtracking. Although there is an auto-map, there’s no easy way to project a three-dimensional space like these levels onto its two-dimensional plane; all those ladders and rising and falling passageways quickly turn into an incomprehensible mess on the map. Dark Forces is an ironic case of a game being undone by the very technological affordances that made it stand out; playing it, one gets the sense that the developers have rather outsmarted themselves. When I think back on it now, my main memory is of running around like a rat in a maze, circling back into the same areas again and again, trying to figure out what the hell the game wants me to do next.

Good luck making sense of this bowl of spaghetti…

Nevertheless, Dark Forces was very well-received in its day as the first game to not just copy DOOM‘s technology but to push it forward — and with a Star Wars twist at that. Just two complaints cut through the din of praise, neither of them having anything to do with the level design that so frustrated me. One was the lack of a multiplayer mode, an equivalent to DOOM‘s famed deathmatches. And the other was the fact that Dark Forces never let you fight with a lightsaber, rather giving the lie to the name of the Jedi engine that powered it. The game barely even mentioned Jedi and The Force and all the rest; like Han Solo, Kyle Katarn was strictly a blaster sort of guy at this juncture. LucasArts resolved to remedy both of these complaints in the sequel.

Jedi Knight actually straddles two trends in 1990s gaming, one of which has remained an evergreen staple of the hobby to this day, the other of which has long since been consigned to the realm of retro kitsch. The former is of course the FPS genre; the later is the craze for “full-motion video,” the insertion of video clips featuring real human actors into games. This “interactive movie” fad was already fast becoming passé when Jedi Knight was released in October of 1997. It was one of the last relatively big-budget, mainstream releases to embrace it.

Having written about so many of these vintage FMV productions in recent years, I’ve developed an odd fascination with the people who starred in them. These were generally either recognizable faces with careers past their prime or, more commonly, fresh-faced strivers looking for their big break, the sort of aspirants who have been waiting tables and dressing up in superhero costumes for the tourists strolling the Hollywood Walk of Fame for time immemorial, waiting for that call from their agent that means their ship has finally come in. Needless to say, for the vast majority of the strivers, a role in a CD-ROM game was as close as they ever came to stardom. Most of them gave up their acting dream at some point, went back home, and embarked on some more sensible career. I don’t see their histories as tragic at all; they rather speak to me of the infinite adaptability of our species, our adroitness at getting on with a Plan B when Plan A doesn’t work out, leaving us only with some amusing stories to share at dinner parties. Such stories certainly aren’t nothing. For what are any of our lives in the end but the sum total of the stories we can share, the experiences we’ve accumulated? All that stuff about “if you can dream it, you can do it” is nonsense; success in any field depends on circumstance and happenstance as much as effort or desire. Nonetheless, “it’s better to try and fail than never to try at all” is a cliché I can get behind.

But I digress. In Jedi Knight, Kyle Katarn is played by a fellow named Jason Court, whose résumé at the time consisted of a few minor television guest appearances, who would “retire” from acting by the end of the decade to become a Napa Valley winemaker. Court isn’t terrible here — a little wooden perhaps, but who wouldn’t be in a situation like this, acting on an empty sound stage whose background will later be painted in on the computer, intoning a script like this one?

Kyle Katarn, right, with his sidekick Jan Ors. It was surely no accident that Jason Court bears a passing resemblance to Mark Hamill — who was ironically himself starring in the Wing Commander games at this time.

Ah, yes… the script. Do you remember me telling you how Timothy Zahn’s early Star Wars novels succeeded by not slavishly echoing the tropes and character beats from the films? Well, this script is the opposite of that. The first words out of any character’s mouth are those of a Light Jedi promising a Dark Jedi that “striking me down” will have unforeseen consequences, just as Obi-Wan Kenobi once said to Darth Vader. What follows is a series of reenactments of beats and entire scenes from the movies in slightly altered contexts, on a budget of about one percent the size. Kyle Katarn, now yanked out of Han Solo’s shoes and thrust into those of Luke Skywalker, turns out to have grown up on a planet bizarrely similar to Tatooine and to have some serious daddy issues to go along with an inherited lightsaber and undreamt-of potential in The Force. The word “derivative” hardly begins to convey the scale of this game’s debt to its cinematic betters.

For all that, though, it’s hard to really hate the cut scenes. Their saving grace is that of the Expanded Universe as a whole (into whose welcoming canon Kyle Katarn was duly written, appearing in the comics, the novels, even as an action figure of his own): the lack of cynicism, the sense that everything being done is being done out of love even when it’s being done badly. When the Jedi ignited their lightsabers during the opening cut scene, it was the first time that distinctive swoosh and buzz had been seen and heard since Return of the Jedi. Even in our jaded present age, we can still sense the makers’ excitement at being allowed to do this, can imagine the audience’s excitement at being witness to it. There are worse things in this world than a community-theater re-creation of Star Wars.

The cut scenes are weirdly divorced from everything else in Jedi Knight. Many FMV productions have this same disjointed quality to them, a sense that the movie clips we watch and the game we play have little to do with one another. Yet seldom is that sense of a right hand that doesn’t know what the left is doing more pronounced than here. The Kyle of the video clips doesn’t even look like the Kyle of the rest of the game; the former has a beard, the latter does not. The divide is made that much more jarring by the aesthetic masterfulness of the game whenever the actors aren’t onscreen. Beginning with that iconic three-dimensional text crawl and John William’s equally iconic score, this game looks, sounds, and plays like an interactive Star Wars movie — whenever, that is, it’s not literally trying to be a Star Wars movie.

Certainly the environments you explore here are pure Star Wars. The action starts in a bar that looks like the Mos Eisley cantina, then sends you scampering off through one of those sprawling indoor complexes that seem to be everywhere in the Star Wars universe, all huge halls with improbably high ceilings and miles of corridors and air shafts connecting them, full of yawning gaps and precarious lifts, gun-metal grays and glittering blacks. Later, you’ll visit the streets and rooftops of a desert town with a vaguely Middle Eastern feel, the halls and courts of a fascistic palace lifted straight out of Triumph of the Will, the crawl-ways and garbage bins of a rattletrap spaceship… all very, very Star Wars, all pulsing with that unmistakable Star Wars soundtrack.

Just as Dark Forces was a direct response to DOOM, in technological terms Jedi Knight was LucasArts’s reply to id’s Quake, which was released about fifteen months before it. DOOM and Dark Forces are what is sometimes called “2.5D games” — superficially 3D, but relying on a lot of cheats and shortcuts, such as pre-rendered sprites standing in for properly 3D-modelled characters and monsters in the world. The Quake engine and the “Sith” engine that powers Jedi Knight are, by contrast, 3D-rendered from top to bottom, taking advantage not only of the faster processors and more expansive memories of the computers of their era but the new hardware-accelerated 3D graphics cards. Not only do they look better for it, but they play better as well; the vertical dimension which LucasArts so consistently emphasized benefits especially. There’s a lot of death-defying leaping and controlled falling in Jedi Knight, just as in Dark Forces, but it feels more natural and satisfying here. Indeed, Jedi Knight in general feels so much more modern than Dark Forces that it’s hard to believe the two games were separated in time by only two and a half years. Gone, for example, are the arcade-like limited lives of Dark Forces, replaced by the ability to save wherever you want whenever you want, a godsend for working adults like yours truly whose bedtime won’t wait for them to finish a level.

If you ask me, though, the area where Jedi Knight improves most upon its predecessor has nothing to do with algorithms or resolutions or frame rates, nor even convenience features like the save system. More than anything, it’s the level design here that is just so, so much better. Jedi Knight’s levels are as enormous as ever, whilst being if anything even more vertiginous than the ones of Dark Forces. And yet they manage to be far less confusing, having the intuitive through-line that the levels of Dark Forces lacked. Very rarely was I more than momentarily stumped about where to go next in Jedi Knight; in Dark Forces, on the other hand, I was confused more or less constantly.

Maybe I should clarify something at this point: when I play an FPS or a Star Wars game, and especially when I play a Star Wars FPS, I’m not looking to labor too hard for my fun. I want a romp; “Easy” mode suits me just fine. You know how in the movies, when Luke and Leia and the gang are running around getting shot at by all those Stormtroopers who can’t seem to hit the broadside of a barn, things just kind of work out for them? A bridge conveniently collapses just after they run across, a rope is hanging conveniently to hand just when they need it, etc. Well, this game does that for you. You go charging through the maelstrom, laser blasts ricocheting every which way, and, lo and behold, there’s the elevator platform you need to climb onto to get away, the closing door you need to dive under, the maintenance tunnel you need to leap into. It’s frantic and nerve-wracking and then suddenly awesome, over and over and over again. It’s incredibly hard in any creative field, whether it happens to be writing or action-game level design, to make the final product feel effortless. In fact, I can promise you that, the more effortless something feels, the more hard work went into it to make it feel that way. My kudos, then, to project leader Justin Chin and the many other hands who contributed to Jedi Knight, for being willing to put in the long, hard hours to make it look easy.

Of those two pieces of fan service that were deemed essential in this sequel — a multiplayer mode and lightsabers — I can only speak of the second from direct experience. By their own admission, the developers struggled for some time to find a way of implementing lightsabers in a way that felt both authentic and playable. In the end, they opted to zoom back to a Tomb Raider-like third-person, behind-the-back perspective whenever you pull out your trusty laser sword. This approach generated some controversy, first within LucasArts and later among FPS purists in the general public, but it works pretty well in my opinion. Still, I must admit that when I played the game I stuck mostly with guns and other ranged weapons, which run the gamut from blasters to grenades, bazookas to Chewbacca’s crossbow.

The exceptions — the places where I had no choice but to swing a lightsaber — were the one-on-one duels with other Jedi. These serve as the game’s bosses, coming along every few levels until the climax arrives in the form of a meeting with the ultimate bad guy, the Dark Jedi Jerec whom you’ve been in a race with all along to locate the game’s McGuffin, a mysterious Valley of the Jedi. (Don’t ask; it’s really not worth worrying about.) Like everything else here, these duels feel very, very Star Wars, complete with lots of villainous speechifying beforehand and lots of testing of Kyle’s willpower: “Give in to the Dark Side, Kyle! Use your hatred!” You know the drill. I enjoyed their derivative enthusiasm just as much as I enjoyed the rest of the game.

A Jedi duel in the offing.

Almost more interesting than the lightsabers, however, is the decision to implement other types of Force powers, and with them a morality tracker that sees you veering toward either the Dark or the Light Side of the Force as you play. If you go Dark by endangering or indiscriminately killing civilians and showing no mercy to your enemies, you gradually gain access to Force powers that let you deal out impressive amounts of damage without having to lay your hand on a physical weapon. If you go Light by protecting the innocent and sparing your defeated foes, your talents veer more toward the protective and healing arts — which, given the staggering amounts of firepower at your disposal in conventional-weapon form, is probably more useful in the long run. Regardless of which path you go down, you’ll learn to pull guns right out of your enemies’ hands from a distance and to “Force Jump” across gaps you could never otherwise hope to clear. Doing so feels predictably amazing.

Kyle can embrace the Dark Side to some extent. But as usually happens with these sorts of nods toward free will in games with mostly linear plot lines, it just ends up meaning that he foils the plans of the other Dark Jedi for his own selfish purposes rather than for selfless reasons. Cue the existentialist debates…

I’m going to couch a confession inside of my praise at this point: Jedi Knight is the first FPS I’ve attempted whilst writing these histories that I’ve enjoyed enough to play right through to the end. It took me about a week and a half of evenings to finish, the perfect length for a game like this in my book. Obviously, the experience I was looking for may not be the one that other people who play this game have in mind; those people can try turning up the difficulty level, ferreting out every single secret area, killing every single enemy, or doing whatever else they need to in order to find the sort of challenge they’d prefer. They might also want to check out the game’s expansion pack, which caters more to the FPS hardcore by eliminating the community-theater cut scenes and making everything in general a little bit harder. I didn’t bother, having gotten everything I was looking for out of the base game.

That said, I do look forward to playing more games like Jedi Knight as we move on into a slightly more evolved era of the FPS genre as a whole. While I’m never likely to join the hardcore blood-and-guts contingent, action-packed fun like this game offers up is hard for even a reflex-challenged, violence-ambivalent old man like me to resist.

Epilogue: The Universe Shrinks

Students of history like to say that every golden age carries within it the seeds of its demise. That rings especially true when it comes to the heyday of the Expanded Universe: the very popularity of the many new Star Wars novels, comics, and games reportedly did much to convince George Lucas that it might be worth returning to Star Wars himself. And because Lucas was one of the entertainment world’s more noted control freaks, such a return could bode no good for this giddy era of fan ownership.

We can pin the beginning of the end down to a precise date: November 1, 1994, the day on which George Lucas sat down to start writing the scripts for what would become the Star Wars prequels, going so far as to bring in a film crew to commemorate the occasion. “I have beautiful pristine yellow tablets,” he told the camera proudly, waving a stack of empty notebooks in front of its lens. “A nice fresh box of pencils. All I need is an idea.” Four and a half years later, The Phantom Menace would reach theaters, inaugurating for better or for worse — mostly for the latter, many fans would come to believe — the next era of Star Wars as a media phenomenon.

Critics and fans have posited many theories as to why the prequel trilogy turned out to be so dreary, drearier even than clichés about lightning in a bottle and not being able to go home again would lead one to expect. One good reason was the absence in the editing box of Marcia Lucas, whose ability to trim the fat from her ex-husband’s bloated, overly verbose story lines was as sorely missed as her deft way with character moments, the ones dismissed by George as the “dying and crying” scenes. Another was the self-serious insecurity of the middle-aged George Lucas, who wanted the populist adulation that comes from making blockbusters simultaneously with the respect of the art-house cognoscenti, who therefore decided to make the prequels a political parable about “what happens to you if you’ve got a dysfunctional government that’s corrupt and doesn’t work” instead of allowing them to be the “straightforward, wholesome, fun adventure” he had described the first Star Wars movie to be back in 1977. Suffice to say that Lucas displayed none of Timothy Zahn’s ability to touch on more complicated ideas without getting bogged down in them.

But whatever the reasons, dreary the prequels were, and their dreariness seeped into the Expanded Universe, whose fannish masterminds saw the breadth of their creative discretion steadily constricted. A financially troubled West End Games lost the license for its Star Wars tabletop RPG, the Big Bang that had gotten the universe expanding in the first place, in 1999. In 2002, the year that the second of the cinematic prequels was released, Alan Dean Foster, the author of the very first Star Wars novel from 1978, agreed to return to write another one. “It was no fun,” he remembers. The guidance he got from Lucasfilm “was guidance in the sense that you’re in a Catholic school and nuns walk by with rulers.”

And then, eventually, came the sale to Disney, which in its quest to own all of our childhoods turned Star Wars into just another tightly controlled corporate property like any of its others. The Expanded Universe was finally put out of its misery once and for all in 2014, a decade and a half past its golden age. It continues to exist today only in the form of a handful of characters, Grand Admiral Thrawn among them, who have been co-opted by Disney and integrated into the official lore.

The corporate Star Wars of these latter days can leave one longing for the moment when the first film and its iconic characters fall out of copyright and go back to the people permanently. But even if Congress is willing and the creek don’t rise, that won’t occur until 2072, a year I and presumably many of you as well may not get to see. In the meantime, we can still use the best artifacts of the early Expanded Universe as our time machines for traveling back to Star Wars‘s last age of innocent, uncalculating fun.

Where did it all go wrong?

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 Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters by David L. Craddock, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe by Chris Taylor, and The Secret History of Star Wars by Michael Kaminski. Computer Gaming World of May 1995, October 1996, January 1997, December 1997, and March 1998; PC Zone of May 1997; Retro Gamer 138; Chicago Tribune of May 24 2017.

Online sources include Wes Fenlon’s Dark Forces and Jedi Knight retrospective for PC Gamer. The film George Lucas made to commemorate his first day of writing the Star Wars prequels is available on YouTube.

Jedi Knight is available for digital purchase at GOG.com. Those who want to dive deeper may also find the original and/or remastered version of Dark Forces to be of interest.

High Technologies, Inc., is a company now almost entirely forgotten, were it not for the fact they — as one of the small number of initial distributors for Apple — produced the first television ad for an Apple product, in 1977.

They had a spectacular flame-out with Apple in 1980, having their contract terminated in March, resulting in a lawsuit in June. High Technology filed a $70 million dollar suit for breach of contract. Apple claimed the termination was because they wanted High Technologies to stay within a six-state region, but they were going outside that area; High Technologies claimed “tortious interference with the Company’s business relationships with dealers.”

A second former Apple distributor — the one that is our focus today — also flamed out in a 1980 lawsuit: Omega Northwest (although this one for, as Apple claimed, “unpaid indebtedness to the Company and for fraud”).

To back up a little, in the 60s the businessman Richard Lawrence founded Omega Northwest as a camera company in Washington state; they extended to hi-fi audio and then eventually computers, with multiple branches (Seattle, Bellevue, Lynwood). For Apple, they made a spin-off subsidiary, Sigma Distributors, who focused entirely on Apple and worked on distributing across the northwest United States.

Their main emphasis was hardware and while they did get into software, by ’83 the president (still Lawrence) was keen on simply handing off software distribution to other companies.

In 1981, a vice president at the Sigma subsidiary in the software section — Larry Franks — decided to get into the adventure business, hiring a software analyst at Boeing (Christopher Anson) to lead the effort, who himself hired the programmer, Alan Clark. Clark made a BASIC program first as a proof of concept for an adventure system, then the two of them (Clark and Anson) turned that into a machine language interpreter. By the end of the year Anson went to work on the spinoff company, Ultrasoft.

All this is from a Softline article, and I want to quote a specific part:

The moment of conception for Ultrasoft can be traced to an observation by Clark that most adventures, and most entertainment software in general, were written by hand. He had an idea that, with the tool-using approach that Anson had brought from Boeing, he could write better adventures more efficiently

This is a little true. You can certainly find random adventure games for sale in 1981 written from scratch (like Oo-Topos) but the most prominent adventures — the Scott Adams games and On-Line Systems games — both used tools like Clark is speaking of. So the statement about “most adventures” being written by hand isn’t incorrect, per se, but almost is misleading.

The main thing to keep in mind is that unlike almost every other game we’ve seen for the Project, The Mask of the Sun came from a long-standing company that was large enough to tussle with Apple in a lawsuit. This is not a “bad thing” in that they have a sense of organization that some of our other companies have lacked, and that means (for instance) they hired a professional artist, Margaret Anson, who had a team that did storyboarding (rather than making a single 19-year old produce so much art they had a mental breakdown).

There are some other parts of the Softline article worth highlighting — the company was very proud of Ultracode, their generalized game-writing tool which got touted on the back of the box — but I’ll spread the details out over my multiple posts on this game.

Now it’s time for plot!

Via Mobygames.

We are Max Steele, archaeologist in the Indiana Jones vein, and while we recently found “the scrolls of the monks of Lhasa” they were stolen by our “colleague” Francisco Roboff. In retribution we nab an amulet from said colleague, and do research back in the United States to find out it is a “Pre-Columbian artifact from central Mexico that is surrounded by legend and folklore.”

However, the amulet has some sort of “curse” that lands us in the hospital with our body fading away, and we find out that a mysterious “Mask of the Sun” affiliated with the amulet might hold a cure.

You immediately send a telegram to everyone you can think of who may know about the amulet. Finally, you receive a message from Professor de Perez, of the University of Mexico in Sanchez. He has a map from the University that relates the amulet and the Mask to several Aztec ruins. With only this to go on, you depart for South-Central Mexico, to meet Professor de Perez at an airfield near one of the potential sites. The rest of the adventure is for you to discover!

I’m playing with the most updated version published by Brøderbund.

You start right as the plane has landed, with the Professor and his student Raoul outside. You get both a jeep and some supplies to go with it (a map, a lantern, food, a shovel, and some rope). The food is described as “tasty food” so despite the fancy underpinnings the game is still rooted in Crowther/Woods.

This is “animated” with the image getting closer and closer. One of the touted features of the Ultra system is a fast enough drawing system to have animations.

The map is a nice touch; rather than just randomly wandering out and finding out directions arbitrarily on the fly, there’s a sense of goals.

To go anywhere we need to hop in the jeep first, and driving has an “animation” showing multiple slides.

There’s a branch where you choose to drive either west or northwest. Picking northwest, as it seems to lead to the closest ruin:

There’s a “darkened doorway” at the top of the stairs. Going inside causes the door to shut and there to be a hissing sound in darkness. Unfortunately, the lantern requires matches to light, and the game did not give any at the start.

This seems like a good place to stop while I scout out the territory. Certainly I can say from what I’ve seen so far this is one of the most polished of the games I’ve played for the Project so far; the art has the feel of late-80s Apple II as opposed to the vector squiggles of this time. (Queen of Phobos had animation and some really good style where it leveraged the vector art for a terrific atmosphere; the games with Incrocci illustrations like Masquerade didn’t have them added in until after 1982.)

Mask of the Sun’s parser, on the other hand, does not seem as polished as the authors want to claim, but I want to get a little deeper in the game before I make any over-arching claims about it.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Daria: A Kingdom Simulator is 40% off until April 11th!

Step into a richly detailed world where your dreams of ruling a thriving kingdom become a reality. This captivating resource management game seamlessly blends storytelling with strategic gameplay. Begin your journey with no more than a vision and gradually shape the destiny of a nation. 

Daria: A Kingdom Simulator is an epic 125,000-word interactive fantasy novel by Mike Walter, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Your kingdom doesn’t exist in isolation. You’ll navigate a dynamic world with rival kingdoms, diplomatic intricacies, and the ever-present possibility of warfare or subjugation as you strive to craft a lasting legacy.  The heart of the game lies in its complex yet accessible battle system. 

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary.
• Return to the Lucidverse and be a part of the history of Daria.
• Play in Easy, Normal, or Hard modes, where each difficulty affects many aspects of play.
• Make use of a fully-functioning encyclopedia of game concepts to aid you.
• Enjoy an endless arena-style, tournament mode for you and your heroes to train in battle.
• Specialize as a virtuous or malevolent cleric, a formidable fighter, or a spell-casting wizard.
• Create noble offices, embark on grand building projects, and manage your subjects to help your nation grow.
• Use battle strategy and troop composition to defeat other nations—or negotiate with them using your diplomatic skills.
• Equip your ruler with the most recently acquired weapons and armor.
• Find and collect ten heroes to join you, including an elven huntress, a dwarven prince, a halfling weapons-master, the Archmage of the Academy of Wizards, the Bishop of the Holy Four, and many others.

Are you ready to take the throne and shape the fate of Daria?

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

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

Not too long from a finish, and fortunately not quite so absurd as assuming the existence of an unmentioned item. Still, it is pretty odd.

I knew DIG worked already from testing it on the sand (you find nothing). I guess it sort of makes sense in a shallow pool, but it certainly isn’t the verb I would have used (and I already tried other searching verbs which I thought would have been equivalent).

The tiny graphic is a blue key. This can be taken up to the locked door you can arrive at via rope tied to anchor.

The problem is, going through the locked door takes you back to the strobe room! So it seemed nothing was gained at all from the exercise. However, you can pick up the rope and anchor again after using them, and there’s no way to jump down without them, meaning that the only way to re-use the rope and anchor is to find the blue key, and take the alternate exit after having reclaimed them from the railing.

Almost there. I was stuck on an endless hall, and this was more or less a verb issue again. I tried pushing and pull and some other things on the appropriately marked wall…

…but you’re instead supposed to just GO WALL.

The chest is a red herring. Something about the skull nagged me so I tried smashing it, and I couldn’t do it without using the anchor. This yields a “remote control” with a button, and the only thing left to do is try pushing the button in literally every room in the game while facing every direction. (Fortunately not that many rooms.) I hit paydirt back near the start, at a wall marked “Lost”.

This is the time bomb that has been threatening to blow us up for 30 minutes.

Roger Jonathan Schrag will return for us in 1982 (he wrote another adventure published in a two-pack, just the other half was a different author). I will say I find it fascinating he describes himself as a “hacker” type most interest in testing the limits of coding the system.

I was a kid at the time I did all of my work for Adventure International. I wasn’t doing it for the money. I wrote these programs for the intellectual challenge and for the novelty of seeing my name in full page color ads in the magazines. Checks sort of came in whenever they came in. Sometimes there were sales reports attached. Sometimes not. Since I wasn’t doing this for the money, I really didn’t care much.

— From a portion of the interview with Roger Schrag

He incidentally went on to port the Scott Adams adventure system to Color Computer on his own initiative. While he did get royalties, it seems to have been just for the challenge.

Not every author has been of the description. We’ve had authors impressed by the concept of the parser, impressed by the idea of building a world, impressed by the idea of an interactive story, or even fascinated by the educational potential of adventure games.

What we still haven’t had much of is a business-focused type, making a plan and assembling an organized team, which is what we’ll get to next time.

(And no, I’m not counting On-Line Systems as being very organized — it was a near-miracle Time Zone got finished. This is an entirely different company.)

It wasn’t that long ago this blog visited Toxic Dumpsite, published by Adventure International in a two-pack with Spook House by Roger Jonathan Schrag, another one of our teenaged auteurs.

Via Giant Bomb.

I didn’t have a great time with the first game but I was misunderstanding the initial setup (that you could look in four directions in each “room”) as well as some of the author tendencies (like the ability to LOOK BEHIND and LOOK UNDER things). There are enough quirks that I didn’t want to wait for too long until tackling game number 2. Yes, I could re-read my old blog post, but there’s an author’s vibe that transcends words that’s hard to cling on to. I hope I can give this game a fairer shake than the last one.

I do have a little historical info I lacked last time. Back in 2009 Dale Dobson interviewed the author. Regarding the inclusion of graphics and the ability to look in different directions:

I think I just saw it as a natural progression. I really enjoyed the Scott Adams Adventures, but I thought it was time to turn up the volume and inject a visual aspect. Facing different directions in a room was just part of adding a dimension to the experience.

This indicates we’re talking about a completely separate thread of development than the line started by Deathmaze 5000. This is quite believable to me as the method of movement is different and the light vs. heavy density makes for very different game types, even if both games are technically in the “first person adventure” genre. I never expected the obscure-and-on-a-different-platform game The Haunted Palace to have had any influence either.

Carl and Rebecca are the author’s brother and sister.

Mr. Schrag also explains that he had no “engine” and simply added code on the fly as he went:

I believe when I went to write Spook House I took the code from Toxic Dumpsite and tweaked it. So I did a lot of code reuse.

But I don’t think I actually wrote an engine per se, probably because I didn’t sit down beforehand and spec out the functionality for an engine. Rather, I just sat down and started writing an adventure. And when I discovered I needed a widget to do X, I coded a widget to do X.

Once again we have a hard time limit, once again 30 minutes done in real time. We are trapped in a spooky house and there’s a time bomb set to explode.

The sign is described as being nailed to the wall, which I immediately noted given the trauma I suffered through the last game.

This game has a much different feel from the previous one, which was mapped out in an “industrial” way; this map tries to be a bit more of a maze. The very first room from the start (to the east) flips around the player a bit, and I was able to explore for a while without solving any puzzles.

Passing through you can find a platform.

You can get to the platform in the distance easily, but I didn’t understand the graphic here at first. I’ll come back to this later.

You can turn north find a “fireman’s pole” to slide down, which lands you in some water.

You can swim around a bit for what seems to be just atmosphere…

Either our character is short or being overdramatic. I wasn’t able to die by just swimming around even though the “sinking” message keeps happening.

…but eventually end up on shore, where there’s an anchor and an exit leading up. This is followed by a “strobe room” which literally flashes.

Also, locked door here to the east.

South of that there’s a rotating room which spins around in real time.

If you drop an item in this game, you can’t pick it up again unless you’re facing the same direction you dropped it at. For this spinning room (if you drop an item, with, say, DROP ANCHOR) it means you have to hit the “enter” key at the correct time (having typed GET ANCHOR or whatnot) to pick it up again.

One exit here leads to a trapdoor dropping you back to the entrance, and another one leads to a ramp with a ledge. I was stuck for a while and looped back to that platform I previously mentioned, where I realized it was meant to be the sort of distance I could jump. One JUMP TO PLATFORM later and I found myself at a dead end with a mirror.

Being trained by the author’s previous game, I made sure to LOOK BEHIND the mirror, yielding a rope.

Since the only obstacle I had pending was a ledge at a ramp, and the only items I had were a rope and an anchor, I put them together to make a grappling hook.

This took me only a few beats to puzzle out, but I originally thought of the anchor as much heavier and not really plausible as a grappling hook.

Once up the rope I found a locked door and a “nail file”. Remembering the sign from the start, I tested out a few attempts at using the file before I came across PULL SIGN WITH FILE.

This file can then be used on the locked door by the beach to land in an endless corridor. I have not managed to get out of it.

That’s certainly an encouraging chunk of progress! The locked-door style gameplay endures here but with some more colorful traversal methods. Despite this having a less “grounded” plot than Toxic Dumpsite I’m having more fun with this one and the environment feels more tactile.

I have finished the game. My prior posts are needed to understand this one.

I should mention on top that if you want to play, use Jim Gerrie’s most recent distribution, which fixes the bug I talked about last time.

The Doctor: I’ve got a pistol.
Sarah: But you’d never use it.
The Doctor: True. But they don’t know that, do they?

From a Star Trek – Dr. Who crossover comic.

I essentially had four obstacles to overcome:

1.) figuring out, of the items I already found, which were part of the Key of Time

2.) finding the item on Peladon

3.) resolving the spider on Mutos

4.) finding the item on Mutos

For the first part, I brute forced things by making a beeline to a single object, picking it up, and quitting the game. That gave me a score.

As the above screenshot implies, the “Dr. Who specific” items (the jelly bears, the scarf, the sonic screwdriver) do not give any points and so are not part of the Key. The bananas from the slime world, the ray-gun from Skaro, the white crystal (not blue crystal) from the fog planet, and the large rock from the Moon all gave varying numbers of points.

This doesn’t mean all the other items are useless. If nothing else, you can give the jelly bears to the Time Lord at the very end who will eat it, just for a little role-playing. Some of the uses turn out to be very abstruse.

For example, I found out (rather too late to help) that typing READ RENTICULATOR will give a number, and that number matches the currently held number of key objects.

The main issue here is that the only information given is the item name; there’s no clue or concept of what the item looks like and it would even make some kind of sense to read the thing.

Moving on to the item on Peladon: I was very, very, close to resolving this one, even though it is a spectacularly unfair. I got lucky (?). Remember I had said sometimes the Peladonians are friendly, and sometimes they are not? They are friendly only right here:

By having this happen, in this location you can now go EAST (the only way to spot this is to LOOK or to return to the room).

I just happened to be lucky enough to hit the right moment to TALK but failed to capitalize on my luck, argh. Anyway: one sionated cumquat. Moving on to Mutos, where I need a walkthrough for both these parts…

…actually, let me back up a bit first and talk about beating the game as a whole. It turns out nearly every location can be handled without taking items from other places; that is, PELADON, SKARO, DIETHYLAMIDE, HIDAOUS, and DARK SIDE OF THE MOON can be visited in any order. You might think hitting Skaro (with the ray gun) is better to go to first, because of the ray gun, which blasts nearly anything into powder. However, you can just evade any creatures that appear without fighting, talking, or doing anything (except the Peladonians, as just mentioned).

If you get 40 TARDIS resets — as the Jim Gerrie version of this game gives you — it means you usually can beat the game in time. I ran a Monte Carlo simulation which failed essentially only once every 100 times. (That means you kept trying to reset making it to GALAFRY at the end and landed on SKARO repeatedly, or something like that.) If you go to the minimum the game’s source gave, 21 visits, you have more like a 25% chance of failure for no fault of your own. And that’s not accounting for the fact this probability is for someone who already has the game solved!

Ok, back to the main narrative. Finishing MUTOS is dependent on items from PELADON and DIETHYLAMIDE. The ray gun does not work on the blue spider; if you recall from last time, that’s where I was getting softlocked on Mutos. It turns out — more or less arbitrarily — that you need a blue crystal, and you need to GIVE SPIDER. I tried, on a different run, giving the crystal, and it didn’t work because I was using the wrong parser syntax.

There is no special item hidden here, and the blue spider is not blocking anything. It turns out the game needed another leap, and in another context I’d call this a clever puzzle, but here it was just infuriating.

Specifically, the “dig here” location lets you use the PICK from back on Peladon, and it digs a different route into the sewers than using the grate. However, there is another identical-looking room which is not marked as such, but digging also works here. Assuming you’ve already defeated the blue spider, you’ll find it here.

The dead blue spider is the last part of the Key.

The game presented what is generally pure exploration (with the weird meta-puzzle of finding key objects) but somehow felt the need to toss in two painful object-related puzzles at the end. Perhaps it is for the best.

As I’ve observed before, fan fiction can hit above its weight class in this era, given the space limitations on text; you don’t actually have to spend the time describing what a Dalek looks like. Unfortunately, I really had trouble feeling like I was ever “in the world” due to all the problems I’ve outlined so this will not satisfy a player who is mainly wanting to pretend they’re hopping around the Dr. Who universe. This is even more a pity in that Dr. Who seems wildly appropriate for adventure games (odd, convoluted solutions to things that don’t really involve violence); fortunately, there will be plenty of more such games to come in the future, including a licensed one in 1984.

But for now, we’re going to return back to the United States, for one piece of unfinished business, followed by a well-regarded Apple II game: The Mask of the Sun.

An Unearthly Child, the first serial of Dr. Who, aired in 1963; in 1967, the Doctor made his first appearance in comic book form, via TV Comic issue 800.

Dr. Who is on a planet with his grandchildren (John and Gillian) and is facing off against spiders. The comic authors were somewhat unclear about the general mood of Dr. Who (which involves outwitting more than shooting alien species) but here he goes full blaster.

From the blog Die, Hideous Creature, Die! which includes details about the Doctor cheerfully destroying a species.

In Dr. Who Adventure I got to use a Dalek ray gun on a spider and it crashed the game, which somehow seems appropriate. But let’s rewind:

I had left off on planet Peladon. One thing I hadn’t experimented with was the verb SEARCH, which works in any random room for hiding hidden things. I ended up hitting zero going through the entire planet, even when trying SEARCH multiple times, except for back in the Maze:

I originally visualized this as a lockpick or a guitar pick; this is the kind of pick for digging.

The discovery of the item also let me test out just what the map was like, where I discovered that every direction (north, south, east, west, up, down) looped back to where the pick was. This indicates that escape from the maze is more or less random, so I shouldn’t sweat mapping it.

I also discovered, on a later playthrough, that you don’t always find the pick when searching — and it isn’t a matter of searching multiple times, but rather, you have to “loop again” and that resets the chance of the search working. I don’t know if this is true generally for the map, but if so, then trying SEARCH multiple times won’t help at all; you would need to re-enter each room multiple times, and try SEARCH each time, hoping for the random chance of the designated object showing up. I’m not up to that level of suffering yet though.

The “peladonians” are the “wandering random enemy” of the planet, but they’re only sometimes an enemy. Here are two separate attempts to TALK with them.

Success or failure seems to be random. HIDE on the always hand always works (when it is a creature you can hide from at all, there’s a nasty spot later where you can’t). You can also simply just move to an adjacent room, it isn’t like the aliens have any physical reality to them; it’s just a dice roll if you see one in a particular room, and if you step out and come back in they’ll be gone unless the dice roll makes them show up again. We’ve seen this kind of behavior most recently in Africa Diamond; somehow it was more irritating in that game, I think because it kept switching through what creature might show up, whereas here — being always the same encounter on the same planet — it has a vague tinge of realism.

Leaving the planet behind I hopped around a little. Note that not all of them have real episode equivalents, or at least, the author was mis-spelling from some half-remembered episode.

GALAFRY (the actual planet of the Time Lords, but spelled wrong)
PELADON (as already seen)
SKARO (the planet of the Daleks)
DIETHYLAMIDE (probably invented for the game)
HIDAOUS (probably invented for the game)
DARK SIDE OF THE MOON (a Cybermen base from the episode The Invasion)
MUTOS (not a planet; the derogatory term for an alien race on Skaro)

I did a lot of hopping around, for our purposes let’s visit the remaining planets as listed in order.

SKARO

Because it isn’t Dr. Who without Daleks. (Upon the Who “reboot” starting in 2005 it seemed like Daleks might have finally been done away with, but alas.)

I admit, I was initially tentative about exploring here, but Skaro turns out to be safer than some other places, as there aren’t instant-death spots like passing TARDISes and the geography, while jumbled up, isn’t mind-rending.

Stepping out of the TARDIS I found some jelly babies. They’re one of The Doctor’s favorite snacks, and one of the common elements I’ve found across a few planets (that is, some sort of “personal object” of The Doctor is lying around). They’d be my first candidate for the “key of time” items just because of the theming but if so, I haven’t found one on any planet yet.

The atmosphere is nice; it turns out you can ignore red screaming sirens, though.

The most important thing I found (via SEARCH in a random room) is a dalek ray-gun.

You might think I would immediately go back and try to use it on the actual daleks, but I was still slightly nervous at this moment and didn’t want to force a confrontation. You’ll get to see the gun in action later though.

DIETHYLAMIDE

There is no planet Diethylamide, a place of fog and mountains. That’s ok, not everything needs to be a reference.

I’m missing some exits in the northwest that almost certainly just go to death. The reason why is that it turns out to be horrible to test death-exits in this game.

There’s no save feature, and if you die, you simply go back to Time Lord Central and have to hop into the Tardis and type RESET a lot to get back to the planet you want. It isn’t even the time spent that was grating as much as the act of intentionally hurling bodies just to check every direction (N/S/E/W) to make sure they’re all accounted for.

There’s a troglodyte wandering around, and it likely is responsible for the occasion where you get knocked unconscious and sent somewhere random with your items missing. Lying around the planet (or requiring a SEARCH in one case) I found a DESIONATING RENTICULATOR, a BLUE CRYSTAL, and a WHITE CRYSTAL.

No idea what any of this does.

HIDAOUS

A slime world, again made-up for the game. There’s not much I can find (although I haven’t bothered mapping thoroughly yet), just a landing point, a set of “LOST IN THE SLIME” rooms (with a SKULL hidden therein) and a tree with some bananas. I expect I’m missing something, or maybe the author just ran out of disk capacity.

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

Where Cybermen are hiding, based off a real series.

I know the Cybermen are supposed to be a threat on par with the Daleks, but I’ve never quite felt the same level of concern with them.

In the game version, they are at least a little more deadly than the Daleks since you can wander into death:

Still, in essence the procedure is the same: hide if you see a threat. I’ve snagged a long scarf (Tom Baker ahoy) and a “large rock”.

MUTOS

A planet with a mysterious monolith, and the one I’m definitely not done mapping yet.

There’s a bit where you can find a sonic screwdriver, and also a sign which says to DIG HERE. DIG works to use the PICK to go down into a sewer, although it seems like you can get the same way from another direction. Either way, the moment where my mapping ceases is right here:

There’s a spider where I softlocked the first time through (no items, no way to escape, HIDE doesn’t work) and the second time through, ray-gun in hand, I managed to hard crash the game.

I think maybe there’s supposed to be a PRINT statement there, but when trying to replace the line then playing through again it still seems to be buggy.

So this is at least a good place to do a write-up. My big problem, other than that stalling point on Mutos, is figuring out what the Key of Time parts are. The magazine article claims there is a way to tell what the parts are, and I have no idea. The game has a score but the only way to check it I’ve found is to quit the game. I’ve tried taking items to the Time Lord who needs the pieces at the starting area but I haven’t got a positive reception yet. Maybe I need all the pieces at once.

Cybermen from The Invasion, one of the “lost” serials of Dr. Who, since the BBC didn’t routinely start archiving their materials until the late 70s.

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Friday, Feb. 23, 2024 over Zoom. Zarf, anjchang, Kirill, Stephen Eric Jablonski, Sara, Josh, Kathryn, Hugh, Hilborn, Dana, Doug, Bill Maya, Mike Stage, welcomed newcomers Matt Griffin and Keltana. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.

Zarf mentions you can get a 300GB download for internet archive https://ifarchive.org/misc/whole-archive.html.

Josh shared many fun projects:

• Smoochie jammer, valentine’s , https://itch.io/jam/smoochie-jam-24
• SeedComp https://itch.io/jam/seedcomp24-sprouting-round
• Josh ran across another interactive non-fiction piece recently: not sure it worked that well but it was an interesting musing on historical architecture: https://kitbuckley.github.io/bottlejack/a_significance_for_piggly_wiggly_parking_lots.html

Anna Antropy discussion. DnD Streaming COLECO procedural generation dungeon game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Dungeons_%26_Dragons%3A_Cloudy_Mountain

ChoiceBeat 10 (a zine focused Interactive Fiction, Visual Novels, and lots of oddities that are narrative!) https://choicebeat.wordpress.com/issues-2/ Matt wrote the Joey Jones interview — and the full interview (which was like 18k wordcount, wayyyyy too long) includes several k words just on Sub Rosa and his history of parser games. A choicescript interview could be cool, allowing people to wade through all the interactive fact material. Josh mentioned that the Seattle IF group did a playthrough of part of Sub Rosa last year and Joey and Melvin came and hung out and did some of the reading and reminisced about making it and that was a lot of fun. Matt is planning on developing a choicescript novel for Choice of Games about the interview.

You can find out Matt’s links and his listen to his @talkingnarrative podcast https://www.talkingadditive.com/ about 3D printing. Anj is also into 3D printing, teaching classes and running a 3d printing club at her local library.

The Game and Interactive Software Scholarship Toolkit https://gisst.pomona.edu/ a frontend tool and backend repository software that allows for the citation and retrieval of references to computational states and replays. You can run old versions of DOS and many old PC games.

Mike Stage be going to Narrascope to talk about teaching! Narrascope talks have been chosen! Registration will be open pretty soon. Narrascope was where Matt Griffin found out about PR-IF.

Katherine working on a game with chess! Just back from Japan! Shared a cool book. Stephen is a chess person. Stephen mentioned he had programmed a game called Lost in the Amazon but the game has been lost. Sounded cool though, and meta!

Anj saw Josh present his Ink Visual Novel Template on Twitch. https://joshgrams.itch.io/ink-vn-lite no Ren’Py but it’s a fun little thing Geoffrey and Josh gave a talk at the Hand Eye Society’s SuperFest and that’s linked from the the itch page. You write just basic Ink and drop the compiled JSON file into the VN template, and then there are a couple hashtags that you can put into your Ink code to control the VN sprites and background image

Josh shared very cool visualizations (originally from 2009?) of the CYOA novels and and having fun paging through those again: https://samizdat.co/cyoa/

Sara nominated for a Nebula award, Congratulations Sara!

Spring thing is the next comp thing on the list! Bill Maya submitted to Spring Thing. Contact him if you want a link to his beta, or just go and play!! Deadline for Entry is Mar. 29

ELO deadline extended until March 1st./. some games might be good for online exhibitions!

Josh ran across another interactive non-fiction piece recently that was an interesting musing on historical architecture thing: https://kitbuckley.github.io/bottlejack/a_significance_for_piggly_wiggly_parking_lots.html
Angela actually lived in a town where there was Piggly Wiggly! What memories.
Matt teaches at NYU IDM and also in biofabrication.

We talked about parents writing IF for their kids. Will Crowther wrote Colossal Cave Adventure for his kids too. Some remember their parents writing IF for them as a kid. Good memories of playing IF in the olden days….

On Friday, March 29, 2024, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of interactive fiction at Patreon and Ko-fi.

Curse of the Garden Isle (2018) by Ryan Veeder

In this game, you play as an employee of the Natural History Museum on the island of Kaua’i. Tourists have this habit of taking rocks from the island, but when they finally realize what curse they’ve invoked, they mail the rocks back here. Today, it’s your job to return the stolen rocks to their proper places on the island. Finding chickens everywhere is completely optional.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Erehwon (1999) by Richard Litherland (writing as “Jos. Pinkfoot”)

In this nerdy puzzle game, you play as a 13-year-old youth carrying a lot of emotional baggage in the one-horse town of Erehwon, Aksarben. You’re desperate to gain the approval of Smurf and his gang and join in their game of “Nowhere, Nebraska”, but they need five dice to play and nobody’s got any.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 1999 where it took 11th place. At the 1999 XYZZY Awards, it was a finalist in the Best Setting category.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Six Stories (1999) by Neil K. Guy

After losing control of your car during a blizzard in the mountains of British Columbia, you make your way to rundown shack and sleep. You wake up elsewhere and soon encounter a mouse, a pair of drawing compasses, a tin robot, a pirate monkey, and a pocketwatch — all human-sized, alive, drinking tea, and telling stories. They need you to lead them away from the Darkness.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 1999 where it took 3rd place. At the 1999 XYZZY Awards, it was a finalist in the Best Use of Medium category.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

The Chronicler (2010) by John Evans

In this sci-fi game featuring time-travel puzzles, you play as an investigator, sent to find out why this research colony stopped communicating with the rest of humanity. Your ship rests to the south. The complex is inside the mountain to the north.

This work was an entry in IF Comp 2010 where it took 26th place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

His Majesty’s Royal Space Navy Service Handbook (2023) by Austin Auclair

In this small game, you play as Sheryl Swift, Sub-Lieutenant of the Human Resources Command of His Majesty Smurg IV, the Decisive’s Royal Space Navy. It’s after hours, but you can’t go home until you find all eight chapters of the service handbook that your subordinates were working on, finished or not.

This game was an entry in SeedComp 2023 where it took 2nd place overall. At the 2023 IFDB Awards, it won the Outstanding Worldbuilding award.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Magic Travels (2010) by Mister Nose

In this non-interactive story, you are the last magician, hunting the Master Hunter. You must defeat him to bring back magic. Unfortunately, the game is just one big text dump, and you always die. Hope you’re okay with that.

According to IFDB, this is episode 2 of the Doctor Nose games.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Moondarkling: Elfboon (2011) by Sam Kabo Ashwell

You play as Zbyana (and you have many other names) of the Ruritanian Liminal Patrol. In the Margin Cafe, you find a beautiful outclade elf. Do you arrest her, ignore her, or try to help her?

This game was a participant in the Speed-IF Jacket 4 event.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Unyielding Fury (2006) by Michael Pruitt

In this short introduction to a horror game, you play as a 13-year-old boy dreaming of running in the dark forest. You feel you belong there. You find a glowing stone, and soon afterwards, a huge werewolf.

This work was an entry in IntroComp 2006.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

On Wednesday, February 28, 2024, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! (Sorry for the late post; I intended to post this last month.) Some of these walkthroughs were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of interactive fiction at Patreon and Ko-fi.

The Little Match Girl 3: The Escalus Manifold (2023) by Ryan Veeder (as “Hans Christian Andersen”)

In this RPG fantasy tale, you again play as Ebenezabeth Scrooge, the little match girl who is now a time-traveling assassin-for-hire. Your target is the Snow Queen, a powerful sorceress who uses Shards from the evil Mirror of Belial to control her servants. You dare not face her alone. Find four fellow warriors to join you in your quest. Trounce your foes, level up, and prevail!

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

The Little Match Girl 4: Crown of Pearls (2023) by Ryan Veeder (as “Hans Christian Andersen”)

It’s December 1848. You play as Ebenezabeth Scrooge, the adopted daughter of Ebenezer Scrooge, and you travel through time and space whenever you look at fire. You’re known as a time-traveling bounty hunter and vampire slayer; now Queen Victoria is your client. Find and deliver pearls to the Fairy Realm so their new prince may be crowned.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2023 where it took 3rd place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

The Little Match Girl against the Universal Sisterhood of Naughty Little Girls (2023) by Ryan Veeder (as “Hans Christian Andersen”)

In this game, you play as Ebenezabeth Scrooge, a young woman whose primary talent is to travel to other times and places by looking at fires. But hush. Concentrating, filling your revolver with fire, you shoot a blast of hot radiance at a scarecrow. In its straw head, a splinter of the hated Mirror of Belial is destroyed, but the scarecrow itself is unharmed. “Well done!” cries Hrieman the crow, who doesn’t mind the rain at all. “But how do you know the Universal Sisterhood of Naughty Little Girls is responsible?”

This game takes place soon after The Little Match Girl 4: Crown of Pearls.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Redux (2023) by Shawn Sijnstra

In this game, you play as someone who can’t tell if their eyes are open or not. Your surroundings keep changing. Sometimes you’re lying on a lawn, wracked with pain; or you’re in a starship, red lights flashing; or you’re in a greenhouse with lush plants; or you’re in the RAM space of a computer, watching data zoom by. Something’s wrong and you have to fix it.

This game was an entry in PunyJam #4 where it took 4th place. The game is also available for other platforms.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Fish Bowl (2012) by Ethan Rupp and Joshua Rupp

In this tiny horror game, you play as Larry Wyndham, the drunk beachcomber. Your skin is sweating. You live a simple life in this shack. Everything you need, the sea will provide. Eventually. But when did you get a fish bowl?

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2012 where it took 12th place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

The Locked Room (2023) by Chris Schneider

In this simple underimplemented one-room escape game based on a handful of jokes, you must find a way to eat, drink, and escape from a locked room.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Tower (2009) by Vivienne Dunstan

In this tiny game, you play as an elderly person who is somehow transported to a mist-shrouded garden outside a tower. Explore the tower and find a way home.

This game was a participant in the Interactive Fiction Writing Month event of February 2009, during weeks 1 and 2.

My walkthrough and map

We’re excited to announce that Volume 1 of the graphic novel Breaks, cowritten by Malin Rydén, author of the popular Hosted Games Fallen Hero: Rebirth and Fallen Hero: Retribution, and Emma Vieceli, is back in print and available to buy! To celebrate, we’re putting Malin’s games on sale until April 4th!

Breaks Volume 1

Before Heartstopper, there was Breaks…the enemies-to-lovers queer comic book sensation. Cortland Hunt has made some dangerous mistakes. Now he’s waiting quietly for those mistakes to catch up with him. Ian Tanner coasts through life denying the spark of anger beneath his laid back exterior. When school politics and personal lives become a battleground, the pair find that what they share may just be their only safe haven. Breaks is the story of two young men discovering who they were, who they are, and who they will become.

Buy Breaks Volume 1 today! And don’t forget to pick up Fallen Hero: Rebirth for 30% off and Fallen Hero: Retribution for 33% off before April 4th!

Become the greatest telepathic villain Los Diablos has ever known! Once you were famous; soon you will be infamous. That is, unless your old friends in the Rangers stop you first. Juggle different identities and preserve your secrets as you build new alliances and try to forget the friendships you’ve left behind.

Fallen Hero: Rebirth is a 380,000 word interactive novel by Malin Rydén, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

• Hone your telepathic talents, possess people and venture into their minds.
• Build your own personalized combat armor: be a terrifying super-strong behemoth, a mysterious speedster or anything inbetween
• Make alliances or enemies in the Los Diablos underworld while you outfight and outthink the heroes set against you.
• Explore relationships as straight, gay, bisexual or aromantic. Romance a mad scientist, your former partner, or both.
• Juggle two bodies and three identities, play as male, female or genderqueer.
• Above all; make sure your past never catches up with you.

How far will you fall down the path of villainy?

Sophia: Hi, Manon! For those of us who aren’t already familiar, could you introduce yourself?

Manon: Hi Sophia! Gladly.

My name is Manon, a French netizen, also going as manonamora on the internet (it is a combination of my name and a French mustard brand Amora — 8 year-old me thought it was the perfect username). I’ve been doing creative things since forever, but only discovered the Interactive Fiction scene in mid-2021. Since then, I’ve been making IF games for fun in my spare time.

I am also one of the organisers of Neo-Interactives, along with Autumn Chen, Jinx/Lapin Lunaire, and you, a collective that organises monthly game jams with fun restrictions to help foster creativity and experimentation, as well as bringing together all shapes of IF.

S: Something I’ve found really charming about interactive fiction is how varied the ways we find it are. How did you find IF, and what made you stick around?

M: I found the IF scene kinda by chance, actually!

I’ve always had a preference for narrative-based and puzzle games. So, I played IF games (and IF-adjacent games) without ever knowing they were IF, like Disco Elysium, Fallen London, the Telltale titles, old LucasArts (and inspired) point-n-click like Sam & Max or Grim Fandango, or a bunch of Visual Novels. I even used to have educational CYOA books when I was a small kiddo, where you’d have to solve problems to complete the story.

But I didn’t get acquainted with the IF scene until a few years ago, when a close friend sent me the link to an IF game (A Tale of Crowns) they thought I’d enjoy because it was text-based and I just… love reading!

After going through the creator’s blog, I wondered if I could try my hands at the medium as well (my friend also dared me to try), even if I had absolutely no coding knowledge nor had I written anything creatively for about a decade at that point. It seemed like a nice challenge, where I could learn a thing or two in the process.

So I created a blog on Tumblr, followed a bunch of other IF creators on that platform and made my first game (Meeting the Parents). Through teaching myself to code and playing more IF games, I found my way into other IF circles, participated in game jams and competitions…

The community helped reignite my love for writing and creating, and I never really left.

S: Game jams. You’ve certainly organised a melange of them. Can you tell me more about the process of how you got started doing so, and why?

M: There was a thread on the IntFiction Forum, in late 2021, spitballing about a fun gimmick for a competition — that would become the SeedComp! — which I thought was neat. Participating in the discussion, I volunteered to be one of the organisers and helped it become an actual event 14 days after the thread was created. It was exhilarating making it all happen, having all kinds of exchanges to set down the rules and trying to figure out how to ensure the event would work smoothly, in such a short time.

Until then I’d been looking for more things to do to give back to the community who’d helped me so much already. Creating bonds between people through collaboration, making people excited to create and play new games, adding maybe new perspectives to ideas and themes or what IF can look like… it just felt right, you know?

With the SeedComp! being a fairly successful event, I thought it would be fun to organise more of those throughout the year, especially a more relaxed, more approachable type. There were already quite a few IF events throughout the year, with SpringThing, IFComp, EctoComp, and the different Parser-specific comps, but little in the unranked department. Very few of them where you would not get that heavy pressure of judgement and ranking. And so a bunch of jams happened!

S: You’ve run game jams with a number of people from the community — though, I think it’s fair to say that most of them have been with the Neo-Interactives. How has consolidating a team influenced the experience of hosting game jams? What was the rationale behind forming the group?

M: Indeed, most recent game jams have been organised under the Neo-Interactives (or with some of the N-I organisers). I am grateful we have each other to rely on and bounce ideas off each other, whether it is working on the important details or the silly elements of the jams. It is less stressful to do it as a group rather than alone, especially when it comes to bringing back older game jams (and wanting to stay true to that original aim) or including all types of IF in the set restrictions. Different minds bring different perspectives. We help each other with tasks, spreading the work with one another, taking each other’s parts when needed.

Consolidating the team under one name also helped with ensuring our message and ethos with the game jams stay consistent, since the group has a shared rationale: wanting to see more experimentation in IF, bringing new blood and new perspectives to the medium, building bridges between the different IF communities and IF forms. We wanted a space where people could comfortably share their work without the pressure of ranking or competition, where they could test the water with themes, formats, or mechanics.

The whole do word/coding crimes vibes!

S: Speaking of your assortment — I’d love to hear more about some of the highlights — the inspiration behind some of your game jams, how they panned out, and anything special you took away from hosting them.

M: And I’d love to tell you more about them!

S: The Neo-Twiny jam was one dear to my heart, as I have a special fondness for Porpentine’s body of work. I’m really interested in why you chose to revive that particular jam. Many of the game jams you’ve run play with mechanical restrictions, rather than thematic inspiration, and I’m curious on how you felt the strict word limit influenced the IF made. Why did you increase it from the original jam’s limitation of 300?

M: This one actually started after seeing a post shared by Autumn Chen on Tumblr about the original Twiny Jam that ran in 2015, where she toyed with the idea of rebooting the jam. I had forgotten about it until I participated in the Partim500, the French version of the Twiny Jam, organised yearly by Adrien Saurat since 2017. However, because French is a verbose language compared to English, the word count limit was raised to 500 words. And 500 words is still very little…

That jam had been such a fun experience for me, that it brought Autumn’s post to mind. I hit her up with the idea of bringing back Porpentine’s jam for the international IF scene and we got to work.

Honestly, we are both now unsure why the limit was raised — though it would probably be a safe bet that the Partim500 had something to do with it. I think having a little more wiggle room, with those extra 200 words, was welcomed by the participants, with many of them voicing how they struggled keeping under the limit.

With much of the IF scene orbiting towards large word counts in games, with tens of thousands of words being the “norm” for a basic project, having such a limited number can feel almost impossible. How can you tell a full story with so few words? How can it feel complete and rounded? How can you convey your message successfully and impactfully?

Creativity thrives on restrictions. The 124 unique submissions clearly showed that.

S. The Anti-Romance jam was hosted by our mutual, lovely friend Jinx. You and I are both fond of the romance genre, as you explore in works like your own Crimson Rose & White Lily (in progress) and it seems a rather curious choice for you to have helped run a jam so antithetical to it! So, why did you?

M: I could be asking you the same thing, Sophia! You helped too!

There wasn’t much thinking going into the why.
When Jinx introduced the concept of organising what would become the Anti-Romance jam, I offered to help in a heartbeat. Just diving head first, without a second thought on what it would entail. Because, you know, friends help friends.

While I enjoy a good Romance or two, I am still fonder of exploring themes — any themes! I’m more the kind of person who tries a bunch of different things and experiments with them rather than sticking with one thing. So being part of this event wasn’t too much out of the ordinary for me…

S: The Anti-Romance jam held a fairly fluid view on what anti-romance looked like – what is it to you? Did any of the works from the jam surprise you in its interpretation of the theme?

M: To me, Anti-Romance was simply the lack of Romance. No romantic gestures, no lovey-dovey words… Not that there isn’t love to share or relationships, but just not the romantic relationship kind. The way I went at it when I participated was to create a premise where you stop people from being romantically involved.

After reviewing all the entries when the jam ended, what I took from the event was how diverse the interpretation of the theme ended up being between the submissions. Although the starting point was the same, some stories focused on requited love, others on the end of romance, or the doomed relationship trope. I don’t think my definition of Anti-Romance changed much after that, but it gave me a lot to think about. It was so interesting how each participant thought of such different stories, or used different mediums to convey their reading of the theme, adding depth to what might seem a silly game jam premise.

S: The Single Choice jam. You’ve dabbled rather extensively in both choice, parser, and the radically experimental area bridging both camps of IF. Were there any challenges in adapting the jam, which limits the player to only one choice, to accommodate both choice and parser games? The latter seems like it’d be particularly tricky to address, given the large vocabulary players develop — X, N/S/E/W, take all, and so on.

M: Extensively is being generous, Sophia! I’ve only just scratched the surface for parsers, I’m sure. But dabbling with both has helped me think about the similarities and differences in how IF games are created. Though thinking hadn’t gone that far when we were setting up the Single Choice Jam…

That jam was probably the one that challenged us the most when trying to accommodate both choice and parser games within the game jam’s constraints, especially since we [the organisers] come from a more choice-based mindset. Unlike the Neo Twiny Jam, the restriction focused on the mechanical side of programming rather than a numerical limitation. Participants could only give the player one choice, and only one passage could have more than one option for action.

There are fundamental differences between parsers and non-parser games, especially in the way they are built and the logic behind the code. A passage is not really synonymous to a room. Available actions in parsers are not neatly printed on the screen. Different players will use different inputs for one command (e.g. X, EXAMINE, LOOK AT). There are common commands that may not be considered an action (like examining something). The many details we probably didn’t consider as extensively as we should have when we thought of this event.

When we were setting up the jam, we didn’t realise the constraint would not translate that well for parser entries, not in the way we first defined it. Though it did result in some interesting discussions on the IntFiction Forum when the jam was announced, with users trying to feel where the line was/should be drawn. We had to make many decisions on the fly in those first few days, defining what was acceptable and what would be going against the spirit of the jam. Thankfully, we did manage to get some lovely parser entries at the end!

We hope that for the next iteration of the jam, it will be clearer for all from the start!

S: The Orifice jam was another homage to Porpentine’s influence, embracing the lascivious lushness that I, and many others, have come to associate with her body of work. Some of the entries were, then, unsurprisingly and explicitly NSFW. That’s a little unique among most of the jams you’ve run, I’d say! What was that experience like?

M: As an organiser, the experience was pretty similar to other theme-focused jams, in the way that you set up a page, agree on some rules, announce it, and hope for the best. The exception maybe being that we definitely expected most submissions to be mainly NSFW compared to other IF jams.

When running the Neo-Twiny Jam, another jam paying homage to Porpentine, we’d seen that influence through some of the more explicit entries. I do think the way we formatted the game page of the Orifice Jam, with your amazing header, did set the tone for the jam from the start. Make it weird, make it gross, make it hole-y. And the submissions delivered!

As a participant, however, I felt a bit out of my wheelhouse with the jam. While I enjoy NSFW content, writing more (borderline) explicit content was very alien to me. Even when embracing Porpentine’s work, trying to bring out that lushness you mentioned, or that focus on the body, was pretty strange. It made for an interesting experience, maybe pushing some out of their comfort zone.

S: The Bring Out Your Ghosts jam was a lovely nod to festivals of the dead, where old, unfinished WIPs were the focus. You’ve also organised SeedComp!, a venue where people throw out their ideas for IF games to be sprouted by others into fully fledged pieces. Has this emphasis on killing your darlings resonated with you or your work, personally?

M: We should all be killing our darlings on the regular. A sort of spring cleaning of our mind, idea file, or project folder. Creativity is sometimes a double-edged sword: you can get tons of great ideas… but you also get tons of ideas you want to work on, now. So, it’s very freeing to let go of things that probably won’t end up being realised, to focus on the ones that are possible or already in process.

While I didn’t share anything in Bring Out Your Ghost last year, both jams have definitely had an impact on how I view ideas and projects, for sure. Aside from helping me letting go of ideas I know I won’t ever have the time/energy/capabilities for making, or barely formed ones, which I have a drawer full of, it has helped me realise what could be feasible and what wouldn’t, whether a project would be short or long, and when to end a story, even if it didn’t include all I wanted to do. It’s a lot of reclaimed headspace!

Though I might actually not be that good of an example: I still have a bunch of Works In Progress on my desk (wish-fulfilment, then?). But Pinkunz, one of the SeedComp! organiser, might be, having submitted almost 40 ideas for games that never came to be during the last edition. Ideas that ended up resonating with other creators, as we saw a couple of games based on a few of those seeds.

S: The Bare-Bones jam seems to be the perfect counterpart to your usual wonderful stylization: the factory defaults on whatever program you used to make IF! With your experience in IF communities outside of the IntFiction forum (such as Tumblr, and interact-if), what has been your experience of differing presentation expectations? Did your work in extensively modifying Twine (especially with your Sugarcube templates and hybrid choice-parser works) inspire the jam?

M: That jam was actually inspired by the Naked Twine Jam that ran on Tumblr in 2014, which we reappropriated as a Halloween jam and opened to all programs, not just Twine — though we did expect to see many entries to stick with Twine. The original jam had been organised as a reaction to the worry of Twine games being expected to be in a more “polished” state (due to the increased availability of tools to customise a project, mechanically and through audiovisuals), and releasing the pressure on new game makers to make… well, something. A sort of levelling of the playing field by removing any custom elements, by bringing it back to its bare bones (hehe).

The ethos of the original jam did fuel what we wanted to achieve with the Bare-Bones Jam, in that we wanted a space for people to focus fully on their story, or their puzzle, or their mechanic, without having to worry about how their game would look at the end — spending maybe too much time on the interface they later wished they’d used on the writing or coding.

With so many gorgeous looking games and well-constructed custom UI out there, it is not uncommon to see messages from creators feeling that pressure of having a polished project. Visuals are another way of conveying elements to the player, and an aesthetically pleasing interface can help enhance the player’s experience. Yet, even with there being more resources available now than in 2014 to extensively modify Twine projects (with templates, macros, etc…), I’ve seen in discussions, especially with new creators on the scene on Tumblr, that people can feel like they are drowning with having to learn so much to reach that level of polish — at best, coding and customising feels like a chore. Many would just prefer to spend that time writing and focusing on the story.

Aside from trying to alleviate pressure from the game-making side, we wanted the jam to be especially accessible to newcomers, as competition can be nerve-wracking. By providing a safe space for people to get comfortable with a new program, or even to try a different one, we tried to ensure people could experiment without any expectation.

And I think it worked! We saw new users participating in the jams making their first game, a few who tried to explore a different kind of IF-flavour (parser instead of choice, or vice-versa), some who tested out new programs (from non-IF ones to more traditional CYOA formats), and other who turned to more aesthetically pleasing formats.

S: While IF has its own Speed-IF tradition, the compressed timelines of game jams are a bit of a shakeup compared to the larger, long standing competitions like SpringThing or the IFComp. What do you think game jams bring to the table of IF as a whole?

M: Alike to competitions, game jams are very interesting events for IF. They provide a structure for participants to create a game of some sort, in a limited amount of time, with a set determined deadline. Game jams are often much shorter than competitions, so they create this sense of urgency: you have a limited amount of time to come up with an idea or a concept that would fit the rules and implement it — this is a great motivator to do things.

Sometimes, game jams will even create this sense of uncertainty: the jam could be a one-off and never happen again, or it could come back but with completely different rules. You may end up with some sort of FOMO (fear of missing out) if you don’t participate right then and there with the idea you’ve just cooked up. If not now, when?

Another important thing I feel about game jams, especially the unranked type, is that they help welcome newcomers to the scene, as I said before, without having the pressure to perform well or worrying about a ranking. They are relaxed events that bring in new blood and diverse perspectives to the IF landscape. I believe those elements are important for the community, especially if we want to continue to grow and reach more people – or at least keep the flame alight.

These unranked jams also provide a special space for experiments, especially for the ones that may not find their place in larger competitions, or for testing formats before committing to them. This way, you can see what works and what doesn’t for you, where you may need some guidance or help, or the path you might want to pursue further (narratively or in terms of programming).

With the addition of restrictions or themes, game jams can help kickstart creativity: they can help with finding ideas for a story, or an angle to take on the restriction(s) — sometimes even force participants to think outside of the box! I mean, what can you do with 500 words? How will you tell a story if you can format it only a certain way? How can you make things interesting if the player only has one choice?

As a whole, those short, focused bursts of collaborative creativity, powered through these game jams, end up shaping what gets written and how they get written.

S: Any game jam plans for the future?

M: Oh, so many! And we are just getting started!

Our aim is to have unranked game jams happening year round, each with its specific flavour in themes, mechanic, or customisation. If a certain theme or constraint is overwhelmingly welcomed by the community, like the Neo-Twiny Jam or the Single Choice Jam, our goal is to bring it back the following year. If not, we would be exploring a different concept, maybe bringing back another historical IF jam. We have plenty of jam ideas stored in our ideas drawer!

After the ShuffleComp was wrapped up, a competition which hadn’t happened since 2015, we worked on ironing out details for the 2024 schedule of the Neo-Interactives, bringing new jams monthly (or so), and are already getting ready to announce the next ones!

[Note: since the interview, the Recipe Jam, Smoochie Jam and Revival Jam have been conducted and you can check out our latest event, the Dialogue Jam, which will run from March 31st through April 29th! And as a solo event project: the Interactive Fiction Showcase!]