By 1999, Interplay had begun crediting its internally developed CRPGs to “Black Isle Studios,” a distinction that represented very little difference, given that Black Isle shared office space and personnel with its parent publisher. Note the careful choice of words on the box above, to call Black Isle the “producers” — not the developers — of Baldur’s Gate.

My power fantasy when playing a role-playing game is to confront a villain, explain point by point why his master plan is flawed, and then get him to admit that he hadn’t thought things through as carefully as I had, and ask me what I think he should do. Conversation-based player characters can have their bad-ass moments just as much as someone wielding a gun…

— Chris Avellone

Planescape: Torment is the damnedest game. Its list of failings is longer than that of many a game that I’ve simply written off as bad, full stop, and moved on from without a second thought. The pacing is glacial for long stretches; the interface is fussy and clunky; the combat is both irritating and utterly superfluous to the game’s design goals. Even much of the writing, by far the most celebrated aspect of Planescape: Torment, tends to seem proportionally less profound and more banal as one becomes farther removed in age and life experience from the twenty-something Dungeons & Dragons zealots who first put all of these words — so many, many words, a reported 800,000 of them in all — onto our monitor screens more than a quarter-century ago. In so very many ways, Planescape: Torment is an undisciplined hot mess.

And yet it’s a hot mess that refuses to be dismissed lightly. For Planescape: Torment is also a vanishingly rare thing in the realm of game narratives: a genuine interactive tragedy, in the sense that Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Nietzsche understood that word. That it recognizes the tragic side of life while inhabiting a genre whose whole point in the eyes of most of its fans is the triumphalism of going from a weakling to a demigod is incredibly brave and subversive. That it did this in 1999, when the games industry was smack dab in the middle of one of the most homogenized, risk-averse periods in its history, is as inexplicable as it is astonishing.

Clearly we have much to unpack…

TSR sold surprisingly few copies of the original Planescape campaign setting, even at the stupidly cheap price of just $30. It goes for $250 among collectors today.

Whatever else it is, Planescape: Torment is first and foremost a licensed adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons, a part of Interplay’s attempt to revive that storied tabletop game’s digital fortunes amidst the collapse of its parent company TSR and TSR’s acquisition by Wizards of the Coast. This particular computer game was no mere branding exercise, as was the case with some of them that came out in Dungeons & Dragons trade dress during the 1990s. On the contrary, Planescape: Torment was deeply, intimately informed by the creative work that took place in TSR’s Wisconsin headquarters earlier in the decade. The extent to which this is the case is often glossed over or forgotten entirely when retrospectives of it are written today. So, let me make it crystal clear here right from the start: love it or hate it, a huge chunk of what makes Planescope: Torment so unique and memorable originated not in Interplay’s Southern California offices but in the nation’s dairy-cow heartland.

It will presumably surprise no one when I write that the “planes” of Planescape are alternate planes of existence, separate from the “Prime Material Plane” in which most Dungeons & Dragons campaigns take place. They were introduced by Gary Gygax already in the late 1970s, in the iconic first editions of the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. His cosmology was a melange of a little bit of everything: quantum physics, Renaissance-era alchemy and astronomy, the holy texts of various religions, New Age philosophy, Dante and Milton, twentieth-century fantasy and horror novels.

Gary Gygax’s vision of the Dungeons & Dragons multiverse, as found in an appendix to the Player’s Handbook.

The Prime Material Plane stands at the center of it all, much like the Earth was once imagined to stand at the center of our universe. It is surrounded by the Inner Planes that embody the physical building blocks of existence, which are in turned enclosed by the Outer Planes that embody the metaphysical alignments, those nine possible combinations of Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic, Good, Neutral, and Evil.

Gygax was always prepared to muse and to elaborate, on this subject as on so many others. Small wonder that these alleged rule books — surely the most chatty and discursive books of rules ever written, the heart of the Gospel of Saint Gary — were perused and pored over endlessly by his young fans, many of whom were discovering for the first time the countless disparate philosophical ideas he threw into the pot. Gygax wasn’t an overly sophisticated thinker in most contexts, but he was a prolific one, who always had ten more ideas waiting in the wings if you didn’t respond to his last one.

For those of you who haven’t really thought about it, the so-called planes are your ticket to creativity, and I mean that with a capital C! Everything can be absolutely different, save for those common denominators necessary to the existence of the player characters coming to the plane. Movement and scale can be different; so can combat and morale. Creatures can have more or different attributes. As long as the player characters can somehow relate to it, then it will work…

I have recommended that Boot Hill and Gamma World be used in campaigns. There is also Metamorphoses Alpha, Tractics, and all sorts of other offerings which can be converted to man-to-man role-playing scenarios. While as of this writing there are no commercially available “other planes” modules, I am certain that there will be soon — it is simply too big an opportunity to pass up, and the need is great.

This was a remarkably prescient description of where planar travel in Dungeons & Dragons would go — eventually. For a long time after The Dungeon Master’s Guide appeared in 1979, the other planes of existence were one of those Dungeons & Dragons concepts that were kind of floating out there in the ether (or was it the Ethereal Plane?) without anyone knowing quite what to do with it. Apart from some sketchy guidelines for “ethereal” and “astral” travel and combat, the rule books remained sadly short on specifics. The 1980 adventure module Queen of the Demonweb Pits, designed by Gygax and David C. Sutherland III, did take players on a jaunt to the Abyssal Plane, but that was a one-shot thing. For all that Gygax had claimed, in his indelibly Gygaxian way, that “the need is great,” as if an understanding of the planes of Dungeons & Dragons was an urgent matter of national security, neither he nor anyone else seemed to be in all that much of a hurry to address said need. The occasional slightly dodgy article in Dragon magazine aside, Dungeons & Dragons remained in practice a very Prime Material sort of game.

This situation first started to change in the latter half of the 1980s. By then, Gygax was on his way out of TSR and the Dungeons & Dragons craze of the decade’s beginning had just about run its course. Necessity was forcing TSR to adjust its business model, from selling the core Dungeons & Dragons game to new players to selling an ever expanding lineup of rules extensions, campaign settings, and pre-crafted adventures to its surviving base of loyal, hardcore players. The planes seemed like fresh fodder for all three types of product.

A longtime TSR stalwart named Jeff Grubb took the first concerted swing at it. In 1987, the company published his Manual of the Planes, the latest in its ever-growing line of new Dungeons & Dragons hardbacks for the hardcore. Grubb took it as his mission to give Gygax’s abstract cosmology a grounding in lived experience, to explain what it would actually be like to visit these places. Unfortunately, he prioritized alchemical realism over playability, winding up with a collection of environments that were as brutally, hilariously inhospitable to even high-level characters as one might imagine a plane of nothing but fire or air to be. “The book was fascinating reading,” notes Dori Hein, an ordinary Dungeons & Dragons fan at the time whom we will meet again in another role. “I loved the mythology and the grand majesty of all the planes, but — try as I might — I couldn’t create an adventure without killing all my players.” In the same vein, Sean Gandert of the website Exposition Break writes that “the planes’ complete resistance to being remotely welcoming is both what makes them fascinating to read about and also makes the book completely skippable and largely irrelevant. It is a work of cosmology and mythology, not a plan for where to send adventurers.”

The Manual of the Planes went out of print in fairly short order anyway, after TSR commenced rolling out a second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in 1989. The cynical interpretation of this initiative is that it was the best way TSR had yet devised for continuing to extract money from its static pool of players, by forcing them to buy the game they loved all over again in its most basic form in order to stay up to date with the times. The idealistic one is that it let TSR clean up a game system that had grown ever more baggily shambolic over the past decade of supplement after supplement. In reality, the second edition was doubtless a little of both, being seen one way by the people surrounding Lorraine Williams in her executive suite and another by the creative types in the cubicles.

That said, and looking back on what I’ve written about the later period of TSR’s history elsewhere on this site, I fear I may have overemphasized the cynicism at the expense of the idealism. There’s no question that the company fell prey to a set of perverse incentives during the last decade of its existence, many of them born out of idiosyncrasies in its longstanding distribution contract with the book publisher Random House. By the early 1990s, this had resulted in an absolute hailstorm of product brought down upon the heads of Dungeons & Dragons fans, more than all but the most well-heeled among them could possibly afford to buy, much less find the time to bring to the tabletop. But there’s likewise no question that these products were made with enormous love and care by the creative staff. This was the heyday of the alternative campaign setting, when TSR offered up the chance to leave conventional high fantasy behind and play Dungeons & Dragons in post-apocalyptic worlds, in the lands of the Arabian Nights, in Gothic castles, on the high seas, even in outer space. So what if there was no way to justify so many settings’ existence as commercial products, if each successive one sold worse than the one before, especially after the collectible-card game Magic: The Gathering arrived on the scene to tempt away large chunks of TSR’s remaining customer base. Circumstance had granted the people making these settings a rare reprieve from the harsh logic of supply and demand, and they didn’t let it go to waste.

Given this cavalcade of rich but disconnected settings, it was perhaps inevitable that TSR would look once again to the planar multiverse as a way of unifying a crazily diverse set of experiences bearing the name of Dungeons & Dragons. A boxed set reviving Gygax’s multiverse could bring them all together conceptually, could even provide a set of practical mechanisms to allow the same set of player characters to jump from setting to setting, just like Saint Gary had first proposed all those years ago.

In addition to being a unifying force for Dungeons & Dragons itself, Planescape was quite explicitly intended as a response to Vampire: The Masquerade, an RPG from an upstart company known as White Wolf Games that flipped everything you thought you knew about the tabletop scene on its head. Whereas Dungeons & Dragons, even in its supposedly cleaned-up second-edition incarnation, was infamous for the complexity of its rules, Vampire gave you just enough of them to provide a runway for storytelling. That fact, combined with its subject matter, attracted fresh blood to the hobby: Goth rockers and theater kids and Anne Rice readers, among them a surprising number of girls and women. At the end of the day, Vampire may have been full of as many clichés as vanilla Dungeons & Dragons —  clichés which are all the more evident from the perspective of today, after several more decades worth of vampire fictions — but they had the advantage of feeling relatively fresh from the perspective of the early 1990s. Indeed, this was the only period in the entire history of tabletop RPGs when it seemed possible that a different game might just unseat Dungeons & Dragons from its throne as the undisputed standard bearer for the hobby. Vampire’s rise made TSR nervous enough to want to make something of its own that was grittier, messier, and a bit less morally straightforward, less of a single-unit wargame and more of a vehicle for improvisational drama. It was no accident that the Dungeons & Dragons brand appeared on the eventual Planescape box only as a small logo tucked away in the corner.

David “Zeb” Cook, another veteran TSR hand, was made lead designer on Planescape. Dori Hein, who had by now graduated from merely playing TSR’s games to working there, became the producer, overseeing a team of artists, cartographers, writers, editors, and play-testers. They pulled out all the stops for a set that wound up consisting of no fewer than four separate books, printed on thick and creamy Pentair Suede paper, and four sturdy cardboard posters. The luscious package was capped off by the most intimidating Dungeon Master’s screen ever devised. One of TSR’s purchasing managers had a sign hanging in his office: “The pleasure of a product well done lingers far longer than the excitement of a bargain.” As it happened, though, the Planescape set was both: it sold for just $30, a ridiculously cheap price for such a luxurious product even by the standards of the 1990s. It may have been no more than a break-even price, or not even that, settled upon in the hope that Planescape would revive TSR’s flagging fortunes in the longer run by spawning a whole new ecosystem of supplements, adventure modules, and tie-in novels.

The Planescape Dungeon Master’s screen. Sitting down around a table that had this thing in top of it, you knew you knew you were in for a mind-bending journey that was more Salvador Dali than Boris Vallejo.

Zeb Cook’s first and most important stroke of brilliance was to give his vision of the planes a hub around which to operate. This was Sigil, a “city of doors” giving unto the many other planes, a meeting ground and melting pot for the entire multiverse. Ranging far afield from the pulpy fantasy of Jack Vance and the stately epic fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien, the two most obvious inspirations for traditionalist Dungeons & Dragons, Cook read postmodern, experimental novels by Milorad Pavić and Italo Calvino for inspiration. Sigil, a city of angles as well as doors, became a physical embodiment of their twisted, self-referential approach to narrative: “Get it right out front: Sigil’s an impossible place, a city built on the inside of a tire that hovers over the top of a gods-know-how-tall spike, which rises from a universe shaped like a giant pancake.”

Sigil is not so refined a place as some might expect for the central hub of the multiverse, but that’s fair enough, given that Cook’s multiverse itself isn’t all that refined. The dominant note of the city, even outside of its plentiful and teeming slum districts, is what we might call dirty Victoriana, of a piece with 21st-century novels like Sarah Water’s Fingersmith and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, which read like genuine Victorian “sensation novels” with the added ability to state outright the disreputable things that their ancestors could only imply. The dialect of Sigil’s streets is vintage Cockney slang in spirit if not always in the details of the vocabulary, with the same uncanny talent for being roundabout and penetrating at the same time: “berks” and “cutters” are no-account people; “the dark” is knowledge; “jink” is money; one’s “kip” is one’s (usually humble) abode; one’s “bone-box” is one’s mouth; to “pike off” means to scram. In keeping with all the best slang, these are words that you know when you hear them even if you don’t actually know them, if you take my meaning. As we’ve already seen, the books in the Planescape box that describe Sigil are themselves written in this vernacular: “Welcome, addle-cove!” begins the Planescape “Player’s Guide.” This is not the Dungeons & Dragons of 1980s school cafeterias; both dungeons and dragons are mostly missing from Sigil, replaced by far stranger things.

Instead of embracing the simplistic good-versus-evil dynamics of traditional Dungeons & Dragons, Sigil is divided into fifteen factions whose adherents are aptly described as “philosophers with clubs,” from the chivalric and vaguely fascistic Godsmen to the nihilistic Bleak Cabal, who preach that “once a sod believes it all means nothing, it all starts to make sense.” Ruling over the whole place, ensuring that no single faction gets too powerful, is the Lady of Pain, who can flay the skin from a poor berk just by looking at him. The overriding theme is that ideas and beliefs matter, are literally woven right into the substance of the multiverse, and can kill or save you just as indubitably as the physical elements of earth, air, wind, and fire. Sigil is the ultimate argument for the value of a good humanities education.

The Lady of Pain.

If there’s a weakness to the Planescape set, it’s that it spends so much time on Sigil that it doesn’t have enough space left over for all those other planes of existence that were supposed to be the whole point of the endeavor. Instead of offering a wide-open set of possibilities, it can feel paradoxically claustrophobic, like the crowded filthy alleyways of the city itself.

Nevertheless, the Planescape box was endlessly audacious and imaginative, as different from the typical Dungeons & Dragons experience as anyone could have asked for. But, whether despite or because of these factors, it was not a commercial success. It sold just 60,000 copies over the five years after its release in April of 1994, a thin foundation indeed on which to build a new gaming ecosystem. The add-on lines, which offered opportunities to flesh out the multiverse in some of the way that the boxed set had failed to do, continued in fits and starts for longer than you might expect — another tribute to the topsy-turvy economic incentives that marked TSR at the time — but petered out for good after the failing company was acquired in 1997 by its own worst enemy Wizards of the Coast, the maker of Magic: The Gathering. Long before then, Zeb Cook himself left TSR for the greener pastures of computer games, having concluded that “it didn’t seem like there was going to be a long-term future” for him on the tabletop. The Vampire craze did eventually fade, but its travails had nothing to do with TSR’s efforts. It was rather something to do with the ever-shifting winds of pop culture, which soon replaced teenagers’ Cure and Alice in Chains records with the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears.

So, had things turned out just a little bit differently, Planescape would be fondly remembered today only by a few tabletop nostalgics as a piece of work of unusual vision that never got its due. Instead, though, it went on to become a landmark of another stripe, in a different medium entirely.

Chris Avellone.

TSR had begun dangling the prospect of a Planescape computer game before publishers even before the boxed set shipped; such a thing was regarded as a potentially vital part to the product line that had become the latest Great White Hope for reversing the company’s accelerating downward spiral. As it happened, though, Interplay proved the only publisher to even nibble at the bait. In 1995, when an inexperienced youngster named Chris Avellone came in for an interview, he was asked how he would design such a game. He brainstormed in the spur of the moment the genesis of the eventual Planescape: Torment: “I would start it after the death screen. What happens after the main character dies?”

Avellone had grown up in the 1980s playing Dungeons & Dragons with his friends in his hometown of Alexandria, Virginia. By the time he went off to university, he had two possible futures in mind for himself: either to become a comic-book author or to become a tabletop-RPG designer. Neither field could exactly be called a growth industry at the time, but he made the best of it. On the gaming side, he sent a long string of submissions not only to TSR but to Steve Jackson Games, the maker of GURPS (“Generic Universal Role-Playing System”), and to Hero Games, the maker of the superhero RPG Champions. Initially, he met only with rejection; his closest brush with his heroes at TSR came when Monte Cook, yet another well-known name among the Dungeons & Dragons cognoscenti, took time out to plead with him personally to just stop submitting stuff already.

But Avellone persevered, and finally began to see some of his gaming material accepted and published. Yet he still had to confront the reality that the life of a freelance tabletop-RPG writer and designer left a little something to be desired: specifically, money. Most of the royalty checks that came in from the beleaguered companies that published his work — the Magic: The Gathering craze was in full flight, pushing RPGs to the margins of the same shops where they had once been the dominant attraction — had just two digits before the decimal point. Avellone, who had by now graduated from the College of William & Mary with a Bachelors in English, was still at loose ends when it came to the all-important question of how he was going to put food on his table as a responsible adult. Everyone told him that the wise choice was to acquire a teaching certificate, but all he wanted to do was find a way to make games full-time.

Oddly enough, he had never seriously thought about becoming a computer-game developer, despite having played his fair share of The Bard’s Tale and its ilk as a teenager. It took Steve Peterson, his editor at Hero Games, to point out to him how different the economics of that adjacent industry were. Peterson pulled some strings to secure Avellone an interview at Interplay Productions, for something which he was unlikely to find anytime soon in the moribund tabletop field: an honest-to-goodness full-time job. He got the job, and started at Interplay in 1995 as a junior designer.

Although he had been asked about Planescape at his interview, he wasn’t allowed to spend all or even most of his time on that perpetually incipient project after he was hired. As the low man on the totem pole, he was shuffled around from team to team, plugging gaps in the design plumbing wherever needed. He worked on the infamous Descent to Undermountain, the nadir of digital Dungeons & Dragons during the 1990s; on Conquest of the New World, Interplay’s workmanlike take on the same theme as MicroProse’s Colonization; and on Starfleet Academy, an attempt to do TIE Fighter in the Star Trek universe that never felt true to its source material, in that it had the usually stately likes of the USS Enterprise dog-fighting in space as if it was, well, a TIE Fighter.

But betwixt and between all of the above, Avellone sat in his cubicle writing his Planescape game. He did so as much for his own peace of mind — because he needed something that he could feel passionate about — as out of any real conviction that the game would ever get made. The winds blowing against it seemed positively gale-force. For by now it was clear that Planescape would not prove the savior of Dungeons & Dragons on the tabletop. The TSR boxed set had barely sold at all, even as, commercially speaking, CRPGs were scarcely in better shape than their tabletop counterparts in the mid-1990s. Interplay already had one game in the stagnant genre under active development, in the form of Fallout. That looked like one too many in the eyes of most of the bean-counters.

Slowly, however, the murky picture started to take on some brighter shades. Just as 1996 was turning into 1997, Blizzard Entertainment unleashed a game called Diablo. Debate raged on Usenet and the young World Wide Web over whether Diablo, with its procedurally generated dungeons and its emphasis on constant action over a fleshed-out narrative, was a “real” CRPG at all or just a watered-down pretender. What was undeniable, though, was that it sold like crazy, raising the question of whether more complex, textured CRPGs might be ripe for a revival as well. Meanwhile a bankrupt TSR was by now in the process of being acquired by Wizards of the Coast. Wizards was saying all the right things about resurrecting Dungeons & Dragons for this new era, and its Magic revenues left it primed to spend more money on that endeavor than TSR could ever have dreamed of even before the collectible-card-game craze had cleaned its clock.

In what had seemed at the time like a triumph of hope over recent experience, earlier in 1996 the Interplay producer Feargus Urquhart had enlisted a fledgling Canadian studio known as Bioware to make yet another Dungeons & Dragons CRPG for Interplay to publish. In what had seemed a minor stipulation of the deal at the time the contract between Bioware and Interplay was signed, the former had agreed to allow the latter full access to the “Infinity Engine” it planned to use to build and run the game. By the spring of 1997, those arrangements were looking like they might prove more important, both to Interplay and to the whole industry, than anyone had anticipated at the time.

The Bioware game, for which Feargus Urquhart himself had come up with the name of Baldur’s Gate, was pitched straight down the middle, being about as traditionalist as a Dungeons & Dragons CRPG could get. It took place in the game’s more or less default setting of the Forgotten Realms, a world that took every cliché of epic fantasy and ran with it. Obviously this was the safest choice for a revival. But, in the wake of Diablo’s smashing success, Urquhart thought there might be space to throw up a curve ball as well to serve as a more outré companion piece. He asked Chris Avellone to condense his massive Planescape notebook into a proper project proposal.

The proposal reached the desk of Brian Fargo, the founder and head of Interplay, at the end of June 1997. “There was always a balance in running a studio between being commercial, being creative, and having your creative people be happy, and having them do things that are interesting to them,” says Fargo. “I was willing to take creative risks from time to time in order to allow these things to happen. Planescape: Torment was clearly one of those. When it came across my desk, I said, ‘Well, that’s as high-concept as you can get.’ But I thought that RPG players would like it, and I loved the writing and sensibility they put into the document. That got me interested in doing it.” It didn’t hurt, of course, that it ought to be possible to do the game fairly cheaply, since it would be able to re-purpose Bioware’s Infinity Engine.

The heart of the Planescape: Torment team was lead designer Chris Avellone, lead programmer Daniel Spitzley, the artists Tim Donley and Aaron Meyers, and producer Guido Henkel (a recent German immigrant who had helped to make the CRPGs Blade of Destiny and Star Trail in his native land). The project was not a major priority at Interplay for the majority of its existence, even after Fallout came out late in 1997 and sold pretty well, thus demonstrating that there truly was a reasonably sized market for more complex, conversation-heavy CRPGs than Diablo, provided that they were done well. In fact, in an ironic sort of way, Fallout’s success was to Planescape: Torment’s detriment. Eager to capitalize on the first non-sequel, non-licensed Interplay release to garner an appreciable buzz among hardcore gamers since Descent in 1995, Brian Fargo decreed that a Fallout 2 had to come out within a year of its predecessor. As a result, Planescape: Torment was all but suspended for much of 1998, while most of the team, Avellone included, moved over to pitch in on the Fallout sequel.

Although they did get it done on time, the biggest CRPG success story of the Christmas of 1998 proved not to be Fallout 2 but rather Baldur’s Gate, which introduced digital Dungeons & Dragons to a whole new generation of gamers who were more familiar with Diablo than Pool of Radiance. Just like that, Dungeons & Dragons on the computer became a hot topic again. With a Baldur’s Gate II not slated for release until 2000, Planescape: Torment was left to carry the Infinity Engine water in the interim. That brought a fresh influx of energy and resources to the project, and these were sufficient to get the game finished just in time for the Christmas of 1999.

It entered stores accompanied by stellar reviews whose fulsome praise felt only slightly obligatory in a Stockholm Syndrome sort of way. (Many reviewers did point out the “tome of text” to be read in tones that suggested that they might not have found it as uniformly delightful as their five-star verdicts suggested.) Nonetheless, as a computer game based on a tabletop setting that had been discontinued more than eighteen months earlier, Planescape: Torment was in a strange position for a licensed product. Even against weak competition — the only other high-profile CRPG release that holiday season was the abjectly terrible Ultima IX — the game’s sales were a shadow of the figures put up by Baldur’s Gate. In an ironic way, the lack of ringing commercial success may have been a positive for Planescape: Torment’s legacy, confirming its modern status as a cult classic that’s for the CRPG sophisticates rather than the hoi polloi.

As for my opinion… well, I’m afraid I’m going to need another article to properly interrogate the reputation and reality of the game. For, whether one happens to be sitting with the prosecution or the defense or just back in the jury box trying to sort through it all, the case of Planescape: Torment is a complicated one.

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Sources: The books Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons by Ben Riggs, Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs by David L. Craddock, and Designers & Dragons: A History of the Roleplaying Game Industry volumes 1 (the 1970s) and 3 (the 1990s) by Shannon Appelcline; Dragon of March 1994, April 1994, May 1994, July 1994, and August 1994; Computer Gaming World of March 2000 and April 2000; the 2015 Games^TM special issue on “controversial” games; Retro Gamer 113. Plus the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Manual of the Planes, and the Planescape boxed set. Plus the materials found in the Brian Fargo Collection in the archives of the Strong Museum of Play.

Online sources include Soren Johnson’s interview with Chris Avellone for his Designer’s Notes podcast, a Last Game Standing interview with Avellone, and Sean Gandert’s series of articles about the evolution of planar travel in Dungeons & Dragons for the website Exposition Break.

Where to Get It: Planescape: Torment is available as digital purchase from GOG.com in an “enhanced edition.” Buying it also gives you access to the original version.

The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation is currently seeking applicants for its board of directors. IFTF’s board is designed with mandatory limits on term length, requiring regular recruitment to ensure the health, vitality and strength of the organization.

The board is responsible for IFTF’s strategic leadership, making sure that all its programs fulfill the organization’s mission and adhere to its values, while also evaluating new projects and directions. Joining the board is also an excellent way to earn experience in leadership, business and philanthropy while building relationships with leaders in narrative gaming.

Volunteer terms on the board are three years in length and represent a highly visible opportunity to advocate for, support and preserve interactive fiction and narrative games as an art form. Serving on the board does not require previous board or nonprofit experience, and requires as little as two or three hours per month in time commitment. A board member may serve two consecutive terms.

IFTF leadership strongly believes in increasing the diversity of the organization, and anyone throughout the narrative game community is welcome to self-nominate using this form. Additionally, the board also welcomes nominations on behalf of others. Please feel free to share the open call with contacts you think would be a good fit. If you know someone who would be a great board member and you think would appreciate the team reaching out to them, please email [email protected].

The deadline to submit is July 1, 2026. Afterward, the current IFTF board of directors and advisory board will review applicants through August 1, 2026. You can find more information—including duties, expectations, qualifications and full details of the application timeline—in the submission form.

IFTF is thrilled to announce the next round of our microgrant program, providing modest grants to folks working on interactive fiction technology, education, preservation, or outreach. Do you have a project in the works that will benefit an interactive fiction community and could use a bit of funds to get it to the finish line? We would love to hear from you: applications for this year’s program are now open.

The goal of the grant program is to support projects that benefit the interactive fiction community at large (rather than funding the commission of new games, for instance). We especially love projects that provide tangible benefits to a community of IF players or makers in their work to preserve, maintain, and inspire the continued growth of this medium. Proposals are evaluated by an independent committee of advisors (distinct from the grant admin committee) for merit, feasibility, and potential impact.

Our budget for the grants program is small: we have $3,000 of funds in total to split between awardees, with a maximum award per application of $1,000. (Requesting a smaller amount is okay and helps us support more projects.) To preserve our volunteer bandwidth, we will not consider funding projects needing less than $150. We will ask you to submit a simple budget to back up the amount you are asking for, as well as a few details about your project and its scope, but we try to keep the application process as simple as possible.

Some fine print: Grant awardees will be asked to submit a report nine months after receiving funds, meaning our funding is best-suited for projects that will be accomplished in under one year. Please note that those directly involved in the grant process (i.e. Grant Admin Committee members, Grant Advisors, IFTF Board Members) cannot apply. Those who have been banned from IFTF activities are not welcome to apply. If you are connected to someone involved in the process, please disclose that in your application so we can make appropriate plans to avoid conflicts of interest.

If you’re interested in applying or learning more about the process, please check out our grant guidelines. Applications will be open until November 15, 2025, and we except to announce accepted projects by January 31, 2026.

Last year, we funded an array of exciting projects focused on accessibility, education, documentation and outreach. And in our most recent funding round, we helped support four exciting projects currently in progress or concluding: Serhii is working on Atrament, an IF engine that combines Ink scripting with Javascript as an alternative to Inky, creating a more full-featured release platform for Ink stories comparable to the mature web deployments for languages like Twine and ChoiceScript. Work is in progress with a launch is expected by the end of the year. Grace Benfell commissioned articles on modern interactive fiction for a special issue of The Imaginary Engine Review, an online games criticism journal, with the goal of introducing modern IF to a broader audience. The special issue is expected to be published shortly. Mark Davis is developing Moving Literature, a web-based platform for interactive fiction builders that allows creators without coding experience to make interactive stories incorporating images and animations. A blog post introducing the platform recently went live. Katy Naylor hosted a series of IF writing workshops earlier this year in London and online, in association with the zine Voidspace, introducing artists from the wider literary and interactive performance worlds to interactive fiction.

We can’t wait to see what ideas you’ve got brewing this year. If you have any questions about the IFTF Microgrants or the application process, please reach out to [email protected]. And if you don’t intend to apply but are still thrilled that IFTF is funding cool projects, you can donate to the grants program directly (choose “IFTF Grants” in the donation page dropdown), or simply to the IFTF General Fund to help us keep this and many other great programs running!

At the end of 2025, David Cornelson stepped down from the IFTF board of directors. We would like to thank David for his time and service to the organization during his two years on the board. David will continue to support IFTF, along with former members of the board, on the advisory board.

In 2025, as part of our micro-grants program, IFTF funded a project from Grace Benfell, co-editor in chief of The Imaginary Engine Review, which was completed last summer!

TIER defines itself as an online journal of games criticism - but Grace and Phoenix, the editors, have a very specific goal and outlook for it, described in their manifesto. TIER values the margins, the strange, the hobbyist releases, the experimental, the games that don’t get a lot of critical attention. Prior issues each focused on a specific game, such as thecatamites’ “Anthology of the Killer” or randomnine’s “OVERWHELM”; but things got a little different for their latest issue…

See, their initial proposal envisioned three small issues on three IF games; however, the scope shifted into a larger issue that would offer the opportunity to showcase a wider range of perspectives on IF. And it is a large issue with no less than 6 pieces on various aspects of IF. (We get it! There is so much to talk about in IF!) Grace explains that the grant money was very welcome as it allowed them to commission more ambitious and experimental pieces overall. The issue took overall longer than expected, but with an interview, a retrospective, and four critical perspectives on a variety of IF games, there’s a lot for everyone!

You’ll find this issue on TIER’s website, featuring: - a reflection on “Repeat the Ending” (Best in Show at Spring Thing 2023) as a personal game and the vulnerability it entails - an honest retelling of what it was to be a Twine author participating at their first IFComp in 2017 - a shorter piece on game poems, and the exploration of experimental techniques that have long been part (or precursors?) of IF - a lengthy interview with Nathalie Lawhead, touching on the power of text-based games for effective, personal, touching, and plain weird experiences, in an industry that looks more towards sleek polished spectacles, and an angry world that stifles creativity - a great study of “Horse Master” that made me go, “fine, yes, of course I will play Horse Master for the 12th time” - an exploration of retro interfaces featured as literary devices in a few IF games, and what they point to.

We are very happy to have helped bring into the world these very unique and thoughtful pieces of writing! Good games criticism pieces have always been very important to the IF scene, from long rec.arts.int-fiction pieces to SPAG articles, and even to this day articles from The Rosebush, but it can go through periods of lull - it takes thoughfulness, introspection, and the time to sit with a piece. IFTF is proud to continue to support a vibrant, healthy creative scene in this way!

One of the projects in the 2025 class of IFTF grants awardees was led by Katy Naylor from the Voidspace. In Katy’s words, the Voidspace is a cross-disciplinary space to bring together practitioners and explore and promote the overlap between the worlds of IF, indie writing, games, and interactive performance to encourage cross pollination. From our experience, notably at Narrascope, those worlds do have quite a bit of overlap that is always interesting to foster! The proposal sought grant money to support the delivery of several interactive fiction workshops and Twine minijams for newcomers as part of the London Games Festival Fringe in April.

The Voidspace successfully managed to run three IF workshops in April, two in person and one online; although they weren’t formally picked as a side event by the London Games Festival, the workshops ran at the same time period. The Void managed to bring together quite a few people from the literary and the interactive performance worlds that form part of the network that Voidspace has created - most of whom had not run into IF before, but had very relevant skills and an interest from their existing practice. The in-person workshops occurred April 5 at Theatre Deli in London, UK, a theatre community hub that frequently partners with the Voidspace. The first workshop focused on Downpour, a very intuitive and accessible tool for hyperlinks-based games created by V Buckenham, who also ran this workshop; and the second one saw Stanley Baxton (who readers of these pages might know from his 2024 IFComp entry) introduce a group to the tool Videotome. As for the online workshop, on April 15 Mark Ward gave and introduction to Twine.

Katy reports that these workshops were very successful! Not only for the attendees - Katy herself reports that the workshops planted several seeds in her minde, helped her shape her approach to advocating for IF and inspired her to use Videotome for an upcoming piece. This also spurred her to create her own introductory IF workshop aimed specifically at theatre makers, which she ran in September at an experimental theatre festival, using physical materials to replicate Twine-like structures - one attendee even said that this broke her writer’s block!

We’re always excited to help introduce more creators to the world of IF, and it sounds like the cross-pollination aspect of this project made it very successful!

PS: when we asked Katy to describe the overlap between IF and interactive theatre, her response was so insightful that we are copying it here verbatim:

The overlap between IF and theater (particularly immersive and interactive theatre, which is the Voidspace’s core interest) is massive!

Immersive theatre often involves audience interacting with environments that are all around them (i.e. inside a big touch real set - see Punchdrunk for the biggest example), choosing which strands of an atomised story to follow (e.g. following different characters or objects), etc. Interactive theatre takes this a stage further and allows audiences to take a direct part in the action - a sort of live action game but with a tight narrative arc. A balance of choice with controlled impact very similar to IF!

IF is well suited for creating environmental narratives - my workshop focuses on the spatial mechanics of “Howling Dogs” - how the degradation of the core space over time tells a story if its own - and encouraged participants to design a story from an environment first perspective. For those interested in interactive theatre you can use dialogue options and variables to create a story that feels responsive in a similar way.

There is also the element of time - even in a linear piece of IF, you can manipulate the flow of time far more than conventional text - by choosing breaks between passages, expanding links, moderated text etc. You can use these simple tools to give a piece of IF a sense of theatricality - landing the timing of ‘beats’ for flow and emphasis. Add the use of variables to build in a sense of time passing and use of environment and you have what I call ‘4d storytelling’. Which if you think about it, is what theatre is… “[Understudied][https://borntopootle.itch.io/understudied]” is a great example - a piece of IF about theatre that uses variables to introduce time pressure, and text effects and structure to choreograph the timing of ‘beats’. Form and content in unity!”

Thank you so much Katy!

Earlier this month, IFTF was delighted to participate in the GDC Festival of Gaming in San Francisco. This was our chance to explain what interactive fiction is, does, and can do to the biggest game developer gathering in the world.

We began by rocking the crowds at the Monday night opening event at Oracle Stadium. Several nonprofits and indie collectives had tables up at the concession level. We took the opportunity to soft-launch our GDC-week project: a collaboratively-authored Twine game - the classic “exquisite corpse” reimagined for branching narrative. Everybody who walked by was invited to add a node to the Twine editing screen — without looking at what earlier attendees had added. (Or, at least, not looking much.)

Naturally, the story got pretty chaotic pretty quickly, even on that first night.

Tuesday was a breather, since the festival hall wasn’t open yet. We took in some of the GDC talks and generally sprawled on the lawn in Yerba Buena Gardens. The weather was lovely — particularly for those of us who had flown in from East Coast snowstorms.

On Wednesday, the IFTF booth opened up (along with the IGF pavilion, alt.ctrl.gdc, and the rest of the festival hall). We were located in “GDC Commons,” alongside several other nonprofits and independent organizations. Our space had three tables, so we were able to demo the first day’s worth of Twine contributions while also grabbing people to continue the growth of the Twine map.

It turns out that most passers-by were familiar with Twine — no surprise, since it’s one of the most popular open-source narrative design tools out there. Fewer people realized that a whole educational nonprofit exists to support Twine. IFTF also manages other IF community services like IFComp (the oldest continuously-run game-design competition), IFDB (the definitive database of IF), the IF Archive, the forum and more. Not to mention NarraScope, our cozy little conference dedicated to narrative games. (Coming up this June in Albany!)

IFTF’s third table was dedicated to an older brand of interactive fiction: the Visible Zorker. This is an open-source project which demonstrates Zork, the original 1979 text adventure. The game is rigged to display its own source code as you play, along with all the variables, timers, and other mechanisms that run behind the game’s magic curtain. We at IFTF love this kind of educational project: revealing and making game design accessible to everyone.

GDC’s festival hall runs three days. By Friday afternoon we were tired (but happy) (but definitely tired) and ready to wrap up. The Twine game was a huge success with over 120 contributed passages over the course of the week.

We’re looking forward to next year at GDC in San Francisco. What will we be showing off in 2027? Haven’t the foggiest! We’ve got eleven months to decide, and you have eleven months to anticipate it. We hope to see you there.

To play the IFTF Collaborative Twine Adventure, visit this page!

Another project funded in 2025 as part of our micro-grants program supported Serhii in the development of additional features for his engine Atrament. Here’s an update!

The core concept of Atrament is that, while the Ink scripting language is widely used, it could be further developed into a more full-featured and user-friendly web-based engine that could offer creators a workflow comparable to Twine or ChoiceScript. While the core of the engine already existed prior to applying to a IFTF micro-grant, additional work was needed to push the tool towards greater maturity, ease of use, and functionality. The micro-grant allowed Serhii to work on the following areas: - developing documentation for authors; - developing a “wizard” style command line tool to provide technical scaffolding to users in creating a project and publishing it; - adding features to allow authors to export their games to a desktop OS; - delivering improvements to the debugger and the compiler; - expanding visual capabilities and extending the markup language; - purchase of a domain name for a dedicated website for the project.

Serhii also notably performed some exploratory work around automated game testing and VS Code integration, two very interesting features that are nonetheless not ready for primetime at this point. Still, the project is still under active development, moving from version 2.0 to 2.4.1 in 2025, and Serhii has integrated the feedback from external developers making a first wave of Atrament games, such as Sun Runners, The Loop, and The Corridor. Plus, given by the enthusiastic reaction the engine has met from established authors over at IntFiction, it seems like we can look forward to more Atrament games in the future!

Head on over to Atrament.ink (and the Github page) to learn more about the project, and give it a try! We are thrilled to have supported Serhii in further improving his engine and making it even easier for authors to develop their stories!

In 2025, as part of our micro-grants program, IFTF funded a project from Mark Davis; thanks to the funding, Mark and the team have made very good progress and were able to launch the platform, now called “Moving Literature”!

The project’s ambition was to design a no-code web-based tool for authoring interactive fiction, specifically designed to empower creators through accessible technology and a low barrier of entry, while still offering some nice multimedia options. Mark’s vision was to foster a vibrant community by blending the narrative power of Ink scripts with modern visual elements, such as the integration of images but also of Lottie animations (hence the zoetrope/Muybridge-style logos on the website!), which are triggered within the story through the use of Ink tags. While Mark explains that the technical stack is one he uses in his professional work, this project brings those high-end tools to the hobbyist and experimental IF scene.

The project was able to launch in the fall of 2025 thanks to IFTF’s support, with the launch of two websites: - MovingLiterature.com: The project’s home base, featuring general communications, development blogs, and “getting started” documentation. - MovLit.com: The library and creation space where the “action” happens, allowing for user registration and story creation.

The micro-grant was used to engage a professional graphic designer (who has since joined the team!) and cover hosting costs for the next 3 years, to ensure the project has a stable home for years to come. This supported the team as they focused on carrying the project towards launch, such as building a documentation library, implementing user registration, and building out forums.

We are very happy to have helped bring this new authoring tool into the world! Building new low/no-code options that nonetheless provide engaging capabilities to control or enhance presentation has proven numerous time to be a very effective entry point for newcomers to discover and enjoy IF, and lower the barrier of entry to more stories being created. IFTF is proud to support such projects that push the envelope for web-based interactive storytelling!

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the third round of IFTF microgrants, following the continued success of our 2024 and 2025 programs!

A big thank you to everyone who submitted a grant application late last year; we are thrilled to see continuing interest in the program and more interesting projects for the IF community! Our independent committee of Grant Advisors have carefully reviewed all applications, and have selected four projects that represent the expanding technical and cultural horizons of the medium. Without further ado, here are the grant recipients, class of 2026!

Flatgame making tool - Kate Bagenzo This project aims to simplify the creation of “flatgames”, a genre that has a decade of history, most often associated with allowing players to view and explore an author’s own drawings (often hand-drawn and scanned), collages, music, etc. Most of these games are either coded from scratch or using Unity templates, which doesn’t quite succeed in making game making as easy as possible, as originally intended. Kate will receive $650 to develop a streamlined toolset that lowers the barrier for artists and non-programmers to bring their visual stories into the interactive space.

Пригода: A Ukrainian-language text adventure engine - Andrii “Пригода” (Adventure) is a dedicated parser-based engine focused on the specific needs of the Ukrainian-language IF community. Andrii will receive $600 to support his efforts in developing this localized parser-based text adventure framework that provides useful features for authors in Ukrainian, from synonyms and aliases as in other text adventure engines, to more Ukrainian-specific needs such as streamlining recognition of different cases, prepositions, and forms of commands. This seeks to ensure that authors have the linguistic tools and engine support necessary to create text adventures in Ukrainian, which currently don’t exist!

Twine & the IF Community article - Tabitha O’Connell Twine fundamentally reshaped the landscape of interactive fiction over the last decade; however, there was a period around 2014 where the community debated the increased use of the tool and its impact on the IF scene and IFComp. The strong viewpoints and particular context made this a key moment in the IF community, and while participants can recount part of the story and the IntFiction threads are still up, there is little literature taking a closer look at this episode and contextualizing this event. Tabitha will receive $750 to fund their work in collecting appropriate sources and materials, before writing their deep-dive critical and historical article on the topic, an important chapter for the IF community of broad interest for the history of the medium.

New Standalone Engine Built with Godot for Making Splitscreen Co-Op Interactive Fiction - Abhik Hasnain, Adeline K. Piercy Although there have been a few experiments over the decades, IF usually tends to be single-player, and multiplayer experiences are rare and lack specific tooling to explore this further. Abhik and Adeline, two students at Edmonton’s University of Alberta, propose to build a standalone engine using the Godot framework specifically for co-operative storytelling, focusing on giving creators a powerful tool allowing them to explore building splitscreen, multi-player interactive fiction; they will receive $1,000 to fund their work. This could unlock entirely new possibilities of exploration and experimentation around this relatively new genre of co-op (local or remote) narrative play.

We love this year’s class of projects, as they explore 4 very different directions that touch on innovation, new frontiers, fostering creation, and community history. Looking forward to getting updates on them next year! And congratulations to the recipients!

We want to thank all applicants, as well as our Grant Advisors, who volunteered their time to select the projects for IFTF: thank you very much to Grim Baccaris, PB Berge, Rourke Bywater, Liza Daly, Chandler Groover, and Nathanaël Marion!

Twine 2.12.0 released on 10 April 2026. Major highlights in this release include a new way to see tags in the story map, a better tag autocomplete, and native Japanese language support.

Full Notes

New Features Added

• When adding tags, multiple suggestions are now shown when more than one existing one matches what’s been typed.
• A new preference has been added where tags now appear as badges with names on passage cards instead of a thin stripe of color. When this preference is active, all badges are shown on passage cards regardless of whether a color has been assigned to them.
• App Twine has been updated to Electron 41.
• A Japanese localization has been added.

Bugs Fixed

• Long passage names now display with an ellipsis in the title bars of passage editors, instead of the title bar getting taller.
• The start passage on duplicated stories is now set correctly.
• A bug where passage name completions in the passage editor didn’t appear in certain situations has been fixed.
• An unnecessary delay when loading localizations has been fixed.
• The Ukrainian localization has been improved.

Story Format Updates

• Chapbook has been updated to version 2.3.1.

For full details, please refer to the Twinery Reference Guide

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Samurai of Hyuga: Book 6 is the spine-tingling sequel to the interactive tale you know all too well. Or do you? Prepare for a role reversal (to put it mildly) as our favorite ronin faces perils unlike any before—including homework, final exams, and love confessions after class, too!

And don’t get me started on the extracurriculars.

Samurai of Hyuga is 30% off until May 28th!

Samurai of Hyuga: Book 6 is a 300,000-word interactive novel by Devon Connell, where your choices control the story. It’s text-based—without animation or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Prepare to enroll in the prestigious Academy for young and gifted shugenja. Unfortunately, you’re none of those things. To survive, you’ll need to fake your way through a life that isn’t yours—all while hunting down a demon and uncovering the school’s dark secrets!

• Infiltrate a shugenja academy held captive by a sinister demon!
• Balance duty and deception while juggling a chaotic social life!
• Join club activities ranging from kendo duels to tea ceremonies!

It’s time to learn the truth behind the Emperor’s quest—not to mention, the source of magic itself. I suggest you start taking notes, because the sixth book of this epic series will put you to the test!

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

Today is the 15th annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day!

The idea for Global Accessibility Awareness Day was conceived in 2011 by web developer Joe Devon and accessibility expert Jennison Asuncion, to call attention to the importance of creating digital spaces accessible to all users.

At Choice of Games, we’re proud to create accessible games. There are no sound effects, no complicated motor controls, and our apps are fully compatible with screenreaders such as VoiceOver. This year, we also added support for OpenDyslexic font in all our apps.

Gaming should be for everyone, and we’re constantly working to ensure that as many people as possible can play ours.

I’ve now played Epic Hero #1 and Epic Hero #2 of the series by Marc Leduc. I’ve given the history already at those entries, but as a brief reminder: he was a Canadian who moved to England (and married and had children there); he was a fan of both the Video Genie and the much rarer Colour Genie and produced a series of three games (Epic Hero) followed by a series of six (Colour Quest), where two of the Colour Quest games were written by a different author and the sixth Colour Quest game is mostly a duplicate of Epic Hero #1.

I wanted to get the Epic Hero games off my list as they’re lingering 1982 games; I had them as 1983, based on CASA’s entries, but I found an ad that put them as coming out right at the end of 1982.

Computing Today, January 1983, with a one-month newsstand delay.

I enjoyed Epic Hero #2 as it was based on experimentation in a fantasy universe but had enough logic to how things worked I didn’t feel like the puzzles were just stumbling at random. Will Game #3 hold up? “This Epic is for the very cunning.” is announced on the opening screen, which is worrying. Most of our authors have stumbled when they’ve tried to crank up the difficulty.

Venus Must Live places things in the future, kind of. We are in the far-flung distant year of 2023. Future?-Venus has mining going on, except there have been “electro magnetic disturbances” so we are sent to investigate.

Unusually for a Scott Adams derived game, LOOK no longer works as a generalized “examine” verb. That is, you don’t LOOK VIEWSCREEN on the scene above, but rather EXAMINE VIEWSCREEN (“Foggy!”) This was changed between Epic Hero #2 and #3; I’m guessing the author was bothered by the janky feel of LOOK OBJECT as a command (in regular English you’d expect “AT” in there). The only downside to dropping LOOK OBJECT syntax is that the generalized LOOK has had a meta-aura to it where it generically means “investigate this thing more thoroughly” so it might not just be visual feedback. EXAMINE implies eyes-only, so EXAMINE (COMMS) LINK giving an audio message is slightly off-kilter.

Comms Link: “This is a recorded message.”

“Colonisation of Venus is imminent. However, unusual electronical disturbances on planet indicate sentient life. Find and return a sentient being to preserve the race.”
“Message Out”

The console has a red button and a blue button. The red button blasts off, and doing so right away is a game over but at least one that gives helpful detail.

The ship blasts off!

Comms Link: “Fool! Either you have not found the sentient being or else it is not secure in Life Support. Consider the expense of this mission! We are anxiously waiting for your return! We are short of experimental animals”

That is, despite this ending the game, the message reveals that our real goal is put the creature we’re looking for in Life Support, and also that the spaceship doesn’t need any extra help to get back off the ground (it’s not uncommon to have “fix your ship” or “find fuel” be one of the tasks in this sort of game). One thing I’ve noticed talking with people about Old Multi-Death Adventures is a sense of annoyance at deaths in that “no progress” is made; however, deaths often give useful information, and the ones that don’t tend to be funny.

Pushing the blue button instead of red sends you to a “Central Access compartment”. The compartment has a mysterious Identi-Comp as well as four pad/hatch combos that lead to other parts of the ship (or outside).

The Identi-Comp has a switch that can be swapped between 1 and 2 (TO ONE and TO TWO is the syntax explicitly given by the game if you try to noodle with the switch) but I haven’t noticed a difference, and my attempts to “SPEAK” or “SAY” something so far have not been recognized. It doesn’t allow arbitrary text, it only allows recognized nouns.

The game treats BROWN as a valid noun so you can say it, whereas the verb OPEN is not and so the game doesn’t let you give the command SAY OPEN at all.

Purple goes outside, and without any kind of inventory (as the game starts) it leads to death, so let’s pass over that for the moment…

One of the best death screens I’ve seen in a while, though.

…and press the brown plate instead. This sends the player to the “medical and scientific” area.

You are in a Medical and Genetic Engineering compartment.
Objects you can see are: Auto-Surg Unit ■ Scanner ■ Brown Pad ■ Closed Brown Hatch ■ Life Support ■

The surgery unit is described as having its “lid” open, and the scanner and life support don’t have any description at all. You can go into the unit and find a black button, white button, and orange button.

The buttons give no descriptions (the author seems keen on “colour roulette”, where you just have to run through the possibilities to see what happens). At first white and black do nothing, but the lid is open; orange closes/opens the lid.

White then turns you into “instant mush”, while black does something … maybe useful?

What will you do now? PUSH BLACK
You’re injected with something, fall asleep and something happens to you. Much later …

Auto-Surg Unit: “Surgery Complete”

You can then PUSH WHITE safely and have the exact same text. Possibly undoing whatever the first effect was?

The last ship room comes from pressing the grey plate in the hub, leading to a big stash of equipment.

You are in a Special Equipment compartment.
Objects you can see are: Grey Pad ■ Closed Grey Hatch ■ Thought Bomb ■ 12 Inch Rod ■ Head Band ■ Space Suit ■ Lift Boots ■

Again, not much helpful in the way of descriptions. The thought bomb gives nothing (nothing!?!?) the 12 inch rod mentions a DISK on one end. The head band, suit, and boots don’t say anything when examined. If you wear the suit, a dial mysteriously appears in your inventory (it took some experimenting before I was sure the two were connected). The game also enforces that the boots need to be placed over the suit.

After the shenanigans above, before moving on exploring the planet, I decided it was wise to go ahead and make a verb list.

Notable points: THINK which is rare and can be hard to come up with (I assumed at least the thought bomb is somehow controlled this way — you’ll see what happens with it shortly), the sense of SMELL gets used (which can be easy to overlook), SWIM and DIVE are both in (I sometimes neglect testing DIVE otherwise in water) and FEEL and HOLD are both in.

Disembarking leads to a Venusian jungle, with exits to the east and west. While the environment will kill without a space suit, this is done in old-school style, not with realistic planetary exploration.

Heading east leads to a cliff that can’t be scaled. I would think the lift boots would work to then somehow float or maybe jump high, but nothing I’ve tried has worked (nor can I mess with the dial on the suit, which I thought might be connected). Theorizing that perhaps multiple items operative via thought I tried THINK UP with disastrous results. I guess UP is short for “BLOW UP” to the bomb. That’s useful information for later, at least.

I’ve also tried messing about with the dial on the suit, but nothing I’ve tried has been recognized, including TURN and ROTATE straight from the verb list. I have a feeling I’m missing some basic aspect to getting the equipment to work.

Going west instead of east at the landing point leads to a maze, a small-scale one identical in feel to Epic Hero 1 and 2.

Mappable via dropping objects. You’d think Leduc would get tired of these by now, but apparently not.

The notable place in the jungle can be found by just going west repeatedly: a pool of glowing liquid and an alien statue. The statue has an outstretched hand, but I have not found any method of getting the parser to recognize placing an item there (it may be I simply need the right object for it to be recognized). PLACE just puts an item on the ground.

What will you do now? EXAMINE STATUE
It
has it’s hand out !
What will you do now? PUT ROD
In what?
What will you do now? IN HAND
I am not quite sure what you mean
What will you do now? IN STATUE
I am not quite sure what you mean

You can enter the pool, but I haven’t found anything useful to do other than drinking the pool and finding out the liquid is poisonous and dying again. Even DIVE doesn’t work.

To summarize:

a.) I’m not sure what the injections at the medical pod do

b.) I don’t know what the Identi-Comp does or how to operate it

c.) I don’t know how to scale a cliff even given objects that seem like they’d work; this may be just parser-struggle

d.) I don’t know what the statue wants or what to do in the pool of poison water

I still have a fair amount of things to experiment with (an advantage of the game giving a big inventory load at the start) but I’m worried this game’s ambition may have passed out of the reach of the author, or at least the author’s ability to make a parser.

There are no walkthroughs for this one, so we’re on our own. Suggestions in the comments are welcome.

Titanium Court is a stylized match-3 battle game in which you are possibly kidnapped by fairies. I loved it and I didn't like it. I mean, I didn't like playing it. I loved the game.

It's doing two things. (Two big things. An infinite number of tiny things.)

One big thing is to build a narrative game on top of an RTS/autobattler on top of a match-3. All of these mechanics are coupled. Throupled? You arrange your battlefield by making groups of three tiles disappear; this also gains you resources, with which you buy units. Winning battles (or losing them) advances the storyline, as does exploration and dialogue; but you also occasionally take a shower, which is a match-3 grid of soap, water, and introspection.

The other big thing is to tell a story in you go to fairyland. I mean you, the person reading this review. Not "the protagonist" or "Wendy Darling" or "Alice". Not me -- I already went and came back. You.

People are always being snatched away to fairyland to learn some valuable lesson about themself or life. Okay, not always. Alice and Wendy are bad examples. Instead think Labyrinth or Groundhog Day or the TARDIS (modern era). The Divine Comedy, if you're middle-aged. It's an entirely familiar pattern. And since Titanium Court is a game, it's couched in the (entirely familiar) second-person language of adventure games: you discover a castle, you enter the gates, you sit at the table and eat fairy-fruit.

(It doesn't say "fairy-fruit", so you don't notice. I didn't notice.)

So fairyland offers you a whole storyline about changing your life, deciding what you need, choosing your axioms. It's all very metaphorical. It's done up in Midsummer Night's Dream by way of so many fourth-wall breaks that you could build a new proscenium out of the rubble. Fine. Good solid stuff.

Only gradually do you catch on that the protagonist is negative space. I don't mean in the usual AFGNCAAP sense -- that's a way for you, the generic "you", to put yourself in an adventure that's not about you. Titanium Court is about you; it's all about you; but the only "you" available is... you. What do you want from your life?

Is it baseball? It might be baseball.

These completely standard game-narrative tropes are stuck together in such an obvious way that it took me half the game to realize that they don't make any sense together. The sense that they do not make is the illogic of fairyland. It's kind of brilliant.

(I think this is what Wanderstop was groping for and absolutely could not find because Davey Wreden thought it was a game about him.)

I really enjoyed... thinking about Titanium Court. I enjoyed being surprised by Titanium Court, which happened repeatedly. I enjoyed the jokes and the clowns. I enjoyed discovering all the wacky variations it throws at the "match-3 battlefield" premise.

I didn't particularly enjoy playing Titanium Court. RTS combat isn't my thing. Match-3 actively bores me. I put in about six hours total, drilling for the mad little scenes with Robin or Puck. Everything in between left me feeling irritably dissatisfied with the time I'd just spent.

But that's fine! Because one of the questions the game asks is how much effort do you want to spend on this. By the time I'd put in six hours, I found four (spoiler) and had the option to use them. The game asked me, very directly, if I was done playing; if that was all I wanted out of Titanium Court. Yes, I said, I'm done. So I rolled the credits.

I know there's enormously more to the game that I never saw. There's way more than four (spoiler) to be found. Plus I only did three (spoiler) of I think thirteen. That's all fine. What I wanted from the game was a way out, and it offered me one with grace and compassion and not a hint of disdain. I took it and didn't look back.

I highly recommend taking a look -- whatever you want.

Very minor footnote: The game nearly uses the color palette of Apple 2 hi-res graphics (blue, green, magenta, yellow instead of orange). But it uses them in impossible combinations -- characters are detailed in blue and magenta, which cannot exist side-by-side on the Apple. This left me with a sense of ineffable disorientation which pervaded the entire game and which, yes, I might be totally making this up, I have no idea if AP Thomson was an Apple 2 nerd, but it's the kind of thing Titanium Court leaves me wondering.

I wanted to knock down one more game from the Rainbow Book of Adventures contest (the first text adventure contest) before moving on to other things. There will be eight left to go (saved for some future time).

Deed of the York is another case like Escape from Sparta where something went awry in the credits. Specifically, the opening title screen indicates a different original author than Chris Harland (as seen in the image above).

So the game is actually by Dwight Logan, originally? (Oftentimes, the port author isn’t considered an “author” at all although changes can sometimes be major enough to warrant that title.) Further muddying the waters is the book’s biographical note:

Chris Harland is a bilingual high school student in the “Great White North” [Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada]. Some of his interests include sports, money, computers and rock music. Chris wishes to thank Dwight Logan and Gerald Nunn, whose initiative and help respectively ensured the program’s creation.

The description of Dwight Logan being the “initiative” certainly seems counter to the idea of him writing it in the first place. This ambiguity also raises a question on the nature of Gerald Nunn’s “help”. Just to be safe, I’m crediting all three.

The author-location also reinforces the point I made about authors coming from everywhere across the map for the contest; the author is not from Ontario or Quebec (the two computing hotspots at the time) but Regina, Saskatchewan. We have encountered the place once before with the deeply surreal game Fantasyland. (While “ranking” doesn’t make complete sense here, I’d say Fantasyland is still the most surreal game this blog has encountered.)

Your grandfather has died and the deed to the York Hotel is hidden somewhere in his abandoned summer home; your job is to find it without dying.

The game also informs you that you need to start by typing the word PIZZA. It then gives you an absolute blank prompt, no room description at all, before PIZZA is entered.

If you can’t tell yet already, this is another game in the wildly-bespoke category, where every location special-codes various commands. Some sample code to illustrate, which only operates in one of the map rooms:

56 IF LEFT$(C$,7)>="SMALLER" THEN 164
57 IF LEFT$(C$,5)="LARGE" THEN 69
58 IF LEFT$(C$,7)="FOLDING" THEN 69
59 IF RIGHT$(C$,6)="SHEETS" THEN 68
60 IF LEFT$(C$,4)="BACK" OR RIGHT$(C$,4)="LEFT" THEN 34
61 IF RIGHT$(C$,4)="DOOR" THEN 169
62 IF RI6HT$(C$,5)="CHAIR" THEN 65

What makes this even harder to deal with than other games of this kind is a.) a number of crashes, which I’m fairly sure are authentic bugs rather than issues on the emulator’s end…

My attempt to OPEN GREEN DOOR at one room.

…b.) and also the fact it uses LEFT/RIGHT/STRAIGHT/BACK as directions (as shown in the code), and the map is completely wrecked besides. To map things out I used west for LEFT and east for RIGHT.

From the opening room (the hallway) you can go STRAIGHT to a ballroom or BACK to the same hallway, you can go LEFT and BACK or RIGHT and BACK as well. That is the end of the game’s consistency in terms of directions, as everything else is chaos.

As the second screenshot indicates, there are no items. GET NOVEL is actually interpreted as NOVEL and then the game describes the novel. This is one hint of multiple ones around the house as to what the right action is to do to get the Deed (you need to type one specific thing in one specific room).

Otherwise, the house is full of deathtraps, or at least game overs. The ballroom has a stair, and going up results in meeting a ghost and losing you the game.

In the cheekiest moment, going through a door causes you to be hit by an axe, and this is followed by a left-or-right prompt.

Picking right ends the game (in a hospital) and picking left also ends the game (you end up dead).

Amidst all the chaos, the key is to realize in fact you are getting a consistent set of clues and all the game is really asking you to do is apply them. In addition to the ones I’ve shown, the starting room has a coatrack with the initials W.S., and a couch is engraved WILLIAM & ANNE.

You need to get into a library (the only way I found was by referring to a PANEL, not any of the L/R/A/B directions) and then, at a library with books (where the game repeatedly insists you can’t refer to the words in the parser), just type the word SHAKESPEARE.

Conceptually, I like the idea of a one-puzzle game spread out across a house where you’re trying to find one hidden thing. In practice, the puzzle was not in solving what was getting hinted at (which was fairly incessant) but rather in dealing with the parser in the first place, and that saying the word SHAKESPEARE somewhere in particular might even be useful (usually it just gives a blank prompt!)

Also messing about with the books in the library can crash the game.

I’ll mark this on the list (along with Raymer’s The Room) as “interesting concept for the time, but implementation couldn’t rise to the occasion”.

Coming up: One more Britgame, and then The Coveted Mirror.

Samurai of Hyuga: Book 6 is the spine-tingling sequel to the interactive tale you know all too well. Or do you? Prepare for a role reversal (to put it mildly) as our favorite ronin faces perils unlike any before—including homework, final exams, and love confessions after class, too!

And don’t get me started on the extracurriculars.

Samurai of Hyuga Book 6 releases this Thursday, May 21st. You can try the first four chapters today for free and wishlist it on Steam!

We’re proud to announce that Wizard Confidential, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app. It’s 34% off until May 21st!

Sling spells and crack the case in a city full of bootleggers, corrupt cops, and vampires. Can you save your partner before a wizard dooms Seattle?

Wizard Confidential is an interactive urban fantasy noir novel by Anthony Eichenlaub, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 210,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, fueled by the vast unstoppable power of your imagination.

Seattle, 1927. You’re a private eye in a city drenched in secrets. Bootleggers run speedboats over the border to supply speakeasies and jazz clubs; gangs shoot it out in dark alleys; and the coppers are even more crooked than the crooks. Crime isn’t the only thing lurking in Seattle’s misty streets: there are werewolves, vampires, and wizards. The wise citizen avoids the dark.

Too bad for them that you’re not wise enough to back down – and that you’re a darn good wizard yourself. You crack the cases that nobody else can, and right now, you’ve got some big ones. City Hall wants you to investigate an out-of-town union leader who’s much more than meets the eye. The Dry Squad wants you to help track down a notorious gang of bootleggers before the Feds move in. And you? You want to find your partner, who’s gone missing under circumstances more mysterious than any of your other cases.

But bigger than all those other problems put together is the rogue wizard who’s been popping up around town. Who is he? Why does he always appear just when something major is going down? What does he want? And most importantly, what does he know that you don’t? The city’s future is at stake, and you’re the only one who can save it.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, or bi
• Solve cases with brains, fists, charm, magic, or good old-fashioned gumshoe work.
• Romance a sultry jazz singer with a family full of secrets; a charismatic rabble-rousing union organizer, or a sharp-dressing smooth-talking City Hall staffer
• Use magic to control the elements, craft illusions, or divine the future.
• Build your detective agency into the biggest one in town – if you can save your partner!
• Bring a labor organizer’s message to the people as a champion of the working class, or bust the unions and ally yourself with the city’s elite.
• Trade bullets and wisecracks with Seattle’s most notorious gangs, bust up a bootlegging ring, or stay above the fray and come out smelling like roses.
• Battle a dangerous wizard for the fate of the city.

On these mean streets, the only thing tougher than the vampires is you.

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

The Boston IF meetup for May will be Monday, May 18, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will post the Google Meet link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting. 

Sling spells and crack the case in a city full of bootleggers, corrupt cops, and vampires. Can you save your partner before a wizard dooms Seattle? Wizard Confidential is a 210,000-word interactive urban fantasy noir novel by Anthony Eichenlaub; I sat down with Anthony to walk about his upcoming game and the rest of his oeuvre.

Wizard Confidential releases this Thursday, May 14th. You can try the first three chapters today for free and also wishlist it on Steam—even if you don’t plan to purchase it there, it really helps!

Wizard Confidential is your first game with us, and it really fits into what I think of as your brand of fiction: a blend of noir and fantasy. Tell our readers about your other novels and what attracted you to this genre.

Noir has always fascinated me, both in books and movies, so I do tend to pull from it in my stories, whether it’s overt or not. I just finished a reread of Dashiell Hammett’s novels, and I’m still finding that the way subtle aspects of the stories weave together in the end are truly masterful. I love how it’s never a simple good versus evil, but instead a messy struggle of order versus chaos where order doesn’t always win and even when it does chaos is right around the corner.

My previous novel series started with The Man Who Walked in the Dark, and it’s a sci-fi noir about a man who literally walks in the dark because the station’s automated lights don’t respond to him. Don’t worry, he’s figuratively walking in the shadows, too. It’s a story that wraps in an art heist, bitter power struggles between crime lords, and a corrupt church into one big tangled mess of a story. Before that I wrote a series called Grandfather Anonymous about an elderly hacker thrown back into action because he needs to keep his family safe. It leans more into crime and mystery than straight noir, but the ambiguity of the characters lends itself to the noir vibe.

What gaming experiences drew you to taking on the challenge of writing interactive fiction?

I’ve been gaming since the beginning of time, both tabletop and on screen. My first experience with interactive storytelling was probably DMing 2nd Edition Dungeons and Dragons as a teen. I’d build wildly elaborate worlds populated with interesting, nuanced characters only for my players to stomp all over everything and murder the wrong NPCs. What I loved most about it was transforming that mess into a compelling story no matter what they did, and more times than not I think I succeeded. It wasn’t until 4th Edition that I started getting material published in Kobold Quarterly, which is really what got me into writing.

On the video game side, I think the flexible storytelling of games like Fallout inspire a lot of what I do, but I also draw from things like Grim Fandango and Dishonored. It wasn’t until I read The Bread Must Rise that I really understood how amazing Choice of Games titles could be, and I knew right then that I had to write one.

Instead of a traditional novelistic protagonist, writing a PC so that the players’ experience is customizable is sometimes a challenge. I notice our authors often have extremely vibrant NPCs as a result. Did you find you had a favorite one, in the writing of the game?

One of the things I love about noir is that the romance can often be more bittersweet than it is happily ever after. In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade has very real feelings for Brigid O’Shaughnessy, but he (spoilers) gives her up to the police so she can account for her crimes. That hard choice is at the center of the story and it’s critical to the character of Sam Spade. Would I have made that same choice if this were interactive fiction? I honestly don’t know. That’s what makes that story so compelling.

I’m not sure I can pick a favorite, but I think Kai Mason was the potential love interest I enjoyed writing the most. There’s so much variability in how things can go, and their story ties directly into the interaction between the union and the budding airplane industry. Every time I wrote a section with Mason, I got to delve into real-life union history, enjoy creating the variable alternate histories, and spend time with a character that I genuinely enjoyed spending time with.

Folks from the wider fandom and literary world may know you as being part of SFWA leadership and from seeing you at sci-fi centered cons—tell me a little about that.

I’m currently Vice President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, and I’ve been a volunteer with the organization for many years. I’m a big fan of how SFWA helps authors at all levels of their careers and I’m a huge advocate for its work in the game writing space. Anyone looking at getting into writing would do well to check out their Constellation series of virtual weekend mini-conventions or their big virtual conference, the Quasars, which is held in the fall. Also, the Nebulas Conference is fully hybrid and has a huge virtual offering, so it’s definitely worth a look even if you can’t get to Chicago in June.

I go to several cons each year. The writer-focused ones I typically go to are The Nebula Conference and 4th Street Fantasy, which is in Minnesota where I live. I also sometimes panel at the Gencon Writers Symposium, but I’m missing this year. I’ll be at World Fantasy Con for the first time this year and ConFusion early next year. I’m a huge fan of panels and have had all kinds of good conversations with other authors. If you ever see me at a conference, please do not hesitate to give me a high five. If I have time to stop and chat, I definitely will.

What are you working on next?

I’m currently writing short stories while I brainstorm some ideas for the next interactive fiction. Short stories let me experiment with different styles, settings, and characters. My short stories range from sword and sorcery to cyberpunk to cli-fi. It’s nice having a breather to write whatever I want when I wake up in the morning.

I had a blast writing Wizard Confidential and definitely want to dive into another big project, but also writing one of these things is a huge commitment. I need to make sure I have an idea that’s going to keep me interested for the next year at least. Fortunately, I don’t have a problem coming up with such ideas. The problem right now is picking which one to write next.

Even though the platform has been stable for a couple of months, it has shown gaps as I work on stories and extended use cases.

One of those use cases was inspired by an intfiction.org thread which asked about multi-user play where two or more people could play a game together, including sharing the command line.

So I started working on a multi-user version of the browser client for Sharpee. I actually had it working, but it was flakey. Claude implemented the design (and I allowed for it) using Web Sockets. As a side note, this actually exposed a pretty bad gap with SAVE/RESTORE which had to get repaired.

Anyway, the web socket implementation was just not working as expected and I designed a true client-server version using my old fyrevm channel-io concepts. However, this wasn't a smooth transition from the existing text-service package and I made the decision to completely replace text-service with a new channel-service.

This was a major change to the platform and required reworking the event processor, sound, and how text is constructed for output. Initially the channel service was working, but there were still things dependent on the text-service, so I had to make two more passes to remove text-service entirely.

Then I had some ideas about my mystery story The Alderman about eavesdropping and that exposed more missing pieces from channel-service. That work is now complete and channel-service controls all client emissions.

I also made the decision to drop the current interpreter+game file design called Zifmia and will use that name for the new multi-user browser implementation. The interpreter will just be Sharpee Interpreter.

The channel-service works exactly like fyrevm's version including allowing authors the ability to create dynamic channels with their own defined content and content type (text, number, json).

Any Sharpee client can implement the full set of channels or ignore things like sound and images.

The opening turn in Dungeon shows its channel manifest:

And the channel output...

One thing that I'd ignored throughout the development of Sharpee were text-decorations. That is now also implemented so authors can use every text styling available in a browser (works in a terminal window too).

"What is the first computer game that you played?" One of those social forum threads which is really about reader demographics rather than games. Still, I tried to remember.

No, my answer wasn't Adventure. I played Adventure in '79 or so -- but before that, I probably ran into Oregon Trail or Lemonade Stand or one of those other BASIC games on a school PET machine. And I definitely played one of the Star Trek variants on a neighbor's Apple 2 (not a II+, this was way early).

But there's also a game that I played at the Ontario Science Center in... man, I really don't remember when. Certainly 1980 or earlier. It might have been before or after my initiation into Adventure.

I will describe the game. You tried to contain a firest fire. The game was built in an arcade-like cabinet, but it was not a commercial arcade game. You had a graphical map of a forest, done in colored ASCII art. You had a cursor controlled by d-pad-style buttons. There was an info display showing wind speed and direction.

A fire got started. (One red square!) You had to control the spread. Your tools were water-bombs -- very limited supply -- and setting back-fires. Maybe you could drop firefighters as well; I don't remember.

I do remember that if you were fast and lucky, you could bang the cursor over to the initial spark and water-bomb it before it spread. That was the ideal outcome. Otherwise, things got out of control real fast. I didn't grasp the scenario well enough to use backfires effectively, but I understood the cheese-it solution.

Come to think of it, I must have played Apple 2 games by then. Because I was clueful enough to recognize that it was not running on an Apple; the Apple couldn't do color-blocks mixed with text like that.

I'll dispense with the tension up front: this game has been identified. Not found -- it's unlikely that the original version survives anywhere. But someone recalls it:

I am replying to a 13-year-old message, I know, I know, but still, for the record:

The game in question was built to the extent of two or possibly three machines. They used an S-100 computer, likely using a Z80, and a custom graphics display that had originally been designed to run the TTC's Downsview control room. They were placed in a custom cabinet using OSC's unique push-buttons (remember the red rubbery tops?) The game used a cellular automata, like Conway's Life, to model the spread of the fire.

The machines stayed with the OSC for years and one of them was taken on the road with their show that visited schools. The last I heard is that one of them ended up in the Firefighting Museum in Sault, but I have never heard back from them.

So no, it's not the DOS game, it was all custom and actually pre-dates DOS.

-- maurymarkowitz, reddit thread, 3 Feb 2023

There's no name for the game; it might not have had a name. I don't think it had a splash screen or anything like that. But that was definitely it.

As the thread notes, there was a later DOS game called Fire Fighter (Eben Sprinsock, 1985) which was similar. Possibly close enough to have been directly inspired by the Toronto original? You can play the DOS game at Archive.org.

Interestingly, the DOS game is turn-based but the original was definitely real-time. Or at least real-ish time.

maurymarkowitz continues:

Found my notes, such as they are:

The company was called United Technologies International, or UTI. Bunch of former UofWaterloo people most of whom ended up in the GTA or Ottawa (back when that was a big tech hub!). Their first machine used three 8080, one for a CPU, another for a disk controller, and a third for the graphics.

The two game machines were built in 78 or 79. They used a single 8080 running CP/M, but I suspect there might have been a second for the graphics even though it had only one display. When I first saw them they were side-by-side in the Communications area where the PDP-11 used to be. Many years later (late 80s I think) I saw one had been moved upstairs into the Natural Resources area which was open and looked down into comms, but no one ever went there so that one was always free to use.

At least one was still operational as late as 1998 mounted in the van they took to the schools. The guy that ran the outreach thinks its last public showing might have been at the CNE that year. He thinks the machine itself was around until 2000 when the shut down the outreach program. That's the one they thought ended up in the Sault. But it turns out I did contact them in the Sault and they say they never had it.

So I guess they're in a landfill somewhere. Probably beside Science North's PDP-1! :-(

-- maurymarkowitz, reddit thread, 4 Feb 2023

There's a couple of other forum threads which turn up the same information. (Because the same guy googled them, just like I'm doing now.) This post from Livejournal remembered more of the gameplay:

For example, maybe you took a bulldozer icon and cleared out some trees to make a firebreak, maybe you started a fire to burn out an area so that when the "real" forest fire got to that point, it had nothing to burn, or you sent in planes to drop water on parts of the fire, or you dropped smokejumpers, just had ordinary firetrucks, or whatever.

-- planettom, toronto.livejournal.com

(Same thread is linked from this post on forums.atariage.com.)

And... that's all the information there is. I have not located any photos or original records. Thanks to maurymarkowitz for collecting what we've got.

So why am I posting this?

First, to collect information in one place. Livejournal is not a reliable platform. Reddit probably isn't going to shrivel up and evaporate, but can we really be sure? At least this way the info is on two web sites with a history of sticking around.

Second, because the Ontario Science Center closed two years ago. I had no idea.

On June 21, 2024, the Ministry of Infrastructure announced the closure of the Ontario Science Centre to visitors, due to the building’s deteriorating infrastructure, including the potential for roof failure due to snow load as early as this winter.

We understand this building holds many memories.

For 55 years, the Ontario Science Centre has been a beloved landmark in our province. Our building itself has been a cherished space for generations of visitors, sparking wonder and curiosity about science and the world around us, every day. It's been the site of first jobs, first field trips, and countless "aha" moments. The memories made within these walls are truly special.

While we are no longer able to welcome visitors at our current location, we will continue to deliver innovative science experiences virtually, through pop-up experiences and in an interim facility, as we plan for our new permanent home at Ontario Place. We will share more details shortly.

My memories of the place go beyond that one videogame. The building was iconically 70s-futuristic -- a space-age outpost sprawling down a forested ravine in the heart of the Toronto. My mental imagery of The Future comes straight from the Ontario Science Center... and Ontario Place, speaking of which.

I revisited the museum in college, and then again in 2015. The game was long gone but I remembered some of the other exhibits. It was still a magical place.

In 2022, I heard that the sky-bridge between the museum buildings was in bad repair and had to be closed. See also this timeline.

At the time, people were speculating that the whole museum had been starved of maintenance funds so that Rob Ford could shut it down and replace it with luxury condos. Or maybe it was Doug Ford. Forces of evil, anyhow.

The report about the roof has been disputed. The replacement building at Ontario Place remains a fantasy, although the museum now has a pop-up exhibit space on the waterfront.

I have another whole set of memories around the 1970s playground at Ontario Place. That's another post, though.

Ontario Place turned up as an abandoned Illyrian city on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. That was weird.

A couple of months ago I referred to a quote from Infocom's internal ZIL manual:

That post was about the social context in which Steve Meretzky wrote those words. So I didn't get into what the ZIL tokens meant.

But this week the question came up on the Visible Zorker Discord. Let's get technical!

(This post is also available on my Patreon.)

What kind of tokens are we talking about? The manual again:

There are several tokens which can appear in parentheses within a syntax definition: HAVE, TAKE, MANY, EVERYWHERE, ADJACENT, HELD, CARRIED, ON-GROUND, and IN-ROOM. This parenthetical list appears after either or both OBJECTs:

<SYNTAX
  GIVE
    OBJECT (HAVE)
  TO
    OBJECT (ON-GROUND IN-ROOM)
  = V-GIVE>

(I've spaced out the <SYNTAX> line for clarity.)

This example defines a grammar line: GIVE ___ TO ___. The V-GIVE routine will handle the action. The parenthesized tokens define some behavior for the two object slots. The parser will use this information when searching the world for objects to match the player's command.

(Note: The manual dates from 1989. EVERYWHERE and ADJACENT were added with the "new" V6 parser used in Zork Zero, etc. I'm still dealing with the early games, so I'll skip EVERYWHERE and ADJACENT in this post.)

So how to figure out what ON-GROUND and IN-ROOM mean? Look at the parser code, right? Here we run into our first problem: the parser code and the syntax definitions use different names.

Here's a set of definitions from Zork 1:

<CONSTANT SH 128>
<CONSTANT SC 64>
<CONSTANT SIR 32>
<CONSTANT SOG 16>
<CONSTANT STAKE 8>
<CONSTANT SMANY 4>
<CONSTANT SHAVE 2>

The initial S is ZIL convention for constants (perhaps "static"), followed by abbreviations. SOG is ON-GROUND, for example. Annoyingly, SH must be HELD rather than HAVE!

By the way, note Infocom's preference for numbering from the high bit down. Clearly HELD was defined first. SHAVE needed more letters because SH was already taken. And they haven't used the low bit at all (yet). You see the same thing with attribute flags and property numbers; all games start with the high value, but not all make it down to zero.

It would be smart to verify our understanding in, as it were, real life. Let's look at the GIVE TO grammar line in Zork 1. Turns out the manual example was simplified. Here's the real definition:

<SYNTAX
  GIVE
    OBJECT (MANY HELD HAVE)
  TO
    OBJECT (FIND ACTORBIT) (ON-GROUND)
  = V-GIVE PRE-GIVE>

Messier... We have both an action routine (V-GIVE) and a preaction routine (PRE-GIVE). The preaction routine checks prerequisites before the start of action handling proper.

We also have a different kind of object flag: (FIND ACTORBIT). This is well-explained in the manual. If the player omits the second object (by typing GIVE SANDWICH), the parser will try to fill in the blank by looking for an object in the room with the ACTORBIT attribute. That is to say, an NPC. If there's exactly one, great! If there's two or more, ask for disambiguation.

But back to the ON-GROUND stuff. We can rip apart the compiled game file to look at the grammar table. (I use the txd tool for this.) The grammar line is eight bytes:

[02 00 ff 00 1e 86 10 3f] "give OBJ to OBJ"

I'll spare you the full decoding. (See Michael Ko's document for that.) The relevant bytes are $86 for the first object (MANY HELD HAVE) and $10 for the second (ON-GROUND). Do those bits match up with the definitions above? Yes! Whew.

Let me rewrite the table, showing both the SYNTAX names and the CONSTANT labels:

HELD       SH     128  ($80)
CARRIED    SC      64  ($40)
IN-ROOM    SIR     32  ($20)
ON-GROUND  SOG     16  ($10)
TAKE       STAKE    8  ($08)
MANY       SMANY    4  ($04)
HAVE       SHAVE    2  ($02)
    (unused)        1  ($01)

Armed with this knowledge, we can dig into the mysterious tokens.

TAKE and HAVE aren't that mysterious. The manual tells us that TAKE means that we will try to automatically take a (portable) object before the action begins. HAVE means the object must be in the player's inventory for the action to succeed.

You'd think these would always go together. Not always! For example, the READ action has the TAKE flag but not HAVE. You'd prefer to be holding a book in order to read it, but a plaque bolted to the wall is still readable.

Conversely, the DROP action has the HAVE flag but not TAKE. You can only drop something you're holding, but it would be peculiar to auto-take something in order to drop it.

The rules point up some interesting corner cases. The EAT action has TAKE, but the DRINK action does not. Why? Because drinkables are liquids, and taking liquids always has special rules -- if it's possible at all. You should be able DRINK from a stream, or at least try, without executing TAKE WATER behind the scenes.

(Mind you, the rules aren't always clear. In Zork 1, lots of actions have TAKE, but only a few have both TAKE and HAVE. Looks like BURN, LIGHT, EXTINGUISH, and WAVE. Why those?)

Okay, let's get to the mysterious tokens.

SH, SC, SOG, and SIR are used in exactly one place in the parser code. It's this stanza:

<COND (,LIT
  <FCLEAR ,PLAYER ,TRANSBIT>
  <DO-SL ,HERE ,SOG ,SIR>
  <FSET ,PLAYER ,TRANSBIT>)>
<DO-SL ,PLAYER ,SH ,SC>)>

Notice that they are used in pairs: SH with SC, SOG with SIR. That's how they're handed off to the DO-SL routine, which is quite short. Feel free to look at it, but here's the gist:

DO-SL takes a container and two bit flags. If the slot has the first flag, we'll check the container's immediate children. If the slot has the second flag, we'll check the container's indirect descendants (those at the second level or below). If the slot has both flags, we therefore wind up checking all of the container's descendants, at every level. (There's a special case for this but it's just a shortcut.)

That may seem rather abstract, but think about how it works with the stanza above. The line <DO-SL ,PLAYER ,SH ,SC> simply means: Check the player's inventory. A SH (HELD) slot will match anything the player is directly holding. A SC (CARRIED) slot will match anything the player is carrying in a container. If a slot has both tokens (which is by far the common case), any object anywhere in the player's inventory will match.

The line <DO-SL ,HERE ,SOG ,SIR> does exactly the same thing, but checking the room contents, with the SOG (ON-GROUND) and SIR (IN-ROOM) flags. The first means directly on the ground; the second means things in containers in the room; both flags together mean anywhere in the room. Except for the player's inventory! We briefly set the player non-transparent, so this line doesn't search inside the player. That keeps the HERE search from getting mixed up with the previous PLAYER search.

Again, most verbs pair ON-GROUND with IN-ROOM. (It's odd for an action to apply to only things in containers.)

Oh, and the room search only runs if the location is LIT. Zork convention is that dropped objects are inaccessible in pitch darkness. You can manipulate your inventory in the dark, like a good spelunker should -- but only your inventory.

Well, now that we've dug through the details, it seems straightforward. Why did Meretzky say it was confusing?

Turns out I skipped over one tricky detail. The SH, SC, SOG, SIR tokens are suggestions, not requirements.

HAVE is a requirement. Some actions can only be done when you're carrying a thing; they need to fail when you're not. But HELD (SH) and company only come into play for disambiguation.

Let's go back to that original manual example:

<SYNTAX
  GIVE
    OBJECT (MANY HELD HAVE)
  TO
    OBJECT (FIND ACTORBIT) (ON-GROUND)
  = V-GIVE PRE-GIVE>

If you're carrying the lunch, you can type GIVE LUNCH TO TROLL -- that's fine. (The troll eats it.)

But you can equally well type GIVE TROLL TO LUNCH. That fails the HAVE test ("You're not carrying the troll") -- but before that point, it skims right by the HELD token for the troll and the ON-GROUND token for the lunch. Like I said, just suggestions.

Say you were carrying a spicy meatball and also a spicy pepper in a glass jar and there was a spicy burrito on the floor. Then the command GIVE SPICY TO TROLL would have three options. The HELD token would cause it to prefer the meatball, because you're holding it directly.

Similarly, in Deadline, GIVE HERRING TO WOMAN would prefer Mrs Rouke (standing in the room) to Ms Dunbar (sitting on the couch, and therefore not ON-GROUND).

Again, it's common for these tokens to appear in pairs. Zork 1 has the syntax

<SYNTAX LUBRICATE OBJECT WITH OBJECT (HELD CARRIED) = V-OIL>

So LUBRICATE HINGES WITH GREASY would prefer a greasy object anywhere in your inventory to one lying on the ground.

(Of course Zork doesn't have even one greasy object. That command is for the benefit of people trying a trick that worked in Colossal Cave!)

But look at this one:

<SYNTAX TALK TO OBJECT (FIND ACTORBIT) (IN-ROOM) = V-TELL>

This doesn't have the ON-GROUND token. So TALK TO WOMAN would disambiguate to a female NPC sitting on the couch, rather than one standing in the room. Why on earth would you want that behavior?

The answer is, you wouldn't! But this situation can't happen in Zork; the three NPCs never enter containers. So the mistake isn't noticeable. In fact the NPCs in Deadline don't sit on the furniture either, so it never comes up there either. (My example with Rourke and Dunbar was fake, sorry.)

Similarly:

<SYNTAX PUT ON OBJECT (IN-ROOM ON-GROUND CARRIED MANY) = V-WEAR>

This lacks HELD, so it prefers items you're carrying in containers to items you're holding directly. This is ridiculous. PUT ON HAT should not prefer the hat in your backpack to the hat in your hand.

The problem is, demonstrating these bugs is hard. You need to find two objects with a synonym in common, put one of them in a container, and then try a particular verb.

Here's a demonstration. Remember that all treasures in Zork, including the PAINTING, can be referred to as TREASURE...

See? Picking the egg over the painting is silly! But of course the command PUT ON TREASURE was silly to begin with. I guarantee that nobody at Infocom ever tested it. You need to spend a week staring at the parser logic to know how to even set this experiment up.

To perform the parallel experiment for ON-GROUND/IN-ROOM, drop both the sack and the painting and type TALK TO TREASURE.

The upshot is that if you're building a <SYNTAX> line with ON-GROUND and IN-ROOM, getting it wrong almost doesn't matter. You'll never get any feedback that you should have used the other one (or both). Thus, confusing. It's a detail which is almost impossible to learn.

The difference between HELD and CARRIED is a bit clearer, because inventory containers are common and you don't want to screw up the affordances of the DROP action. But the DROP syntax is the same in every game; they copied those basic verbs around. Most Infocom folks probably never needed to know why DROP is written the way it is.

In conclusion...

Nah, I'm not building up to a grand thesis here. I'm pointing out the ways that a design system can be opaque, even to the people who invented it.

I guess the lesson is that ZIL should have provided a simpler set of options for common use. Maybe define HELD and IN-ROOM for most verbs, and then fancier terms (HELD-DIRECT vs HELD-INDIRECT, IN-ROOM-DIRECT vs IN-ROOM-INDIRECT) for the few cases that really required them. If there were any.

Also, more regression tests. Create a "game" with a playground of objects, containers, and NPCs; run through every combination of actions and objects and containment setups. Or at least enough combinations to exercise every possible parsing outcome, plus all the weird experiments above.

As far as I know, ZIL never had this testing setup. Neither did the hobbyist IF systems of the 1990s. Inform 7 has a very large suite of unit tests, but I don't know if they're written to exercise the parser as distinct from the I7 compiler.

Future goals? Maybe.

The common thread this time is "the id". I don't mean the games are horny; they're not. (Although PSI has "flirt" dialogue options.) I mean somebody wanted a specific thing and made a game that catered to it. You want a style of puzzle that videogames don't do much, or you want a building-climber with zero risk of falling, or you want 3000 books piled on the floor. Here you go.

• Puzzle Spy International
• Murder at the Birch Tree Theater
• Gecko Gods
• Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!
• Legacy of Kain: Defiance: Remastered

Puzzle Spy International

• by Travel-Friendly Cake -- game site

A short puzzler made up of Hunt-style puzzles. That is to say: basically paper-and-pencil puzzles where you get a lot of clues and maybe a grid and no immediate idea what to do with it all. But when you start putting pieces together, a pattern emerges, and then a final solution. Neat! This form is very familiar to me as a Boston resident; in fact, some of my friends are off doing a BAPHL as I write this. (I skipped it for Open Studios.) However, the form is not common at all in videogames. I hope this becomes more of a trend.

PSI (yes, the letter "Ψ" is their logo) is short and on the easy side. Hints are available to make it even easier. That's fine! It's a pleasant day's spy-themed entertainment. With just a hint of dating sim for flavor, if you're into that.

Murder at the Birch Tree Theater

• by Crucible Juice -- game site

Golden-Idol-alike set in a cursed community theater. "Cursed" because people keep dying! Totally by accident! Deduce the details of ten (or more) deaths, from 1975 through 1995, and figure out who's really behind it all.

(That's not actually a mystery -- one character is consistently a sociopathic jackass in every scene, although he's not the only one. Maybe I should say "jack-dog"; the characters are all rendered as anthro animal cartoons. Jackhound? Hm.)

Birch Tree Theater is a good playable example of its genre. It's fun to see the theater and its dramatis personae through the decades. The shows are mostly musical theater, which gives the author scope for innumerable furry-musical puns and filks. You don't have to be a fan of musicals to get them. Well, you probably have to be a fan to get all of them, but I caught "Alan Minken" so I figure I'm doing pretty well.

Gecko Gods

• by Inresin -- game site

A nonviolent(*) open-world puzzle adventure in a tropical archipelago. These sorts of adventures always involve climbing charismatic megastructures, which I love. Normally the climbing is part of the puzzle. In this one, you're a gecko! You can climb literally anything! You can dance on the ceiling! Falling doesn't hurt because you're so small! Perfect.

(* Almost nonviolent. Sometimes you have to beat up some hostile beetle-pots. They can't hurt you much though.)

Notionally, you're trying to solve puzzles to light up statues and stuff to bring back the Gecko Gods. In fact you're there to smash pots and eat tasty bugs. Puzzles are just a way to keep score.

...Okay, I'm kidding. The puzzles are quite good. Not brain-crushing hard, but a good variety of levers (which you can grab with your tiny gecko mouth), wires to connect up, balls to push onto plates (with your tiny gecko head), and so on. There's a few slider puzzles but they're not too painful. And of course lots of disorienting three-dimensional architecture to crawl around, including on the ceiling.

Eating bugs is still the best part. I have no idea how, but your tiny gecko viewpoint somehow invites you to be distracted by every tasty bug you see. Even though snacking down provides no bonus whatsoever. Other than an achievement for eating one of every species -- but you can't eat just one bug! C'mon. This is master-level embodiment work.

I haven't finished this; I think I'm working on my third island of five. It's a pretty large-scale game, and not just in comparison to your tiny gecko self. Will finish though.

EDIT-ADD: Did not in fact finish. The game ends with a timed race which is kinda bullshit. I watched it on youtube.

Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!

• by ArtRising -- game site

Some games have a convoluted design history, full of pivots and agonizing "find the fun" focus sessions. Other games, you can tell, had a one-line design process: "Oh my god what if you were in a giant messy room full of books and you had to shelve them all?!" Sold. Write it and ship it.

Seriously, click through that game link and look at the screenshot. If you don't immediately Get It, you're not the target audience.

I'm afraid Arcane Library doesn't entirely fulfil its promise. At root it's an incremental game. You start out picking up books one at a time; then you begin to acquire magic to make the job go faster. The problem is that this wheel turns about one-and-a-half times and then jams.

I say "incremental" but really these games trade on the exponential, right? Every phase is supposed to go ten times faster than the last, until you're blasting through paper clips or potatoes or whatever in planetary-sized gulps. Here, your fifth shelf of books goes a lot faster than your first; your tenth shelf goes somewhat faster than your fifth; after than you're kind of in a rut.

I think if the game had more varieties of spells, with more interesting interactions, it would have held together. Maybe 40000 shelves instead of 400? With a rank of spells that operated on a whole new level -- shelves instead of books? Or a lot more secrets. (There are four locked chests but no surprises beyond that.) As it is, I decided I'd had enough after an hour or so.

Footnote: A friend insists that you're supposed to play without using the spells at all. Just put away 3000 books, by hand, one at a time. If that's your kink, have I got a game for you.

Legacy of Kain: Defiance: Remastered

• by Crystal Dynamics -- game site

I played this in 2003 and reviewed it with the faintest of praise. My entire 2003 commentary:

An acceptable followup to the first two Soul Reaver games, but not inspired. The paradox story elements from SR2 are abandoned completely -- not that they were all that strong to begin with, but I was hoping that the conclusion would be more interesting. The major story revelations are all either murky or implausible. I still want more games set in this universe, but they need to start over with better writers.

If I had known that the next Nosgoth game would take 23 years to ship, I might have been kinder!

Historic note: A followup game called Dead Sun was planned in 2010 with Sam Barlow at the helm. It was cancelled in 2013, freeing Barlow to go off and write much more interesting games. (And yet we mourn.) Some remnant of Dead Sun was spun off into a multiplayer battler called Nosgoth, which never got out of beta.

So what's it like to come back to a twenty-year-old game that I never planned to replay? I sure didn't remember much of it.

You alternate playing Kain and Raziel, recrossing the same territory in different time periods, until they converge at the end for a final beat-down with the Elder God. That's about all I remembered. That's about all there is to remember.

Oh, there's plenty of story. You cross paths with the regulars: Moebius and Vorador, Ariel and Janos Audron. You even have a run-in with Mortanius, who hasn't been on-stage since Kain corked him in the original Blood Omen. (Time travel: a scriptwriter's gift to cameos.)

It's just, you know, lots of revelations and people sneering at each other. We get more history of the Elder Race vs the Hylden, but as usual, the Hylden are boring. The Hylden Lord escapes at the end, which is either sequel-bait or a reverse-setup for Blood Omen 2 -- I'd completely forgotten him.

Any given exchange is a pleasure to listen to! The voice actors are having a blast. (Check the making-of bonus videos.) But when I try to lay out what happens, I get: "The writers put Kain and Raziel through their paces." No wonder they get so antsy about free will.

I had fun. There's plenty of puzzle-shrines and puzzle-tombs and puzzle-courtyards to keep you busy. The environmental puzzles are the heart of these games; Defiance provides them in top form. As a bonus, most of these maps are polymorphic. Kain and Raziel run through the same areas -- from different starting points, using different abilities, solving different puzzles, breaking or fixing architecture in ways that will be reflected in each others' time periods. It's a genuinely impressive design stunt.

On the down side, this is all paced out with endless hallway fights. Fights, fights, fights. They just don't vary that much, as Kain or as Raziel. You beat on mooks until they bleed and then suck them dry, blood- or soul-wise. Bosses: dodge first, then pound.

The one exception is Turel, the boss-vampire cut from the first Soul Reaver script. You finally get to take him out -- and his fight is a stylistic gesture back to the environmental puzzle-fights of that earlier game. A good bit. Otherwise, it's all a bit of a slog. Or a bit of a sluagh. (Sorry.)

"Zarf, you Nosgoth fanboy, you protest way the heck too much." You bet your tattery blue ass I'm a fanboy. I love the whole ridiculous setting. Raziel is one of my household gods. (Limited-edition 18" figurine guarding my book collection.) When Ascendance and this remaster came out, I grabbed both and played right through.

What I love about the world of Nosgoth is that it's big, underexplained, and trails off in a thousand weird directions. It's exactly the kind of setting that doesn't benefit from having all its cracks filled in and smoothed out. Vorador forged the original Reaver blade? No, argh! This is exactly why Sam Barlow's mission was to start fresh with new characters and a new era.

That said, I will give Defiance its due: it wraps up Raziel's story on a hell of a high note. (Spoilers:) It effectively recasts the entire Kain-and-Raziel arc as a twisted vampire love story. Seriously, Raziel dies in Kain's arms swearing eternal fidelity. Not a dry eye in the house, albeit probably tears of blood.

Okay, yes, Kain has spent the last 1500 years of linear history being an unsurmountable and utter dick to Raziel. For plot reasons. Still -- OTP forever. Go them.