Planet Interactive Fiction

At id, the company was rolling in millions of dollars and we just had walls. It was the whole Carmack idea of, “I don’t need anything on my walls, all I need is a table and a computer and a chair,” instead of, “Okay, we’ve got a lot of money, why not make a really bad-ass office?”

— John Romero

Romero is chaos and Carmack is order. Together they make the ultimate mix. But when you take them away from each other, what’s left?

— id Software artist Paul Steed

It was Trip Hawkins who first opened the can of worms. In 1983, to celebrate the release of Electronic Art’s first half-dozen games, he proclaimed their developers to be the rock stars of the new digital generation. The advertising campaign that followed was built around Annie Leibovitz-inspired photographs of his charges, trying a little bit too hard to look cool there in moody black and white, with Pinball Construction Set creator Bill Budge proudly showing off an actual studded leather glove. (“That’s not me really,” he would later admit; he’d bought it for dressing up as a punk rocker at a costume party.) The campaign attracted much comment, then as it still does today, but it appears not to have been all that effective in selling games. Within a few years, EA had backed off the programmers-as-rock-stars angle and was moving toward becoming the faceless corporate collective that gamers know — and in some cases hate — today.

But a dream as enticing as this one could never truly die. Ten and a half years after those airbrushed-cool EA advertisements, a group of scruffy outsiders in Dallas, Texas, unleashed DOOM upon the world. John Carmack and John Romero became the leaders of a movement that remade the culture of computer gaming over the next several years, turning it brasher, bolder, more action-oriented — and, yes, more violent. With his long hair and his penchant for black jeans and heavy-metal tee-shirts, Romero looked more at home with a studded leather glove on his fist than Bill Budge ever had. Within a year or two, he was playing DOOM in the back of a tour bus next to Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.

The reborn rock-star ethos rippled outward from id Software, Carmack and Romero’s company. Suddenly gaming was cool in a way it had never been before. Sony went all-in on rave culture and heroin-chic in promoting its new PlayStation console. David Bowie wrote songs for and lent his voice and persona to Omikron: The Nomad Soul, shortly after the aforementioned Trent Reznor had written the soundtrack for id’s Quake. A fellow named American McGee, who had worked for a few years as a level designer at id, overcame his middling CV with a rock-star-worthy name and rock-star-worthy-looks, making a transgressive shooter based on Alice in Wonderland that would have done Alice Cooper proud, with his own name up in lights there on the front of the box.

But it’s safe to say that no one in gaming did the rock-star thing bigger and better than John Romero himself. DOOM had been his brilliant, dangerous masterpiece, the game the kids all wanted to play as loudly as possible while their parents pined for the more innocent days of Pac-Man. And after DOOM… well, anyone who has ever seen one of those VH1 Behind the Music documentaries knows what has to come next. It was time for him to lose himself in decadent rock-star excess and lose the plot on his art.

Such is the conventional narrative about Ion Storm, at any rate. Is it correct, you ask? Partially — but the tale is also more complex than it might seem on the surface.

In the earliest days of Ion Storm, John Romero and Tom Hall stand outside the mock-Tudor mansion the former bought with his DOOM money.

When we last checked in with John Romero, it was the summer of 1996, and he had just been fired from id Software for some combination of artistic disagreements with John Carmack and dereliction of duty. id’s fandom on the young World Wide Web greeted the news much as their parents had that of the breakup of the Beatles. How could the partnership of opposites that had changed their lives by marrying Carmack’s cutting-edge graphics technology to Romero’s diabolically inventive level designs have fallen apart so quickly?

As it happened, Romero had already been weighing his options for months by the time the axe fell. He’d been considering starting a new studio with his old friend Tom Hall, who’d been fired from id years before for trying to inject too much story into DOOM. Now, Hall was running into much the same problem at 3D Realms, where he had been assigned to a shooter called Prey. (True to form for 3D Realms, who believed in taking their time with their games, Prey wouldn’t be completed until 2006.)

Romero’s firing changed the two men’s talk into action. Feeling the need of a partner in what lay ahead, perhaps still feeling a twinge of guilt for the way Hall’s tenure on DOOM had ended, Romero offered to pay him a salary from his own DOOM windfall while the pair of them got a new studio off the ground. Romero’s stated ethos for the studio reflected the lingering bitterness he felt toward Carmack, who had made it clear that technology — his technology — would always be the primary driver of life at id.

Design is law. What we design is what’s going to be the game. It’s not going to be that we design something and have to chop it up because the technology can’t handle it or because some programmer says we can’t do it. You design a game, you make it, and that’s what you do. That’s the law. It’s the fucking design.

It didn’t take Tom Hall long to turn in his resignation at 3D Realms.

Romero first thought to call the studio Dream Design, but soon decided that sounded too “soft,” like a “mattress brand.” Hall suggested changing it to Ion Design. Then a mutual friend named Kee Kimbrell chortled over the phone one day that “the competition better watch out, or they are going to get caught up in an ion storm!” “We’re done here,” said Romero the moment he heard those words.

Publishers courted the new studio like record labels after a hot new band. Romero and Hall made the rounds of the industry, toasted and feted at every stop: Activision, Origin, Virgin, Mindscape, Acclaim, GT Interactive. Many of these houses had been blindsided by the 3D-action revolution in games, which had sprung up from the hinterlands while they imagined that the future of interactive entertainment was for it to become one with the movies. Now, they hoped to tempt the coolest dude of all from the new scene to come in and save their bacon. Romero dined out on their desperation, unabashedly playing one publisher against another, mocking them for their cluelessness to their faces.

In the course of these journeys, Romero and Hall visited the less prominent publisher 7th Level, who were looking to diversify from educational software into games. In service of that agenda, they had already bought a fledgling studio known as Distant Thunder, founded by one Todd Porter. A nephew of the legendary rockabilly guitarist Chet Atkins, Porter was, in addition to being a pretty good guitarist himself, a former seminary student and male stripper (stage name: Preacher Boy) whose chief claim to gaming fame was a rather excruciating 1989 CRPG called Knights of Legend. (The CRPG Addict, who has far more time and patience for the lesser lights in his favorite genre than I do, spent a staggering 96 hours with it; he numbered among its flaws the fact that you need to enter “ten keyboard commands just to move one step.”) Romero and Hall got to chatting with Porter. One thing led to another, and soon they decided to offer him a job and a stake in Ion Storm. Porter agreed to join, bringing with him his art director from Distant Thunder, Jerry O’Flaherty.

Romero had his fair share of flaws, as these articles will make abundantly clear. And yet, as this episode demonstrates, his enthusiasm for games was honest and almost naïvely heartfelt. On the strength of nothing more than good vibes and good chemistry, he gave Porter and O’Flaherty 25 percent of his new studio each, leaving himself and Hall to split the other half equally. It seemed that he still wanted to be a member of a band, not a solo artist. “At worst, if we disagreed on a company direction, we’d stalemate,” he remembers thinking. Not having much experience running a business, he had no idea how damaging such a stalemate could be.

On Christmas Eve of 1996, Ion Storm closed a deal with Eidos Interactive. The British publisher was already riding high off Tomb Raider, featuring the short-shorted and ludicrously proportioned Lara Croft, who despite her lack of corporeal reality was poised to become an unlikely It Girl of the mainstream zeitgeist. Now that Eidos had a full-blown pinup star, why not add a rock star to the stable? They agreed to pay Ion Storm $3 million in advance for each of three games — one from Romero, one from Hall, and one from Porter — plus a slush fund of another $4 million thrown on top, ostensibly for console rights. And they asked for the right of first refusal on Ion Storm’s next three projects as well, again promising $3 million for each of them in advance if they liked what they were pitched. Once the games reached stores and sold through their advances — that ought to take only about 150,000 unit sales, peanuts in a world where DOOM and Quake had sold in the multi-millions  — Eidos would pay a 40-percent royalty directly into Ion Storm’s pocket. It seemed like a spectacularly good deal.

Hall’s game, which would come to be known as Anachronox, was meant to combine the gameplay of Final Fantasy and Super Mario 64 with a story inspired by the novels Battlefield Earth and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Romero was predictably unfazed by this unwieldy collection of influences. Sounds great, he said. Design first and all that.

Porter’s idea was vaguely based on the old horror flick Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Romero described it to the press as “a real-time-strategy, first-person-action, weird hybrid of a game, completely hectic and totally hot.” Make of that what you will.

Romero’s own game was to be called Daikatana. It would send its player and two non-player companions hopscotching through two millennia worth of human history, from late Antiquity to the far future. It was to include shooter elements, but was also to be much more than just another DOOM or Quake. Like Hall, Romero mentioned JRPGs as some of his primary inspirations. Stealing a page from the early playbook of Electronic Arts, some of whose rock-star advertisements had sported the tagline “Can a Computer Make You Cry?,” he said that “I want you to become so emotionally attached to the characters that certain events in the game will make you break down and cry, just like in the opera scene from Final Fantasy III.” Who would have thought the man who had brought the verbs “frag” and “gib” into the lexicon could be such a soft touch?

As true-blue a man of his people as Bruce Springsteen was of his, Romero made it a point to hire his employees from the booming DOOM and Quake modding scenes as much as possible, foregoing for the most part folks with established industry résumés in favor of ones who reminded him of him and his friends from id before DOOM changed their lives forever. They all moved into an anonymous-looking but spacious “starter office” in North Dallas.

Standing from left to right: Bob Wright (a friend of Todd Porter’s, he was COO for a spell), Porter, Tom Hall, John Romero, and Jerry O’Flaherty. Seated: Mike Wilson.

Romero poached id’s marketing director, Mike Wilson, to become Ion Storm’s CEO and head PR man. “Honestly, I didn’t see how it could miss,” Wilson would say later. “I had just driven up the rates for a PC game to well beyond where they had ever been. It went up over the course of a year from, like, a million dollars a game to two or three or four [million] in advances. And I’d just renegotiated the Quake [royalty] rate up into the 40s [percent]. So I knew that the going rates were pretty good. And with John’s name, and Tom’s… you know.”

In fact, Wilson told his new employers that he wouldn’t have taken the Eidos deal, sweet as it looked. Now that they had, he said that they ought to “burn through” the six games they were on the hook for as quickly as possible, in order to become a publisher in their own right. That was where the real money was, he said. Romero was skeptical, but Wilson found an unexpected ally in this scheme in Todd Porter, who, it was slowly becoming clear, fancied himself an equally smooth and crafty wheeler-dealer.

Wilson and Romero enjoyed taking potshots in the press at their crosstown rival id, and in particular John Carmack, behaving rather like John Lennon during his “How Do You Sleep?” phase. In the same rock-star spirit, Romero, Hall, Porter, and O’Flaherty debated flying out to London together to have their picture taken on the famous Abbey Road crosswalk, a Fab Four for this new pop-culture era of interactivity. Dubious as that idea was, it would surely have made for a better first advertisement than the one they finally landed on. In April of 1997, by way of announcing Daikatana to the world, Ion Storm told their fans that “John Romero’s about to make you his bitch. Suck it down!” Mike Wilson judged that last phrase to be such a winner that he took out a trademark on it.

Daikatana had somehow wandered far afield indeed in a remarkably short time from the interactive epic that was supposed to make you cry. It was too much even for some of Romero’s more slavish followers — the ones who non-ironically bowed down to him saying “I’m not worthy!” at trade shows, who looked to him for personal-grooming as well as gaming tips. (“I always flip my hair over in front of my face and look at the floor while using a brush and hair dryer to slowly dry all my hair,” he said of his famous heavy-metal locks. “Brushing downward while drying will help straighten your hair and completely drying it will make sure it doesn’t kink up or curl up.” Who said that gamers were oblivious to fashion?) Instead of seeming edgy and cool, as Wilson had no doubt envisioned, the “bitch” advert hit all wrong, demonstrating contempt not just for social norms — that was A-okay in the rock-star business — but for Ion Storm’s own most likely customers. The online blowback which ensued was an early indication that there might be some cracks in Romero’s armor, some limits to what even he could get away with. He would have done well to heed the warning when it was presented to him.

The irony of Ion Storm’s public beef with id was that their three games were actually to run under the Quake engine. But now Romero learned of the disadvantages of not working in the same office where the technology that powers your dream design is conceived. At the E3 show in May of 1997, where the corridors were still buzzing with talk of the “bitch” advertisement, id demonstrated the upcoming Quake II. Romero pronounced immediately after he saw it that Ion Storm couldn’t possibly make do with the Quake I engine, that they would have to wait until the sequel was released six months from now — id naturally got first dibs on their own engine — and then update their works-in-progress accordingly. Many members of his own team were confused by his stance; they could make Daikatana just fine with the Quake I engine, they said, then upgrade for the next game. Why was a studio that had pure design as its founding ethos suddenly getting so hot and bothered about polygon counts and screen resolutions? But Romero was adamant; it was the Quake 2 engine or nothing. “If we don’t switch engines,” he said, “it [Daikatana] will look ancient in comparison.” Daikatana, originally projected to be a direct competitor to Quake 2 that Christmas, would have to be pushed to 1998. Hall’s and Porter’s projects would also make the switch, suffering similar delays.

While he waited on his new engine, Romero’s broader ambitions for his studio continued to grow. Unhappy with the company’s unremarkable current digs, he set his heart on the “penthouse” at the top of the 55-story Chase Tower, the third or fourth highest (depending on how you measured it) building in all of Dallas. The soaring ceiling and canted walls of the multi-tiered space were made of glass, giving a view that no other location in the city could match. Yet ten years after the skyscraper had first opened for business, the penthouse was still unoccupied; the real-estate agent explained that many potential tenets had looked at it, only to balk at the rent of half a million dollars per month and the almost equally astronomical cost of air-conditioning the giant glass bubble through the long, hot, sun-drenched Texas summers.

The agent must have danced a jig when Romero said that he would take the white elephant anyway. He hired a contractor to turn it into a gamer’s paradise, complete with a “rec area” with billiard and foosball and ping-pong tables and stand-up arcade machines, a deathmatch arena, a labyrinth, a movie theater, a television lounge, a motion-capture stage, $1500 chairs for everyone, and lots of comfy couches and showers for the many employees who would be encouraged to more or less live in the Ion Storm tree house. The renovations would require months to complete, at a cost of $2.5 million. Incredibly, Mike Wilson managed to convince Eidos to foot the bill, by promising that they could house their board of directors here and use the space as a showcase for visiting press. While they waited on the renovations to be completed, Ion Storm took over the 30th floor of the Chase Tower.

The Chase Tower in downtown Dallas, with the Cathedral Shrine of Our Lady Guadalupe sitting just at its base. This juxtaposition of big business and religion, ultra-modernity and tradition, is Dallas, the city where I grew up, in a nutshell.

Their publisher’s generosity in picking up the renovations tab notwithstanding, Ion Storm was spending money at an alarming rate. A perverse incentive emerged from the terms of their contract with Eidos: to initiate more projects so as to collect more $3 million advance payouts to cover short-term costs. Todd Porter hatched an ingenious if ethically dodgy scheme in that direction.

He had heard from his old colleagues from Distant Thunder that 7th Level had gotten cold feet about the games thing after their RTS G-Nome had stiffed. (Computer Gaming World said that G-Nome “perfectly simulates putting a moron in a giant robot.”) They’d decided to cut their losses and get out of games as abruptly as they’d gotten into them, just as Porter’s old gang were about to finish another RTS, this one called Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3. (“Gift 3” was the name of the planet in the game, not an indication that it was the third in any series.) Ion Storm could buy it for a song, Porter said, give it to four employees for six weeks or so to apply a final coat of spit and polish, and offer it to Eidos. If the publisher accepted it, and if the cost of acquiring Dominion and finishing it worked out to less than $3 million, then they would be able pocket the difference, even if the game never sold a single copy. Even in the worst case of Eidos saying no thanks, they would still have burned off one of their three options, and would still be free to shop it around elsewhere or publish it themselves. “The only reason we’re thinking about acquiring it is to burn an option, simple as that,” wrote Romero in an email.¹

As Porter had hoped, Eidos agreed to pay the advance and publish the game, although it was clear that they weren’t thrilled at the prospect. But nothing else went according to the plan which Porter had pitched to the other founders. He ended up paying 7th Level fully $1.8 million for Dominion — far more than his partners had expected — only to admit once he had it that it was in far worse shape than he had anticipated. He proceeded to hire a group of his own former employees from Distant Thunder to finish it, a task that now looked likely to consume quite some months. The project went out of the black and into the red in December of 1997. It now had to sell decently well if it wasn’t to lose Ion Storm money, $3 million advance or no. The other founders were left wondering whether they had been the victim of guile or incompetence on Porter’s part. It was a question they would find themselves asking again and again as time wore on.

In the meanwhile, in September of 1997, Ion Storm announced that they had signed a fourth game designer to initiate a fifth development project. Older, bespectacled, and as thoughtful and well-spoken as Romero and his friends were brash and profane, Warren Spector was by no means an obvious candidate to join them. He had made his reputation at Looking Glass Software with Ultima Underworld and System Shock, games which he liked to describe as “immersive sims.” They used the same three-dimensional first-person perspective as DOOM and Quake, but in more cerebral and conceptually ambitious ways that counted combat as just one part of a larger whole. Nevertheless, Romero was a fan, eager to sign him up when he learned that the financially troubled Looking Glass was shutting down the Austin office where Spector was employed. Romero sent him an email: “Dude, you’ve got to join Ion Storm. Let me come down and convince you.” When he arrived, he gave Spector the same pitch he had delivered to Hall and Porter: he could make any game he wanted to make, using $3 million of Eidos’s money. At Ion Storm, nobody would tell him what to do.

Spector found the offer a hard one to refuse, especially after a couple of years of creative frustration at the perpetually short-staffed Looking Glass. At the same time, though, what he saw going on 180 miles to his north in Dallas made him nervous. He would accept, he said, but only if he could stay in Austin, opening his own office there and keeping the rest of Ion Storm at arm’s length. “I will never say the words, ‘Suck it down,’ and I don’t want to make anybody my bitch,” he stated. “We’re going to be the classy part of this company.” Far from being offended, Romero agreed to his terms. Eidos picked up yet another $3 million option, and Ion Storm could look forward to paying rent on yet another office space. But, setting all that aside, it was, many a gamer will tell you today, the best decision John Romero ever made. For it would result in Deus Ex, one of the most beloved and critically lauded computer games of all time, every inch the silver lining in the Ion Storm story.

Spector was wise to keep those 180 miles between himself and the rest of Ion Storm. By now, the Dallas office was wracked by constant infighting among the senior staff, which made the place feel more dysfunctional by the day. Almost everyone seemed to agree that Todd Porter was the problem; now that he felt free to show his true colors, he was by most accounts an abrasive character indeed. Yet Romero and Hall had no way of getting rid of him, since his loyalist Jerry O’Flaherty would always vote with him to keep him around. Romero was learning a belated lesson on the dangers of a business stalemate.

It turned out to be Mike Wilson rather than Porter who left first under bad terms. There are two stories as to how and why. One involves him “borrowing” $30,000 from the company’s bank account to buy himself a used BMW. He took the money just for the short term, so he said, because “my loan officer is out of town.” But Wilson then proceeded to wreck the car before said loan officer could return, leaving the company out all that money.  The other story — the one told by John Romero in his recent memoir — is that Wilson started a games publisher of his own on the side, without telling any of his colleagues, and was fired when they found out. For all we know, of course, both stories might be true. Lord knows, Ion Storm was crazy enough to make that possible.

Whatever the exact reasons for his departure, there is no disputing that Wilson really did announce the new publisher Gathering of Developers — or G.O.D., as he preferred to call it — soon after his departure. In its bare couple of years as an independent going concern, G.O.D. produced a surfeit of revolutionary rhetoric about rescuing the creatives from the predations of the suits, but came out with few games that were reviewed well or that sold much. Its one real hit, before being swallowed up by the much larger publisher Take Two Interactive, was rather out of character for it: the strategy game Railroad Tycoon II. Other than this, G.O.D. was most noted among gamers for its “booth babes,” who at trade shows and especially at invitation-only after-hours parties let it all hang out, so to speak. Whatever else you can say about him, there can be no denying that Mike Wilson worked like a demon to cement the case for game developers as rock stars.

With Wilson went Ion Storm’s own ambition for becoming a game publisher as well as developer. Indeed, Ion Storm was becoming ever more tightly coupled to Eidos, dependent upon them for their very survival. By the beginning of 1998, Eidos had begun sending a monthly remittance of $1.2 million to Dallas just to keep the doors open. Understandably concerned about the situation, they were starting to make noises about wanting equity in the studio itself in return. It looked like the founders might have to grant this wish, just to keep the lifeline from being pulled out of their grip.

In the midst of it all, in February of 1998, Ion Storm finally moved into the penthouse at the top of the Chase Tower. In addition to all of the other perks, there were free soda and limitless junk food on tap for the nearly 100 employees. Rumor had it that there were other, more illicit substances floating around the place as well, although these were presumably not purchased by the company — not officially, anyway. Call it part and parcel of the rock-star lifestyle.

Oddly few photographs of Ion Storm’s infamous penthouse office space exist. At some point, though, John Romero shared the following pictures, along with explanations of exactly what we are looking at. I found them in a Reddit post by one “Tricky-Adeptness-657.” The photographs appear to have been taken when the offices were mostly cleaned out, probably in the run-up to Ion Storm’s final closure.

The penthouse of the Chase Tower — now known as the Dallas Arts Tower — looks like this today. You can still play table games there, so the continuity with the past is not completely broken.

The penthouse was by no means a failure in its role of providing a showcase for a burgeoning creative industry, of showing that there was enough money flying around here to buy plenty of rock-star decadence. This was something that a mainstream reporter who had never played a computer game more advanced than Solitaire could readily understand and convey to her audience. CNN toured the penthouse for an on-air segment; Entertainment Weekly named Romero one the 100 most important people in its circumscribed world; Time called him the Quentin Tarantino of games; Texas Monthly included him on its list of “Top Twenty Texans”: “John Romero is the reigning bad boy of computer gaming, an image he cultivates with his flowing black hair, devilish smile, passion for fast cars (he’s a self-described ‘maniac’ behind the wheel of his Ferrari Testarossa), and thirst for bloody fights to the death — onscreen, of course.” It seldom came up in such coverage that Ion Storm had yet to finish a game, was in fact hemorrhaging money to no clear purpose.

To find a more skeptical and at least modestly more informed take on the current state of the studio, you had to turn to the gaming websites. Here the bloom had just about come off the rose. Ion Storm’s tone-deaf public relations and lack of concrete progress to show on any of its disparate projects were fast transforming fans’ view of John Romero in particular from worshipful adulation to angry mockery. Hell hath few furies like gamers scorned…

Meanwhile the company’s new fishbowl playground was proving great for every purpose except one: that of actually getting work done. The bright sunlight streaming in from above and every side made it impossible to see the monitor screens. Some employees resorted to working only at night; some went to a hardware store and returned with sheets of black felt, which they taped to the walls and ceiling to keep out the accursed light. They eventually discovered that outdoor patio coverings served the purpose best. The stunning space with its views of the Dallas skyline and of the blue sky overhead, streaked with jet contrails from the nearby airport, turned into a sad-sack tent city, which had to be hastily torn down like a homeless encampment before a police raid whenever a representative of the press came around.

Ion Storm received the Quake II engine from id at long last in the same month that they moved into the penthouse, whereupon the programmers saw that porting Daikatana over to it would be even more complicated than they had thought. Eidos had been told that Daikatana would be ready by March; not for the first nor the last time, Romero had to disappoint them. The publisher was growing steadily more worried and impatient at the endless delays and the lack of focus. Some at Ion Storm hatched a plan, perhaps after indulging in one of those other substances that were said to be floating around the penthouse, to launch a line of comic books. It was unceremoniously squashed by an increasingly interventionist Eidos, but not before illustrators had been hired and computers and specialized software purchased for them to use. The sense of strategic and tactical confusion was palpable. People complained that John Romero and Todd Porter had a different answer to every question that was posed to them, were effectively running two different companies. The stalemate ground on.

Ion Storm was learning the hard way that it was an exercise in diminishing returns to chase the latest, hottest game engine instead of just doing the best work possible with the tools to hand. At the E3 show in May of 1998, the new Quake 2-powered Daikatana looked underwhelming once again, this time when set beside the brand-new Unreal from Epic MegaGames, the first shooter by another studio to up the audiovisual bar on id’s own flagship releases. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was also the upcoming shooter Half-Life from a new studio known as Valve, which looked poised to bring a richer story to the genre in much the same way as had been mooted for Daikatana, but with vastly more self-assurance and clarity of purpose; ironically, it made do perfectly well with the old Quake 1 engine. At the same show, Ion Storm’s Dominion, which had still not been released nine months after it had been bought, looked like even more of a long shot than it had before next to Blizzard Entertainment’s Starcraft.

Nevertheless, the fact remained that Dominion was the only game Ion Storm had that was anywhere close to completion. Todd Porter was convinced, against the evidence of that E3 show, that it could become a hit. He turned down an offer from Compaq to bundle it with their home computers, for a royalty of $1 for every such computer sold, with a guaranteed minimum payout of $1.5 million. His logic was that doing so would “cannibalize” retail sales. When finally released in a standard box in June of 1998, Dominion flopped miserably, selling fewer than 17,000 copies and being named a run-up for “Coaster of the Year” by Computer Gaming World: “Let’s just hope that Ion Storm learns from this experience before its next game ships, or its legacy may be closer to Blind Faith’s than the Beatles’.” It was not an auspicious retail debut for the most hyped studio in the industry.

In the aftermath of this fiasco, Eidos said that they no longer wanted Ion Storm to bother finishing Porter’s Body Snatchers-style game, despite having already paid $3 million for it. Just get the other games done and all will be forgiven, they said. Porter’s team was split between Romero’s team, Hall’s team, and Warren Spector’s down in Austin. The integration process did not go particularly smoothly.

Still, the infighting at the top was even worse. Instead of hashing out their differences face to face, Romero and Porter took them out on their opposite numbers’ favored underlings. Angry on-the-spot firings became commonplace. Epithets like “fucking rat-faced bitch,” which used to be reserved for deathmatch sessions, became normal office chatter. Someone — maybe many people — were leaking to the gaming press, which reveled in every petty anecdote. The atmosphere of paranoia and distrust left some employees on the verge of a mental breakdown. The penthouse paradise had turned into Lord of the Flies.

A deal to give Eidos 19 percent of Ion Storm, in return for forgiving all of the advances that had come the latter’s way, fell through on the day when the contract was to be signed, when Eidos was informed that Ion Storm would not have a game ready to go for the coming Christmas either. There were rumors that Eidos was just about ready to pull the plug completely. In the midst of the worry and disappointment, Porter sent out a company-wide email asking if anyone wanted to buy his Lotus sports car, because he was looking to upgrade to a Ferrari like the one Romero had; it was leaked and all over the Internet by the next day. Ditto other emails in which Porter called his colleagues “shit” and implied that he had fired a PR firm because Romero was getting too much of the spotlight.

But by no means did all of the troubles at Ion Storm come down to Porter’s abrasive presence. Romero struck many of his employees as… well, as kind of lazy, a conclusion John Carmack had reached years ago. “If you want the overriding problem with John Romero’s character, I’d say it was his emphasis on being John Romero in the public eye, rather than getting things done — especially the things that made him John Romero in the public eye in the first place,” said one anonymous employee to a journalist. “It’s this idea that, once you’ve reached this pinnacle, life is a free ride and you don’t have to do anything from that point on, which is totally wrong.”

“Some people don’t want to do anything,” said another anonymous employee who preferred to speak still more cryptically. “And to them, it’s not a high price to pay to let someone else take control, if they can still do whatever they want.” It seemed that, for all his popular reputation as gaming’s reigning alpha male, Romero could be weirdly passive — one was almost tempted to say timid — when push came to shove. Most of his people believed, probably correctly, that he had the clout to oust Porter if he really, really wanted to; it wasn’t as if anyone was coming to the Chase Tower penthouse to meet the creator of Knights of Legend. But he just let the situation fester, until those around him were almost as angry at him as they were at Porter.

On November 19, 1998, eight core members of the Daiktana team asked for a meeting with Romero. “We don’t think this game is ever going to get done,” they said. They told him that they had received an offer from Mike Wilson over at G.O.D. to make a shooter starring the veteran rock band KISS, and that they had decided to take him up on it. They were leaving, then and there. All of the free soda, candy, and perks in the world weren’t worth enduring the toxic work environment which Ion Storm had become.

True to form, Romero told the heart of his team not to let the door hit them on their way out. But even as he did so, he could surely all too clearly picture Wilson giggling to himself at having engineered so perfect a revenge for his firing from Ion Storm. How the hell was Romero going to finish his game now?

Predictably enough, the story of the walkout was all over the online gaming sites within hours. Ion Storm had become a soap opera par excellence for people who claimed they hated relationship dramas. Even juicier than Wilson’s knife in the back was the person who now stepped up to take a prominent role in Daikatana‘s design. Having recently split from his second wife, Romero was to elevate his new girlfriend, Stevie “KillCreek” Case, to the position of primary level designer.

The Ion Storm saga was already rife with as much anger, dysfunction, and general decadence as any Behind the Music documentary. Now it was time to complete the tableau with a healthy dose of sex.

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 Masters of DOOM: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner, Online Game Pioneers at Work by Morgan Ramsay, and DOOM Guy: Life in First Person by John Romero; Computer Gaming World of October 1996, January 1997, June 1997, June 1998, October 1998, and January 1999; Retro Gamer 75; Dallas Observer of January 19 1999; Texas Monthly of September 1998.

I owe the anecdote about Todd Porter being a nephew of Chet Atkins to a decade-old email exchange with Mark Mark Pelczarski of Penguin Software, who gave Porter his very first job in the industry.

Also the online article “A Hardcore Elegy for Ion Storm” by Christian Divine for Slate.

Pantheon of Bones, a new DLC for Life as a Lich by Adrao, is now available for purchase! Another game by Adrao, Hero or Villain: Genesis, has received a major free update and expansion. To celebrate, we are placing all games associated with the new updates on sale: Life as a Lich, Tokyo Wizard, Raiders of the Icepeak Mountains, Hero or Villain: Genesis, Hero or Villain: Battle Royale, and all associated DLCs are up to 40% off until October 15th!

Life as a Lich — Pantheon of Bones adds new areas to explore, both above and below your dungeon, along with hoards of exotic components to fuel your undead studies.

Delve into a new wing of the Ossis Bibliotheca to uncover secrets of gods and demigods, learn to craft the Key of Unsealing and the Medallions of Infernal Dissonance and Broken Prayers, or just make some presents for your loved ones.

This expansion creates an entirely new sequence of quests tied to the gods themselves. Will you be a pawn of their designs, or forge your own destiny?

There are a dozen new spells to learn, from summoning demonic panthers, to buffing your minions in battle, to transmuting materials. But if learning is not your thing, you can also just take undeath a little slower and hang out with your companions!

Adrao developed these games 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.

One of my readers mentioned that eblong.com is now showing a "restricted website" warning for some UK users when browsing with iOS.

If you try to modify the "Allowed List" preferences, you find an iOS notice: "To change these restrictions, the UK requires you to confirm you are an adult."

I want to be clear that I didn't do this. It's a restriction built into iOS. It apparently popped several months ago:

Apple is rolling out age checks for iPhone and iPad users in the UK that will ask them to verify if they are adults to access "certain services" such as 18-plus apps.

After customers accept the latest iOS 26.4 software update, they will be asked to verify their age, which they can do by providing a credit card or scanning their ID, according to an Apple support page.

Those who do not confirm how old they are or are underage will have web content filters turned on automatically.

-- BBC News, 25 March 2026

It is true that I added UK content restrictions to the IF Archive. That is an IFTF policy, set up on the advice of IFTF's lawyer. However, eblong.com is my personal web site, not an IFTF service, so it is not subject to that policy. Same goes for zarfhome.com, which is more player-facing but still run by me personally. Ditto the Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog and the Visible Zorker (both hosted by me on eblong). And this blog (on zarfhome).

Obviously (a) I am unthrilled about this but (b) there's nothing I can do about it. Apple does not, to my knowledge, offer a "solemnly swear my website is not evil" button. But I only know what I'm reading in this article and Apple's support page.

It seems clear from the lack of public screaming that most UK users have been silently "verified as adult", probably due to having a credit card tied to their Apple account. (App Store, Apple Music, etc.) (But "Debit cards aren't eligible" according to the support page.)

There's alternate sources for some of my stuff. My games are on the IF Archive, but as I said, that has server-side content restrictions.

The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog is mirrored on the Internet Archive. (No connection to the IF Archive!) You can pull my Visible Zorker pages off of Github.

As for the rest, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine may provide a browsing path. ("The dead past is the living present," thank you Isaac.)

eblong is my record of everything I've done in the past thirty years. It's more than half my life. The point is to provide context and an anchor. Erasing that -- erasing that for children -- is an enormous disservice. You don't need me to tell you that. I just wanted to get it in writing, for those who can still see it.

I am not particularly interested in apportioning blame between Apple and the UK government here. I don't have an inside view and I'm biased. As are you. The result is the same, regardless. This crap is not done getting worse.

(This post is mirrored on Github in case you can't see the original.)

Planetfall was yesterday's public release, but of course I've spent the past few weeks concentrating on Infidel. A couple of days I came across the most egregious bug I've yet seen in an Infocom game.

This bug is extremely difficult to detect by playing the game. I must the first person to notice it, just because I'm the first person to play the game with (the equivalent of) a memory-level debugger.

So why do I call it an egregious bug? Most people would call it a "trivial" bug, since it almost never impacts gameplay. But look you: it's a wild pointer bug which scribbles over memory in an unintended way. As a C programmer, I am legally required to regard memory corruption as the worst of all possible sins. On top of that, it's a compiler bug!

(Warning: This will get into ZIL code and Z-machine implementation details. Note that I will be analyzing Infidel release 22 serial 840522, the update for Macintosh. The original release, serial 830916, has the same bug with slightly different memory addresses.)

Let's set the scene. Infidel takes place in the remote Egyptian desert. You start out in your camp. The Nile is to the west. To the east are nine desert locations, a 3x3 grid. (One of these holds the buried pyramid you're searching for.)

If you venture outside that region, or leave your camp in any other direction, you are officially lost in the desert. You can travel as far as you want; you'll just find more desert. (Until sunstroke finds you.) This is a known trick, first seen in Enchanter; a single room called ENDLESS-DESERT represents every unmapped desert location. When you move, if you haven't blundered back to your camp or the mapped area, you just loop back to ENDLESS-DESERT. The game keeps track of your latitude and longitude.

To make this convincing, the game has to juggle objects. If you drop stuff in ENDLESS-DESERT and then move, those items are shifted offstage. Their lat/long coordinates are recorded in an array called DESERT-TABLE. If you return to those coordinates later, the game can shuffle those objects from DESERT-TABLE back to ENDLESS-DESERT, and you will find them waiting for you.

(Probably. When you drop an item in ENDLESS-DESERT, there's a one-in-three chance that it is immediately covered up by sand and lost forever. That's not relevant here, except that it makes the bug harder to uncover, as we'll see.)

Okay, so far the plan looks solid. Let's see it in action:

Both locations are the same ENDLESS-DESERT, but the pickaxe maintains the illusion of distinct rooms.

(Wouldn't it be more realistic if the shovel disappeared silently, buried in sand, while your back was turned? Maybe that playtested badly.)

Anyhow, that seems to work fine. Where's the bug?

Let's take a look at the DESERT-TO-TABLE routine that makes this work:

<ROUTINE DESERT-TO-TABLE (
                         SLOC 
                   "AUX" (TBL ,DESERT-TABLE) 
                         (CNT 0)
                         (F <FIRST? ,ENDLESS-DESERT>)
                         N)
  <REPEAT ()
      <COND (.F <SET N <NEXT? .F>>)
            (ELSE <RETURN>)>
      <COND (<EQUAL? .F ,WINNER>)
            (<FSET? .F ,TAKEBIT>
             <REPEAT ()
                 <COND (<==? <GET .TBL .CNT> 0>
                        <PUT .TBL .CNT .SLOC>
                        <PUT .TBL <+ .CNT 1> .F>
                        <SET CNT <+ .CNT 2>>
                        <REMOVE .F>
                        <RETURN>)
                       (ELSE
                        <SET CNT <+ .CNT 2>>)>>)>
      <SET F .N>>>

There's a similar TABLE-TO-DESERT routine to bring stuff back. We'll focus on this one.

The routine has one required argument: SLOC, the lat/long coordinate. (This is encoded as a single number, but never mind that.) Then "AUX" marks the four optional arguments, which also serve as local variables; the Z-machine doesn't distinguish. TBL is the array address we'll be writing to. It defaults to DESERT-TABLE. F is initialized to the first object in the ENDLESS-DESERT contents list. CNT and N are initialized to zero.

As it happens, when this is called, the game only passes one argument, SLOC. It relies on the default value of TBL=DESERT-TABLE. (If there were two endless deserts in the game, it would want to call this routine with two separate tables. But there ain't.) DESERT-TABLE is an array of 100 values (200 bytes) starting at address 11129.

The function body loops through all the objects in ENDLESS-DESERT (starting with F). Every portable object (ignoring scenery and the player) is removed, and we add two values to the TBL array: the coordinate SLOC and the object ID. The table might already have entries (you can drop stuff in multiple places), so we're careful to find empty slots to fill in. When we reach the end of the list we're done. If the logic looks a bit convoluted, remember that we're dealing with a linked list.

All sound good so far? It sounded good to me. "Hey," I said to myself, "I should display the DESERT-TABLE contents in the State tab! That way people can watch the objects being shuffled in and out."

So I set that up... and it didn't work. The DESERT-TABLE array remained resolutely empty. I could see the objects disappearing and appearing -- just look at that pickaxe above! -- but where were they going?

Any C nerd looking at a fixed-size array will ask "What about array overflow?" But DESERT-TABLE has a comment:

;"length should be 2*number of takeable objects"

Indeed, 100 values at two values per entry is enough space for 50 objects. Piling up every portable object in the game would get you (I think) 45. Anyhow, nothing is being stored anywhere in the array.

Time to disassemble the DESERT-TO-TABLE function from the game file and take a look. (I warned you we'd go deep...)

Routine 109bc, 5 locals (0000, 001e, 0000, 0000, 0000)

109c7:  GET_CHILD     ENDLESS-DESERT -> .F [TRUE] 109cb
109cb:  JZ            .F [TRUE] RTRUE
109ce:  GET_SIBLING   .F -> .N [TRUE] 109d2
109d2:  JE            .F, G70 [FALSE] 109d9
109d6:  JUMP          10a02
109d9:  TEST_ATTR     .F, #0f [FALSE] 10a02
109dd:  LOADW         .TBL, .CNT -> -(SP)
109e1:  JZ            (SP)+ [FALSE] 109fb
109e4:  STOREW        .TBL, .CNT, .SLOC
109e9:  ADD           .CNT, #01 -> -(SP)
109ed:  STOREW        .TBL, (SP)+, .F
109f2:  ADD           .CNT, #02 -> .CNT
109f6:  REMOVE_OBJ    .F
109f8:  JUMP          10a02
109fb:  ADD           .CNT, #02 -> .CNT
109ff:  JUMP          109dd
10a02:  STORE         .F, .N
10a05:  JUMP          109cb

(If you're looking at the 1983 release, this routine is at address 1051a but is otherwise identical.)

I'm using the txd disassembly tool from ztools, but I've edited the output to show variable names. Note that the opcode names do not match ZIL terminology. txd dates from the early 1990s. We had no ZIL manuals so we had to make up our own opcode names.

The first line sets the initial value of F to the first object in the room (<FIRST? ,ENDLESS-DESERT>). The second line tests whether F is zero, which is the condition of the function's REPEAT loop. The loop continues from there.

Notice anything missing? Where do we initialize TBL to its default value of DESERT-TABLE (11129)? That seems like an obvious hole.

Aha, says ZIL, we've got you covered. A Z-machine function has slots to initialize its local variables (or optional arguments) to constants. That's shown in the header lines:

Routine 109bc, 5 locals (0000, 001e, 0000, 0000, 0000)

CNT is initialized to zero, as is N, implicitly. F is not initialized from a slot because it's calculated, not a constant. ZIL generates that FIRST? (GET_CHILD) line at the top of the function. DESERT-TABLE is a constant, so...

...Whoops. No it isn't. DESERT-TABLE is a global variable. Its value will never vary -- it will be 11129 through the whole game -- but ZIL doesn't know that! TBL is initialized to the constant value 30 (hex 1e), which is the index number of DESERT-TABLE.

(Global variables are numbered from 16 to 255 for boring reasons. DESERT-TABLE is the 15th global, so it's number 30.)

It seems clear that nobody thought about this case (an argument defaulting to a global variable value). If they had, ZIL would either display a compiler error ("Default value is not a constant!") or generate a STORE instruction at the top of the function (same as how F is initialized). 30 is simply wrong.

The upshot is that when DESERT-TO-TABLE start writing object numbers to memory, it doesn't write to address 11129. It overwrites memory addresses 30 and up. Oh dear.

The TABLE-TO-DESERT routine uses a default global argument in exactly the same way. So it pulls the object list back from address 30, producing apparently correct results. But memory has been stomped.

So what's at that address?

The first 64 bytes of memory are header data, but not all of the header is used. By sheer luck, only addresses 0-29 are meaningful in Z-machine version 3. If DESERT-TABLE had been the third global, index 18, this bug would have corrupted the game's serial number! Which would be a lot more obvious.

So addresses 30-63 are unused, but address 64 is the beginning of the abbreviations data. This is part of the Z-machine text compression scheme: a list of 96 words which occur frequently and can therefore be pulled out and replaced by a few bits.

Prediction: if we drop nine objects in the desert (and then walk away), the last one will overwrite the start of the abbreviations table.

This is a bit of a nuisance to arrange. Remember that dropped objects have a one-in-three chance of simply disappearing. I had to drag a lot of stuff out there and try it a few times. But I succeeded, and the next text the game printed looked like this:

This is of course a heat-driven hallucination, but notice that the word "the" (the first abbreviation) has been replaced by "You" (the second). This indicates that the early string data has been overwritten by junk which happens to have no terminator, so the print routine continues to the next valid string.

In another test I managed to crash the interpreter. I suspect that it overwrote the first abbreviation with the bits representing the first abbreviation, so the print routine went into an infinite loop. You know. As one does.

Okay! Bug demonstrated! What have we learned?

This bug shipped and absolutely nobody noticed. When I played Infidel as a kid and explored the desert, my game was corrupting memory. Same with every other player, including Infocom's playtesters.

It's very likely that nobody tried dropping more than eight objects out in the Endless Desert. Why would you? There's nothing out there! It's not on the way to anywhere. The entire mechanism exists only to occupy players who have not yet discovered the pyramid. The attention to detail is typical of Infocom, but that area can't have been playtested very hard.

(I would love to peruse an Infocom testing log to see if any trace of the bug appeared. The Infocom Cabinet doesn't seem to have anything relevant. Let know if you come across such a thing.)

The 1984 revision of the game did nothing to address the bug. Infocom did not have anything like the Visible Zorker. They might have had debugging tools to inspect memory, but nobody thought to apply them to these routines and their storage.

I have not surveyed later games to see if a similar bug exists -- or is correctly handled by the compiler. I'll keep an eye out.

How would one fix the bug? Simple: remove the argument default for TBL, and instead start the routine with <SET TBL ,DESERT-TABLE>. Or else pass in DESERT-TABLE as a second argument to the routine. Either would work.

There's another pair of routines PROP-TO-TBL, TBL-TO-PROP which have a similar bug with the PROP-TBL table (address 11329, global number 22). I am honestly a bit baffled by these routines. They look like they're doing a similar shuffle-job with the holes you can dig in the sand. (These are stored in desert rooms as the CAPACITY property.) But the game doesn't let you dig in ENDLESS-DESERT; it says "The ground is too hard here." So the routines appear to be useless. They may be a remnant of an earlier feature which was removed during development. Perhaps because it corrupted the serial number!

If I were updating Infidel (as opposed to riffing it), I would definitely restore the ability to dig useless holes out in the desert. That kind of pointless detail is one of the great joys of IF.

Infiltrate the undying emperor’s palace, gain his trust, and assassinate him! Your choices could save the empire, conquer it, or destroy it forever. A Blade for the Emperor is a 600,000-word interactive novel by Samuel Gohra. It releases on Thursday, October 15th, and you can wishlist it on Steam today! We sat down with Samuel to discuss the game.

A Blade for the Emperor is about an assassin, so it goes to some pretty dark places. How do you pull yourself back from that after a long writing session?

There is definitely plenty of darkness in this story. The player is an assassin (though they choose just how much blood they spill), venturing into a setting beset by dark magic, monsters, and people doing monstrous things.

I actually find quite a lot of contrast from the more morbid elements within the writing process itself. It isn’t a story of unremitting bleakness, and I always strive to find room for color and life and humor amid all the grisly skulduggery.

Beyond writing, I find it a great reprieve to hike around some of the more scenic idylls I’m lucky enough to have close by, which are largely assassin-free. There are also some alternative Australian comedy creators that can reliably scour anything remotely serious or sensible from my brain.

I’m always taking in other stories, whether playing or watching or reading something – it’s an important source of nourishment, and escapism from my own creative endeavors. I like to have a balanced diet of heavier and lighter things, from different media and genres, so I’m always coming back to my own projects with a fresh melange of inspirations.

Despite the darkness, I imagine it has to be fun to write a PC who’s a badass assassin. Is there a particular physical or magical feat that the PC can do that you’re particularly proud of inventing?

It has been great fun putting the player at the center of a city coming apart at the seams, taking them through a gauntlet that reaches from the lowest depths underground to the most distant heights above the clouds – and finding all the ways that their skills supernatural and otherwise could be put to use.

The source of much of the PC’s power is Quintessence, a finite inner essence that allows them to push beyond normal human limits. This opened up possibilities I thoroughly enjoyed writing, such as mimicking any voice regardless of the player’s own identity – from commanders to emperors to demons, and other special possibilities I won’t spoil.

Their supernatural resilience also opened up some interesting opportunities, including a particular scenario I’m quite fond of. With poisoned drinks before them and their target sat alongside them, the PC can choose to drink deeply to ensure their target does also – plunging them both into a hallucinatory delirium when the poison takes hold, and taking the PC down an otherworldly path. I always enjoy being able to hide strange, secret things down what might be less-trodden paths.

You’ve also had a professional life in games journalism. What perspective does that give you on the industry? How does it inform your fiction and game writing?

Above all, I think writing about the industry and within it has increased my appreciation for the immense amount of effort that goes into every project. By their nature, games are such complex and distinct creations, often representing the collaboration of many different disciplines. So much work goes into incredible concepts that for a multitude of reasons may never reach the audiences that would have loved them, and it’s a kind of miracle whenever one gets across the line.

It makes me immensely grateful to have had the support, collaboration and guidance of Choice of Games, to bring this story to completion.

It has shaped my approach to fiction significantly as well. Having written about games from an analytical perspective, trying to articulate what I love most about my favorite gaming experiences and how they work, I’m often consciously drawing on these same techniques that I’ve connected with in other stories.

Turning to another one of your other projects, I’m fascinated by your VR game Walk the Past! Do you have a background in history? How did you go about the research for that game?

This was an indie game project, essentially a walking simulator experience that explored the Battle of Cartagena, taking players through the locations and events of a really remarkable conflict in Spanish and British history.

Through the developer Balandra Studios, I was fortunate enough to have access to deeply informed academic insight. There is also a trove of primary sources to be found online, including journals of key figures – the Balandra team provided translation for Spanish sources, and it was an engrossing challenge to construct the unfolding battle, and dramatize this through conflicting narrators and collectible journal fragments. There was a real sense of escalation, turning points, ticking clocks and mounting hubris, that emerged quite organically from the factual accounts, often fitting together into a narrative of their own accord.

My interest in history is more recreational than formal study, but I have relished opportunities to delve into specific periods for particular projects.

Writing the imperial machinations of A Blade for the Emperor was another opportunity to do so. The strangest smallest details from history have inspired entire characters and storylines in this story, from the unlikely origin of certain priceless ancient dyes, to the likely apocryphal demises of historical queens.

What are you working on next?

There are a few prose and screen concepts that have been sitting on for some time, as I worked on A Blade for the Emperor. In the short term, I think it will be a nice change of pace to write something that isn’t half a million words long – thankfully that’s virtually everything else. There are a few short stories bouncing around in my head, some short film concepts I’ve been discussing with a collaborator for a while, and a longer prose concept that I think could well end up as another interactive project.

I’m looking forward to spending some time mulling these over and exploring opportunities, and finding out which is next!

(Read part 1 on Happy Bushman here.)

It turns out I was stuck on what was the only hard part; there are pieces where you can lose, but for the most part it’s cases where it is clear what you did wrong and you just need to back up and try again.

Original PC-88 version, from Yahoo! Auctions.

Before getting into the gameplay, a quick correction: I was taking the Romanization of the author’s name from Mobygames because I couldn’t find it elsewhere, but I realized the author’s name is printed (small and faintly) on the back of his book.

IF YOU DON’T READ THIS BOOK, YOU CAN’T ENJOY THE ESSENCE OF ADVENTURE GAME

Hence I changed Yū Numata to Yasushi Numata. Additionally, Busca in the comments points out there’s a sixth game, Burglar’s Adventure; you can see screenshots at the link I just gave.

I had hit a point where the Coke bottle was stolen by a baboon. This occurs in the movie (see above). As I indicated last time, Xi talks the animal into dropping the bottle in the movie; I assumed some sort of direct confrontation in the game (even if of a different nature).

There’s some fruit you can pick if you advance — I thought maybe I could trade — but the baboon disappeared and I thought I was softlocked. This is entirely wrong; you’re supposed to go backwards a fair ways into the village to the stump, and then look at the stump. This reveals the hiding place of the bottle.

Unless I missed a message, there’s no obvious way to realize this. It ended up being the hardest part (for me) in the game.

The remainder of what happens is more straightforward; there are a few “traps”, but of a relatively obvious nature. For example, back to those fruits I tried to give to the baboon:

You’re supposed to eat them. If you don’t, in the next scene where it gets dark and you need to sleep, you die of hunger. That’s what I mean about the “trap” being obvious. Certainly by normal adventure game practice you’d hang on to the fruit, but knowing about the starvation makes it essentially a non-puzzle.

There’s a second issue here, which is you get killed by a beast if you fall asleep. I caught on the fire needed lighting; start trying to do so and a rhino comes charging.

After a second try it gets successfully lit and the animal goes away. You can now sleep.

Onward! More “advance” … quite a bit. I appreciate the simplification here of removing compass directions when exploration isn’t the point of the game, but it means the author needs to do even more work to fill in the void left behind.

Bow and arrows just lying around. You need to take them.

Oh no, a lion! And that’s supposed to be Steyn there (this movie’s version of the man who is helpless saying coherent words around women). He seems cooler in this version. You can shoot the lion and he doesn’t even turn around, it’s like how the cool guy in shades walks away from the explosion without glancing.

And the truck’s in the tree, you just pass by here and admire the scenery.

Killing the lion was important because of a moment later where you pass by some goats. If you just keep walking you die of starvation. Clearly, the intent is to use the bow and arrow you still have handy.

Unfortunately, this gets you arrested (this also happens in the movie!) but because you did the good deed earlier, you get let off easy by the judge. We can resume taking the Coke bottle on our quest!

We now have the jeep available to take. I’m not even sure how this is sequenced exactly. (Fictional Xi does not know how to drive.) The implication is perhaps Steyn is helping, but he doesn’t get drawn in the Jeep, he only shows up in a scene later.

After some driving, you reach a gate. And the “puzzle” is to get out of the jeep, open the gate, and keep moving forward.

Steyn (who maybe was travelling with us) pulls out a telescope and we see some kids with some guerillas. Now comes the final part of the game, where we take them down. Except our bow and arrows were confiscated!

Don’t worry, we’ll see them again soon. First though, we need to take the shrub/weed out of the way here otherwise (later) we make too much noise. This was the only other “hard” part of the game I thought because it isn’t very clear at describing what happens.

Past that are a bow and arrows — they’re just lying around everywhere I guess — which describe themselves as “big and cute” when you pick them up.

Forward some more reveals another bow and arrows, this one small enough to make it easy to sneak.

Pick up the comically oversized bow (or forget to grab the weed) and you’ll get spotted here; as long as you only took the smaller bow you can continue.

The bow and arrow serve their purpose just fine, and they do so on the next scene as well.

Better than Solid Snake.

Then there’s just a rock, and oh no if you keep going you get shot! You need to LOOK ROCK and then do the shooting.

With that you get offered a cattle or money as a reward, and assume you blow off the money, the funniest death scene of the game ensues.

You’re supposed to pick the cash (I guess avoiding tempting any stray lions) and you finally can reach the end of the world. Movie version first, just for comparison:

I like how matter-of-fact this is.

Because it wouldn’t be a Japanese game without killing the god-boss at the end bonking God at the end with a Coke bottle.

Kazuma Satou in the comments points out he “finished the whole thing with no hints in less than the movie’s runtime.” It took me a little longer (both looking up things like the Japanese word for telescope and me trying to argue with the baboon).

In a more serious sense, there was clearly some major struggle in both this game and Genma Taisen in figuring out how to adapt a movie. The only reason The Dark Crystal worked in parts was exploration; here, both games remove that aspect entirely and rely more or less on binary live-or-die choices (like picking up the wrong bow; and really, are you going to ignore the charging lion?) This doesn’t have as many ridiculous moments like the fake-out questions or quizzing what your power levels are.

At least it turned out better than the arcade game. It was released before this game, mid-1982, as Gonta Road Rush (with some unfortunate imagery on the side of the cabinet). Quoting Game Machine from August 1982 (courtesy tweakbod from Gaming Alexandria).

The game follows “Gonta,” a tribesman, as he overcomes various obstacles to return to his home in Africa; the game consists of three stages in total. It begins with a city street stage, then goes through a tunnel and so on while avoiding moving cars one after another. Monsters that attack along the way can be defeated with the spear (button operation).

It was released in the US as Desert Dan with some graphical changes. The description of the video below claims “it’s probably one of the worst arcade games I have ever played.”

Adventure authors were not the only ones struggling with the idea of converting media, it seems. At least Happy Bushman has some scenes that vaguely resemble the movie!

Coming up: the grand finale ending to Thissala. No, really.

Now through October 8th, you can get Choice of Games titles for up to 40% off on Steam as part of the Steam Autumn Sale. Hosted Games and Heart’s Choice titles are also participating in the Autumn Sale, so enjoy generous discounts on all three in this once-a-season sale!

October's offering is Planetfall, Steve Meretzky's first title.

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license. In addition, I've posted high-resolution scans of the original folio manual and feelies.

The package promises space comedy. Notice that the Infidel package refers to Planetfall as "Infocom's nuu SF laf klasic". And yes, Meretzky is a dab hand with a tension-breaking joke.

The mutants lap up the chemical, howling with delight. One immediately grows three new mouths.

But I'm not sure Planetfall can be described as a comedy. The mutants are about to tear you apart, after all.

The overall story is a carefully-graded arc. Tedium, then a shocking disaster (although the game doesn't narrate your shock or fear in any way); then the reveal of the abandoned, decaying facility that will be your new world. A lonely struggle to sustain yourself. The slow realization of the catastrophe which engulfed Resida and is now advancing through your body. Then hope and another tragedy -- this time acknowledged by the game! -- followed by a bang-up chase-scene ending.

The opening scene and the deliberately-saccharine final paragraph are played for laughs, but absolutely nothing else about Planetfall is. Even Floyd's reliable role as comic relief is background foil for those moments when he exhibits human grief and determination.

This month's Visible app doesn't have too many fancy features. The big one is a Translation tab for Residan text. It's not necessary to play; the whole point is that Resida uses "logical" phonetic spelling, so you can read it with only a little bit of effort. Except that little bit adds up to a lot of annoyance, especially when you reach the library and its rapid-fire infodumps. Every time I've come back to Planetfall, I've said "Oh, sigh, the spelling." And so I offer you this handy alternative! Every time a Residan text scrolls by in the main pane, it's added to the Translation tab in standard English.

(No deep magic here. I just retyped them all by hand. It's under a hundred lines, only about 1200 words total.)

I have not attempted to provide cheat codes for the hunger, sleep, and disease timers in the game. I'm with Drew Cook on that issue: the survival elements of the game, and their increasing difficulty, provide the embodied grounding for the game's intensity.

(Yes, you have to take several runs and a deliberately optimization-minded approach to have any hope of winning. But that's every Infocom game. If that kind of mindset killed immersion, we wouldn't have gotten this far.)

Speaking of optimization, this is Infocom's first attempt to make action duration a meaningful game element. In most of the previous games, a turn was a turn. Deadline said that a turn was a minute, and gave you exactly 720 of them; but only a few "careful" actions took more than one minute.

Planetfall measures everything in millichrons. A Galactic day runs ten chrons; the status line thus shows the time of day from 0000 to 9999. Basic actions take seven millichrons -- roughly one minute, indeed. But many verbs set a longer duration: a WAIT is 40 millichrons. Furthermore (literally), the game map marks particular exits as taking specific amounts of time to traverse. A really long hall might take 160.

You might shrug this off as the same kind of fussy simulationism as the hunger timer. But, as far as I can tell, the durations are set for game balance rather than strict realism. For example, an elevator ride runs 50 or 100 millichrons, which is seven to fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes in an elevator is nonsensical. But it is a meaningful fraction of a game day. Two or three WAIT commands is enough to remind you that time's a-wastin'; better have all your chemicals in order before heading up that tower.

Really, the game day is highly compressed for gameplay purposes, just as it is in most modern graphical RPGs. "Ten chrons" is meant to express a certain amount of game experience, not 24 literal hours. And that's too many millichrons spent on that subject. I'll leave it there.

More reading:

• The Digital Antiquarian
• Drew Cook

In other Visible Zorker news, I've added a "source code" link for every game. (See the project site and scroll down.)

The Visible Zorker apps have always included full syntax-colored ZIL code with commentary. But that's in a dynamic web app, which isn't the most convenient browsing format. These new links provide the same source code (and most of the same commentary) as plain static HTML.

You can of course also view the raw source code (and everything else related to the Visible Zorker) at Github.

Upcoming work:

Visible Enchanter will be the next public release on November 1st. Magic! Terrible evils from the dawn of history! More magic!

Patreon supporters got access to Visible Enchanter a month ago, and Visible Infidel today. Please remember that the Visible Zorker is a Patreon-supported project! Your donation is immensely appreciated. (And credited in each game's "About" page, of course.)

Speaking of Infidel, I've discovered the most egregious memory bug in the game file. I bet you can't wait to hear about that. Details coming in a couple of days.

Recently I played Genma Taisen, published by Pony Canyon in Japan in March 1983 to coincide with the accompanying animated film. It was an official conversion; the “first” from Japan, maybe, although there were Space Battleship Yamato games (like this one and this one) and I don’t know if any were “official”. In the same month, Pony Canyon released another game, Happy Bushman. It was based on the live-action film The Gods Must Be Crazy, from South African filmmaker Jamie Uys (Uys is pronounced “Ace”).

Converting a slapstick comedy film might seem an odd choice, but there was logic to it. For me to fully explain what happened I need to start with Uys and the creation of the film:

Uys made his first film, Daar Doer in die Bosveld (Far Away in the Bushveld), in 1951, with what he describes as a “two-man crew” with just himself and his wife (the only exceptions being a few more actors and music). The plot has Hans Botha (played by Jamie Uys) being tasked to pick up a new schoolteacher, Martie du Toit (his wife Toit Hettie Uys) from a bus stop. The car has trouble with the brakes; Hans has trouble with speaking to women, zany antics ensue. The same character gets reused in a 1954 sequel, and then Uys does a remake in 1958.

From the 1958 version. Source.

This was done amidst apartheid South Africa, and the same year as the remake shown above he made the short propaganda film The Condemned Are Happy at the behest of the South African government showing the “benefits” of forced removals. Quoting from the film: “one Sunday I went to look at the new town, my eyes grew big when I saw the houses they had built … truly the white man is very clever.”

Jamie Uys rose in prominence and while he was one of the first to bring films internationally, he insisted on growing the industry locally. His most “serious” work, Dingaka from 1964, is a court drama where an African tribesman is on trial for murder. Quoting a preview article in South Africa Digest from ’64, It contrasts the “hectic life of the city” with the “simple, unsophisticated setting of the South African veld”. (This idea gets mentioned explicitly at the start of The Gods Must Be Crazy.) The music is quite good and the film as a whole suggests to me Uys simultaneously had interest in local cultures while also holding an “idealized” vision of them.

The idealization shows up strong in The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), which allegedly shows the authentic life of the ǃKung (one of the San peoples), starting in literal documentary style. The background was entirely made-up. The lead actor (Nǃxau) was a cook making a salary and quite familiar with modernity, but Uys claimed he “spent three months crisscrossing the Kalahari desert” to find his lead, and took photos and “marked the longitude and latitude” so he could find the people again. He claimed he met N!Xau in Botswana who had supposedly only seen one white man before (a missionary) and when he asked him to come work, he “didn’t understand, because they have no word for work.” None of this was true. To be clear: the issue isn’t that actors were acting — this was fiction, after all — but that Uys pretended the basic “documentary” frame held, and this was really showing the life of the San. More clicks were added to the soundtrack to make their language sound more exotic.

The film was test-screened in the US without much success; it was instead Japan where it first hit international fame. It was the biggest moneymaker of 1982, considering both foreign and domestic films. It turned out that N!Xau (and the idea of the San) attracted the Japanese imagination (Uye called him a “national hero” in the country); he flew to visit and did numerous interviews and learned to enjoy the taste of sake.

The Japanese loved this tiny star from Africa and couldn’t see and talk enough about his short khaki pants, shy smile and language.

— Via a 2003 news story

After a film makes money in theaters, it can make money in television. Early in April 1983 it showed on Fuji TV, combined with a media rush similar to Genma Taisen, with both a new music album (in February) and and a new computer game (in March). Pony Canyon’s advertising for the game explicitly mentions the premier of the TV show coming up on Golden Movie Theater (and the availability of the album).

The album was, significantly, via Canyon Records; in other words, the game and the album both came from Pony Canyon. The artist for the game, Takaomi Shibayama, was from the music side of the business and has a long list of credits as art director through the early 80s. (As far as I can find this was his only game.)

One of his 1983 albums, via Discogs.

The designer/programmer on Happy Bushman was Yasushi Numata, part of one of Japan’s computer clubs. I haven’t talked about Japanese computer clubs much; as an example, The Theoretical Science Group of Tokyo University is probably the most “famous” of Japan’s early computer clubs now (as much as late-70s computer history in Japan can be famous) because of their creation of Heiankyo Alien which originated the “digger” genre of game, leading to Space Panic and (by indirect means) the ultra-seller Lode Runner. (There’s a video from F_T_B if you want to know more about them and their rivalry with the University of Tokyo Microcomputer Club.)

I’m not talking about the TSG today, but rather FORESIGHT, situated in Yokohama. They were founded in 1980 by three high school students (as opposed to being a university club). They started just exchanging information and programs related to the PC-8001. They began their own zine; our author first appears in the August 1980 issue with THE GALAXY.

Source.

Yasushi Numata had some other programs appear (including a Star Trek variant and a golf game) but the most relevant item he made was a book about programming adventure games for the PC-88 series. It was published after Happy Bushman (in October) and is elaborate enough that Numata had clearly been thinking about the topic for a while (it includes 5 original games).

Source. The games are Treasure Hunt Adventure, High School Adventure, Planet Adventure, Survival Adventure, and Monster Adventure, the latter two being RPGs.

I do not know how Yasushi Numata got connected with the Pony Canyon production. Shuwa System Trading Co. (which published the book) is entirely unaffiliated. He does have FORESIGHT listed with his name in the credits; my guess is the club was contacted first and Numata was considered the best candidate for the project.

The plane is animated flying from right to left. The “special thanks” is to Fuji TV.

The PC-88, FM-7 (and 8), and Sharp MZ computers all got ports. I went with the FM version but I’m playing on an 8 rather than a 7 (the two are generally cross-compatible with BASIC programs on tape, just the 8 was made first and was slower).

Just like in the movie, a plane drops a Coca-Cola bottle from above towards our protagonist. Unlike the movie, it doesn’t fall right next to him.

You play as the main character Xi from the movie, starting in the village. There are no compass directions, you can only move “ahead” (susumu) or “back” (modoru) so everything is strictly linear. I do not have a manual so I admit I had to consult a walkthrough immediately to realize this. I’ve tried to hold back otherwise for now.

If you keep going forward, you eventually reach an elder who stops you and tells you that you can’t leave the village as it is against the rules. The key here is the grass shown above at about the halfway point, where you need to break out “miru” and LOOK GRASS. This reveals the bottle, which you can then take.

With the bottle in hand you now get told that you need to return it to God. (There’s no long sequence where the bottle is shown to be useful and people fight over it. The game seems to be aiming for a loose adaptation like The Dark Crystal.)

Leaving the village, there’s a baboon who will eventually nab your bottle as you pass on by. (You repeat typing “ahead” all this time — it’s essentially a way of advancing the clock on the story.)

If you advance farther and come back, the baboon is gone. In the movie Xi talks to the baboon and explains how the object is evil which might be the solution here, but I’m going to save all that (and hopefully the remainder of the game) for part 2. Stay tuned!

(Special thanks to F_T_B for his help with research.)

On Monday, September 28, 2026, 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.

Tableaux Vivants (2026) by Neil Shaw Cohen

In this fantasy game set in the late-Victorian era, you are a woman who has forgotten herself, looking at the words “To myself”. The words are freshly inked on the page, but what did you intend to write? It must have been important. You’re in a study. You don’t recognize it, but it seems oddly familiar. There are hundreds of books on the bookshelves, many about literature. And near the unwritten letter is a brown leather bookmark. It bears an ouroboros encircling the monogram “T.V.” How curious.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2026, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Ruined Temple (2026) by Alex Crossley

In this colorless slightly-buggy adventure, you control a party of adventurers tasked to root out a ruined temple of uppity goblins. Your party consists of Aedron (fighter), Lossdant (multi-talented elf), Kyra (magicienne), and Thadivus (dwarf).

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2026, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Bob The Barbarian (2026) by Charles Moore, Jr.

In this fantasy adventure, you play as Bob the Barbarian, armed only with your dull wits. You’ve crossed miles of wasteland to rescue the princess Xandina from the evil sorcerer Zarayeb and prove yourself worthy of your proud barbarian heritage. Let’s do this.

This game was written in Dialog and was an entry in IF Comp 2026, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Out by Midnight (2026) by Arthur DiBianca

In this scavenger hunt game, you might be anyone with lockpicking skills standing in the foyer of the old haunted Bordelon House. Find the ten items on your list and leave before midnight because that’s when the ghosts attack. It’s already 7:30 PM, so don’t waste any time! Optimize!

This work was an entry in IF Comp 2026, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Alana’s Dungeon (2026) by Alana Armstrong and Clyde Falsoon

In this small adventure, you might be anyone standing beside two locked chests in a meadow. At the other end of the meadow is an unlocked cabinet and stairs down into a dungeon where you might win a prize fit for a princess!

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2026, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Black Thumb (2026) by Bridget Hoang

In this short game, you wake up in your bedroom. Your parents are gone, the dream for any teenager. Hm, what to do first? Why don’t you set up your succulents? Echevrias, you think they’re called. It should only take a few minutes. Today will be a good day.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2026, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Live And Get Pie (2026) by Tame Spond/ee

In this very short game written in verse, you play as a spy who didn’t rehearse. You fall from a plane! Please don’t die! You know you must live… and get pie.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2026, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Try Again (2016) by Tom Devereaux

In this very short apocalyptic story, you play as a radiation specialist, Dr Maggie Winston, who wakes up disoriented in a bunker in the ruins of New York City. You soon find a pistol, a golden watch, some of your notes, a diamond, and a portal.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

More thoughts on a combat system.

adding combatants to the system

Our simple example from last time simulated violent exchanges in which a player attacks an enemy during the course of a usual Inform turn. Enemies, meanwhile, retaliated during the every turn phase of action processing. I think this is a typical arrangement, combat or otherwise. Action processing responds to the player’s command, and every turn is often used to handle whatever the rest of the world gets up to. It’s a very protagonist-centered arrangement that makes perfect sense in nearly every Inform game.

It does get a little awkward, sometimes, where we have to think of multiple in-game characters doing things that affect each-other. One idea might be to have characters telegraph their intent and then allow the possibility of reaction. Victor Gijsbers’s Kerkerkruip operates in this way. Players can dodge attacks or attack, and from that initial, seeming simplicity some marvelously complex possibilities emerge.

I have something a little different in mind, which is fortunate, as I doubt I could improve upon the mechanics of Kerkerkruip even if I wished. I’d like to make a simpler system that places heavy emphasis on which actor gets to go first. To start, we need a way to define combatants and assign them relevant properties. We can do this with tables. I’d like to use these tables on a per-kind basis. “Protagonist” can be a kind, as can “zombie.” Other types of enemies can be handled in a similar way.

a protagonist is a kind of person.
some protagonists are defined by the table of player characters.

Next, the table itself. What should go in there? In the previous post, we discussed “speed” and “accuracy” statistics, so let’s keep those. I think we could also use a “defense” statistic to reflect an enemy’s ability to resist damage. Finally, we should assign our creations a finite measure of health.

table of player characters
protagonist	max health	current health	accuracy	speed	defense
Chad	45	45	7	5	7

This will create a person named “Chad” while granting them the specified values for accuracy and whatnot. Authors might want to account for other properties, such as gender, but we’ll leave that for now.

We can make some enemies in the same way.

an enemy is a kind of person.
a zombie is a kind of enemy.

some zombies are defined by the table of z-types.

table of z-types
enemy	max health	current health	accuracy	speed	defense
gurgler	5	5	7	3	2
groaner	7	7	7	3	2

Where are these people? Unless otherwise specified, the player appears in the first room mentioned by the program. We will need to add something like

the player is Chad.
Chad is in the Foyer.

What about the zombies? Until otherwise specified, things created by sentences like some zombies are defined by the table of z-types will begin nowhere, or out-of-play. We could add a location to our sentence, ie, some zombies in the foyer are..., but chances we don’t mean to make separate tables for every room. There are several ways to place the zombies ourselves, including declarations like gurgler is in the filthy kitchen. We’ll come back to this eventually.

but seriously. who goes first.

My first tabletop roleplaying experience was with Gygax-era Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and though a great many advances have taken place over the years, I still reach for the terms I learned in those days. Determining the order in which multiple combatants act is, in that idiom, a question of determining initiative. A person‘s speed statistic should influence initiative, obviously. Weapons probably have speed, too, though we haven’t gotten that far. I’ll proceed as if we’ve worked that out already. I think we’ll need more than just an ordered list of people. What if the player chooses to do something slow or clunky, or else just ignores combat altogether? We should leave ourselves room to adjust the order on the fly if we need to. Note that I am assuming multiple—several, even—combatants active at once. This would be overkill otherwise.

That sounds like a table to me.

table of initiative
ranking (a number)	combatant (a person)	initiative (a number)	pending (a truth state)
--	--	--	--
with 10 blank rows

Here’s my initial thinking on these items:

• Ranking: the order. A “1” value should correspond to the person acting first, “2” should correspond to the person acting second, and so forth. I’m adding this in case I need to easily find out if X goes before Y, or is acting first in the turn. I can have some definitions that let me work these things out on the fly.
• Combatant: the actor in question
• Initiative: a number determined by some as-yet unwritten rules.
• Pending: I’m going to update this when any actor does something. This will provide an easy way to determine how many actions remain in the turn.

Let’s make a rulebook!

initiative is a rulebook.

This will be the default rule, but we can always make new rules for exceptions later.

an initiative rule (this is the default initiative check rule):
	blank out the whole of the table of initiative;

I’m going to calculate the player initiative separate from the initiative of other actors. I don’t really need to do this, but I might want to do things differently later. I’m just leaving myself room for that here.

	let P be the speed of the player;
	let S be the speed of the equipped weapon of the player;
	let player's initiative is dice roll plus (P + S);

*needle skip* What is “dice roll,” you say? That’s just a method for grabbing a random number. A dice roll. For the purpose of this blog, let’s just make it a simple random number.

to decide what number is dice roll:
	decide on a random number from 1 to 8;

Why eight, and not six, or ten, or 20? My vibes-based answer is that it will make an actor’s speed statistic sufficiently impactful without dominating: sometimes fast characters will still go last, but they won’t do so often.

Alright, back to our rule. We have a dice roll, a weapon speed, and player speed, and that gives us an initiative number for our player. Let’s put it in the table.

	choose blank row from the table of initiative;
	now combatant entry is the player;
	now initiative entry is player's initiative;
	now pending entry is true;

Great! Let’s get the other combatants’ values in the table.

	repeat with E running through enemies in the location:
		let P be the speed of E;
		let S be the speed of the equipped weapon of E;
		let enemy's initiative be dice roll plus (S + P);
		choose a blank row from the table of initiative;
		now combatant entry is E;
		now initiative entry is enemy's initiative;
		now pending entry is true;

We’ve used a repeat loop to add an entry for every enemy in the player’s location. Our first “ranking” column is empty, though, so let’s fill that in now. We do this by sorting the table by initiative, high values first, then follow up by adding in our ranks.

	sort the table of initiative in reverse initiative order;
	let N be 1;
	repeat through the table of initiative:
		now ranking entry is N;
		increment N;

The rulebook exists, but we haven’t yet set it to run anywhere. Where should it run? That is probably a question for next time. For the sake of simulation, I’ll put it in a debugging out of world action.

initiative debugging is an action out of world applying to nothing.
understand "dbg initiative" as initiative debugging.

carry out initiative debugging:
	follow the initiative rules;
	showme the contents of the table of initiative;

This will yield up something like this (the numbers, being random, will vary):

>dbg initiative
table of initiative
(row 1)  | 1 | yourself | 12 | true |
(row 2)  | 2 | groaner | 10 | true |
(row 3)  | 3 | gurgler | 7 | true |
(row 4)  | --  --  --  -- 
(row 5)  | --  --  --  -- 
(row 6)  | --  --  --  -- 

These zombies are slow, but I suppose that’s a fairly common state of affairs. We probably want to think about exceptional cases: someone using a healing item probably shouldn’t benefit from their weapon’s speed rating. And so forth.

We still can’t use this, though. How are we supposed to orchestrate the actions of various actors? Next time, I’ll try to come up with a good way of directing the “traffic” of multiple actors.

Most soap operas take a while to work their way up to murder, but EastEnders kicks off with it from the very first scene, airing February 1985 on BBC One.

A door gets kicked in; the characters Arthur Fowler, Ali Osman and Den Watts find the “cantankerous old man” Reg (who had been missing a few days) nearly dead. It is revealed later another character attacked him trying to steal his old war medals. (Reg dies. Conversation reveals Reg was too much of a “nasty old drunk” for people to care.)

I would say “this sets a tone that would continue its whole run” but it’s a still-running soap with over 7400 episodes (as of this writing) so I can’t declare anything constant, but it did get a reputation as being gritty and topical. It was designed by Julia Smith and Tony Holland (previously of the police procedural Z-Cars) with the intent of being a “younger” competitor to ITV’s Coronation Street (first launched 1960). It was squarely designed as working-class and diverse.

By the mid-80s all sorts of British TV was getting adapted into games, like The Young Ones and Minder. In 1986, multiple companies were interested in EastEnders. The contract was won by the Welsh company Macsen.

It is having to work very closely with EastEnders — seen by nearly 20 million people each week — to get the correct amounts of excitement and authenticity. The best-loved soap in Britain has an almost religious effect on many fans and a poor game simply won’t be accepted, it seems.

The co-owners, Moelwen Gywndaff and Edryd Gywndaff, explained that they were “co-operating very closely with the BBC” and that “all the life is there, and if you get away from that, then you are getting away from the essence of EastEnders.”

Out by the end of 1986. Cover via Mobygames. The “PART I – THE ARCADE GAME” suggests they intended an adventure game for part II. I could see an EastEnders version of Urban Upstart working out.

I’m not clear what the original intent was with “close co-operation” — this was printed in the September version of Bang Weekly before work started — but it didn’t land that way. The production was rushed. The actual creation was done by the trio of Anthony Roberts, Paul Towers, Derek Laws under the label of Towers Software; Anthony Roberts himself explains:

I was part of a 2 main programming team that brought this Wonderful game to the Spectrum (and C64, although that one never made it to production!). We were holed up in a Welsh Hotel for 3 weeks prior to Christmas, after being commisioned by Macsen to produce this game from scratch. I have no idea where the music came from, it was given to us as a module we just called into as required. Macsen did indeed go bust, just as the game was released, and we never received a penny for our efforts!

For what its worth, if you could see past the awful graphics, (and lack of joystick control!!!), as a strategy game it was oddly captivating.

The music that was handed off was by Julie Dunn (who was called David Dunn at the time). She made other well-regarded music from the day; the game I recognized just browsing her work was Finders Keepers.

If you didn’t see the warning signs yet: EastEnders the video game is widely considered very bad, being a cryptic assortment of mini-games with barely any connection to the show. The video I’m linking below is titled Possibly the Worst Game Ever.

So how did Macsen get the contract for a highly-regarded show in the first place? The Bang article claims that “its track record of previous licenses” are what counted: games based on the TV game shows Blockbusters, Bullseye, Countdown, and Treasure Hunt.

Your Computer, Dec. 1986 issue.

The C64 ports of Blockbusters (and the “Gold Run” spinoff) are both by today’s author, Huw Ford. It is unclear if he was ever engaged to work on EastEnders (maybe he was going to do the never-made C64 port before everything imploded?). Given he worked on a 1985 game show conversion with a different company he had probably parted ways with them already, which may have been for the best: by the middle of 1987 Macsen was sunk with a debt of 350,000 pounds.

Prior to his game show work he launched his own label in 1983, HFS Software; he was 21 years old.

From Computer Choice, Dec. 1983 issue. Notice how the same pose is used with all three games.

Confusingly, the name of the company shifted (with the same address) to WordLight and to Omen, not in any particular sequence; the Dragon 32 cover of Land of Tezrel uses both company names simultaneously.

Via World of Dragon.

Land of Tezrel landed on C64, VIC-20, Dragon, and BBC Micro, with the C64/VIC-20 versions by Ford only, the Dragon port by Anthony Mansell, and the BBC port by Gavin Cradle. Neither of the people porting have any other credits, although it is possible Mansell worked directly for Dragon Data; as Ford explains, while he was creating his games he “only lived a few miles away” from the factory (in Wales) and he was able to talk to the developers.

I went with the VIC-20 version I have (a later OMEN branded one) just because it felt like the original platform. Through discoveries I made later this turned out to be clearly the case; additionally, even though I have the (earlier-published) HFS version for C64 and the (later-published) OMEN version for VIC-20, I can say the VIC-20 version just slapped on a new title screen and really represents the earlier version of the game. I’ll get into that later.

The early ad called this “AN UNUSUAL ADVENTURE” and while it doesn’t seem like it right away — your goal is to gallivant around a standard fantasy world, find the Magic Ring of VORDA, and escape — I pretty quickly caught on to what the author meant. The entire game is outdoors on a 10 by 10 grid (just a touch larger than HOBBIT) but also has the player’s original position and most object positions randomized. The actual function of the objects stays consistent but the random elements are enough to toss this into adventure-roguelike territory. The closest comparison I can think of is Dungeon from Andrew Colin’s Introduction to BASIC; while there are major enough differences it could be coincidental, it’s possible Ford was referring to the guide while making this game. The other comparable game is Conquest of Memory Alpha with its own grid structure and randomness (a less likely crossover since that was a TRS-80 game).

The above screen comes from one of my starts. The start location is random with the exception of starting on the south side of the map (there’s a river dividing the north and south portions).

Stars mark important spots. It is indeed “dessert” and not “desert”.

We’ve seen a similar region division idea elsewhere (like with Reality Ends; one thing that helps this game along is occasionally describing when there’s an adjacent region, giving specific places more flavor.

Items (spread at random) include a sword, an “oracle box”, and a wand. One room has a path across the river which suggests you need to get a cape from a dragon to pass by. I never did find the cape.

The reason I didn’t find the cape was the wandering enemies that you can find. The dwarf (seen above) simply tries to swipe objects; I was holding a sword, I tried KILL DWARF, and it worked. I no longer had to worry about the dwarf swiping things.

At least the game clarifies it’s an EVIL dwarf, unlike the one in Twin Kingdom Valley which seemed to be peaceful that I left alone.

In addition to the dwarf, there’s a MONSTER and a DRAGON that show up. In both cases they will magic you away to another place unless you either type RUN (a command you can get by typing HELP during the scene) or by killing them. Unfortunately, at this stage in the game I wasn’t sure how to kill them; despite KILL DWARF working, when I tried it on either enemy the game didn’t understand my command, so I had to suffer getting teleported instead.

However: the teleporting isn’t bad! The teleport can land you anywhere on the map, including on the north side, so even though I didn’t find the cape to get over the river, I didn’t need it because I could just jump over by teleport instead. Before exploring that side, two other elements on the south side to note.

The first is a canyon (lower left corner) where at the end there seem to consistently be some KEYS. I say “seem to” because the randomness seems a little glitchy in this game.

Sometimes (but not on every game) a wizard would block the way in the canyon. The wizard asks if you have a fish to give. If you say NO (without a fish) he simply refuses you to pass; if you say YES (with no fish) he gets angry and teleports you away. On my winning run I didn’t see the wizard so I didn’t need to deal with the fish, but it’s simply a red fish (not a red herring) randomly placed elsewhere on the map the wizard wants.

The wizard showed up in most of my attempts, so I’m not sure why he was sometimes absent.

There’s additionally, in the mountains, a room with a waterfall. Saying the word VORDA teleports you there. (Usually: I did have the word refuse to work sometimes, and just like the wizard not showing up, I’m not clear why.)

We’ll return here later.

With that taken care of, let’s teleport to the north side of the map.

I had the sword. The I DON,T UNDERSTAND was a result of me trying to KILL MONSTER.

There’s a “ruined castle” on the east side with a LITTLE OLD MAN. The game says if you give the man some food he will give you a hint where the ring (the main quest for the game) is.

The food was nearby; he just says it’s in the Snow Queen’s Castle, which is not terribly helpful because after mapping things out that’s clearly the only other important thing where something might be hiding.

There are two sets of keys you need to open the gate. One is at the end of the canyon (I think always) and the other is randomly placed. With both you can OPEN GATE. This is near the end of the game but I was getting sent away by the GUARDIAN OF THE GATE. KILL GUARDIAN was not doing any good.

After numerous frustrating attempts (including bringing the wand over and trying to make that work) I checked the walkthrough, only to find out that it was for the C64 version and has a significantly different series of events, and it tells you to KILL GUARDIAN here (the exact thing that wasn’t working). I asked gschmidl for some help and he extracted a text file with the source code.

932 ifmid$(in$,u,3)=”use”ormid$(in$,u,4)=”kill”ormid$(in$,u,4)=”figh”then950
933 ifmid$(in$,u,3)=”run”then995
934 ifmid$(in$,u,3)=”hel”thenprint”{clr}if you are unarmed{down} ‘run'{down}”:u=256:nextu:goto930
935 nextu
936 print”{clr}{down}i don,t understand”
937 print”{down}and the”:printo9$(cq):print”has cast his spell.”:goto987
950 foru=1tolen(in$)
951 ifmid$(in$,u,4)=”wand”andwa=1andys>msthen22100
952 ifmid$(in$,u,4)=”wand”andwa=1andys<msthen22000
953 ifmid$(in$,u,5)="sword"then22200

I’m not quite sure why KILL DWARF worked, but after studying things over I realized the game wanted either USE SWORD or KILL SWORD. This isn’t a guaranteed win but at least the game now understood me.

With the RNG going my way, the guardian died and I was able to claim the ring.

Not quite the end, though! The game now wants you to find a wardrobe and escape (I assume this is Narnia-adjacent). Trying out VORDA which warps back to the waterfall reveals the wardrobe right away. OPEN WARDROBE reveals one last monster fight and then victory.

Regarding the C64 version, the sword is no longer out in the open: you have to jump into a cave to find it. The dragon also is no longer in a random place, and you need to SMASH a STALAGMITE to reach the lair if you want to claim the cape (still optional because of teleportation, though). Also oddly, the north side of the map now has a bit more structure to it; the second pair of keys are now consistently placed at a dead end, and the Snow Queen Castle becomes actual rooms rather than something you interact with indirectly while outside.

The author’s original vision seemed to match more closely with Colin’s Dungeon (pure RNG item placement, only three items can be held in inventory at a time, lots of random teleports) but with some changes to reduce the pure-slot-machine aspect in the initial VIC-20 version, and even more changes after to create the C64 version. The improvements did help, even though this is just an “afternoon game” (or at least it would be, had I not had the parser trouble with USE SWORD). I also thought the “region” system worked in the tight restrictions the author had in terms of content; the description of adjacent regions plus a few extra rooms were enough to keep the landscape from being flavorless.

This is a “street lamp” in the dark forest on the north side. In the VIC-20 version you can RUB LAMP and get a message about nothing happening; the C64 version has a joke about a genie coming out and falling over dead.

Due to the heavy randomization, this game also enters the rare pantheon of “early text adventures that reflected later careers”; Huw Ford eventually went on from writing game show conversions to work on gambling machine software, and the CEO of his most recent company calls him a “Jedi coder” who “knows every computer language” in an interview.

I wasn't blogging in 2006, but I was a regular commenter on the Nielsen Haydens' blog Making Light in the year and on the morning that I read "Mike Ford is gone."

I found the comment which I posted twenty years ago today:

I saw him just one or two times, at conventions. I never spoke with him. I admired him desperately and furiously.

I started with reading Just the Planet in a Crown Books, because I couldn’t justify spending my allowance on it. After a while, I started to worry they’d throw me out — not for finishing a book in the store; for laughing too loudly.

I finish, as a lot of us have, by waiting for Aspects.

-- me, that thread, Sept 25, 2006.

Aspects is available, such as it is. The Dragon Waiting and The Scholars of Night and Growing Up Weightless have been reprinted. Web of Angels has been reprinted, just a couple years ago -- ancient time; I forgot that edition was on my shelf. The Trek novels have remained in print, ironically, because they were work-for-hire and not subject to the long weird story of Ford's publication rights.

I also own The Last Hot Time and The Princes of the Air and The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues (a Paranoia module). I have the Tor Double that includes "Fugue State". I have the two short story collections and the Bordertown story collection. I hope those get reprinted. I have a tiny small-press collection of Ford's poetry. It includes "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station", which Ford legendarily wrote as a Christmas card and subsequently won a stack of awards.

(Camelot Station, under its Mittel-modern barrel-vaulted glass roof, comes 'round again as the Grand Terminus of Aspects.)

I need to reread the lesser-known stuff. I've been rereading Aspects recently, piecewise out of order, as I have now and then since 2021. "Comfort reading," my spouse diagnosed correctly. I can't spend all my time in the comfort zone, though.

A few years ago I wrote an essay about language in Aspects. I thought about writing another essay, as a twenty-years' memorial, but I don't have enough pieces. Or too many, incomplete. What did happen to the Moon? How does the book's Book (its Tarot deck) echo the plot? The rules of Battleboard? Goddess, her aspects and consorts? The way Silvern and Edaire's telepathic conversations are always perfectly transparent to the reader? The omnipresent and unspoken theme of "Every story can be told two ways"?

All of that is in there, but none of it is finished and I don't see how it works. Teresa Nielsen Hayden (the book's editor) described it as having "(was going to have) (damn it) a fiendishly complicated plot." I don't even know what the plot was! I don't know if she does!

I have figured out a few things about Aspects, and since I'm not writing an essay, I'll just list them.

• Varic is certainly the one who doesn't care about the circumstances of his death. He disclaims caring whether he lives.
• Gaily, the cook at Strange House, is described as "frighteningly animated"; she "seem[s] to be floating" or "dancing" whenever she moves. Now go read the description of Gelly, the Klingon gladiator introduced in Chapter One of The Final Reflection.
• Winterhill the ex-street-kid orders a whole bowl of bacon for breakfast because he can.
• Lescoray suffered a Great Famine once. In legend, it also suffered a volcano when sorcerers (or gods) did... something... to the Moon. The same event? A volcanic winter?
• "The Coron of the Grange" can be sung to "Oh Susannah," seamlessly. ("It rained all night the day he left / the weather it was dry / the sun so hot he froze to death / oh Coron, don't you cry.")

Beyond that, I've been humming the chorus of "Summer's Gone to Cavalry" since last week. I have a shadowy notion how the rest of it goes. I'll keep listening.

I’ve finished the game; I was nearly at the end. My previous posts are needed for context.

From the Microbee Software Preservation Project.

I had left off on an apparent combination lock with four symbols, where you had to enter an “input” as a string of numbers. I had tried every permutation 1234, 2341, 4231, etc. with no luck.

I decided after enough further struggle that I must be missing an item, so I re-checked every location and item in case some of the ones that were previously red herrings were not (the locked chest at the rope, a shield on a wall, the swamp that kills you, a random broken dagger, etc.) One of those items turned out to be the key, but I wasn’t able to reach a solution by thinking from that direction.

What I did next was flip from thinking about nouns to thinking about verbs. This is something that I’ve written about long ago with mainframe Zork, although in that case I was thinking of simply finding which verbs work (which eventually changed into my “common verbs” chart). I didn’t need a chart in this game because it provides all the verbs from the start.

UNLOCK, LOCK, OPEN, CLOSE, SHUT, GET, TAKE, PUT, DROP, GIVE, THROW, EXAMINE, LOOK, READ, PUSH, PRESS, PULL, LEVER, DIG, LIGHT, BURN, EXTINGUISH, KILL, HIT, ATTACK, INFORMATION, INVENTORY, FILL, FIX, TIE, DRINK, HELP, QUIT

That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful to see what the verbs do! Sometimes they have a very specific failure response. I took a random tree near the castle and tried each verb in sequence; I was told after LEVER TREE that I needed the pick to do that (the broken pick from the start)!

With the pick in hand tying LEVER TREE gets a “nothing happens” response, but that means — especially given the custom-coding to check if you have the pick — that it must work elsewhere! I went through every item in the game again trying LEVER THING, finally hitting upon LEVER SHIELD.

I see what’s going on now with it — you’re trying to yank the shield off the wall — but that’s never the language I would normally use, and while I’m fairly sure I’ve seen LEVER as a verb somewhere else it’s rather rare.

The niche has a scroll which gives the combination I was seeking. There are repeats, which indicates a brute force method with just the digits 1 through 4 would have worked (but that would have been painful, and of course it’s better to solve the author-intended way).

4411 from the scroll.

There was nothing deep and/or significant here in the general content, and barring the two obscure secrets (the cauldron and the shield) there was nothing elaborate as far as puzzles go, but the art gave a pleasant buzz to the experience and easy is better than too hard (and despite that, this ended up going to three posts). There’s still two more games from the same author which we’ll eventually get to so hopefully Chris Norman will show up one day to explain the process.

The mini-map really is novel: we’ve seen a few but very few, and none that have a visualization quite like we’ve seen here. Morpheus Kitami suggested that some games of the 90s may have been influenced by this series, although the Microbee itself was obscure enough it’d have to be a circuitous route if that’s the case. Still, an idea come up with independently and not repeated can be just as interesting as one that influenced the industry. The game does get a mention in a 1984 Swedish magazine; for reasons I’ll save for another time the Microbee did manage to make inroads in Sweden.

Interestingly enough, the review complains about how the game applies a room and description after every command, and this can be irritating when using a modem. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I’m guessing for remote use the top part of the screen is sent after all commands (because sometimes that’s the only thing that changes). The Microbee developed strong network capabilities early (see Owen Hill’s background in telecom) but I don’t know the exact configuration.

Coming up: I’ve got a few things cooking, and I’m not sure what the order will be (there may even be another game tossed in the middle). One of them laterally involves a famous British TV show, one of them involves a Japanese conversion of a movie (produced jointly by companies in South Africa and Botswana), and one of them involves an Apple II game by two unexpected authors.

(Continued from my last post.)

Eye of Min, as I previously mentioned, was part of a trilogy, the second and third games being The Sabre of Sultar and The Temple of Azragor respectively. They were originally sold separately. Clipping an excerpt from a 1983 catalog:

An adventure program featuring a graphic map that is updated as progress. in your search of the eye. When you have solved this excellent mystery, the next in the series is waiting, it is called “SABRE”.

However, they soon also started selling an “Adventure Pack” with the three together. From Australian Personal Computer, October 1984:

Because of this, I can give you the “cover art” for Eye of Min, scan from the Microbee Software Preservation Project, which I find fascinating, font like a old-school zine:

Or maybe fliers for an unlicensed heavy metal concert.

I’m not done, but what I’m stuck on is potentially a “self-contained” puzzle so I don’t want to start prodding at the walkthrough (or the source code in BASIC) yet. I suspect I am very close to the end otherwise.

So last time I was stuck with a wand I couldn’t use (the solution will come up naturally later), a cave that only had 8 trees and nothing else, a well that I couldn’t enter without dying. Oh, and there were bandits, but that part was easy.

Just needed to actually hit them with a sword rather than a random item.

Nothing else seemed promising except the potential for something hidden. I had already tried PUSH and PULL on the bookcases but I went ahead and tried it on everything. Finally, I hit paydirt on the last item I hadn’t tested yet:

To be fair, I was thinking of the cauldron as a “utility” item to maybe mix a potion or two later (it still could apply for that later, but it’s now less likely). Heading north into the newly-found secret passage required lighting a candle or torch. This passage leads to a locked door. Trying to UNLOCK DOOR prompted me with what item. The “broken pick” at the start I figured was a red herring so I tried out the wand, and somehow that worked.

Not sure what I’m doing to invoke the magic. Or maybe it isn’t magic at all, and just applying the fact it’s a big metal stick.

Further in was a room with a locked chest and a rope; neither the wand nor the broken pick works this time on the chest. (There is a FIX command, but it seems to do nothing with the pick, so unless there’s a tool somewhere to allow repair I believe the pick is a red herring.)

At least I was able to get the rope. I assume the chest gets unlocked later.

I took the rope over to the well and did TIE ROPE; the game didn’t understand that. It wants TIE WELL.

This turns out to be a “knowledge puzzle”. One of the norms of these games that it helps to know is “will you find random things in certain places that are clues to puzzles”; an escape room game from the Flash era of course will, but at this time period it wasn’t common, and especially not common for the code to be “indirect” (example: as opposed to the code just written on a paper, you see five circles followed by three circles somewhere, meaning a lock gets opened by 53).

If you PUSH KNOB the game will prompt you with which one. Most of the knobs will kill you.

However, based on the fact the dead-end cave with no items had 8 trees, the answer to the puzzle here is 8. Pressing that knob specifically will open the next passage. I admit I solved this by brute force and only worked out what it was meaning after the fact. (Escape room logic has been done before in this era, but it isn’t common!) I also found out after the fact that the number of trees in the cave changes (randomization of a detail like that tends to be another clue that something is used for a knowledge puzzle).

Inside is what I assume is yet another knowledge puzzle.

If you examine the panel there are plates, and you can push the plates. It asks you to push them as a sequence.

Which order. e.g.2143.

Entering the wrong code is death.

The room fills with poisonous gas.

I had a couple theories having to do with smallest-to-largest or largest-to-smallest but I ended up (via save states) brute-forcing all 24 permutations of 1234. None of them worked. It turns out any number sequence is possible, so it might be you need 2123 or the like. I’ve combed over the rest of the game and haven’t seen anything resembling a clue (or at least, one I can share with you) but I figure I’d toss one this out here to you, the readers, before I break down and check spoilers. (If someone does check spoilers, all I really want to know is if this is a self-contained puzzle, or if I’m missing a physical clue I’m supposed to read elsewhere like the trees in the cave.)

In the 1960s, Qantas wanted to improve their flight reservation system. At the time, reservation clerks would get tickertapes from travel agents and enter flights manually; every single sales office needed to be contacted whenever a flight was full. Cancelling involved, again, manually calling every office.

To make the company run smoother, they obtained three IBM S/360s (each with 64K of memory) and spent 18 months with IBM creating a new system.

IBM S/360 being unloaded from a plane in 1966, from IBM Australia.

By the end of the decade the IBM systems were interlinked with Honeywell H632s, which weren’t even out when the reservation system was first being developed. Source.

The information on reservations still needed to be sent by wire; this meant engaging the PMG (Postmaster-General’s Department), which was responsible at the time for both postal and telegraph duties. The project manager for the Qantas job was Owen Hill (electrical engineering graduate in the ’60s, he was a “cadet” which means PMG paid for his degree while he worked three weeks a year for them). Tapes were sent at an approximate rate of 75 baud. The “end transmission” text was NNNN which was a problem in Australia due to the presence of Shannon Airport (SNN). While the system made everything run smoother it required constant nurturing, and Hill remembers being “down in Melbourne every two weeks” handling issues.

He found the situation frustrating enough that as soon as his contract was up he left for a job with IBM, and from there hopped to creating his own company: Applied Technology. He had discovered the magic of buying electronics in bulk and made his own mail-order business selling individual parts and especially kits.

From Electronics Today International.

Applied Technology didn’t stay pure mail order; they had a shop in Hornsby (just northwest of Sydney). A group of enthusiasts started to cluster there, one of them being David Griffiths. Griffiths had designed his own video card, the ETI 340, with plans printed in Electronics Today International starting in their April 1978 issue. It had a resolution of 64 characters across by 16 down (same as a TRS-80). It slotted into an S-100 bus meaning it could be used with an Altair or other S-100 compatible computer.

From the front cover of the issue.

The hobbyist Stephen Dennis tried to embark on the challenge of building the machine, but even after soldering it together it wasn’t working; he called the magazine to get a hold of the designer (Griffiths) and the two collaborated to turn the plans into a more general kit. It started to be sold (in the kit form) by Applied Technology. The store in Hornsby became a tight-knit cluster of enthusiasts.

In January 1981, the idea sprouted to make a new “complete” kit.

[Matthew] Starr, who was just finishing high school, had become a regular visitor to Applied Technology’s nearby retail hobby shop. He’d already built his own David Griffiths system and even helped fix customer problems while visiting the store.

Matthew Starr (see above) and Owen Hill co-designed (along with some other Applied Technology regulars) a computer based around the already-created video card. It was codenamed “Granny Smith”. Hill and Starr went down to the offices of the publication Your Computer to do a pitch around Christmas 1981. Hill wanted to put a 32-page brochure in the magazine which essentially counted as a manual for the kit, with the last page giving ordering instructions. The editors agreed but thought the system needed a better name; on the drive home Starr suggested the Bee, which Hill improved to the Microbee.

Source.

You can read the insert/ad that printed shortly after here. The brochure promised that users could “build the most powerful state of the art kit computer complete for $399.00”. (That’s worth about $1,785 Australian dollars today.) It’s heavy on technical details including schematics.

Technically, the Microbee is similar to a TRS-80 (not only the 64 by 16, but a Z80 processor) although it had more expandability (something the company emphasized in early advertising) and the character graphics are programmable enough to allow for arbitrary graphics. While dK’tronics had to make a custom graphics rom as a piece of hardware for new character graphics on the ZX-81, the Microbee has the character-modification feature built-in.

The upshot is a system whose graphics float between pixel-based and character-based and have a feel unlike anything I’ve seen before. To give a general idea, here’s Halloween Harry from 1985; this was later the basis for the much more famous Apogee game:

So: high-res relatively speaking, but also divided into tiles to enough an extent there’s a “Game and Watch” feel even though animations are quite possible? You’ll also see this distinctive look in the adventure game I’m about to get to shortly.

The kit sales took off and Applied Technologies soon after started selling pre-made computers; where they really hit their stride was winning (along with Apple) the New South Wales education contract in April 1982, so they became one of the embedded “education computers” of Australia. (Apple was the expensive option, Microbee was the cheaper option.) I have the video cued where Hill talks about how the shop was so busy customers starting stepping behind the counter to help:

They eventually peaked at 11% of the market in Australia and with presence in more than 3000 schools. Most of the software for the system was Australia-developed (despite some sales elsewhere, most notably Sweden).

Source.

Microbee had its own software branch, Honeysoft. Outside authors sent in products and received royalties; one of their products from 1983 was a trilogy of adventure games by C. W. Norman. I think the name is Chris W. Norman but I haven’t unearthed anything else about the author yet; since I’m just doing the first game for now (and this is only part 1 of ?) there’s still plenty of time for information to come up, or even the author to find himself while Googling.

In high-res mode the ratio of pixels wide vs. pixels tall is 1:2. This makes for a much wider look than the TRS-80 despite the character counts matching.

Eye of Min is a “single target” treasure hunt where you’re just looking for one treasure, the “priceless gem” in the title that is protected by “deadly traps and hideous monsters”. The game helpfully gives a complete verb list:

UNLOCK, LOCK, OPEN, CLOSE, SHUT, GET, TAKE, PUT, DROP, GIVE, THROW, EXAMINE, LOOK, READ, PUSH, PRESS, PULL, LEVER, DIG, LIGHT, BURN, EXTINGUISH, KILL, HIT, ATTACK, INFORMATION, INVENTORY, FILL, FIX, TIE, DRINK, HELP, QUIT

There’s a graphical window consistently drawn in the lower right corner of the screen; it’s top down somewhat like Ultima. I think the programmable-character style essentially encourages this, and if you flip back to the brochure excerpt you’ll even see the same standing figure used in both the sample and this game.

The figure moves around as you move around the map, and is actually quite lovely for an automap from this era. We’ve seen a few like with Time Adventure but they tend to be fairly abstract.

Here’s a map drawn by myself to compare:

The action starts outside and is a little deadlier than it might initially seem. From the pond with the bench, going east into the swamp immediately kills you via quicksand; north is a dark cave where going in without light kills you; west is a well with no rope where going down kills you.

Heading back to the start (with the curious broken pick, no idea if that’s just scenery) and going northeast is the ruined castle, and a switch of map scene:

It’s less deadly than the outside. The ground floor has a broken dagger, not-broken sword and scabbard, candle (on a dining room table) and pen (on a writing desk). The inventory limit is tight enough that you can’t just take them all.

Also, there’s a door you need to open to reveal the northern part of the map.

Off the side of the entry hall there’s also a guard room (shovel, torch) and a tower with a tinderbox. You can use the tinderbox to light either the candle or the torch and safely go into the cave.

The cave is seemingly a dead end. I have not been able to find a noun that the game lets you use to refer to the “8 living trees” and it really might just be scenery (the game is consistently using CAPS for when there’s an object you can do things with).

The only other piece of progress I made is with the shovel back at the guard tower; I did DIG while at the pond and the game asked me where, so I said BENCH.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to use the wand! The verb list has no “WAVE” verb or anything else typical; I ran through the entire list without luck. Perhaps it merely needs to be held at the right place, or there’s a magic word involved.

The game did warn about enemies, and after enough fiddling around with the wand, two bandits appeared blocking the way to the castle.

Unfortunately, due to the inventory limit (and me prioritizing the shovel) I hadn’t brought the sword from the castle along, so my attempts to beat the bandits over the head with a wand failed.

I suspect I’m just missing something basic that will break things open, but for now I’m stuck.

Testing the game isn’t as rapid as I’d like because the emulator I’m using (MAME) starts eating inputs if I try to speed the computer up. There is a walkthrough so I’m not looking for “spoilers” but I will take suggestions from anyone who hasn’t played the game. I sense this won’t be long and this will be part 1 of 2 (it’s just BASIC, and if nothing else, the graphics take up space) but I’ve been fooled before.

Enormous thanks to Sebastian Boell who (along with Graeme Philipson) interviewed Owen Hill and Owen Hill himself who gave permission to use the interview. Thanks also to Ewan Wordsworth, current owner of Microbee (he was formerly an employee and has a modern website).

In partnership with World of Darkness and Paradox Interactive, Choice of Games is proud to announce the release of Hunter: The Reckoning — Day for Night by Josh Labelle, now available on Steam, iOS, and Android. It’s 20% off until September 24th!

Josh’s previous game, A Crown of Sorcery and Steel, is on sale this week as well!

These monsters aren’t just in the movies! Will you hunt the vampires, werewolves and others stalking Hollywood, or will you become a monster instead?

Hunter: The Reckoning — Day for Night is an interactive novel by Josh Labelle set in the World of Darkness. It’s entirely text-based, 1,000,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Hollywood is full of monsters. From the greedy studio heads to the desperate hopefuls out for their big break, nobody gets out without sin. Once, you were one of those hopefuls, barely scraping by trying to make your dreams come true—scrambling to land auditions or hustling to get your screenplay read.

Then a chance encounter with the supernatural showed you that Hollywood is ruled by another kind of monster. You’ve dedicated yourself to hunting down the beasts who stalk the back alleys of Los Angeles, and doing everything in your power to stop the ones who rule the boardrooms.

It’s been a blockbuster summer for the supernatural, full of inexplicable phenomena and monstrous incidents. There are fires in the hills, ghosts in the theaters, and a beast threatening pets in Beverly Hills that is definitely not a coyote. Could it have something to do with EVRLST, the hottest new self-help and wellness cult run by a washed up ‘80s superstar? Is it true what they say about him never being seen in the daylight and not having aged a day in the last three decades? And what about the woman they call the Baron of Hollywood? What kind of power does she have—and can it possibly compare to the studio execs?

Fortunately, you’re not alone. Others have seen the truth in the shadows, including a retired special-effects wizard, a mortician to the stars, a theater manager, and more. You’ll need all the allies you can get as you drive through the seedy supernatural underbelly of Tinseltown, where chaos reigns, and blood and money flow. There’s no telling who will get top billing, and who will end up slashed on the cutting room floor.

Or will you shirk your hunting duties to pursue your Hollywood dream? Make connections, land jobs on movies, or even make a deal with the devil to get cast in a major blockbuster. Maybe the best way to defeat the bloodsucking monsters is to join them. Or is that Hollywood’s biggest lie, the lie you tell yourself?

• Play as male, female, nonbinary; gay, straight, bi, asexual, or poly.
• Choose your weapon to blast through supernatural threats, and upgrade it for even greater firepower; and visit your local garage to find your perfect getaway vehicle.
• Stop a hot new celebrity from literally sucking the life out of their fans—or succumb to their charms and plunge into a romance.
• Solve a decades-old murder and set an unquiet soul to rest—or drive out the ghost with arcane force!
• Uncover the secrets behind a cult that preys on young vulnerable actors, and stop the monster behind it!

Redeem lost souls in the city of angels—or lose your own soul trying.

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

a primitive design for determining attack success.

it’s a numbers game.

The tabletop RPG space has matured a great deal since I first played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980’s, and a substantial body of theory content has been produced over the years. I am hardly an expert in the field, and I haven’t played a tabletop game in over a decade. I hope my more sophisticated readers will forgive me if I have come up with something rudimentary or dull!

At its most basic level, two combatants will roll a ten-sided die (ie, randomly generate a number between one and ten). The system will then add modifiers based on character traits or weapons to each roll, and the highest of the two numbers will succeed. If the attacker rolls high, the attack will hit. If the defender wins the roll, the attack will miss. Let’s start with only a small number of modifiers:

Attacker: character accuracy statistic and, if applicable, weapon accuracy.
Defender: speed statistic.

How would we go about producing these numbers? We could dash something together quickly:

a weapon is a kind of thing.
a person has a weapon called the equipped weapon.

a shotgun is a weapon.

attacker is a person that varies.
defender is a person that varies.

to decide what number is the attack roll:
	let A be the accuracy of the attacker;
	let W be the accuracy of the equipped weapon of the attacker;
	let R be a random number from 1 to 10;
	decide on (R + A + W);

This is fine, so far as an initial idea goes, but I don’t think it’s the right approach. If the idea is to make a large, complex game that can handle all sorts of different combat conditions, we do not want to limit ourselves to a single phrase deciding a number. What if we need to add more scenarios, such as rolls involving special bonuses or unique weapon considerations? In the long run, we will likely prefer something more modular, like a rulebook producing a number.

It isn’t hard to start.

to-hit is a rulebook producing a number.

We can transpose our definition, then use a rule to subtract the defender’s roll from the attacker’s roll. If the result is a positive number, we can consider the attack successful. This can be the default rule, but we are free to add more as new situations develop.

a to-hit rule (this is the standard to-hit rule):
	let A be the accuracy of the attacker;
	let W be the accuracy of the equipped weapon of the attacker;
	let R be a random number from 1 to 10;
	let attack roll be (R + A + W);
	let S be the speed of the defender;
	let R2 be a random number from 1 to 10;
	let defense roll be (R2 + S);
	rule succeeds with result (attack roll - defense roll);

In a very simple implementation, we might use a check rule to handle missed attacks. Let’s whip up a new action, then do something with it.

attacking it with is an action applying to two things.

check an actor attacking something with something:
	if the number produced by the to-hit rules is less than one:
		say "[if the actor is the player]Your[otherwise][The actor]'s[end if] attack misses!" instead;

Something’s missing (heh), though, isn’t it? I haven’t added command grammar for the attacking it with action. That’s because Inform includes a dizzying variety of synonyms for the attacking action’s attack command, each of which stands in our way. Let’s clear a path before moving forward.

repurposing in-use commands.

Inform has a built-in attacking action already. It only supports one noun, so it doesn’t allow for attacking something with something. We’ll need to start by disabling the many commands Inform has associated with this action. There are a lot of them.

understand the command "attack" as something new.
understand the command "kill" as something new.
understand the command "break" as something new.
understand the command "smash" as something new.
understand the command "torture" as something new.
understand the command "wreck" as something new.
understand the command "crack" as something new.
understand the command "murder" as something new.
understand the command "punch" as something new.
understand the command "thump" as something new.
understand the command "hit" as something new.
understand the command "fight" as something new.
understand the command "torture" as something new.
understand the command "destroy" as something new.

As a matter of preference, I will not be adding all of these commands back in. In fact, I think this will do for now.

understand "attack [something] with [something preferably held]" as attacking it with.

As a convenience, let’s go a step further. Since the player has an equipped weapon, we probably shouldn’t force the player to type the weapon name every time. I’ll add a second action that only specifies a target.

vaguely attacking is an action applying to one thing.
understand "attack [something]" as vaguely attacking.

Since this is a combat focused game that won’t involve a large variety of actions involving enemies, I’m going to do something a little unusual next. This can cause problems if the situation isn’t completely right for it, so use caution with this tactic (the limitations are discussed here). With this grammar, a player typing an enemy’s name will perform a vaguely attacking action:

understand "[enemy]" as vaguely attacking.

Our work isn’t done, though. We need to turn vaguely attacking into something with a specified weapon. Since a person has an equipped weapon, we can tap into that. Be sure everyone starts with an equipped weapon specified!

first before vaguely attacking:
	try attacking the noun with the equipped weapon of the actor instead;

There. Down the line, we’ll almost certainly want to add checks (is the second noun a weapon? is the noun an enemy? and so forth), but this is enough for now.

some output.

With that sorted, let’s add a very rudimentary carry out action.

carry out an actor attacking something with something:
	say "[if the actor is the player]Your attack strikes [the noun][otherwise][The actor] strikes you[end if]!";

…and an every turn attack by any enemies present:

every turn when an enemy is in the location:
	repeat with E running through enemies in the location:
		try E attacking the player with the equipped weapon of E;

The results are not terribly exciting yet:

>gurgler
Your attack strikes gurgler!

Gurgler’s attack misses!

>g
Your attack strikes gurgler!

Gurgler’s attack misses!

>g
Your attack misses!

Gurgler strikes you!

This is just a beginning, of course. We have no damage delivery method yet, and allowing the player to attack first every time will likely rob encounters of suspense. We will have to come up with something better there!

next.

who gets to attack first?

It's been 9 months since I was in the midst of porting Dungeon (aka mainframe Zork) to Sharpee as a dogfooding process. Of course the infamous maze is within the game and works as expected.

A couple of months ago I started working on Chord, a more natural IF modeling language that builds on top of Sharpee, now know as "the platform".

And yet one simple Sharpee/IF concept escaped Chord's implementation. In 3.6.0 of Chord, you cannot create multiple rooms with the same name. The Id and Name are properties of every object in Sharpee, but Chord doesn't surface them in a way that would allow you to create multiple rooms (or objects) with the same name.

So I started digging through the code, thinking this would be a simple change. And then I went down another rabbit hole.

The way I constructed Sharpee and Channel IO left the template client with two different values: one is room name and one is location and even though they derive from the same underlying value, they are brought to the web page in totally different ways.

So I said to myself, "That can't be good."

Long story short: I ended up digging through 10 layers of how text gets to the web page and defined a new primitive: IFElement. An IFElement is something you read on the web page as a part of the game. It can be the location name, the score, the turn count, the time, the room description, and even the prompt.

I have channels! Yes, but channels are different than IFElements. The analogy is something akin to HTML and the DOM or TCP/IP and HTML. I don't know. There's an analogy in there somewhere.

The scenario that bit the hardest was the status line location name vs the inline location name. Those can be two different outputs.

Status Line might get:

The Well Room (in the bucket, filled with water)

While the inline text might be:

The Well Room

In this case, I have two text blocks derived from the same IFElement, but in one case it has an amendment and the other it does not.

What is an amendment? I don't know. So I drilled down into how this concept of an IFElement could be amended and that really broke my brain (and honestly it made Claude make a lot of really bad guesses at how to proceed and this is where people who think we're all vibe coding are dead wrong - this is hard work).

I had to model several different scenarios to find determinism from previous stories and then find a path that makes sense to authors in both Sharpee and Chord.

I am NOT getting into those details YET, mostly because although I wrote several ADRs on this rabbit hole, I am only implementing one of them now, so Chord gets multiple rooms with the same name. But this change is a part of a potentially much larger change that I need to ponder for a bit before deciding whether I want to do another golden test refactoring (touching 80+ files in the world model package).

But the rabbit hole did lead to the concept of IFElement that is different than an output Channel and different than a TextBlock. They are all primitives with their own use cases. Just not sure how to throw all three in the air and have them land elegantly.

The Boston IF meetup for September will be Thursday, September 24, 6:30 pm Eastern time. (Not on the 28th as previously posted!) We will post the Google Meet link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.

Our in-person meetup will be Monday, September 28th (for real this time), 6:30 pm, at MIT. Exact meeting place to follow, but you won’t go wrong by coming out of the Kendall T stop on the MIT side (near the MIT Museum) and looking around.

I owned an Acorn Electron as a kid. It wasn’t the greatest games machine in the playground, but it did have the best game of all-time, Braben and Bell’s Elite, and one of the finest adventure games of all time, Trevor Hall’s Twin Kingdom Valley.

For a boy with a fertile imagination, and an obsession with the Fighting Fantasy books, Twin Kingdom Valley whisked me through the screen, and into a fantasy world of babbling brooks, Forests, Orcs, Trolls, Goblins, Dragons, Kings and treasure!

— Mark James Hardisty, Classic Adventurer 13, 2026

I’ve finished (as much as a game like this can be “finished”) so final spoilers ahoy; you should read my previous posts about the game before this one.

Mattias in the comments mentioned that some objects have images attached. Most don’t; LOOK BRASS KEY (or nearly any other item) gets the response “seems ordinary” and I had tried that enough times I assumed that there was no point to looking at items further (the intro text also doesn’t say anything about this as a feature). However, it turns out there are a few exceptions, like the diamond above (found at the start of the cave next to Watersmeet) or the picture in the cabin.

The picture ends up being a hint, because if you look at the wooden rod (back at the forest king area), you’ll notice a relation.

This turns out to be not needed to beat the game (and in fact I ignored it almost completely after using it) but that’s also true of the bridge in Crowther/Woods. You can WAVE WAND while at the fissure to get into the desert from the south, without passing through secret doors.

Since the secret doors are in close proximity to Watersmeet (and part of my gameplay involved going back there to heal up in between trips) it was better to use those anyway.

Incidentally, the desert has two “sand lurkers” (no idea what they look like, humanoid or not) and when I found them one was carrying a bag of silver…

…so I used a mace I found lying around to chip away at their health until they died. This is more complicated than I’m making it sound because unarmed enemies will run away when you whack at them, and out in an open desert I found it easy to lose track of them. I accidentally fell into the moat of the castle a few times while searching (which causes serious damage). Additionally, the one holding the bag of silver dropped it in the process (and it got scooped up by a castle guard) so I ended up getting no treasure at all from the process (until I later killed the castle guard).

While dealing with this came later in my sequence, it’s easier to explain now what happened with the princess: I took the guess she might be related to the Forest King (since the two kings hate each other as part of the narrative). There’s also the meta-element that the Forest King doesn’t have a character that can be killed while the Desert King does, indicating to me the Desert King is the violent one and the Forest King is the peaceful one. The one thing I hadn’t tried is bribing the guard when getting tossed into the dungeon.

I decided to not worry about max score and leave the dwarf in peace. He’s still got his One Ring to pine over. I’m sure nothing bad will come of it.

With the amulet being worn, you can then free the princess (who is just past the gold-key door, so all you need to do is basically take the amulet into the basement).

The silver key you get can then unlock the door at the bones; the bribe you handed over is right in the room. Given the circumstances, I think the intent is not that you’re stealing the gift back, but rather the Forest King is thankful enough about his daughter being returned that you’re welcome to take it back.

The diamond works too. According to Morpheus Kitami’s playthrough the bag of silver from the desert does not work so there’s some value threshold to the bribe.

With this all done, it was time to raid the castle and kill guards. As far as I can tell all you really need is a sword (which an elf happened to be carrying around, I did ASK ELF FOR SWORD and he handed it over); if there’s “experience points” muddling the experience it’s too small an aspect to notice.

Don’t attack if they’re clustered like this.

As long as you fight one-on-one (and go back to Watersmeet to heal) the guards are pretty easy.

The Desert King is pretty straightforward as well, as long as you get him alone. On this run for some reason he was up near the storage room and cellar.

The combat incidentally brought out the feeling Trevor Hall mentioned about why there needs to be extra rooms: when physical placement of the guards (and juking them so they aren’t clumped together) becomes an issue, “ordinary” rooms take on new meaning. This is very similar to the treatment of rooms on MUDs that I’ve written about before. For a time I found this section of game to be nearly indistinguishable from playing a regular MUD (except it being single player, of course).

One more encounter, with the last castle guard hanging out near the dragon.

One other fun aspect is the giant. I mentioned last time arming him with an axe; he’s still effective but described the whole time as an “ill giant”. If you go back to Watersmeet and he follows, he’ll swim and heal himself! (This happened after I had already killed the dragon; I’ll explain why that’s important in a moment.)

With all that done, I still had a few things to mop up. One of them was a witch in a tower who had a gold staff and a dagger; I was able to kill the witch normally and get the staff. According to my check of the walkthrough later, it was supposed to be a lot harder; the gold staff allegedly prevents damage, and you need to hand over a dagger which will cause the wielder to harm themselves in order to defeat the witch.

I found the moment so ordinary (see above) that I didn’t have a screenshot and had to reload a save state just now just to return to the fight. Maybe the gold staff only applies in the C64 or Spectrum versions? Or maybe the witch normally doesn’t have a knife? Did a guard wander in and suffer an unfortunate death, but in the process of grabbing the knife from the guard, the witch no longer had protection? Barring the BBC Micro version being different, this demonstrates how much chaos and variety the game has by relying on characters to be the “obstacles”; a hard-coded puzzle could have forced the player to reckon with the gold staff.

Another thing to mop up was the locked silver door in the Desert castle, and this one was fun to find. There’s a wooden staff locked behind the door, and this is another one of the rare cases where you get a visual:

Waving the staff did nothing (WAVE is only for the wooden rod) but the skull was suggestive that it was a weapon.

The staff is a one-hit-kill weapon. It’s pretty fragile (breaks after roughly two uses) but fortunately there’s really only one use that’s important: the dragon.

(Morpheus on his playthrough did not use the staff, but rather had healed the giant and went all weapons blazing with giant-buddy. I found the flames to be too dangerous to pull this off but there’s a lot of randomness involved; the best I could do before dying was get the dragon “weak”.)

With the master key I was able to get into the last remaining locked door, and as predicted, it had the Desert King’s chest. The chest is very heavy and you can’t be holding anything else at the same time (including the lamp!) I ended up toting it through darkness in the maze over to the rock fall and reached the final room.

Once you’ve proven yourself with the chest, you don’t need to carry it to enter this place, so there’s the slightly odd circumstance of spotting the secret of life, turning around and leaving to deposit the chest at home, and then returning for the secret of life. I think I’m satisfied enough to say I’m done with the game.

The gold river, incidentally, was supposed to be the seed for the sequel:

Near the end, you find a river of gold. You have to wonder where it would go? And that’s where the next game would take you. But how could you travel the river? What boat could withstand molten gold?

I had started on a dynamic landscape tool such that forests, deserts, etc would be different in each game restart, but never wrote any game code. No story line was written, but you would be able to travel the river of gold to a vast land. No more pathetic 17 locations. I recall some ideas like “A wooden boat would burn in a river of molten gold”, so the game had to be started well. Some part of the original game would lead you back to that river.

Unfortunately, Bug Byte collapsed while owing lots of royalties (the same circumstances that caused Matthew Smith to jump ship with Manic Miner) so the sequel never happened.

Now that I’ve seen enough context, I’m going to quote Hall at length from this interview where he discusses how the characters work. He explains how other games only had characters “appear to come and go” without the ability to give chase, and then goes into technical details:

Location database: up to 256 locations possible, each with a description, and list of exits (a direction code byte [including locks]+ 1 byte target location). One byte “image number” per location. Locations also have a zone.
Object database: object with weight, value, throw damage, hit damage, fragility and location.
Creature database: Creatures with location and inventory of objects, friend/foe flag, permitted zones and health. One of the creatures is “You”.
Graphics database: 256 objects, (including sub-objects), drawn on a 16×16 grid. Giving about 80-100 location images, using about 200 objects in the BBC version, almost all 256 objects used in expanded C64 version.

So: Your question on NPCs.
They could inspect the tables (except pictures, no need for that).
They have a decision tree including some random numbers, but basically:
Can I pick up a weapon?
Can I fight?
Should I flee?
Should I wander (in my zone)?

All their fight chances were similar to yours, except “You” always got the first blow.
Note that even if you chose to run away, the other blows still came.
The game had a combat exception rule that running if your last action was to fight, let you run away.

All in all, the rules were probably less than 1/2 K of code!

This 1/2 K code of code is what causes the game to be memorable, and for quotes like the top of this post (calling it “one of the finest adventure games of all time”). Just like The Hobbit, people did necessarily play to “win”; the experience could vary just based on where the NPCs roamed to. The game has a genuine air of replayability that many other authors of this time failed at; I’d say because of the lack of plot/minimalism it is even more replayable than The Hobbit.

Another curious moment: there’s a locked brass door in the dungeon area where the room has nothing in it, but I tried locking the door anyway and an elf and a troll appeared from nowhere. I was able to easily kill the troll because it didn’t have any weapons.

I say all this because I’m still on board with the outside perspective of Morpheus Kitami, and others who were less impressed: “I have mixed feelings, the game was fun, but it’s hard to call it a good adventure game.” It was very easy to have objects that you needed snagged by NPCs and roaming around, which is both a demerit and a feature. I had tried to store some items (including the flint stone) in the “secret door” section but didn’t realize elves could get in there; I hadn’t lit my lamp yet so ended up typing ASK ELF FOR STONE in the dark section as I wandered around until I eventually found where it went. The fact that this encounter could even happen in the first place was both absurd but also stunning, and the feel of a world where “anything can happen” is what gave it such prominence to those who formed core memories around it.

What Trevor Hall would do on a desert island, from The Classic Adventurer.

Coming up: our first encounter with the Microbee, a computer developed in Australia.

Three mysteries... or games which are mystery-shaped, at least. Plus one which doesn't fit the theme but does fit the symmetry group.

• The Mermaid Mask
• This Bed We Made
• Cognition Method
• He Who Watches

The Mermaid Mask

• by SFB Games -- game site

The piratical Captain Mortuga lies dead in a locked room. On his piratical submarine. Luckily, the young substitute captain has summoned the dynamic duo of Grimoire and Sally to solve the crime!

This gets mentioned in "static deduction" genre lists, but it's actually not. It's a traditional mystery game. You interrogate suspects, search the mansion for clues, unlock a few locked doors, show every clue to every suspect, and eventually call everybody together in the Dining Room to Explain All. I mean, the mansion is a submarine and everybody was arguing in the Mess Hall before you barged in, but it's the same genre as Deadline or any millionth Sherlock Holmes game.

Which is not surprising, because The Mermaid Mask is third in a series that dates back to 2014. The second game shipped after Obra Dinn, but not by enough to redesign the whole game model, even if the designers had wanted to. And why would they? Nothing wrong with an old-fashioned locked-room mystery.

The game leans hard on its cast of characters. The ship has nine residents, counting the captain and the, er, ex-captain. All are involved in a tangled web of secrets and awkwardly concealed motives. You'll have to dig down through the layers to reach the one that got Mortuga's throat slit.

The voice-acting and animation are top-notch. The writing is... uneven. I liked the story; there's a lot of knotty and interesting stuff going on. But the writers seem to have gotten stuck in banter mode. Every little aside between Grimoire and Sally is mugging for a chuckle, and a 50% hit rate is not good enough for that sort of thing. Really, even if it were 100%, it would get samey.

An interesting side note: the game does a great job of having you play Grimoire-and-Sally. The truly dual protagonist is a bit of a rarity in videogames. Aside from one tutorial scene where Sally naps, you are never playing one character with the other as sidekick. It's always both.

(Or maybe neither? The gameplay isn't really about solving mysteries in the Holmesian sense. The game mostly asks you questions like "What piece of evidence shows X?" Then Grimoire-and-Sally narrate X. They're running the show; you manage the evidence files.)

(Oh jeez, you're playing the notebook. That's hilarious.)

The other problem is pacing. Post that tutorial chapter, you spend a huge chunk of the game walking around and collecting evidence. Oh, they throw in a few research questions and a sequence of puzzle boxes to tide you over, but mostly it's click everything and lawnmower the topic lists. Eight times over. (For the eight living characters.)

Once you've got most of the evidence, the game starts unlocking "suspicion" topics. That's how you pin down each suspect and solve their sub-case. This is where the game actually starts. But it takes you half the game to get there, and that first half is essentially all static dialogue. I seriously came close to uninstalling before I got to the mystery part.

The mystery part is more satisfactory. (Albeit in a police-procedural way, as I said.) It's not a difficult game. It's not trying to be; the game is generous with clues, and the UI is easy to brute-force if that's the way you want to tackle it. I'll be honest: I did a lot of brute-forcing. It was easier than trawling one half-rememebered snippet from the archived ocean of clue responses. But it's a perfectly good mystery yarn. Interwoven collection of mini-character-mysteries, I should say. With a big eerie mystery at the end.

I'm glad I gave it a try, but the format doesn't do it for me.

This Bed We Made

• by Lowbirth Games -- game site

A narrative game about investigation, but not police investigation or even private investigation. You are Sophie Roy, an overworked underpaid hotel maid. Thank heavens for social invisibility, though, because you are the most dedicated snoop in 1950s Montreal. Journals? Photos? Letters in locked jewelry cases? If it's in your hotel, it's fair game.

Today, however, something has Gone Wrong. The frame story doesn't hint at what, but the police are keen to hear everything you've learned. Time to flash back through your day on the fifth floor. But... maybe don't tell the police everything.

This reminded me a lot of Disappearance at Dahlia View. Poking around is the whole game. There are some light puzzles. Suitcase combination locks, torn-up notes, an extremely simple cipher. (Diegetically simple: it was invented by schoolkids.) If you're not sure of your current story goal, hit a key and Sophie will muse revealingly to herself. Really the biggest obstacle I faced was convincing myself that reading private mail isn't scary. Nobody will catch you in the act, at least not in real itme.

Your snooping isn't police-shaped like Ex-Detective Conway's, mind you. You will not be setting up card-and-string boards or fill-in-the-blanking crime reports. The game doesn't even reveal what the crime is until quite late. You're just putting together details of people's lives, aided by your co-conspirators behind the hotel desk.

This makes for a good comparison with Mermaid Mask. Both games are all about the gathering of info. But Mermaid Mask thinks it's a detective game. Secretly it wants you to rush through the gathering phase so you can get to the important crime-solving. This Bed knows it's a snoop game, so it concentrates on making the gathering phase a delightful and engaging story. I much prefer that approach.

That said, I did not solve the crime. That is, I got to the end of the story and I still don't know how <spoiler> got <spoiler>ed! I also got a rotten ending, although, to be fair, this is because I didn't pick up on the other core mechanic.

See, in addition to peeking at evidence, you have the option to destroy any piece of evidence. This isn't meaningful for most of the game. But after you leave the fifth floor for the last time, the police will arrive and tromp through all your carefully cleaned hotel rooms. Have you discovered anything that 1950s asshole cops might misread, or read in bad faith? Consider well before you push that elevator button.

I reloaded before that "won't have a chance to return" warning, did some prudent additional cleaning, and got a better story outcome. But still not a perfect one. And I still don't know how the crime got crimed.

Maybe this is just the way of choice-based games. This Bed does a fair amount of your-choices-matter (aka "Beth will remember that"). I could have just screwed myself early on. And then, as I freely admit, I'm bad at detective games which don't hold my hand.

But I'm not going to replay more than that last ending scene. I got happy endings for <spoiler>, <spoiler>, and <spoiler>. The last few puzzle pieces will just have to take care of themselves.

Cognition Method

• by Team Cognition -- game site

A mysterious geometric object has been found near Jupiter. The astronauts exploring it found mysterious geometric puzzles. Then they disappeared. One of them is your son.

This is a very enthusiastic puzzle game which is handicapped by being enthusiastic about things that we have seen an awful lot of. Gravity-shifting puzzles. Crates on plates. Brutalist archicture. Noneuclidean nightmare corridors created from your trauma. Sad Dad Astronaut.

None of these are bad schticks. I have loved all of these schticks individually, and they fit together no problem. But the result feels very by-the-numbers in narrative, environment, and puzzle design. You can pretty much call every Silent-Hillian door gimmick and every line of dialogue as they come out.

The only really new combination is "gravity puzzles" plus "massive brutalist spaces". There's fun moments when you enter a brain-meltingly vast space that makes you feel like a bug in a cathedral, and then you figure out how to send yourself flying to the top of the cathedral.

On the down side, some annoying platforming. Not difficult, but annoying.

For a puzzle game, it's not all that densely packed with puzzles. We've gotten used to the test-chamber pacing where every puzzle flings you straight into the next one. This isn't that. The world is spaced out with architecture and memory bubbles. Cognition Method wants you to absorb its monologues and its monolithic silence as you move through.

And, let's be fair, this is some high-quality monolithic silence. The game doesn't just slap one brut-concrete texture on giant cubes and call it a day. Every one of these spaces is different. Lighting, atmosphere, enclosure. Little decorative features of water or ivy. Some spaces are oppressive; others are liberating. Indoors, outdoors. Elements are echoed and rearranged. It's poetically done.

Overall, a nice architecture tour paced with weak dialogue and a modest number of modestly fun but not mindblowing puzzles. Cognition Method is successful at what it does, but it's got a lot of competition.

He Who Watches

• by Bobby Vanden -- game site

I haven't finished this one. In fact I've barely gotten to the meat of the game. But I mention it because it's running the same notional dogpark as Cognition Method. You got your crates, your plates, and your gravity shifts. But it's a very different set of design choices.

He Who Watches runs firmly on the test chamber model. You literally teleport from one puzzle to the next. The spaces are functional, and some of them are imposing, but there's no pretense of atmosphere or architectural beauty.

(Not in the main body of the game, I should say. A very brief opening scene lets you traverse an outdoor mountain path. That's good setup. I wouldn't be surprised if the late game goes somewhere mind-expandingly cool. But for now, I'm looking at acres of test-chamber tiles.)

As for narrative, I've gotten about one line so far. Solve puzzles for the puzzle god to become the puzzle god. Probably. Again, we might get more later on.

No, this is a puzzle game pure and simple, and it goes hard on them. I am definitely getting a workout.

Some of this is the mechanics, which are really not intuitive at all. Your tool is a bow-and-chain-arrow with a peculiarly rigid chain. The gravity rules let you shift around any inside angle, but no outside angle. No jumps either, not even hopping down off a cube. This makes for extremely persnickety navigation.

But I can't deny that these mechanics are productive as heck. Every puzzle has a distinct Neat Idea, all built on the basic mechanics. Just to show off (and to provide oft-needed boosts), the game uses the "insight" hint model: every room lets you peek at an easier puzzle using the same trick. (I think Can of Wormholes did this first?) So you know the designer had something specific in mind. I'm dozens of puzzles in and there's no sign that they're running out of ideas.

The puzzles alternate between self-contained rooms (the aim is always to reach the exit) and larger complex chambers, which offer more entangled multi-step challenges. The steps are unlocked by solving the small puzzles, but then you have to figure out how to get around. Everything is organized around a rather alchemical-looking symbolic map. I look forward to finding out more about that.

You want secrets? You got secrets. I don't got secrets -- yet! I can definitely see where some secrets must be hiding. I look forward to getting into more of those, too.

Anyway, this is just to say that I am eating the plums that are locked in the gravity-shifting puzzle box. Cognition Method had the visual and environmental juice, but He Who Watches is sweet and delicious.