Style | StandardCards

Planet Interactive Fiction

Sunday, 12. October 2025

Renga in Blue

Leopard Lord (1983)

Bedrooms all over the country were becoming overwhelmed by battered boxes of early computer equipment, bought under the dubious auspices of “helping with our homework” before being turned over full-time to the more pressing task of completing 3D Monster Maze before morning registration. — Bob Fischer Upon the release of the ZX80 and ZX81 computers, […]

Great Yarmouth, by the sea.

Bedrooms all over the country were becoming overwhelmed by battered boxes of early computer equipment, bought under the dubious auspices of “helping with our homework” before being turned over full-time to the more pressing task of completing 3D Monster Maze before morning registration.

Bob Fischer

Upon the release of the ZX80 and ZX81 computers, in addition to software, companies popped up to provide hardware. The two obvious gaps to fill were memory (1K in the original) and the keyboard (called “one of the worst keyboards ever”).

dk’tronics was started out of David Heeley’s bedroom “just prior to the launch of the ZX81” based on his “interest in electronics” with a 16k memory expansion; when the ZX81 came out he went full-time, still using his house as his base of operations through 1981:

The business was all mail-order then but I was getting a very good response. I had to do everything myself — manufacturing, packaging, selling and posting — and I was working in my bedroom, my garage, my shed.

He had four employees (and had moved out of his house) by the end of the year, with their keyboard being one of their best-known products.

Heeley in 1984. Source.

They got into software as well at the same time (before eventually falling back entirely on hardware once the market started to get flooded), with some of their early work by none other than Jeff Minter, who eventually became famous enough to have a modern collection based on his company, Llamasoft. The dk’tronics work came before Llamasoft. As Minter notes in an interview:

The first machine I actually owned was the ZX80, and in fact I did a few pre-Llamasoft games for the ZX80/ZX81 for an outfit called dk’tronics in the U.K. However, they treated me spectacularly badly, and so the founding of Llamasoft coincided with my getting my hands on the VIC. Games were just something I did in my spare time before that.

It’s worth watching a little of his game Space Invaders, as it sets up a point of history I’m about to make.

The invaders look hi-res compared to regular ZX81 games. That’s because the game is using custom hardware: specifically, the dk’tronics graphics rom, which changes the character display to show game sprites as “text”. (In other words, the mechanism that might normally display the letter R is modified to show part of a spaceship.)

From a May 1982 dk’tronics ad in Your Computer.

All that setup helps explain the existence of the company Kayde Electronics, another ZX81 hardware manufacturer. In addition to a keyboard and memory packs, Kayde also sold a graphics rom almost exactly identical to the one from dk’tronics. It only has one bank changed (modified to make Pac-man graphics). Both companies were even situated in the same city. It’s unclear if the graphics rom was under license or if they ripped dk’tronics off. (It’s not even an approximation, they’re exactly the same sprites. Given the documentation that came with the dk’tronics edition it would be easy to make a copy.)

Another data point to add is the game The Valley. This was a type-in RPG printed in Computing Today, April 1982; the very same issue had a version you could buy from ASP Ltd. The CRPGAddict played it back in 2014, noting everything was an enterprise of Argus Press.

Kayde started publishing it themselves…

…and it was essentially identical to the type-in (see El Explorador de RPG for more on this). Kayde eventually changed the game’s name to “The Swamp”, likely because of it being blatantly stolen.

All these shenanigans might be part of the reason why the company went into receivership in 1983 (a year after its founding) and disappeared entirely shortly after; during 1983 they put out a series of five text adventures (maybe six or seven) hence the company’s appearance here. Based on the inlay for one of the company’s other games, I think the order goes

1. Leopard Lord
2. Terror from the Deep
3. Ace in the H.O.L.E.
4. Horror Atoll
5. Arcane Quest
6. The Roundsby Incident
7. Picnic Adventure

where 6 may not exist (despite having cover art in ads) and 7 probably doesn’t exist (it was advertised with “temp” art). At the very least, all we have access to are games 1-5.

Leopard Lord is the first in a new range of adventure games from Kayde which all have been written by a science fiction writer.

The statement above is from the tape’s inlay, although no specific credit is given so it is unclear if “science fiction writer” refers to someone who published a short story once, or a teenager with a zine, or something more respectable. Based on the text of the introduction I think something from the first two categories is more likely, although from the company’s other behavior I can’t discount a.) a real author made an off-hand comment which was used as the author “writing the game” b.) the content was stolen from elsewhere and/or c.) the ad copy was simply lying.

The introduction drips “AD&D dungeon master” to me so I decided to drag the microphone out and do something I hadn’t done in a while: a dramatic reading!

You are Prollen the Mercenary.

The people of or Yarm have offered you 1000 gold coins if you will rid them of Fordel, the evil wizard.

Fordel is the leader of a vicious clan. He is known as the elite Leopard Lord. He is totally evil and will let nothing stand in the path of his ultimate ambition, to control the world, by bringing forth a demon from the nether pits.

At first you are reluctant to help.

The reward is raised to 1500 gold coins, a veritable king’s ransom, but still you hesitate.

Then you find that Fordel is holding your friend, Braneth, somewhere in the hall of the elite Leopard Lord.

Fordel will use Braneth’s heart torn from his living body to summon the demon.

The ceremony is to take place tonight.

With all this wind-up pointing to a hack job I had a bit of dread going in, but oddly, I enjoyed myself. This follows my general mantra that a simplistic parser works out as long as the actions demanded of the player also stay simple. It certainly helped I did my “verb list search”, so I didn’t have to struggle later:

CLIMB, READ, BREAK, OPEN, KILL, LIGHT, THROW, SEARCH, GIVE, EXAMINE, INSERT

SEARCH and EXAMINE in particular set off my warning bells. If you go north from the forest in the start you’re in, er, more forest, but there’s also a HEDGEROW. I did SEARCH and found a BLUE KEY…

…but before moving on, I restarted and went and tried EXAMINE instead, informing me that I see nothing special. That means SEARCH and EXAMINE are treated differently, which can be a very nasty trick with this kind of reduced parser (where, intuitively, it doesn’t seem like verbs should have any subtlety).

To the east of the hedgerow is a leopard and the game’s first combat. The game clearly has D&D in mind (later there’s a water weird, which is D&D-only) but there’s no obvious puzzle here, just the command KILL LEOPARD.

What seems to be going on behind the scenes is that the game is checking if you are holding a set of particular objects; if you are, you win the battle, otherwise you die. The game starts you with a SWORD, DAGGER, and TINDERBOX. If you drop the SWORD before the combat, you still win. If you drop the DAGGER, you still win. If you drop the SWORD and the DAGGER, you lose.

IT KILLS YOU
YOU HAVE FAILED. TRY AGAIN YOU ARE OUR ONLY CHANCE

In some cases the game is looking for a specific item, in others it seems to be simply looking for a combination. Because there’s no description when you win — every weapon is used “passively” — I didn’t stop to diagram out the possibilities, although it did give me trouble later.

North of the leopard is the entrance; you use the blue key to open the door, and you can also find a torch hidden in the thicket. (There’s no command for lighting or unlighting; I assume the game has a flag somewhere that checks if you have the torch and tinderbox; I never found where it was and ended up dropping the two items later as the inventory limit is tight.)

Right at the entrance is a book which encourages you to check out the next game, Terror from the Deep (I wonder if this will be like the Scott Morgan games where each game references the next one.) Just north is a snake (the default sword & dagger still work) followed by a harpy guarding a box (ditto).

The box has a red key which gets used on a red door. It’s so helpful when the villains color-code everything.

There’s a “small room” with a sarcophagus where the passive check-your-weapons combat system comes into play. If you open the sarcophagus there’s a mummy, and trying to fight it kills you. The room also has writing that says

THIS COULD BE TRAGIC IF YOU DON’T USE MAGIC

which indicates the standard sword and dagger won’t work.

Two rooms away there’s a glowing axe :– holding it is sufficient to defeat the mummy. Defeating the mummy gets the player absolutely nothing. I think again we’ve got D&D influence creeping in, where a “side monster” is a perfectly good encounter to beef up to the next “level”, but because that infrastructure has been ripped out by being a Pure Adventure, the author wasn’t sure what to do so put the side encounter in anyway.

Mummy from the AD&D Monster Manual.

Around the same area there’s a trapdoor that leads down.

In this area, there’s a leopard guarding a pendant. (Again a wimp, funny for a game titled Leopard Lord that the leopards are the easy kills.) Along the same hall there’s a STATUE, where if you EXAMINE it (not SEARCH) you see a HOLE, and then can INSERT PENDANT to open a secret passage.

This would have been so much more irritating without the verb list. I already knew INSERT was going to apply somewhere.

The secret area has a TUNIC and MIRROR, both essential items for later.

Heading back up to the main floor, there’s a long hallway flanked on the south by a troll.

The troll is, like the mummy, completely optional. Even the GLOWING AXE doesn’t help here. I got a shield later and came back and managed to win.

Nearby there’s also a “room painted in red” where you can find a coin and rod in a cupboard (rod useless, coin helpful). Oddly, there’s a wall with a warning about not breaking it, but no puzzle: you’re simply supposed to obey the sign. There’s no way to survive breaking the wall and no secret obtained by doing so.

I guess this is meant as another D&D encounter-for-color, perhaps?

The north end of the hall has a chimney going up to the last part of the game.

North has a single guard, whereas south has two; you need to fight the guard to the north first and obtain the SHIELD there, then you can fight the guards to the south.

The cupboard has the green key needed for the green door that’s just right there. In a D&D campaign I could see it working to find the item to open the next door after a combat, but in adventure format it comes off as silly.

Past the guards to the south is “Fordel’s Private Quarters” where you can find a throwing axe. Heading north instead, there’s a pool with a water weird to one side (I never killed it, there may be no way) and a medusa on the other (strangely, the mirror is not needed at all).

Maybe the shield helped? I didn’t find it worth the time to check every single combat.

Further north is an “OLDMAN” who is peaceful. (KILL doesn’t even work to get yourself stabbed by the secret ancient kung-fu master or whatever.) Pulling out my verb list again…

CLIMB, READ, BREAK, OPEN, KILL, LIGHT, THROW, SEARCH, GIVE, EXAMINE, INSERT

…there’s no TALK command, and the only one that seems relevant then is GIVE. I went through my objects and decided COIN was the most likely gift.

The OLDMAN says: to win we need a MIRROR, AXE, and MIRROR. That is a typo and I eventually realized that ARMOUR (which we’ll pick up in a moment) is the real third item. The AXE here is not the glowing axe but the throwing axe back at Fordel’s bedroom.

Heading west, since we don’t have the armour yet, we just die:

We can instead go north past the OLDMAN, nearly get hit by an arrow…

I’d been assuming the TUNIC was helping in fights and keeping it in inventory. There’s no WEAR command and it may only be useful at this spot.

…and find the ARMOUR the OLDMAN didn’t speak of because the author didn’t bother to check for typos of essential information.

With the three items in hand, entering the ceremonial chamber is now safe, and we can THROW THROWING AXE to end the game in victory.

I realize, laid all out like that, this doesn’t sound like a good game at all. And to be honest, it isn’t! But I did find it weirdly playable and charming mainly because I didn’t get stuck that long; even the ARMOUR typo didn’t stop me for long because I logicked out that there’d be no reason to put the ARMOUR past a trap unless it got used somewhere. It felt like I had fallen into some teenager’s after-school D&D campaign and the minimalist setting didn’t bother me that much, because it was delivered with passion.

Mind you, no idea where the science-fiction writer mentioned in the ad copy comes into this. I half-suspected this may have been adopted off a real printed campaign, but I couldn’t find any good hits. There’s a Leopard Lord in the “Oriental Adventures” campaign Ochimo: The Spirit Warrior but that didn’t come out until 1987.

Part of the map of the 1987 campaign, from the Internet Archive.

However, I do have some D&D experts lurking the wings, so if someone has a suspicion they want to throw into the comments, feel free.


IFTF Blog

2026 IFTF Microgrant Applications Now Open!

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 ar

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!


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


The IFTF Microgrant program is back!

The IFTF Grant Admin Committee is pleased to announce that the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation’s microgrant program is returning (after a successful pilot last year). Do you have a project in the works that would benefit an interactive fiction community and could use a bit of funds to get it over the finish line? We would love to hear from you: applications for this year’s program are now

The IFTF Grant Admin Committee is pleased to announce that the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation’s microgrant program is returning (after a successful pilot last year). Do you have a project in the works that would benefit an interactive fiction community and could use a bit of funds to get it over the finish line? We would love to hear from you: applications for this year’s program are now open.

In our first year, we provided funding to support four great projects:

  • Improve accessibility features for Parchment on iOS (Dannii Willis)
  • An IF Workshop for writers in Indonesia (Felicity Banks)
  • Audiobook Documentation for Inform (Ryan Veeder)
  • Chronicling the history of annual IF awards (Brian Rushton)

As the list of last year’s awardees might suggest, 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 remains 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 October 31, 2024, and we except to announce accepted projects by January 31, 2025.

If you have any questions, please reach out to [email protected]. We can’t wait to see the ideas the community comes up with!


2023 Grant Report: “Accessible IF on iOS” (Dannii Willis)

Dannii Willis has been the main developer of the open source tool Parchment for a very long time (has it been 15 years already?). Parchment is a very cool interpreter for parser games, allowing anyone to play the games directly in the browser. Dannii applied in 2023 for an IFTF microgrant, asking the organization to cover the price of acquiring a used iOS device; this would allow him to test the Pa

Dannii Willis has been the main developer of the open source tool Parchment for a very long time (has it been 15 years already?). Parchment is a very cool interpreter for parser games, allowing anyone to play the games directly in the browser. Dannii applied in 2023 for an IFTF microgrant, asking the organization to cover the price of acquiring a used iOS device; this would allow him to test the Parchment interpreter on real hardware himself, which would lend itself to faster iterations. Dannii was also in particular very interested to test the compatibility of Parchment on iOS with UserVoice, and try to push the envelope around accessibility features for blind or low-vision players.

We just received his report, which has great detail on the project and the work he accomplished using the iOS device he was able to acquire with our support — work for Parchment, but also on other cool projects! Hope you enjoy reading this!


Thanks to the IFTF grant I was able to purchase a refurbished iPhone 13, which has allowed me to test and resolve some significant issues with Parchment.

First, some virtual keyboard improvements: mobile phones and tablets are commonly used via virtual keyboards. While on most websites these work smoothly, they pose a problem for an app like Parchment which wants to adjust itself to fit perfectly in the remaining visible screen space, so that the status window etc will still be visible. Unfortunately browsers don’t act the same way with their virtual keyboards, so keeping a consistent user interface for both iOS and Android is difficult. In late 2022 Chrome introduced a meta tag for specifying which behaviour an app wants. Firefox added support for it in 2024, but Safari still doesn’t support it. In addition, while Safari does support the VirtualViewport API, which allows you to be notified when the virtual keyboard is opened or closed, its resize events are quite delayed, up to 700ms, which feels very sluggish. With my iOS testing device I was able to find solutions for these problems, so that Parchment now has a very smooth and responsive interface on all browsers.

The next two projects haven’t been added to the stable version of Parchment yet, but have been shared for testing. As part of a major comprehensive update to Parchment, I have developed a new file system and dialog. Similarly to the general virtual keyboard updates, it needed a little bit of special care to get working in iOS. Second, I have finally added sound support to Parchment! The Glk API that Parchment is built upon supports three sound formats, AIFF, Ogg/Vorbis, and MOD. Unfortunately Chrome doesn’t support AIFF, and Safari doesn’t support Ogg/Vorbis! (None of them support MOD, though MOD files are also rarely used, so for now I’m not intending to support them in Parchment.) I have added a small audio decoding library into Parchment so that AIFF and Ogg/Vorbis can be supported in all browsers.

And I have also used the iOS device for a bonus project: Infocom Frotz! This isn’t part of Parchment, but seeing as I used my iOS test device to work on it, I’ll mention it too: this year I ported Frotz to the web, finally allowing Infocom’s multimedia (sound/graphics) games to be played online. Infocom’s version 6 of the Z-Machine was a big departure from its earlier versions, and so even today it is only supported by some Z-Machine interpreters. Its window model is not compatible with the Glk model that most interpreters now use, and so playing Infocom’s Z6 games has required a stand-alone Z-Machine interpreter rather than the multi-interpreters the community usually recommends (Gargoyle, Lectrote, Spatterlight, or Parchment). But just because the Z6 model doesn’t fit our modern Glk model doesn’t mean that interpreters like Frotz aren’t high quality. Frotz already has an SDL version, and Emscripten, which I’ve been using for years to port the Glk interpreters for Parchment, also supports SDL. So it didn’t take a lot of effort to build Frotz with Emscripten, thereby allowing the Z6 model to finally be supported on the web. It still needed some extra polishing, most notably that Emscripten’s version of SDL doesn’t support mobile virtual keyboards. But I have a lot of experience with that! And of course, there were more viewport issues in iOS.

The test iOS test device helped me accomplish a lot this year that I couldn’t have effectively tested otherwise. Even though the year is over I of course won’t be getting rid of the phone. So you can expect at least one more end of year report from me. Will Safari finally add support for the interactive-widget viewport meta tag? I can only hope so. See you then!


2023 Grant Report: “Teaching Indonesian Authors to Write Interactive Fiction” (Felicity Banks)

We wrap up this series of grant reports with this fourth and final blog post, on Felicity Banks’ project and how support from IFTF made her able to travel to Indonesia and spread the word about IF! Felicity is a long-time IF author who lives in Australia but has ties to Indonesia, having travelled there over half a dozen times and learned the main language, Bahasa Indonesia. She applied for a micr

We wrap up this series of grant reports with this fourth and final blog post, on Felicity Banks’ project and how support from IFTF made her able to travel to Indonesia and spread the word about IF!

Felicity is a long-time IF author who lives in Australia but has ties to Indonesia, having travelled there over half a dozen times and learned the main language, Bahasa Indonesia. She applied for a microgrant to travel there for the Ubud Writers’ and Readers’ Festival, the largest writing festival in South-East Asia), hoping to offer an IF workshop as part of the official program track. However, after the festival declined the proposal, Felicity instead shifted the project’s focus to connecting with authors in Ubud around the time of the festival and giving a series of workshops. (Oh, and go to cat cafés and monkey forests.)

This proved to be very successful, with Felicity teaching 7 small workshops (focusing on the use of tools such as Twine) involving 18 Indonesian-speaking authors! The workshops went very well, as told by Felicity:

“It is wonderful to see people’s faces light up as they see their words transformed into a game at the touch of a few buttons. They are extremely impressed that volunteers on the other side of the world care so much about inviting Indonesian people into the community.”

Following these workshops, Felicity sought to keep the momentum going - as part of her application, she proposed to stay in touch with participants for two years after the workshops, to follow their progress. A WhatsApp group was created with over a dozen of Indonesian authors joining, and everyone keeps in touch and remains engaged with IF. Felicity also ran, in late 2024/early 2025, a small friendly comp for her students, with small cash prizes for the three best interactive stories.

We love this project - despite the fact that Indonesian is spoken by 200-250 million people, we are not aware of a Indonesian-speaking IF scene, and we would love for one to spring to life! Felicity’s familiarities and ties with Indonesia have allowed her to become an ambassador for IF there, and plant the seed among the community of authors; we are very happy the microgrants program was able to help make it happen!

“This was an incredible journey and I met lots of wonderful writers. Thank you so much.” -Felicity Banks


Announcing the 2025 IFTF Grant Recipients

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the second round of IFTF microgrants, after a successful pilot in 2024. The grants program exists to disburse small-value grants to peer-reviewed projects that benefit a community of interactive fiction makers, players, researchers, or educators. An independent committee of Grant Advisors review each submission and provide recommendations for funding to

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the second round of IFTF microgrants, after a successful pilot in 2024.

The grants program exists to disburse small-value grants to peer-reviewed projects that benefit a community of interactive fiction makers, players, researchers, or educators. An independent committee of Grant Advisors review each submission and provide recommendations for funding to the Grants Committee, who this year have selected four projects to fund.

We saw great diversity again this year in the projects submitted, including a higher number of submissions compared to our pilot year. Thanks to everyone who submitted proposals! Here are the list of grant recipients for 2025.

Critical Essays On Interactive Fiction - Grace Benfell Grace is a co-editor of The Imaginary Engine Review, an online games criticism journal. Grace will receive $500 to commission three articles for the journal on significant interactive fictions written in the 2010s, exploring how these works continue the medium’s tradition of experimentation and introducing modern IF to a broader gaming audience.

No-code IF platform for web using Ink - Mark Davis Mark Davis is developing a web-based tool for interactive fiction builders that allows creators without coding experience to create interactive stories incorporating images and animations, using Ink scripts under the hood. Mark will receive $600 for hosting and branding assets for the in-development platform, crucial steps towards opening it up to outside testers on its road to launch.

Interactive Fiction Workshop for London Games Week - Katy Naylor Katy will receive $716 to host a series of IF writing workshops and Twine mini-jams at the 2025 London Games Festival Fringe, and present resultant works online in a special edition of voidspace zine. The workshops are aimed at people interested in games or interactive writing but who have not coded or designed a piece of IF before, hoping to bring new voices into the community.

Atrament, an Ink-based IF engine - Serhii Serhii is working on 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. The core of the engine is already complete: Serhii will receive $1000 to fund dev time writing documentation, testing and debugging the engine, and adding improvements focused on easier development and deployment workflows for authors.

We’re thrilled to see so much passion for expanding the audience of IF writers and readers in this year’s awardees. We want to thank all applicants, as well as our Grant Advisors, who volunteered their time to review the projects and formulate a recommendation for IFTF: thank you very much to Grim Baccaris, Kate Compton, Emilia Lazer-Walker, Juhana Leinonen, Colin Post, and Kaitlin Tremblay.

Congrats again to this year’s grant recipients! Check back in the fall for information about next year’s grant cycle. An announcement of the 2024 grant recipients is also available.

And lastly: if you like the grants program and want to see it continue, please consider donating to IFTF! Our Paypal page allows you to specify the program you’d like to see your money fund - you can select the grants program in the dropdown menu if you are so inclined. Thank you to everyone who has been donating to IFTF and allowing us to continue furthering our mission!


IFTF Officer Transition

On February 22, 2025, IFTF elected two new officers to the roles of Treasurer and Technical Officer. The former position is being filled by Colette Zinna, while the latter, a new role, is being filled by Doug Valenta. Previously, these tasks were handled jointly by Andrew Plotkin, whose term on the board finished in March 2024 and whose time as Treasurer has now also ended. The board thanks Andrew

On February 22, 2025, IFTF elected two new officers to the roles of Treasurer and Technical Officer. The former position is being filled by Colette Zinna, while the latter, a new role, is being filled by Doug Valenta. Previously, these tasks were handled jointly by Andrew Plotkin, whose term on the board finished in March 2024 and whose time as Treasurer has now also ended. The board thanks Andrew for his many years of service to the organization’s administration; he will be continuing as the chair of the IFArchive committee and helping with the NarraScope conference.

Colette Zinna is a longtime fan of narrative games and an occasional game developer. She’s attended or volunteered at NarraScope every year since it began.

Doug Valenta is a programmer and creator focusing on games, narrative, language, and the web, and a two-time NarraScope speaker. Doug works as a software engineering manager, leading a platform engineering team at a data management startup. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner and two dogs.

As we celebrate our two new officers, we look forward to the organization’s continued growth as we continue to expand our purview, operational activities, and service to the world of interactive fiction and narrative games. You can read more about IFTF’s leadership, and join us on the Intfiction.org Forums to toast the new officers.


New IFTF Committee: Institutional Relations

We are pleased to announce the creation of our new Institutional Relations committee! You can learn more by reading our charter here. The intent behind this committee is to help support IFTF in establishing and nurturing relationships with institutions that align with our vision. Over the years, we have realized there are so many of them! Other non-profits (related to digital arts, video games, op

We are pleased to announce the creation of our new Institutional Relations committee! You can learn more by reading our charter here.

The intent behind this committee is to help support IFTF in establishing and nurturing relationships with institutions that align with our vision. Over the years, we have realized there are so many of them! Other non-profits (related to digital arts, video games, open source, etc.), educational institutions, libraries, museums and other preservation-oriented folks, video game studios, but also government bodies and granting bodies, and everything in between!

While IFTF has established a number of great institutional relationships over the years, there wasn’t necessarily formal internal resources or structures that could help in supporting these relationships; with so many committees with different goals and activities, there was a risk of a lack of coordination or visibility, and missing identifying interesting opportunities or potential synergies. This committee’s goal is to help with this, and also support the org more generally in things like communicating IFTF’s impact to various interested stakeholders more effectively, or having a more structured and more long-term-focused approach towards fundraising. We believe this is an important step in IFTF’s maturation, and we are very excited about it!

Our committee has a few members to get started with, however we’re definitely interested in onboarding more folks! If you like building bridges, or know a few people in fields related to what we do, like to find missing puzzle pieces, enjoy the thrill of finding new partners, have some fundraising experience — or if just like interactive fiction and would love to help us and maybe gain some skills, please get in touch via email and we’d be thrilled to chat!


IFTF 2024 Transparency report now available

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

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


Announcing the IFTF Patreon

Hello to everybody in the IFTF Community (and beyond!) The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation’s board of directors is thrilled to announce the creation of a new way that you can help support our mission and get some fun perks in the process. This initiative has been in process for many months and we are delighted to finally launch it for the public. You may now support IFTF on the Patreon

Hello to everybody in the IFTF Community (and beyond!)

The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation’s board of directors is thrilled to announce the creation of a new way that you can help support our mission and get some fun perks in the process. This initiative has been in process for many months and we are delighted to finally launch it for the public.

You may now support IFTF on the Patreon platform, at the following URL:

https://www.patreon.com/IFTF

Backing IFTF on Patreon provides an additional, accessible route to helping us continue to serve the community of narrative game lovers and its ever-evolving needs. By becoming a member of our Patreon, you can unlock various perks, such as:

• A special role and access to an exclusive channel in the IFTF Discord ($5/month tier)
• A unique profile badge on the Intfiction forums ($5/month tier)
• A scaling discount on NarraScope admission ($10/month tier or higher, after 6 continuous months)
• Access to the Secretest Discord channel ($100/month tier, for you wild and wacky folks!)

We plan to continue to expand the perks over time as each of IFTF’s committees hooks into the system. We also are open to suggestions about additional things we can offer, so if you have ideas, please feel free to contact IFTF.

IFTF Patreon Q & A

Q: I already financially support IFTF another way. Is that changing or being eliminated?

A: No! This is simply another option for helping out.

Q: If I support IFTF via PayPal, it’s considered a tax-exempt donation. Is that still true with Patreon?

A: We advise checking with a tax advisor with expertise in your specific jurisdiction, but Patreon states that “if the creator is a legally recognized not-for-profit company and you receive nothing of value in return for your payment to them, then some jurisdictions allow the patron to take a tax deduction.”

For more information, this is a good place to start: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/207099326-Is-my-payment-to-a-creator-tax-deductible

Q: I have an idea for a perk or feedback about the Patreon!

A: That isn’t a question, but you can still get in contact with us via the many routes outlined on our website: https://iftechfoundation.org/contact/

The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation is registered in the United States as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.

Friday, 10. October 2025

Renga in Blue

Suspended: Farewell, Sweet Prince

I’ve finished the game, and as I suspected, I was running into a single small issue (a problem with the parser, really). My previous posts are needed to make sense of this one. Last time I had the issue of needing to replace two cables. I could replace one of them (with a wire scavenged […]

I’ve finished the game, and as I suspected, I was running into a single small issue (a problem with the parser, really). My previous posts are needed to make sense of this one.

Last time I had the issue of needing to replace two cables. I could replace one of them (with a wire scavenged from FRED) but not the second. I was most suspicious of the “orange wire” attached to the GG-1 needed to win the game, but seemingly removing the fuse and the wire then broke the device.

I was under the assumption that removing the fuse breaks it, for the good reason that the game wouldn’t let me put it back.

FC: Cryolink already established to Iris.
Internal map reference — Main Supply Room
I’m in the northernmost portion of a large, messy area where debris is scattered about as if something had shaken it loose from the walls. Sitting near the wall is a machine which has a little orange button on its face. Beside the button are two small sockets, one red and one yellow. A red IC sits in the red socket, and a yellow IC sits in the yellow socket. The front panel is open and a fourteen-inch cable of orange wire is exposed. A small glass fuse it sits in the panel. On the front panel is a series of eight circles. The orange button is flashing.

>get fuse
Taken.

>iris, put fuse in front panel
There’s no room.

>put fuse on front panel
There’s no room.

Hence my barking up a wrong tree for about an hour, but I finally thought to ask Whiz about the fuse, and got something helpful.

AP: This is a small glass fuse which should be removed before tampering with any exposed sections. After tampering with machine internals, the fuse should be put back into the machine.

I went with the exact wording “put back into machine” and tried it:

>iris, put fuse in machine
FC: Cryolink established to Iris.
IRIS: Done.

Oho! Now I did have one last surprise, as I realized the codewords are not consistent across games, and if you try to guess it will just scramble. (You could still save-restore and go through the 56 possibilities.) However, since I wasn’t being pushed for time, I sent a robot over to grab the camera and bring it to get plugged in.

>plug in tv1
I’ve plugged it in. I detect a vibration from it as it comes on.

IRIS INTERRUPT: Receiving transmissions.

>point tv1 at sign
The small sphere has been pointed at the recessed sign.

IRIS INTERRUPT: The little sign presents me with the access code the machine in the Main Supply Room needs to reset the Filtering Computers. It says CONKLA.

>REPLACE NINE-INCH CABLE WITH ORANGE CABLE
Okay. It’s done.

FC INTERRUPT: Approaching balance between all three units. Attempting internal stabilization. Reset codes may be entered now for planetside stabilization.

>IRIS, PUSH CON
FC: Cryolink established to Iris.
FC: First access code accepted. Enter second access code now.

>IRIS, PUSH KLA
FC: Cryolink already established to Iris.
FC: Second access code accepted.

FC INTERRUPT:

All systems returning to normal.
Weather systems slowly approaching balance.
Hydroponic systems working at full capacity.
Surface life in recovery mode.

Extrapolation based on current weather systems and food supplies:
Total recovery in 82 cycles.
Current surface casualties: 11,862,000
Projected casualties during recovery: 3,417,000
Original population: 30,172,000
Total possible survivors: 14,893,000

This score gives you the possibility of being considered for being burned in effigy. On a scale of 1 (the best) to 7 (the worst), your ranking was 7.

You successfully completed your task, bringing the Filtering Computers back into balance, in 347 cycles.

Now to do it all over again, but faster, and keeping track of the computer settings while I’m at it. The best robot to send over to twiddle with dials / levers / switches is Whiz, because while they were useful for figuring out the puzzles, they are not needed once all the information has been drained from the library. Also, they can see and manipulate all the controls, and just in terms of start position, Whiz is exactly the same distance from the skywalk as Waldo.

A speedy run means sacrificing robots to the acid, so no dealing with the humans, and fixing the system faster than they can arrive (or at least, on my walkthrough, I managed it right when they arrive). That means Auda would normally be best positioned to nab the camera (starting on the north side of the map) but while Auda can hear the CAR needed to go to the Biological area, Auda can’t see the camera so can’t pick it up.

Internal map reference — Biological Laboratory
I am in the Biological Laboratory.

>get all
AUDA: I don’t hear what you mean to get!

Additionally, Auda can’t get the cutter from the Small Supply Room (Auda starts in the room next to it). The only description there is “the air is very still”.

Stars marking the locations of the cutter and the camera.

So at least one more robot is going to need to be sent up to get those; I ended up trying Poet, but Poet is unable to see the wedge when dropped, so I ended up sending both Waldo and Poet and having them split up: so Poet goes to get the camera, while Waldo goes to get the cutter. Then the two meet back at the step, Poet makes a beeline over to Iris to nab the orange wire in the GG-1 (while the robots have been moving, I had Iris fix the machine, so Iris just passes it off to Poet) while Waldo goes over with Sensa to the Gamma Repair to get the wire from FRED.

The timing works such that Poet goes and makes a sacrifice first, swapping a wire and using the camera immediately prior to expiring.

Internal map reference — Secondary Channel
Connections are what make life worth living. In each direction we find our source of disorientation, our metaphysical essence. Linkups are possible, connecting our distant cousin with our essence, our very presence here. There’s a signpost overhead — the next stop…

>POET, REPLACE NINE-INCH CABLE WITH ORANGE CABLE
FC: Cryolink already established to Poet.
Okay. It’s done.

POET INTERRUPT: Warning: I detect the presence of the other worlds.

>POET, PLUG SENDER IN PLUG
FC: Cryolink already established to Poet.
I’ve plugged it in. We’re on location, all systems go.

IRIS INTERRUPT: Receiving transmissions.

>POET, POINT SENDER AT SIGN
FC: Cryolink already established to Poet.
The sender has been pointed at the signpost.

IRIS INTERRUPT: The little sign presents me with the access code the machine in the Main Supply Room needs to reset the Filtering Computers. It says FOOBLE.

POET INTERRUPT: SYSTEM FAILURE: Farewell, sweet prince.
Oh oh. Trouble ….

FC: So much for that robot. Too bad.

Poet’s death of course being dramatic; Sensa I sent to die changing the other wire.

FC: Cryolink established to Iris.

FC INTERRUPT: ALERT! ALERT!
Intruders detected in Sterilization Chamber!

>IRIS, PRESS BLE
FC: Cryolink already established to Iris.
FC: Second access code accepted.

FC INTERRUPT:

All systems returning to normal.
Weather systems slowly approaching balance.
Hydroponic systems working at full capacity.
Surface life in recovery mode.

Extrapolation based on current weather systems and food supplies:
Total recovery in 4 cycles.
Current surface casualties: 23,000
Projected casualties during recovery: 0
Original population: 30,172,000
Total possible survivors: 30,149,000

This score gives you the possibility of being considered for a home in the country and an unlimited bank account. On a scale of 1 (the best) to 7 (the worst), your ranking was 1.

You successfully completed your task, bringing the Filtering Computers back into balance, in 100 cycles.

Of course, at the same time as all that I had to juggle Whiz fiddling with controls, but it didn’t turn out to be too terrible to deal with. As soon as possible Whiz needs to fix the dials to repair the weather (as mentioned last time, 54, 100, 54 the best ones I found). Right after, even before a second earthquake hits (messing with the transport and food) Whiz can move over to the transport room and flip all three of the switches; then I had him camp in the hydroponics room and wait. At the exact moment in my walkthrough that the earthquake hits (when Sensa was about to unlock the cabinet with FRED) I had Whiz fix the settings.

WATER: LEVEL 50, SETTING 70, OUTPUT low
MINEARLS: LEVEL 15, SETTING 30, OUTPUT low
LIGHTING: LEVEL 30, SETTING 50, OUTPUT low

What happened here is that a setting and its level are supposed to be the same, but water dropped by 20, minerals dropped by 15, and lighting dropped by 20. So the way to fix it is to crank water up by 20, minerals up by 15, and lighting up by 20. Not exactly a strategy game moment, is it?

WHIZ, SET FIRST LEVER TO 90
WHIZ, SET SECOND LEVER TO 45
WHIZ, SET THIRD LEVER TO 70

More turn optimization is no doubt possible, but all that was good enough for a regular difficulty max-score win. What about ADVANCED difficulty though?

From left to right, Stu Galley, Marc Blank, Steve Meretzky and Michael Berlyn. Source.

FC: Request for advanced game acknowledged.

SENSA INTERRUPT: Secondary tremor detected by Filtering Computers. Intensity: 8.4. Projected damage: Automatic controls for surface transportation; Automatic controls for Hydroponics Area.

IRIS: In the Weather Monitors.
WALDO: In the Gamma Repair.
SENSA: In the Central Chamber.
AUDA: In the Entry Area.
POET: In the Central Chamber.
FC: Whiz is no longer in communication.

Starting places of the robots are the same, except Whiz is now removed entirely from play, and all three systems (transport, food, weather) are damaged all at the start.

The main point to make is that we are trying to prevent people from dying, not necessarily go as fast as possible. I went ahead and did all-hands-on-deck by sending Waldo, Sensa, and Poet all over to controls simultaneously, so they could be fixed as fast as possible. The fixes are absolutely identical to the regular game; there’s no “tertiary quake” that messes with the controls even more, so after they’re fixed, the rest of the game can proceed as normal — except — the delay means the humans will arrive. However, the acid seems to be more deadly anyway (I couldn’t run any robots through) so I also put Auda back into play, stealing the toolbag at the right moment.

FC INTERRUPT:

All systems returning to normal.
Weather systems slowly approaching balance.
Hydroponic systems working at full capacity.
Surface life in recovery mode.

Extrapolation based on current weather systems and food supplies:
Total recovery in 9 cycles.
Current surface casualties: 67,000
Projected casualties during recovery: 0
Original population: 30,172,000
Total possible survivors: 30,105,000

This score gives you the possibility of being considered for a home in the country and an unlimited bank account. On a scale of 1 (the best) to 5 (the worst), your ranking was 1.

You successfully completed your task, bringing the Filtering Computers back into balance, in 116 cycles.

I think more optimal might require simply knowing what switches/levers/dials should be done first to be effective faster.

WALDO, SET SECOND DIAL TO 100
WALDO, SET FIRST DIAL TO 54
WALDO, SET THIRD DIAL TO 54
POET, FLIP FIRST SWITCH
POET, FLIP SECOND SWITCH
POET, FLIP THIRD SWITCH
SENSA, SET FIRST LEVER TO 90
SENSA, SET SECOND LEVER TO 45
SENSA, SET THIRD LEVER TO 70

For instance, maybe it would be better for Poet to hit the switches in reverse order? That’s optimization past what the game is even tracking for the overall ranking. For even further exploration someone could muck about with the game’s CUSTOM which lets you decide where the robots are and which ones are alive; is it possible, for instance, to win the game with only one robot? (You might worry about FRED, but the BOTH ROBOT AND ROBOT syntax lets you use the same robot twice, so you can have BOTH WALDO AND WALDO move FRED. For Iris being dead and not seeing the code, you can do some brute-force save/reload with the relatively small number of combinations that need to be tested.)

However, I’m fine ending things there…

…except I ought to try IMPOSSIBLE, right?

>impossible
FC: Okay, you asked for it…

FC INTERRUPT: External sensors detect huge radiation abnormalities in the star which provides Contra with all light and heat.

WARNING! TIME CRITICAL!!

External sensors detect significant instability in the star.

…two turns later…

FC INTERRUPT: Oh oh. Abnormalities in star approaching critical level. NOVA IMMINENT!

So long from all the gang — Iris, Waldo, Sensa, Auda, Poet, Whiz, FRED, and last but not least, we three FCs.

After clearing myself of spoilers, I get the fun of reading everyone’s write-ups; in addition to Jimmy Maher, Drew Cook, and Aaron Reed I mentioned in my first post of the series, I also got to read The Adventure Gamer (Joe Pranevich, specifically) and The Data-Driven Gamer (part 1, part 2). Data-Driven experimented with the humans and different ways of messing with their pattern; you can, for example, steal the CAR so they can’t get the clones, at which point they’ll argue and then eventually decide to just disconnect the player directly. I also liked Drew Cook’s observation that the lore mentions “malcontents” to the whole lottery system that were “dealt with summarily by the Authority”; the ominous threats on the lottery report letter (involving confiscating children) give the impression that the word “utopia” at least needs an asterisk.

One extremely common thread was remarking on difficulty.

I did not find it that difficult, so that brings up for me the fascinating question: why? I can even compare with my much-younger self, which was utterly baffled.

I could vaguely gesture at the 20 years I’ve been blogging about interactive fiction and mumble something about experience, but I don’t think that’s a good explanation; my grim patience and experience applied with a game like Adventure Quest, but that’s a game that I recognize has high difficulty as I’m hitting it. With Suspended, nearly every object has explicit hints from Whiz; there are often three or more ways to realize the utility of an object. The fixes to the Filtering Computers are relatively straightforward. (When I played this long ago, my child imagination thought I’d need to be changing numbers every 10 turns or so, when you just need to do a single adjustment once for each control.)

Perceptually, I had very little trouble fitting together the multiple perspectives all happening at the same time. It was “normal” to me that Auda would not see an object at all and that information needed combining with another robot. I also never felt like I needed to resort to keeping track on the map of where the robots were; it’s not like they were wandering randomly; I always had particular missions in mind, and when I was in the phase of just trying to understand what was going, I usually focused on one robot at a time anyway.

The game’s longer-term legacy would be more complex. Its alienating premise and interface turned off players expecting the more traditional storytelling that was becoming the core of Infocom’s brand. It was also challenging, uncompromising, and required an obsessive attention to detail: “a game for frustrated would-be air traffic controllers,” one reviewer called it. The first Infocom game created by a writer, it had less plot and characterization than nearly any of their other titles. Today many consider it one of the company’s lesser works, more notable for its unusual packaging and bizarre premise than its often tedious gameplay.

— From Aaron Reed

Clearly, the “fractured reality” element has been too much conceptually for some people (including my younger self). I just find it so puzzling to read so many takes entirely counter to my experience: regarding the paragraph above, I was able to ignore a lot of details. In fact, that’s perhaps why I had the better experience, in that players who could only cope with the fire hose of information by swallowing down every drop ended up with reams of notes, whereas I was able to zero in on the important aspects, and simplify thinking of the game-winning gizmo as a GG-1 and not a complex array of sensory perceptions. I never stopped to examine Poet’s side comments, or figure out the exact rules if one object could see Thing X but not another. (One noteworthy thing I should mention, as it blows my mind at a technical level, is you can have a robot not see an item, but be with a robot that can see the item, and the non-seeing robot can then use it. This is meta-knowledge on a high level. Whiz originally is hesitant to look up anything involving FRED — the robot was removed from the library system — but once FRED is found, Whiz is more willing to engage and can give the hint that the robot can be scavenged from.)

I still find the game a magnificent experience and it is one of the few Infocom games I would change very little beyond a couple moments of parser polish. The most recent Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time pool puts Suspended at 21st out of 50, tied with Spellbreaker, Trinity, and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

(Now Hitchhiker’s really is a difficult game. Absolutely nothing in Suspended compared to the complications of the Babel Fish, or the door where you needed to prove your intelligence, or the time travel. Suspended’s difficulty is in being so much unlike anything else; even with multi-character games like Guardians of Infinity: To Save Kennedy they didn’t have the perceptual issues of Suspended.)

Coming up: I’m going to spin the dial on random a few times, but we’re coming close to getting back to another Apple II graphical game. I know some of you have been waiting. It’s not “rare” but it is one I’ve never seen discussed before.

Thursday, 09. October 2025

Zarf Updates

My old Infocom transcripts

Back when I was a kid, after I solved an Infocom game, I'd print out a transcript of a "perfect" playthrough. And, as it happened, I kept this box of printouts through all the moves and decades since. The box sits right now on my shelf of Preserved ...

Back when I was a kid, after I solved an Infocom game, I'd print out a transcript of a "perfect" playthrough. And, as it happened, I kept this box of printouts through all the moves and decades since.

The box sits right now on my shelf of Preserved Stuff, in between the box of "How to Play IF" postcards and the stack of hand-scribbled adventure game maps from the 90s.

It's a nice memento but very nearly useless. I'm not about to scan in all those pages, and you wouldn't learn much from reading them. Not even about my play style -- as I said, these are optimized, after-the-fact transcripts.

However, a question came up on Jason Dyer's blog about the exact version of Suspended that I played. And I said hey! I could look at the transcript and tell you!

...Actually, I can't. Suspended doesn't print out the release and serial info when you start a transcript. Oh well.

But since I was in there, I snapshotted the start of every transcript. Here they are.

(Okidata dot-matrix printer, in case you were wondering. Might have been the μ82a model? Or μ92, according to the post from ten years ago. Trust that guy, he's got a better memory.)

Some of the printouts are pretty hard to read -- not because the ink has faded, but because we ran our printer ribbons into the ground back then. I've heavily cranked the contrast in these shots.

Zork 1

K. ›VERSION / ZORK I: THE GREAT UNDERGROUND EMPIRE / COPYRIGHT 1982 BY INFOCOM, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ZORK IS A TRADEMARK OF INFOCOM, INC. / RELEASE 26 / SERIAL NUMBER 820803 ›L WEST OF HOUSE YOU ARE STANDING IN AN OPEN FIELD WEST OF A WHITE HOUSE, WITH A BOARDED FRONT DOOR. THERE IS A SMALL MAILBOX HERE.

The very first! Actually, this wasn't the Zork I first played. We had the original "barbarian Zork" package published by Personal Software. I remember it was a 13-sector floppy -- I had to boot from Apple's special BOOT13 disk to convince my disk drive to load the game. (Anybody know what release that would have been?) (EDIT-ADD: Release 5, thank you.)

I don't recall pirating a later release to avoid this boot-y dance, but I'm sure that's what I did.

Zork 2

80NOK. ›L INSIDE THE BARROW YOU ARE INSIDE AN ANCIENT BARROW HIDDEN DEEP WITHIN A DARK FOREST. THE BARROW OPENS INTO A NARROW TUNNEL AT ITS SOUTHERN END. YOU CAN SEE A FAINT GLOW AT THE FAR END. A SWORD OF ELVISH WORKMANSHIP IS ON THE GROUND. A STRANGELY FAMILIAR BRASS LANTERN IS LYING ON THE GROUND.

This, in contrast, is the original Zork 2 that we bought. It doesn't show the version when you SCRIPT, which puts it at r19 or earlier. Probably much earlier.

The first line is the OK. from the SCRIPT command. Note the 80N before that -- the interpreter is sending some kind of control code to the print driver. Probably putting it in 80-column mode. To no avail, since the interpreter will be sending 40-column lines.

Starcross

OK. ›L BRIDGE (YOU ARE IN THE CONTROL COUCH.) THIS IS THE CONTROL ROOM OF THE STARCROSS. THERE ARE EXITS LABELLED (ARBITRARILY) "PORT," "STARBOARD," AND "OUT." THE LATTER EXIT HAS A HEAVY BULKHEAD WHICH IS CLOSED. YOUR SHIP'S COMPUTER TAKES CARE OF ALL THE ROUTINE TASKS OF NAVIGATION AND

I see I didn't even start this transcript at the beginning. You wake up in the Living Quarters, get up, and move to the Bridge.

Deadline

OK. ›VERSION DEADLINE: AN INTERLOGIC MYSTERY / COPYRIGHT 1982 BY INFOCOM, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. DEADLINE AND INTERLOGIC ARE TRADEMARKS OF INFOCOM, INC. RELEASE 18 / SERIAL NUMBER 820311

I remembered to type VERSION this time. Release 18 is the earliest version which has been preserved. It's probably the first version that shipped.

Enchanter

HERE BEGINS A TRANSCRIPT OF INTERACTION WITH ENCHANTER / ENCHANTER IS A TRADEMARK OF INFOCOM, INC. COPYRIGHT (C) 1983 INFOCOM, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

They've now invented the idea of the transcript banner. This text appears when you type SCRIPT.

You can't see this, but I did a RESTART immediately after the SCRIPT command. I was trying to capture the dramatic "It must be the warlock Krill" intro text. Sadly, the interpreter wouldn't do it; the restart cut off the transcript.

Suspended

HERE BEGINS A TRANSCRIPT OF INTERACTION WITH SUSPENDED. SUSPENDED IS A TRADEMARK OF INFOCOM, INC. COPYRIGHT (C) 1983 INFOCOM, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ›ARR / FC: FULL REPORT FROM IRIS / IRIS: INTERNAL MAP REFERENCE -- WEATHER MONITORS VISUAL FUNCTION NONFUNCTIONAL. IRIS: I AM HOLDING NOTHING IN MY DAINTY EXTENSIONS.

As I said, Suspended lacked the serial number as well. The ARR command is a shortcut for ALL ROBOTS, REPORT.

Planetfall

HERE BEGINS A TRANSCRIPT OF INTERACTION WITH PLANETFALL. PLANETFALL IS A TRADEMARK OF INFOCOM, INC. COPYRIGHT (C) 1983 INFOCOM, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ›TURN ON MACHINE / THE SCREEN GIVES OFF A GREEN FLASH, AND THEN SOME WRITING APPEARS ON THE SCREEN: 1. HISTOOREE 2. KULCUR 3. TEKNOLOJEE 4. JEEOGRAFEE 5. XE PRAJEKT 6. INTURLAJIK GAAMZ

I seem to have skipped the beginning here, and started the transcript at the library computer. To record all of this important Resida history for later reference, I guess.

Wow, that phonetic dialect is just as annoying today as it was in 1983.

Subtle note: Planetfall kept the heading "INTURLAJIK GAAMZ" even in the grey-box edition, after Infocom had rebranded their "Interlogic games" into "interactive fiction".

Infidel

HERE BEGINS A TRANSCRIPT OF INTERACTION WITH INFIDEL. INFIDEL IS A TRADEMARK OF INFOCOM, INC. COPYRIGHT (C) 1983 INFOCOM, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. YOU HEAR A PLANE FLYING HIGH OVERHEAD, OUTSIDE THE TENT.

Witness

HERE BEGINS A TRANSCRIPT OF INTERACTION WITH THE WITNESS: AN INTERLOGIC MYSTERY COPYRIGHT (C) 1983 INFOCOM, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. WITNESS AND INTERLOGIC ARE TRADEMARKS OF INFOCOM, INC. REVISION NUMBER 13 / SERIAL NUMBER 830524 / WHAT SHOULD YOU, THE DETECTIVE, DO NOW?

Again, probably the release version.

Sorcerer

Here begins a transcript of interaction with SORCERER. SORCERER: INTERLOGIC Fantasy / Copyright (c) 1984 by Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved. SORCERER and INTERLOGIC are trademarks of Infocom, Inc. Release 4 / Serial number 840131

We got an Apple //e to replace the ][+! Or possibly this switch occured when we got an 80-column card? I don't remember exactly. Lower-case was a revelation.

Seastalker

Here begins a transcript of interaction with SEASTALKER: F D EMOLPHO AND THE ULTRAMARINE BIOCEPTOR / Junior-level interactive fiction from Infocom / Copyright (c) 1984 Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved. / SEASTALKER is a trademark of Infocom, Inc. Revision number 15 / Serial number 840501

The heading "___ AND THE ULTRAMARINE BIOCEPTOR" is customized; the game starts with a "type your name" prompt. I typed "F D Emolpho". Emolpho will later return as one of the compu-loa of System's Twilight.

As it happened, I also owned a well-read copy of Tom Swift and His Jetmarine, to which Seastalker owes an obvious debt.

Spellbreaker

Here begins a transeript of interaction with SPELLBREAKER. SPELLBREAKER / An Interactive Fantasy / Copyright (c) 1985 by Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved. SPELLBREAKER is a trademark of Infocom, Inc. Release 63 / Serial number 850916

Spellbreaker must have gone through a lot of test cycles, because release 63 seems to have been the first version.

Trinity

Here begins a transcript of interaction with TRINITY / An Interactive Fantasy / Copyright (C)1986 Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved. / TRINITY is a trademark of Infocom. Inc. Interpreter 2 Version B / Release 11 / Serial Number 860509

My longest transcript printout.

Lurking Horror

Start of a transcript of THE LURKING HORROR. THE LURKING HORROR / An Interactive Horror / Copyright (c) 1987 by Infocom. Inc. All rignts reserved. THE LURKING HORROR is a trademark of Infocom. Inc. Release 203 / Serial number 000000

Serial number 000000? Yes, I pirated this one. I don't remember if my friend manually erased the serial number, or if that was some kind of piracy-detection feature in the interpreter. It's certainly release 203, serial 870506, though.

I still have the photocopy they made me of the manual. The last page is defaced by a hideous smear of ichor which has bled through the page! Or grease. Probably grease. We wondered whether that was a bit of deliberate environmental storytelling (not that the term existed at the time). But no, scanned versions of the manual (see here) don't have the smear. Just a packaging defect.

Two pages photocopied from the Lurking Horror manual. A dark stain is visible on both pages. It's slightly transparent, and text from the other side is bleeding through.


Thus we have it. You can see I didn't do every game. After a while the prospect of replaying from scratch felt like work.

I was hoping I'd discover a hitherto unknown serial number. Nope! Although it would likely have been the earliest games, and those were the ones that didn't record a serial number.

Wouldn't have mattered anyhow; the floppies that I played from are long since gone. As are most of the packages. I have a few of the folios still.


Renga in Blue

Suspended: Thinking Like a Robot

(Continued from my previous posts.) I’m likely extremely close to the end, but given I still need to tackle the “strategic” layer (and check the alternate difficulty levels) I’ll have enough content for a long final post next time even if I’m only a turn away from victory. My big break — taking me almost […]

(Continued from my previous posts.)

I’m likely extremely close to the end, but given I still need to tackle the “strategic” layer (and check the alternate difficulty levels) I’ll have enough content for a long final post next time even if I’m only a turn away from victory.

From Mobygames.

My big break — taking me almost all the way to the end — came from Whiz. I realized despite him complaining the moment you take him out of the “library” section where he plugs in…

Internal map reference — Index Peripheral
CLC identifier shows the object before me as the Index pedestal.

>n
Internal map reference — Outer Library Area
CLC identifier tagging detected directly to the south.

>n
Internal map reference — Hallway Junction
Request directions which would send me in a southerly direction as linkup seems imminent.
The W1 is positioned by the step.
There is a W1 here.

…it’s very useful to see things through Whiz’s eyes, as he sees things by their library computer (CLC) tag. (The wedge that allows passing over the step is W1.) This means they get identified quite precisely so they can be looked up in the machine. For example, the machine with the eight circles (FOO, MUM, BLE, BAR, KLA, CON, BOZ, TRA) is only spoken of vaguely by the other robots, but Whiz knows what it is.

CLC reports this area is abnormal in its arrangement. A GG-1 sits here, barely operating. A CX3 chip sits in the S1, and a CX4 chip sits in the S2.

I don’t know the “human” name, but it helps in this game to think like a robot anyway, and GG1 (without the hyphen) is enough to query the library.

>query gg-1
FC: I don’t know the word ‘gg-1’.

>query gg1
CLC: Hmm. That’s a tough one. Hold on a minute while I try to locate a reference …

CLC: Here it is! I was beginning to think I was going senile.
IP: Data available from the Technical Pedestal.
IP: Data available from the Advisory Pedestal.
IP: Data available from the Historical Pedestal.

The database indicates the GG-1 “holds the 8 circles used to reset the Filtering Computers” and that “If the Filtering Computers are operational and balanced, keying in the two codes will result in a system reset.” While I suspected already that using the machine was essentially the last step, this confirms that two of the three-letter codes are needed.

The catch here is the “operational and balanced” part which I don’t have yet.

TP: The three Filtering Computers are kept in balance by two series of four cables. Four cables run through the Primary Channel, while another four run through the Secondary Channel.

I showed the relevant room off already with Poet, but here’s Whiz:

Internal map reference — Secondary Channel
CLC tagged location indicates I am within a connecting tube. The connecting cables for the filtering computers line this floor, resting in their grooves. A small plug, PL-1, sits within the wall beneath the ACS.

Whiz cannot see there’s a sign here (and in the primary channel, which looks the same but has different cables). Whiz can look it up where the advisory panel mentions Iris ought to be able to see the sign somehow.

While I didn’t have a method at this moment in my gameplay, I kept exploring with Whiz and found the right item shortly after. Remember the mysterious force field?

CLC warns that the area to the east is dangerous.
Mobile CLC tagged object CAR is at the head of the tunnel.
I can detect nothing inside of it.

Looking up the CAR reveals it is, well, a “car”. This is a transport tunnel and you’re just supposed to enter the car (or “egg”) and the robot will get moved to the other side. (I admit to initially misreading and think the “egg” was out of reach.) Whiz’s library search leaves no ambiguity:

AP: Use this to get to the Biological Area and back.
TP: Operating this vehicle is as simple as entering it.

Voila, the last part of the map I hadn’t reached yet:

Straightforwardly, this is where the clones are stored (as well as an ominous switch out of robot reach — I haven’t tested Bad Ending yet but I assume the humans come in and use this if they hadn’t seen the acid leak). There’s also storage:

Internal map reference — Biological Laboratory
This area is identified as the Biological Lab. Equipment here is available for clone revivification.
CLC tagged device TV1 sits on the floor by a table.

Most robots puzzle a bit over the device (Sensa mentions an RF signal, and while Iris calls it a “television camera” she gives no hint how it is operated) but Whiz can look TV1 up directly:

TP: This is a complex television camera which links directly to Iris.
AP: It can be activated by plugging it in at the correct location.

That’s what the plugs at the wire grooves are for!

Internal map reference — Secondary Channel
CLC tagged location indicates I am within a connecting tube. The connecting cables for the filtering computers line this floor, resting in their grooves. A small plug, PL-1, sits within the wall beneath the ACS.
In the room with me is Poet.

>plug tv1
FC: What do you want to plug the tv1 in?

>pl-1
I’ve plugged it in. CLC indicates object now functioning.

IRIS INTERRUPT: Receiving transmissions.

>point tv1 at sign
The TV1 has been pointed at the ACS.

IRIS INTERRUPT: The little sign presents me with the access code the machine in the Main Supply Room needs to reset the Filtering Computers. It says CONBLE.

Thus, the two circles that need to be pressed to win the game are CON, followed by BLE. (This does not change even on reset, so — as far as I can tell — the bio-area does not need entering in the future.)

Again, though, I’m stuck on my catch: I need to replace the bad wires. There are specifically two of them, one for each of the “channels”.

In the primary channel (to the north) the cables are 4-inch, 6-inch, 10-inch, and 18-inch. One way to tell which is broken is to simply try taking them; the inert wire will be safe, whereas any of the live cables will fry and destroy the robot taking it. (This seems extreme, but given how many save/restores are going on with this game anyway, it seems a perfectly valid approach.) Alternatively, Poet (the diagnostic bot) can examine them.

>examine four-inch
The data transmissions within this cable are irregular. Immediate replacement recommended.

>examine six-inch
I perceive nothing special about the six-inch cable.

So the four-inch cable needs to go. In the secondary channel the options are 5, 9, 19, and 20. Again, the take-and-fry method works. Examining does not work; all the cables appear normal. However, Poet can also diagnose with touch, which apparently finds a different (but equally cable-wrecking) issue.

>touch five-inch
Sensory pads detect no abnormal flow.

>touch nine-inch
Data transmissions are highly irregular through this cable.

>touch nineteen-inch
Sensory pads detect no abnormal flow.

>touch twenty-inch
Sensory pads detect no abnormal flow.

Great! Now I just need replacement cables. One of them I had seen already at the ancient FRED robot; unfortunately, you can’t just take the wire, as it needs a cutting tool, the one that was on the north side of the map, a little too high to reach. There’s a solution that took me a few beats to find but was satisfyingly logical — logical enough that it occurred to me while off the computer, so I went back to test it.

Internal map reference — Small Supply Room
I can detect a small area, cluttered with things which extend from the walls. Doorways lead to the east and the west.
There is a high extending holder here.
Sitting on the high extending holder is…
A cutting tool
There is a square container here.

>drop wedge
Dropped.

>get on wedge
Okay. I’m standing on the solid wedge now.

>get tool
Taken.

This is the using the wedge that bridges the north and south sides of the complex; after passing over, a robot can pick it up, use it to grab the cutting tool, then put the wedge back where it was. This is leveraging the mental model that players sometimes have where an item is “checked off” without realizing re-use might be possible.

The result is a “twelve-inch cable” off of FRED which (I assume) is functional. The parentheses are there because I need a second cable, so I haven’t even confirmed if the one coming from FRED even works.

There are three visible candidates:

  • First, the blue cable sitting in storage that the memo already warned was non-functional. I also tested using it anyway as the second cable and it didn’t work.
  • There’s a “backup cable” in storage that you can find by moving the shelf (this is the same place Waldo’s microsurgery extension is held). Unfortunately the cable is crushed and non-functional.
  • There’s a functional cable (orange color) used in the GG-1 device. You can remove the device’s fuse and then take the cable, but then it becomes non-functional.

I haven’t had luck with any of them. That is, I go over to the primary channel, REPLACE the bad cable, go over to the secondary channel, REPLACE the bad cable, and try to have Iris press one of the buttons and the game says the computers are still broken.

One last wrinkle to all this is the repair conveyer belt which I mentioned not having figured out last time. I thought I needed to get it moving first, but instead, you can just put an object on the north side and the machine will activate automatically.

Internal map reference — Alpha Repair
Running, running, getting nowhere amid the hustle and bustle of life.
The glider is not in motion.

>put cable on glider
Done.

>look
Internal map reference — Alpha Repair
Running, running, getting nowhere amid the hustle and bustle of life.
The glider is in motion, moving a twelve-inch cable.

>s
Internal map reference — Beta Repair
We’re getting nowhere fast, glider, but at least we’re not getting there slowly.
The glider is in motion, moving a twelve-inch cable.

>s
Internal map reference — Gamma Repair
Oh, to reach the end of one’s previous existence, to travel the roadways of life when they are most needed, only to end up here, reborn.
The glider is in motion, moving a twelve-inch cable.
There is a FRED here.
There is a cage here.

>look
Internal map reference — Gamma Repair
Oh, to reach the end of one’s previous existence, to travel the roadways of life when they are most needed, only to end up here, reborn.
The glider is not in motion.
There is a twelve-inch cable here.
There is a FRED here.
There is a cage here.

The twelve-inch cable is the one from FRED. I’ve tried running the other cables through and nothing changes — they’re still busted. I’m fairly sure I’m missing one small step somewhere and I’ll make it to the end.

Envelope containing a catalog. From Infocom-IF.

You might notice I didn’t discuss the controls / people dying in the millions part of the game. People have certainly been dying…

>score
There have been 7,557,000 casualties (original population: 30,172,000) in 242 cycles.

…but as far as I can find you can essentially ignore this after convincing the humans that there was a real accident and didn’t just cause another “Franklin incident”. According to arcanetrivia in the comments, eventually the game will end with enough death, but I haven’t hit that limit while doing lots of experimenting and having robots meander back and forth. There’s essentially no urgency until I have the last puzzle solved, and then I can worry about optimizing and dial settings to keep people from getting frozen and so forth.


Choice of Games LLC

Demo Available Now! Two New White Wolf Games Coming Soon

We’re super excited for the announcement of two upcoming games, Hunter: The Reckoning — A Time of Monsters and Hunter: The Reckoning — Day for Night. What’s more, A Time of Monsters will be coming out in just one month, on November 13th! Today, for the first time, you can try the free demo for A Time of Monsters on Steam! (Don’t forget to add both games to your Steam wishlist! The

We’re super excited for the announcement of two upcoming games, Hunter: The Reckoning — A Time of Monsters and Hunter: The Reckoning — Day for Night. What’s more, A Time of Monsters will be coming out in just one month, on November 13th!

Today, for the first time, you can try the free demo for A Time of Monsters on Steam! (Don’t forget to add both games to your Steam wishlist! The more wishlists we get, the better the game will do on Steam on release day.) Additionally, tune in to the World of Darkness Twitch at 11am Eastern to watch Huddy stream the demo.

Topple the vampires from the streets below! Will you unite the homeless, the gangs, and the secret hunter societies to defy vampiric rule?

Hunter: The Reckoning — A Time of Monsters is an interactive novel by Paul Wang, set in the World of Darkness. It’s entirely text-based, one million words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

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

Hunter: The Reckoning – Day for Night is an interactive novel by Josh Labelle set in the World of Darkness. It’s entirely text-based, 900,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Wishlist it on Steam today!

Wednesday, 08. October 2025

Renga in Blue

Suspended: One With the Cosmos

(Continued from my previous post. The official WordPress reader has a bug with Soundcloud embeds, so if the last post seemed strangely short you might want to check it before moving on.) Be prepared, this is going to be a long one. Rather than laying out the territory first and then tackling puzzles, I’m going […]

(Continued from my previous post. The official WordPress reader has a bug with Soundcloud embeds, so if the last post seemed strangely short you might want to check it before moving on.)

Be prepared, this is going to be a long one. Rather than laying out the territory first and then tackling puzzles, I’m going to flip back and forth a little. Let me first give the general meta-layout:

The main important point of the structure is that there’s a “north side” (with the entrance/decontamination area, a “maintenance corridor”, a “library room” and a biological area) that is separate from the “south side” (central control, central core, repair, environmental override controls, and filtering computers). Between the two there is a “step” which robots can’t pass, so Auda starts trapped on the north side and the other robots start trapped on the south side.

>N
I can’t climb the step.

Let’s start focused on the “Central Chamber” area. This is the area that Iris (the only robot with visual sense) is restricted to, although Iris starts broken and unable to see.

Without Iris, Sensa and Poet are still both able to make a pass. I’m going to give the description each one makes because the two parts together help put together what’s going on.

Internal map reference — Central Chamber
POET: It hops and skips and leaves a bit, and can’t decide if it should quit. It tells the world what it should know, but doesn’t know when it’s been shown.

SENSA: Internal map reference — Central Chamber
All around me charges flow, shaped by the very nature of this room. The electrons are being channeled into an electrical column, central to this environment.

The starting place. Notice how Sensa describes a “column” that Poet doesn’t even mention; Poet is purely luxuriating in metaphor rather than describing anything.

POET: Internal map reference — Weather Monitors
They puff and billow and strain a bit, roar then ebb with time.
In the room with me is Iris.

SENSA: My receptors detect huge electrical flow through the walls and meters all around me.
In the room with me is Iris.

Neither has much helpful to say here; this room, and two other rooms off the Central Chamber (Hydroponics and Transit Monitors) are intended for Iris.

POET: Internal map reference — Main Supply Room
This is another fine mess you’ve got me into. Umm, umm umm! A processor sits on the floor, munching and spitting electrons. Button, button, who’s got the button while the socks ablaze with color. A brain tres sits in the primo socket, and a brain quart sits in the secondary socket.

SENSA: Internal map reference — Main Supply Room
A strange apparatus sits before me, processing electrons internally. This device seems active, though some internal mechanisms are exposed. There are two receptacles, designed to hold small circuitry, and a button beside them. A ruined device sits in the plus receptacle, and a seized device sits in the negative socket.

Flipping back and forth this essentially describes the same thing; while it seems like Sensa is being more exact, it turns out Poet’s “tres” and “quart” will be helpful in a moment. Going to the supply room just south…

Internal map reference — Middle Supply Room
POET: From junk we spring, to junk we go.
Contained spirits, like thoughts, fly from reach.
The basket of goodies for Grandma contains…
A brain plain
A brain quartet
A brain trio
A brain two
A brain zip
There is a sixteen-inch cable here.
It is something we can all grasp, something to embrace, whose presence I detect.

SENSA: I am in the Middle Supply Room.
I perceive a small container which holds several small devices.
The small container contains…
A scanning object
A buss object
A maximized object
A filtering object
A polarized object
There is a sixteen-inch cable here.
A small object emits a weak signal, specifically oriented toward Waldo.

…this is clearly the same set of objects, just described in different ways (except the cable, which is absolutely identical, but based on that mysterious only-on-some-versions memo, can be completely ignored). They do show up in the same order, so the “maximized object” is a “brain trio”.

While this all strongly suggests the “tres” needs to be replaced with a “brain trio” (or maximized object) and the “quart” needs to be replaced with a “brain quartet” (or buss object) trying to swap them in and press the button had no seeming effect. There’s another part later where the plain/quartet/trio notation ends up being very helpful, just not for this exact issue.

The contrasting descriptions of the last object are helpful side by side: “a weak signal, specifically oriented toward Waldo” merged with “something we can all grasp”. The two made me realize this is some sort of tool specifically for Waldo. The GET OBJECT trick also still works

FC: Which object do you mean, the scanning object, the buss object, the maximized object, the filtering object, the polarized object, or the micro extension?

and Whiz quite explicitly says when asked about it: “It looks like a simple waldo for Waldo, in a sense. It has small extensions on it which could probably be used for micro-surgery or something like that.” We’ll be bringing in Waldo a little bit later to try it out.

Internal map reference — Sub Supply Room
POET: It burns and wields tremendous light and makes our joints delight its might.
To rise and fall, and climb new heights, to descend the pit of robot despair. Everything cracks under pressure, sooner or later.

SENSA: Internal map reference — Sub Supply Room
The air here is still. No vibrational activity.
Nothing within this environment emits singular vibrations, but an object does send out a CLC identifier.

Sensa indicates an object; the CLC identifier indicates it is in the “central library computer”. This means you can switch over to controlling Whiz and look for it; the best place to go for this kind of speculative search is an “Index Pedestal” which lets you know if an item is in the database at all and where to get the info.

Internal map reference — Index Peripheral
CLC identifier shows the object before me as the Index pedestal.

>plug in
It’s great to be home. Plugged in to the Index Pedestal. Ready to process queries.

The problem is Sensa’s description is too vague, and while Poet’s description is technically accurate, it doesn’t quite help find the item in the index. However, it is possible to TAKE OBJECT to instruct a robot to grab whatever is in the room (or even TAKE ALL). Once held in inventory, Poet has a more helpful description:

My Zen Master says I am grasping…
A slanting wedge

You can then jump over to Whiz and ask about the wedge:

>query wedge
CLC: Hmm. That’s a tough one. Hold on a minute while I try to locate a reference …

CLC: Ah! Here’s the tagged object. Sorry about that delay, but it’s crowded in here.
IP: Data available from the Advisory Pedestal.

Going over to the relevant pedestal, Whiz then explains that the wedge “can be used as a step or small platform.” This is sufficient information to know: this is meant to bridge the north and south parts of the map!

Internal map reference — Hallway Junction
Life is filled with choice. Decisions always make my eyes moist.

>n
I can’t climb the step.

>put wedge on step
The slanting wedge has been positioned at the step.

>n
Internal map reference — Sloping Corridor
Oh, the travesty of descent, the joyousness of having one’s spirit lifted beyond measure to another glorious level.
The slanting wedge is positioned by the step.

Before going on to further exploration, let’s fix Iris. Fortunately, Whiz is helpful when asked.

AP: Iris can be best used to monitor the monitors surrounding the Central Chamber.
Waldo should remove the maintenance panel and replace all faulty chips.

Bringing Waldo (the grasping/touching bot with sonar), and then doing EXAMINE IRIS:

WALDO: Iris feels extremely delicate and is under a meter in height. My pressure extensions detect a maintenance panel which should be accessible to me.

Remember he had a micro tool in storage; if you pick up and “wear” it, you can then open the panel.

When I open the smooth metal panel I detect a smooth device, a bumpy device, and a rough device.

It’s easy to forget with all the strange messages, but Poet is intended as a diagnostic bot, and can TOUCH each of the boards inside to figure out which one is broken.

>examine iris
The door is open and behind it I detect a brain zero, a brain dos, and a brain uno.

>touch zero
Sensory pads detect no abnormal flow.

>touch dos
Sensory pads detect no abnormal flow.

>touch uno
Electrons can no longer find flow paths through this brain.

The “uno” corresponds to the “plain brain” with the maintenance supplies.

>replace uno with plain
Okay. It’s done.

IRIS INTERRUPT: OOOH! That felt good! Close my panel, big boy.

>waldo, close panel
FC: Cryolink established to Waldo.
WALDO: Closed.

IRIS INTERRUPT: You never looked so good.

We can now see what the room actually looks like!

FC: Cryolink established to Iris.
IRIS: Internal map reference — Central Chamber
I’m in a large room which looks like the inside of a globe. The walls seem sculptured with wiring, swirling around the room’s perimeter, leading into a tall column. The column itself has a door on its face. Doorways lead to the west, south, east and northeast.
In the room with me are Waldo, Sensa and Poet.
Waldo is carrying a microsurgery extension.
Poet is carrying a blue chip.

Since I’m guessing you’re curious:

>w
Internal map reference — Main Supply Room
I’m in the northernmost portion of a large, messy area where debris is scattered about as if something had shaken it loose from the walls. Sitting near the wall is a machine which has a little orange button on its face. Beside the button are two small sockets, one red and one yellow. A burned chip sits in the red socket, and a fried chip sits in the yellow socket.

>s
Internal map reference — Middle Supply Room
This is the middle of an L-shaped supply room. Scattered about on the floor are all kinds of debris. Nothing looks salvageable.
Among the rubble I can see a little basket, sitting on the floor.
The little wire basket contains…
A plaid IC
A green IC
A yellow IC
A red IC
There is a blue sixteen-inch cable here.

>e
Internal map reference — Sub Supply Room
I am in a sub-station of the supply rooms. The room is small, with debris littering the floor.
A broken shelf lies on the floor in a terrible state, beyond use.

With the colors, it is possible to fix the “burned chip” and “fried chip” properly; the red IC goes in the red socket and the yellow IC goes in the yellow socket.

>push button
Okay. I’ve pressed the button. The front panel popped open, exposing a series of eight little circles with letters written on them. The front panel bears further examination. A bunch of orange wire is exposed, and beside it, in the panel, rests a small glass fuse.

>examine front panel
On the panel are a series of eight circles. Each of these circles has a three letter code printed on it. The three letters correspond to half of the Filtering Computers’ reset code.

The circle codes are FOO, MUM, BLE, BAR, KLA, CON, BOZ, and TRA respectively. I don’t have anything matching with them yet.

Other than that puzzle, the main use of Iris is to check various monitors. The earthquake that started the game is already causing weather to go out of control; Hydroponics and Transit are at “optimal” to start (on default difficulty, at least), but there are secondary quakes later which mess with those too.

Internal map reference — Weather Monitors
All around me I see meters indicating the state of the weather conditions on all three planet-side continents.
The monitors for surface weather show:

  TEMP: 26 WINDS: 70
  PRECIPITATION: a blinding snowstorm
  TOWER PRESSURES: Tower 1 -- 55
                   Tower 2 -- 20
                   Tower 3 -- 55

I haven’t fully experimented yet with everything, but at least tried to fix the weather, by going to the “skywalk” branch on the south side of the complex:

The controls are switches (for transit), levers (for hydroponics) and dials (for weather), with the added complication that not every robot can see every control. Sensa can see all the controls normally. Waldo can see all of them with his sonar (although he sees the switches as “bumps”); Poet only can work with the levers and dials but the switches are invisible. Auda hears a roaring sound while on the skywalk but can’t refer to any of the controls.

Internal map reference — Skywalk Beta
I can hear the tremendous roar of wind in a tunnel to the north. An exact duplication of this sound can be detected from the east and west, though their intensities are somewhat less.

>n
Internal map reference — Hydroponics Control Area
I am in the Hydroponics Control Area.

All the dials are set at 55, but since the Tower’s pressure is at 20 it clearly is not working properly. I ended up getting the weather to simply “rain” by cranking the second dial up to 100, and had everything down to a “light drizzle” by moving the first and third dial down a step to 54.

  TEMP: 42 WINDS: 18
  PRECIPITATION: a light drizzle
  TOWER PRESSURES: Tower 1 -- 54
                   Tower 2 -- 45
                   Tower 3 -- 54

One important point here is that you can technically reach the dials before you’ve fixed Iris, so you can take the information already gathered and send a robot to fix the weather right away. I’m not sure how I feel about that. The “quantum realities” that the game encourages (like Deadline) where you experiment and reset many times feels like it admits “knowing how the chip color puzzle works” but not so much fixing weather without seeing it. On the other hand, the attempts from the Cambridge authors like with Hezarin to “fix” this issue with randomness-during-the-game ended up breaking it utterly instead, so I’d rather authors avoid trying too hard to avoid pre-knowledge.

To recap, as far as puzzles solved, I’ve bridged the step between the north and south areas, fixed Iris, fixed a “reset code” device in storage, and prevented a snowstorm.

Aaron Reed’s map of the south section of Suspended, which you can get as a mouse pad.

Staying with the south side for now, there’s a “repair area” (where Waldo starts at) with two unresolved mysteries. The first is a “walkway” that runs north to south. According to Whiz, putting something in at one side will run it through and have it fixed at the other ends, except the walkway isn’t running. From Sensa’s perspective:

Internal map reference — Alpha Repair
Strong electrical interference can be detected within this environment.
The conveying mechanism is not in motion.

>s
Internal map reference — Beta Repair
I detect slight vibrational activity from a conveying mechanism.
The conveying mechanism is not in motion.

>s
Internal map reference — Gamma Repair
Vibrational activity and electrical emanations detected from the north are stronger than those in the immediate vicinity.
The conveying mechanism is not in motion.
In the room with me is Waldo.
A large object emits strange flows, its surface a tracery of filament-like circuitry. The circuitry is concentrated near the center of one side.

While I haven’t been able to get the walkway running, I have managed to deal with the “large object” which is a locked cabinet. Most of the robots aren’t helpful here, but having Sensa examine the cage (spotting a “flowswitch”) followed by Poet touching it (who otherwise can’t sense it) is sufficient to give instructions on how to open the cabinet.

>touch cage
Data bits flow within the surface of the cage, concentrated in a circle.

>sensa, examine cage
FC: Cryolink established to Sensa.
SENSA: Concentrated on the front surface of the large object is a flowswitch.

>poet, touch flowswitch
FC: Cryolink established to Poet.
POET: Sensa has the ability to turn the plates and detect when they are properly aligned.

SENSA, TURN PLATES causes it to open, revealing a “broken device”. Sensa and Waldo don’t give more detail than that, but Poet refers to the device as FRED, which is enough to get Whiz on the case:

Technical: This robot is a dead and departed robot who is totally beyond repair.

Historical: This robot was an all-purpose, multi-function robot which proved inadequate for maintenance purposes.

Advisory: There may be some salvageable parts inside it.

While FRED is larger than any of the robots, you can specify BOTH robots move FRED. (This is the puzzle that made me grumpy last time, but again, I didn’t have the manual directions that indicated I could command two robots at once.)

>both waldo and poet, get fred
FC: Dual-Cryolink established to Waldo and Poet.
FC: The robots have moved it.
FC: Cryolink established to Waldo.

>look
Internal map reference — Gamma Repair
I have reached the south end of this area. The walkway ends here.
The walkway is not in motion.
In the room with me are Sensa and Poet.
There is a broken mechanism here.
I can feel a bunch of smooth wire coming out of the mechanism.
There is a hollow object here.

>poet, examine wire
FC: Cryolink established to Poet.
POET: I perceive nothing special about the twelve-inch cable.

I’m guessing this goes back to the override device; fixing it seems to be the central puzzle of the whole game. I haven’t taken this puzzle any farther at the moment (you may notice this post is already getting rather long, and I’m not done yet).

It’s time for some acid! Which FRED supposedly resists, so I may need to simply salvage some parts or even fix FRED entirely (my memory is gone past the BOTH robots part, it’s apparently the moments of frustration that stick in memory!) I also found a method of fixing the acid leak later (but it may not be optimal for turns). For now, though, let’s just send in some sacrifices. Going east to the Filtering Computers requires passing under acid, which Poet describes colorfully:

Internal map reference — Short Corridor
The great interpreter of all our daily occurences lies ahead, while a walk in the sky waits for me to the northeast.
Bathe in luxuriating, though scorching, solvents.

>e
Internal map reference — Cavernous Room
Twice the size of life, this area makes me feel like a dwarf.
Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head
And before you know it I’ll
wake up dead… a puddle of lead.

>e
Internal map reference — East End
Ah, Mama! Here I am, your sonny boy, returned after a lifetime of wandering!

>e
Internal map reference — Beta FC
Amid the nervous neurons, the synaptic links make jumps akin to imagination found only in Wonderland.

POET INTERRUPT: I fear I’m about to become one with the cosmos.

There’s a little time before a robot who gets acid-bathed dies, so I think it may be possible to do whatever needs doing via sacrifice rather than “solving a puzzle”. I have yet to experiment; taking Sensa through reveals a “plug” in two places (Primary Channel, Secondary Channel).

Internal map reference — Secondary Channel
Sensory mechanisms detect the disquieting flow of electricity within this tube. The flow is concentrated within the small cables which line a groove in the floor. There is a small hole in the wall of the tube awaiting a plug, while slightly higher up rests a sign.

(The sign isn’t portable, and Iris can’t reach this spot, so I don’t know what it says.)

Finally to the north side:

Auda starts in a long east-west hall where to the far west is “sterilization” followed by “decontamination”; this is for any humans entering the facility (ominous note). Along the way is a “small supply room” with a metal tool up high, which Waldo describes as a cutting tool (but can’t reach).

Internal map reference — Small Supply Room
I can detect a small area, cluttered with things which extend from the walls. Doorways lead to the east and the west.
There is a high extending holder here.
Sitting on the high extending holder is…
A cutting tool
There is a square container here.

Opening the container gives the message “Robots are restricted from opening this cabinet” which feels additionally ominous, in the way that the (television show) Westworld had things the robots just couldn’t see.

A branch heading south has a few specific points of interest:

A maintenance access room: Waldo describes a “strange combination of circular protuberances” with a “small spray going upward”. Sensa more specifically describes it as acid where “Approximately 99.87 percent of these acid droplets are
going up into the room above.”

A library core: This is meant to be the human-usable version of the same database that Whiz can access. If you send Whiz over he specifically says “This peripheral allows no interaction with robots.”

A force field: The end of the hallway turns east to a biological area I haven’t been able to access because of a force field.

Internal map reference — Hallway End
Sonar detects the end of the southern hallway. To the east is a long, narrow area which travels out of my receiving range.
Sonar also detects a large hollow container sitting at the head of the long tunnel.
I can detect nothing inside of it.

>e
CLC WARNING: Dangerous force fields prevent eastern movement.

Sensa has the most helpful description…

Sensory input indicates the end of the southern hallway here, with extremely violent force fields and electrical disturbances to the east.
Sensors detect an egg-shaped object, large enough for me to enter, sitting at the head of the long tunnel.
I can detect nothing inside of it.

…although I’m still not sure yet what’s going on here.

Almost done! Let’s talk about the arrival of the humans. This happens after some amount of turns (I haven’t counted) I assume because they’re trying to do the clone-replacement process, assuming you’ve gone haywire (you think they might notice the earthquakes, but this seems to be the matter of hundreds of years of peace means they have trouble figuring out what to do in a crisis). Switching to Auda, which starts in the north section anyway:

Internal map reference — Sterilization Chamber
A loud whirring noise can be detected from the west.
A small plaque makes tinging noises here.

>w
CLC WARNING!! Further westward movement prohibited to all robots.

(The plaque here is portable and I took it to Iris to read it, but let’s save that for last.)

After enough time passes:

AUDA INTERRUPT: Some talking mechanisms just entered the room.

>wait
FC: Time passes…

I can hear the sound of metal against metal, followed by the sound of a creaking door opening.

“I’ve got the toolbag. Everything in it seems intact.”
“Well, don’t lose it, man. We’re lost without it. We’ll never pull the switch on him if we lose it.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t let it out of my sight.”
“I’m getting sleepy. It was a long ride down here. What do you say we catch some sleep?”
“You really think we should? With all the devastation taking place?”
“I don’t have much choice. I’m not thinking clearly, and I really need to sleep. More casualties will occur if we don’t take care of ourselves.”
“Good point. Let’s go.”

The humans head to the “sleep chamber” to the far east and pause:

“Well, this is some sleep chamber. No frills.”
“Don’t complain. At least there’s bunks for us.”
“I suppose. I’m going to put the toolbag on the floor while I grab some shuteye.”
“What about the robot?”
“What, that ear thing? Gimme a break!”

AUDA: I hear the sound of metal being placed on the floor.

Trying to take the item (a toolbag) awakens the humans:

“Give me that, you little devil!”
“That robot’s a thief! Let’s get it!”

I’m not sure if it is possible to steal the tools entirely, but you can lead the humans over to the acid leak which seems useful:

“Hey — Look at that! The pipes going up to the Filtering Computers have burst.”
“Yeah. Maybe the person in the cylinder isn’t at fault….”
“Hmm. You could be right. Let’s fix this and then see if things return to normal.”

AUDA: I can hear the sound of metal, like a wheel turning, and the hissing stop.

“That should take care of that leak. Let’s go up to the Rec Area and wait for awhile.”
“Fine. Meanwhile, I’ll get our toolbag back.”

AUDA: I hear footsteps as the talking mechanisms walk away.

SENSA: I detect the flow within the pipes overhead stopping and the acid leak stopping, too.

The fun thing about this scene is I first only had Sensa here with the bag but forgot to bring Auda along, and Sensa can’t even sense the humans there, so the hissing mysteriously fixed on its own (although I could guess at what happened).

That’s an enormous amount of progress, I think! I still have the open problems of

  • Dealing with hydroponic and transport controls
  • The mysterious force field
  • What to do with FRED
  • Getting the repair device near FRED running
  • Getting the “cutting tool” that’s too high
  • The mysterious plugs past the acid drip
  • Using the reset device with the eight codes
  • Anything else involving the humans (either using them to help, or stealing their tools)

Hopefully I won’t need these! Via eBay.

One last thing before I check out, since I promised: the message on the plaque, as read by Iris:

This Underground Complex was designed and built by the Frobozz Engineering Company, makers of such fine products as One-Way ™ Bus Tickets, Ozone Nozone, and “Best in the East”, soon to be a Smello-vision ™ release.

Chief Designer/Architect: Michael Berlyn.

Despite a lack of dark / grues, I suppose that means Suspended is part of the extended Zorkiverse?

Tuesday, 07. October 2025

Renga in Blue

Suspended (1983)

A bicycle can get you from New York to LA, so will a jet plane. In one sense they are the exact same thing; in another they are nothing alike. In one sense we are working within traditional genres — mystery, fantasy, science fiction — and in another we are still teaching ourselves, laying out […]

A bicycle can get you from New York to LA, so will a jet plane. In one sense they are the exact same thing; in another they are nothing alike. In one sense we are working within traditional genres — mystery, fantasy, science fiction — and in another we are still teaching ourselves, laying out the groundwork for what these things could be. For the most part, we are working without pioneers. In our own way we are like Louis L’Amour or Agatha Christie or Dashiell Hammett.

— Michael Berlyn, from the 1984 article Masters of the Game

The Boston Computer Society (founded by Johnathan Rotenberg) has briefly shown up here in regard to Tim Quinlan, and the company Mad Hatter Software which had published the game Sleuth right before disappearing. Rotenberg himself describes the early days of the group as “a fairly obscure computer group” even up to 1982, when their membership was north of 4,000. While famous amongst computer insiders, enough so that Jobs offered Rotenberg a job in 1981 (he declined, wanting to finish college) that didn’t mean recognition amongst the general public. 1982 was when that would change.

Their big event of the year was Applefest, the East Coast equivalent to Applefest in California.

Picture of 1982 Boston Applefest, From Facebook. The balloon was attached to the ground but people could ride up a couple feet and get an Apple balloon pin.

1982 had Jobs and Wozniak themselves as keynote speakers. The BCS publication Computer Update quoted one attendee that

I kind of expected them to come out in white robes.

indicating religious fervor. The audience was standing-room only.

Software had a strong reception, with games especially doing well on Saturday when many children were in attendance. Sir-Tech, which had debuted Wizardry in 1980, had come back with the just-completed sequel Knight of Diamonds in tow.

Via The Boston Phoenix 11 May 1982.

This time, a feature landed in the Wall Street Journal in October, featuring the “whiz kid” Jonathan Rotenberg, and suddenly Boston Applefest was mainstream.

Somehow, I hit the “tipping point” in October and was besieged by press from all over the world…including BusinessWeek, People, Time, Sports Illustrated, CBS News, numerous magazines and talk shows, and even the National Enquirer (which threatened to “stake me out” if I didn’t cooperate with them).

Just like California Applefest was a source of backroom deals (leading to Al Lowe starting with Sierra, for instance) this could happen on the East Coast as well; this is where Marc Blank of Infocom and Michael Berlyn first met. This was before Zork III came out, so Infocom was still fresh off the thunderbolt of Deadline. Marc enjoyed the technical challenge, but he did the story as well, as it was simply standard that the entire work be done by one person; however, as he stated in a later interview, he “always loved the idea that someone who’s more talented than I am in writing could take this and do something that’s really much better than I could do.”

So the idea for me was really just experimenting with another style of telling, of having the story evolve, a different interface just to see where it would go. And to me that was more important than the story.

While Michael Berlyn’s novels were not considered Pulitzer-worthy or Hugo-worthy, he was a “real author” who also had adventure experience with his works Oo-Topos and Cyborg. Berlyn’s weak spot was his hand-written BASIC source code, so the Infocom’s parser and overarching world system would let him create a next-level product. The pair struck a deal; originally Michael intended to stay in Colorado, but the difficulty of working with ZIL remotely meant he and his wife Muffy moved to Boston a month later.

The mention of Muffy is important in that she already helped with Oo-topos and Cyborg and apparently contributed “significantly” to Suspended. (Eventually, the fact she couldn’t be hired officially — there was a policy against family member hires at Infocom — led to Michael Berlyn leaving, but that’s a bit farther along in the story.)

The structure of Deadline was a good place to start from, as Blank had already done hard work in establishing a complex system of NPCs, really more complex than any other product on the market at the time (The Hobbit would be an exception, except it wasn’t out yet). Berlyn had already experimented in Cyborg with having the player merged with a character in the world. Expanding the idea from Cyborg led to a game where the player awakens from cryofreeze and can only see, hear, and interact with the world via multiple robots. The object-oriented nature of Infocom’s ZIL system meant the Deadline NPCs could be adapted easily to become PCs for the player to jump into instead.

…it was his story and I did some of the tools, the technology that he needed to get all the robots moving around like they were on tracks.

The resulting product, originally titled Suspension, eventually landed on the moniker Suspended.

My own copy of the game, from Michael Berlyn’s garage. This version’s on 8-inch disk for the NEC APC. I got it back in 1998 as a prize in IFComp.

Just like Starcross, the packaging is (in)famous amongst collecting circles for being highly elaborate with a facemask and a fold-open map with figures representing the locations of six robots. The map is extremely important as the game is wildly unusual for Infocom, or really, adventures as a whole: there is no standard exploration. You are given the entire map at the start, but without details as far as what you can find where, just names of places. The overall feel is akin to one of the strategy games from the time that came with a board where the player was intended to move pieces around based on the computer’s instructions. Compare with, for example, Chris Crawford’s Tanktics, originally developed on a KIM-1 with a six-character display (just like Kim-Venture).

Part of the chart for the Commodore PET version of Tanktics, from Data Driven Gamer.

There’s even multiple difficulty levels to add to the strategy game feel, but I would still call Suspended a full adventure at heart. (Although I wouldn’t object if The Wargaming Scribe tried the game out just for fun!)

Starting positions of five of the six main robots.

I incidentally found moving the real pieces on a real board (see picture above) to be a pain — again similar to a wargame setup, it requires a flat surface to be handy near your computer, which I don’t have — so I made a Figma page to work with instead. I may re-scan the map image later but it works for now.

My normal next step would be to collect and read all the documents that come with the game, but I hit one other curious snag. There’s a “memo” that’s in my version of the game I wasn’t finding elsewhere.

It mentions specifically that cables need to be changed with the syntax REPLACE (cable in groove) WITH (cable a robot is holding), and that erratic behavior may manifest itself in a “crash”. Does it mean a literal game crash? This feels out of character for Infocom, who I think are more likely to fix a bug rather than go through the effort of printing an entire extra piece of documentation to cover over a problem. The reference to the sixteen-inch cable being broken also seems more like a hint than a bug aspect.

I crowdsourced this over to Bluesky and Mastodon. Chris Kohler found a “facemask” version of the game on eBay had the memo; I had confirmation from Andrew Plotkin their early copy did not have the memo. I’ll need to investigate this further, but I’m playing a later release first (Release 8 / Serial number 840521) and then will check earlier release for bugs. Unfortunately I do not have a 8-inch disk drive in order to extract the data file I have so I can’t tell exactly which release it is.

Everything else you can find at the Infocom documentation project or the nine versions of Suspended up at the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History (one which has the memo).

It is the far future: the planet Contra has been terraformed with settlers from Earth. They have conquered their world and live in a highly controlled environment: perfect weather, perfect growing of food.

Rather like the story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, there is a dark side to this, in that the system running the planet needs a human in stasis. The human is “put under” for 500 years but some aspect of their brain is enough to support the systems for that long; if everything goes well, they are awoken after 500 years and the cycle is renewed, with a “recruit” gathered from a planetary lottery.

In Suspended, you have won the planetary lottery.

You should only awake in the case of an emergency, which the manual emphatically explains, won’t happen. This is despite a previous disaster involving “the Gregory Franklin incident”.

Gregory Franklin was awoken after 467 years, but there was no emergency, so he decided to create one:

Overriding the three Filtering Computers, he directed the transportation systems to kill whoever happened to be walking outside or riding on any of the glide ramps. Psychologists believe that he must have possessed a twisted sense of humor–to have people maimed, run over, chased by robot-taxis provided him with pleasure for the moment. However, he soon tired of this and decided to eliminate a larger section of the population in a far easier manner.

Ever since weather had been controlled, dwellings had not been designed to withstand snow and sleet. Franklin altered the pressure in the Weather Towers near the cities, setting off raging storms and creating freezing temperatures. Thousands perished from exposure; thousands more became popsicles.

The upshot is that anything that seems to go awry means that you might find yourself replaced with a “clone”.

FC ALERT! Planetside systems are deteriorating. FC imbalance detected. Emergency reviving systems completed. You are now in control of the complex.

SENSA INTERRUPT: Seismic aftershock detected ten meters north of Beta FC. Tremor intensity 9.7. Projected damage: connecting cables in Primary and Secondary Channels.

FC INTERRUPT: All Robots, report locations.

IRIS: In the Weather Monitors.
WALDO: In the Gamma Repair.
SENSA: In the Central Chamber.
AUDA: In the Entry Area.
POET: In the Central Chamber.
WHIZ: In the Advisory Peripheral.

This is from the game itself. The manual includes special commands…

REPORT LOCATION
ARR (all robots report)
ARL (all robots report locations)
QUERY ABOUT (used for)
ALL ROBOTS, (do something)
DRAG (robot) TO
BOTH (robot) and (robot), (do something)

…but for the most part, your command is in the format ROBOT, DO THING. If you are using a particular robot, you can skip the “ROBOT” preface.

Robots all have individual abilities. Iris, the “visual robot” who can see, starts out nonfunctional. I don’t know the exact boundaries but Iris cannot move about the whole facility.

>IRIS, GO WEST
FC: Cryolink already established to Iris.
Internal map reference — Main Supply Room
Visual function nonfunctional.

Auda is the robot that can hear, although it starts at the northern part of the map.

>w
Internal map reference — Decontamination Chamber
A small hissing can be detected overhead, as if a small port leaked a semi-liquid compound.

>w
Internal map reference — Sterilization Chamber
A loud whirring noise can be detected from the west.
A small plaque makes tinging noises here.

Notice that the plaque might say something, but since Auda can only hear we don’t know (yet) what it says.

Waldo is a “grasping robot” with six arms, sonar, and a well-developed sense of touch.

WALDO: Internal map reference — Gamma Repair
I have reached the south end of this area. The walkway ends here.
The walkway is not in motion.
A large object sits before me. Sonar indicates it is hollow, but not empty.

Whiz is a robot restricted to the “Central Core” that can make queries, and is sort of an encyclopedia. I haven’t tried searching through entries yet.

>whiz, look
FC: Cryolink established to Whiz.
WHIZ: Internal map reference — Advisory Peripheral
CLC tagged object indicates it is the Advisory pedestal before me.

>whiz, plug in
FC: Cryolink already established to Whiz.
It’s great to be home. Plugged in to the Advisory Pedestal. Ready to process queries.

Poet and Sensa start in the same place, the “Central Chamber” (right next to Aura). Poet is a “diagnostic robot” who can activate its sensor with the TOUCH command, but has a cryptic style of speaking.

>POET, WEST
FC: Cryolink established to Poet.
POET: Internal map reference — Weather Monitors
They puff and billow and strain a bit, roar then ebb with time.
In the room with me is Iris.

>TOUCH IRIS
Sensory pads detect no abnormal flow.

>EAST
Internal map reference — Central Chamber
It hops and skips and leaves a bit, and can’t decide if it should quit. It tells the world what it should know, but doesn’t know when it’s been shown.
In the room with me is Sensa.

Sensa has a mixture of operations and “can detect vibrational activity, photon emission sources and ionic discharges”; Sensa also has appendages like Waldo.

>SENSA, LOOK
FC: Cryolink established to Sensa.
SENSA: Internal map reference — Central Chamber
All around me charges flow, shaped by the very nature of this room. The electrons are being channeled into an electrical column, central to this environment.
In the room with me is Poet.

That’s six robots; there’s a seventh the manual mentions that was put out of service by Franklin (and will become important later).

I use the phrasing “and will” because: yes, I have played and beaten this game before. Like Zork III, it was quite a while ago, and I don’t remember much, but I do know where the seventh robot is and what I thought at the time was a highly unfair command to get to it. (Now that I have a full manual, I see it’s listed in the manual; I played the Lost Treasures of Infocom version which I’m pretty sure did not give this game’s “special commands”.) I remember that at some point humans arrive, presumably thinking another Franklin incident is happening; I also remember there’s an acid drip somewhere that’s a pain (that is, if you roll a robot through a particular room they’ll become disabled). Other than that I’m pretty memory-free, other than I enjoyed the game quite a lot.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. I’ll give the layout of the complex (as far as I can figure) in my next update. In the meantime for anyone who wants to skip ahead, you can check Jimmy Maher, Drew Cook, and Aaron Reed, all who have their own takes on the game. Also, thanks to Jonathan Rotenberg for sharing some documentation about Applefest 1982.

Sunday, 05. October 2025

Renga in Blue

Engine Failure (1983)

Engine Failure is a type-in that first appeared in Personal Computer World (April 1983) and then in the spin-off Personal Computer Games, the same as Adventure in 1K. Personal Computer World was very business-oriented, so it is understandable they might have needed to scrabble from prior material to have enough to launch a games magazine. […]

Back to Scotland! It’s been a while.

Engine Failure is a type-in that first appeared in Personal Computer World (April 1983) and then in the spin-off Personal Computer Games, the same as Adventure in 1K.

Personal Computer World was very business-oriented, so it is understandable they might have needed to scrabble from prior material to have enough to launch a games magazine.

An ad from the same issue showing a typical example of content. Hilderbay made a previous appearance on this blog with the game Gold but otherwise was focused on business and utility software.

The author, Ian Watt, is yet another one of our teen-aged authors (born in 1967). He founded a ZX80/81 club out of Glasgow (“One of the club’s main aims is to encourage computer literacy”) that was a branch of Tim Hartnell’s extended group (see my writeup on The Citadel for more on how that got started). Of his five published games, one was only in magazines (this one), one is part of a book edited by Hartnell, and three are part of a book by Ian Watt with an introduction by Hartnell. Eyeballing dates, it looks like Engine Failure was the first to make print, which is why I’m starting here.

Pollokshaws, where the ZX80/ZX81 club met. Via Rosser1954, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Engine Failure is “tiny” (two pages, along the lines of Arkenstone) but due to some cryptic object interactions took me a while to finish.

Our spaceship has had its engine fail near a planet, and the engine needs to be repaired before the spaceship is destroyed in the atmosphere.

Gameplay starts in a control room with cryptic buttons; pushing the red one right away causes the ship to blow up.

Even after finishing the game I’m unclear what the functions of the buttons are (that is, I know which ones to press to win, but I’m not sure what the user manual would say each one does in a real-world sense).

Just south of the starting control room is “living quarters” with “water” and a medical bay with a “pill”. The game lets you uneventfully drink the water and eat the pill although it isn’t clear what puzzles this solves, or if it even helps solve a puzzle (it does, I’ll mention it when it happens).

To the south are some “computer banks” with a floppy disk — I’ll deal with that later — and then heading eastward leads to a Cargo Hold (with pliers) and an empty Engine Servicing Room (where going any farther is death, due to a “pet origonk”).

The issue here conceptually is that the sparsity makes it unclear if this is just an adjoining room or something useful later; there’s no control panel or circuit board. Hence, for a while I kept trying to go west, but it turns out going west is impossible and always a death.

Heading back to the computer storage banks and west, there’s a shuttlebay, although entering the shuttle kills you with nerve gas.

It is unclear why the shuttle on your own ship would be filled with deadly gas. I assume there’s some unmentioned sabotage in the plot that happened on our last stop.

Going a bit farther west is a spacesuit; wearing it is the solution to the nerve gas. You can then find a screwdriver inside.

The screwdriver can be used to UNSCREW a panel at a room marked “Left Engine” (Right Engine has the creature and is impossible to reach). The panel has a lever, and pulling it activates a blue light.

It’s time to head back to the control room, but while heading back we should grab a “jewel-socket”, a “zappergun”, and that previously mentioned floppy disk along the way.

There is a blue light in the control room now, and you’d think that’d mean you just press the blue button, but that kills you. You need to press the yellow button, which turns the light yellow, and while the yellow light is on you press the blue button, which reveals a “pcb” that is “somewhere in the ship”. (Somewhere turns out to be that empty “servicing room”, but we’ll head back there later.)

While we’re at it, we should also INSERT FLOPPY (no description that there’s a place to put the floppy, I just tried INSERT FLOPPY in every single room until it worked). This causes a red light to turn on, and now we can go straight to the put and PRESS RED.

This will activate a “TELEPORT TERMINAL” just to the south and west of here. I spent a long time trying to operate the machine before checking the source code; it’s just the word TELEPORT by itself.

You are safe teleport if a.) you’ve drunk the water b.) eaten the pill and c.) are carrying the zappergun. The first two prevent a disease from killing you, while the zappergun prevents guards from killing you. (It’s very weird and passive, since the zappergun doesn’t get shown being used! You might go through all this and not realize there is any opposition at all.)

While holding both the ASTRAGEM and the JEWEL-SOCKET from earlier you can INSERT ASTRAGEM. Then, back where the PCB got revealed (next to the killer pet) you can INSERT JEWEL (as long as you are holding PLIERS) and a red light will turn on. Then to finish the game you just need to run back to the control room (where it starts getting very hot, the time limit is tight) and press the red button again.

Why does red either blow up the ship, activate the teleporter, or activate some kind of gem? Why does the lever causing a blue light mean you should not press the blue button, but the yellow button instead? I know the author was essentially trying to create an “experiment” type puzzle, but it diverged into the sort of messy and unintuitive interaction I associate more with fantasy games.

Incidentally, while trying to solve the above issues, I looked at the room structure data, and it’s very unusual. Most games have data along the lines of Room Name, 4, 5, 1, 0, which indicates a room, and the rooms (by ID) that go north, south, and east respectively. This game instead has a whole data line like this:

0 -1 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 -3 0 0 -2 0 0

These are all the north exits, and furthermore, they give information in a relative sense. That is, if you’re in room 2 (living quarters) and go north, you subtract one from the room ID to find where it goes (room 1, the control room at the start). I’ve never seen anything like this before; almost always the absolute room ID of the destination is given. I’m unclear why the author would use this method of expressing exits. Perhaps his book has some clue, but we’ll save that for a later time.

Coming up: Infocom.

Friday, 03. October 2025

Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian

A Looking Glass Half Empty, Part 1: Just Lookin’ for a Hit

This article tells part of the story of Looking Glass Studios. There was some discussion about it: “Wow, gosh, it’d sure be nice if we were making more money and selling more copies so we could do crazy games of the type we want, as opposed to having to worry about how we’re going to […]

This article tells part of the story of Looking Glass Studios.

There was some discussion about it: “Wow, gosh, it’d sure be nice if we were making more money and selling more copies so we could do crazy games of the type we want, as opposed to having to worry about how we’re going to sell more.” Hey, I’d love it if the public was more into what I like to do and a little less into slightly more straightforward things. But I totally get that they’re into straightforward things. I don’t have any divine right to have someone hand me millions of dollars to make a game of whatever I want to do. At some fundamental level, everyone has a wallet, and they vote with it.

— Doug Church, Looking Glass Studios

Late in 1994, after their rather brilliant game System Shock had debuted to a reception most kindly described as constrained, the Boston-based studio Looking Glass Technologies sent their star producer Warren Spector down to Austin, Texas. There he was to visit the offices of Looking Glass’s publisher Origin Systems, whose lack of promotional enthusiasm they largely blamed for their latest game’s lukewarm commercial performance. Until recently, Spector had been directly employed by Origin. The thinking, then, was that he might still be able to pull some strings in Austin to move the games of Looking Glass a little higher up in the priority rankings. The upshot of his visit was not encouraging. “What do I have to do to get a hit around here?” Spector remembers pleading to his old colleagues. The answer was “very quiet, very calm: ‘Sign Mark Hamill to star in your game.‘ That was the thinking at the time.” But interactive movies were not at all what Looking Glass wanted to be doing, nor where they felt the long-term future of the games industry lay.

So, founders Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner decided to make some major changes in their business model in the hope of raising their studio’s profile. They accepted $3.8 million in venture capital and cut ties with Origin, announcing that henceforward Looking Glass would publish as well as create their games for themselves. Jerry Wolosenko, a new executive vice president whom they hired to help steer the company into its future of abundance, told The Boston Globe in May of 1995 that “we expect to do six original titles per year. We are just beginning.” This was an ambitious goal indeed for a studio that, in its five and a half years of existence to date, had managed to turn out just three original games alongside a handful of porting jobs.

Even more ambitious, if not brazen, was the product that Looking Glass thought would provide them with their entrée into the ranks of the big-time publishers. They intended to mount a head-on challenge to that noted tech monopolist Microsoft, whose venerable, archetypally entitled Flight Simulator was the last word — in fact, very nearly the only word — in civilian flight simulation. David-versus-Goliath contests in the business of media didn’t come much more pronounced than this one, but Looking Glass thought they had a strategy that might allow them to break at least this particular Microsoft monopoly.

Flight Unlimited was the brainchild of a high-energy physicist, glider pilot, and amateur jazz pianist named Seamus Blackley, who had arrived at Looking Glass by way of the legendary Fermi Laboratory. His guiding principle was that Microsoft’s Flight Simulator as it had evolved over the last decade and a half had become less a simulation of flight itself than a simulation of the humdrum routine of civil aviation — of takeoff permissions and holding patterns, of navigational transponders and instrument landing systems. He wanted to return the focus to the simple joy of soaring through the air in a flying machine, something that, for all the technological progress that had been made since the Wright brothers took off from Kitty Hawk, could still seem closer to magic than science. The emphasis would be on free-form aerobatics rather than getting from Airport A to Airport B. “I want people to see that flying is beautiful, exciting, and see the thrill you can get from six degrees of freedom when you control an airplane,” Blackley said. “That’s why we’ve focused on the experience of flying. There is no fuel gauge.”

The result really was oddly beautiful, being arguably as close to interactive art as a product that bills itself as a vehicular simulation can possibility get. Its only real concession to structure took the form of a 33-lesson flying course, which brought you from just being able to hold the airplane straight and level to executing gravity-denying Immelman rolls, Cuban eights, hammerheads, and inverted spins. Any time that your coursework became too intense, you always had the option to just bin the lesson plans and, you know, go out and fly, maybe to try some improvisational skywriting.

In one sense, Flight Unlimited was a dramatic departure from the two Ultima Underworld games and System Shock, all of which were embodied first-person, narrative-oriented designs that relied on 3D graphics of a very different stripe. In another sense, though, it was business as usual, another example of Looking Glass not only pushing boundaries of technology in a purist sense — the flight model of Flight Unlimited really was second to none — but using it in the service of a game that was equally aesthetically innovative, and just a little bit more thoughtful all the way around than was the norm.

Upon its release in May of 1995, Flight Unlimited garnered a rare five-stars-out-of-five review from Computer Gaming World magazine:

It’s just you, the sky, and a plane that does just about anything you ask it to. Anything aerobatic, that is. Flight Unlimited is missing many of the staple elements of flight simulations. There are no missiles, guns, or enemy aircraft. You can’t learn IFR navigation or practice for your cross-country solo. You can’t even land at a different airport than the one you took off from. But unless you’re just never happy without something to shoot at, you won’t care. You’ll be too busy choreographing aerial ballets, pulling off death-defying aerobatic stunts, or just enjoying a quiet soar down the ridge line to miss that stuff.

Flight Unlimited sold far better than System Shock: a third of a million copies, more even than Looking Glass’s previous best-seller Ultima Underworld, enough to put itself solidly in the black and justify a sequel. Still, it seems safe to say that it didn’t cause any sleepless nights for anyone at Microsoft. Over the years, Flight Simulator had become less a game than a whole cottage industry unto itself, filled with armchair pilots who often weren’t quite gamers in the conventional sense, who often played nothing else. It wasn’t all that easy to make inroads with a crowd such as that. Like a lot of Looking Glass’s games, Flight Unlimited was a fundamentally niche product to which was attached the burden of mainstream sales expectations.

That said, the fact remained that Flight Unlimited had made money for Looking Glass, which allowed them to continue to live the dream for a while longer. Neurath and Lerner sent a homesick Warren Spector back down to Austin to open a second branch there, to take advantage of an abundance of talent surrounding the University of Texas that the Wing Commander-addled Origin Systems was believed to be neglecting.

Then Looking Glass hit a wall. Its name was Terra Nova.

Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri had had the most protracted development cycle of any Looking Glass game, dating almost all the way back to the very beginning of the company and passing through dozens of hands before it finally came to fruition in the spring of 1996. At its heart, it was an ultra-tactical first-person shooter vaguely inspired by the old Robert Heinlein novel Starship Troopers, tasking you with leading teams of fellow soldiers through a series of missions, clad in your high-tech combat gear that turned you more than halfway into a sentient robot. But it was also as close as Looking Glass would ever come to their own stab at a Wing Commander: the story was advanced via filmed cutscenes featuring real human actors, and a lot of attention was paid to the goings-on back at the ranch when you weren’t dressed up in your robot suit. This sort of thing worked in Wing Commander, to whatever extent it did, because the gameplay that took place between the movie segments was fairly quick and simple. Terra Nova was not like that, which could make it feel like an even more awkward mélange of chocolate and peanut butter. It’s difficult to say whether Activision’s Mechwarrior 2, the biggest computer game of 1995, helped it or hurt it in the marketplace: on the one hand, that game showed that there was a strong appetite for tactical combat involving robots, but, on the other, said demand was already being fed by a glut of copycats. Terra Nova got lost in the shuffle. A game that had been expected to sell at least half a million copies didn’t reach one-fifth of that total.

Looking Glass’s next game didn’t do any better. Like Flight Unlimited, British Open Championship Golf cut against the dark, gritty, and violent stereotype that tended to hold sway when people thought of Looking Glass, or for that matter of the games industry writ large. It was another direct challenge to an established behemoth: in this case, Access Software’s Links franchise, which, like Flight Simulator, had its own unique customer base, being the only line of boxed computer games that sold better to middle-aged corporate executives than they did to high-school and university students. Looking Glass’s golf project was led by one Rex Bradford, whose own history with simulating the sport went all the way back to Mean 18, a hit for Accolade in 1986. This time around, though, the upstart challenger to the status quo never even got a sniff. By way of damning with faint praise, Computer Gaming World called British Open Championship Golf “solid,” but “somewhat unspectacular.” Looking Glass could only wish that its sales could have been described in the same way.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see all too clearly that Neurath and Lerner crossed the line that separates ambition from hubris when they decided to try to set Looking Glass up as a publisher. At the very time they were doing so, many another boutique publisher was doing the opposite, looking for a larger partner or purchaser to serve as shelter from the gale-force winds that were beginning to blow through the industry. More games were being made than ever, even as shelf space at retail wasn’t growing at anything like the same pace, and digital distribution for most types of games remained a nonstarter in an era in which almost everyone was still accessing the Internet via a slow, unstable dial-up connection. This turned the fight over retail space into a free-for-all worthy of the most ultra-violent beat-em-up. Sharp elbows alone weren’t enough to win at this game; you had to have deep pockets as well, had to either be a big publisher yourself or have one of them on your side. In deciding to strike out on their own, Neurath and Lerner may have been inspired by the story of Interplay Productions, a development studio which in 1988 had broken free of the grasp of Electronic Arts — now Origin System’s corporate parent, as it happened — and gone on to itself become one of the aforementioned big publishers who were increasingly dominating at retail. But 1988 had been a very different time in gaming.

In short, Neurath and Lerner had chosen just about the worst possible instant to try to seize full control of their own destiny. “Game distribution isn’t always based on quality,” noted Warren Spector at the end of 1996. Having thus stated the obvious, he elaborated:

The business has changed radically in the last year, and it’s depressing. The competition for shelf space is ridiculous and puts retailers in charge. If you don’t buy an end-cap from retailers for, say, $50,000 a month, they won’t buy many copies.

Products once had three to six months. The average life is now 30 days. If you’re not a hit in 30 days, you’re gone. This is predicated on your association with a publisher who gets your title on shelves. It’s a nightmare.

With just three games shipped in the last two and a half years — a long way off their projected pace of “six original titles per year” — and with the last two of them having flopped like a wet tuna on a gymnastics court, Looking Glass was now in dire straits. The only thing that had allowed them to keep the doors open this long had been a series of workaday porting jobs that Warren Spector had been relegated to supervising down in Austin, while he waited for the company to establish itself on a sound enough financial footing to support game development from whole cloth in both locations. Ten years on, after Looking Glass had been enshrined in gaming lore as one of the most forward-thinking studios of all time and Spector as the ultimate creative producer, the idea of them wasting their collective talents on anonymous console ports would seem surreal. But such was the reality circa 1997, when Looking Glass, having burnt through all of their venture capital, was left holding on by a thread. “I remember people walking into the office to take back the [rented] plants which the studio was no longer able to pay for,” says programmer and designer Randy Smith.

As for Neurath and Lerner, they had swallowed the hubris of 1995 and were now doing what the managers of all independent games studios do when they find themselves unable to pay the bills anymore: looking for a buyer who would be able to pay them instead. But because Looking Glass could never seem to do anything in the conventional way even when they tried to, the buyer they found was one of the strangest ever.

The Boston firm known as Intermetrics, Inc., was far from a household name, but it had a proud history that long predated the personal-computer era. Intermetrics had grown out of the fecund soil of Project Apollo, having been founded in March of 1969 by some of the engineers and programmers behind the Apollo Guidance Computer that would soon help to place astronauts on the Moon. After that epochal achievement, Intermetrics continued to do a lot of work for NASA, providing much of the software that was used to control the Space Shuttle. Other government and aerospace-industry contracts filled out most of the balance of its order sheets.

In August of 1995, however, a group of investors led by a television executive bought the firm for $28 million, with the intention of turning it into something altogether different. Michael Alexander came from the media conglomerate MCA, where he had been credited with turning around the fortunes of the cable-television channel USA. Witnessing the transformation that high-resolution graphics, high-quality sound, and the enormous storage capacity of CD-ROM were wreaking on personal computing, he had joined dozens of his peers in deciding that the future of mass-market entertainment and infotainment lay with interactive multimedia. Deeming most of the companies who were already in that space to be “overvalued,” and apparently assuming that one type of computer programming was more or less the same as any other, he bought Intermetrics, whose uniform of white shirts, ties, and crew cuts had changed little since the heyday of the Space Race, to ride the hottest wave in 1990s consumer electronics.

“This is a company that has the skills and expertise to be in the multimedia business, but is not perceived as being in that business,” he told a reporter from The Los Angeles Times. (It was not a question of perception; Intermetrics was not in the multimedia business prior to the acquisition.) “And that is its strength.” (He failed to elaborate on exactly why this should be the case.) Even the journalist to whom he spoke seemed skeptical. “Ponytailed, black-clad, twenty-something multimedia developers beware,” she wrote, almost palpably smirking between the lines. “Graying engineers with pocket protectors and a dozen years of experience are starting to compete.” Likewise, it is hard not to suspect Brian Fargo of Interplay of trolling the poor rube when he said that “I think it’s great that the defense guys are doing this. It’s where the job security is now. It used to be in defense. Now it’s in the videogame business.” (Through good times and bad, one thing the videogame business has never, ever been noted for is its job security.)

Alas, Michael Alexander was not just a bandwagon jumper; he was a late bandwagon jumper. By the time he bought Intermetrics, the multimedia bubble was already close to popping under the pressure of a more sustained Internet bubble that would end the era of the non-game multimedia CD-ROM almost before it had begun. As this harsh reality became clear in the months that followed, Alexander had no choice but to push Intermetrics more and more in the direction of games, the only kind of CD-ROM product that was making anyone any money. The culture clash that resulted was intractable, as pretty much anyone who knew anything about the various cultures of computing could have predicted. Among these someones was Mike Dornbrook, a games-industry stalwart who had gotten his start with Infocom in the early 1980s. Seeking his next gig after Boffo Games, a studio he had founded with his old Infocom colleague Steve Meretzky, went down in flames, Dornbrook briefly kicked the tires at Intermetrics, but quickly concluded that what he saw “made no sense whatsoever”: “They were mostly COBOL programmers in their fifties and sixties. I remember looking around and saying, ‘You’re going to turn these guys into game programmers? What in the world are you thinking?'” [1]Dornbrook wound up signing on with a tiny startup called Harmonix Music Systems, which in 2005, after years of diligent experimentation with the possibilities for combining music and games, altered the landscape of gaming forever with Guitar Hero.

Belatedly realizing that all types of programming were perhaps not quite so interchangeable as he had believed, Michael Alexander set out in search of youngsters to teach his old dogs some new tricks. The Intermetrics rank and file must have shuddered at the advertisements he started to run in gaming magazines. “We are rocket scientists!” the ads trumpeted. “Even our games are mission-critical!” When these efforts failed to surface a critical mass of game-development talent, Alexander reluctantly moved on to doing what he should have done back in 1995: looking for an extant studio that already knew how to make games. It so happened that Looking Glass was right there in Boston, and, thanks to its troubled circumstances, was not as “overvalued” as most of its peers. Any port in a storm, as they say.

On August 14, 1997, a joint press release was issued: “Intermetrics, Inc., a 28-year-old leading software developer, and Looking Glass Studios, one of the computer gaming industry’s foremost developers, today announce the merger of the two companies’ gaming operations to form Intermetrics/Looking Glass Studios, LLC. Through the shared strengths of the two entities, the new company is strategically positioned to be a major force in the computer-game, console and online-gaming industries.” Evidently on a quest to find out how much meaningless corporate-speak he could shoehorn into one document, Michael Alexander went on to add that “Looking Glass Studios immediately catapults Intermetrics into a leading position in the gaming industry by giving us additional credentials and assets to compete in the market. Our business plan is to maintain and grow our core contract-services business while at the same time leveraging our expertise and financial resources to be a major player in the booming interactive-entertainment industry.” The price paid by the rocket scientists for their second-stage booster has to my knowledge never been publicly revealed.

The acquiring party may have been weird as all get-out, but it could have worked out far worse for Looking Glass, all things considered. In addition to the obvious benefit of being able to keep the doors open, at least a couple of other really good things came directly out of the acquisition. One was a change in name, from Looking Glass Technologies to Looking Glass Studios, emphasizing the creative dimension of their work. Another was a distribution deal with Eidos, a British publisher that had serious retail clout in both North America and Europe. Riding high on the back of the massive international hit Tomb Raider, Eidos could ensure that Looking Glass’s games got prominent placement in stores. Meanwhile this idea of the Looking Glass people serving as mentors to those who were struggling to make games at Intermetrics proper — an excruciating proposition for both parties — would prove to mostly be a polite, face-saving fiction for Michael Alexander; in practice, the new parent company would prove largely content to leave its subsidiary alone to do its own thing. Now the folks at Looking Glass just needed to deliver a hit to firmly establish themselves in their new situation. That was always the sticky wicket for them.

The first game that Looking Glass released under their new ownership was Flight Unlimited II, which appeared just a few months after the big announcement. Created without the input of Seamus Blackley, who had left the company, Flight Unlimited II sought simultaneously to capitalize on the relative success of Looking Glass’s first flight simulator and to adjust that game’s priorities to better coincide with the real or perceived desires of the market. Looking Glass paired the extant flight model with an impressively detailed depiction of the geography of the San Francisco Bay Area. Then they added a lot more structure to the whole affair, in the form of a set of missions to fly after you finished your training. The biggest innovation, a first for any civilian flight simulator, was the addition of other aircraft, turning San Francisco International Airport into the same tangle of congested flight lanes it was in the real world. These changes moved the game away from being such a purist simulation of flight as an end unto itself. Still, there was a logic to the additions; one can easily imagine them making Flight Unlimited II more appealing to the sorts of gamers who don’t tend to thrive in goal-less sandboxes. Be that as it may, though, it didn’t show up in the sales figures. Flight Unlimited II sold better than Terra Nova or British Open Championship Golf, but not as well as its series predecessor, just barely managing to break even.

This disappointment put that much more pressure on Looking Glass’s next game to please the new boss and show that the studio could deliver a solid, unqualified hit. In a triumph of hope over experience, everyone had high expectations for The Dark Project, which had been described in the press release announcing the acquisition as “a next-generation fantasy role-playing game.” Such a description might have left gamers wondering if Looking Glass was returning to the territory of Ultima Underworld. As things worked out, the game that they would come to know as simply Thief would not be that at all, but would instead break new ground in a completely different way. It stands today alongside Ultima Underworld in another sense: as one of the three principal legs — the last one being System Shock, of course — that hold up Looking Glass’s towering modern-day reputation for relentless, high-concept innovation.

The off-kilter masterstroke that is Thief started with a new first-person 3D engine known as The Dark Engine. It could have powered a “low-brain shooter,” as the Looking Glass folks called the likes of the mega-hit Quake, with perfect equanimity. But they just couldn’t bring themselves to make one.

It took a goodly while for them to decide what they did want to do with The Dark Engine. Doug Church, the iconoclastic programmer and designer who had taken the leading role on System Shock, didn’t want to be out-front to the same extent on this project. The initial result of this lack of a strong authority figure was an awful lot of creative churn. There was talk of making a game called Better Red than Undead, mixing a Cold War-era spy caper with a zombie invasion. Almost as bizarre was Dark Camelot, an inverted Arthurian tale in which you played the Black Knight against King Arthur and his cronies, who were depicted as a bunch of insufferable holier-than-thou prigs. “Our marketing department wasn’t really into that one,” laughs Church.

Yet the core sensibility of that concept — of an amoral protagonist set against the corrupt establishment and all of its pretensions — is all over the game that did finally get made. Doug Church:

The missions [in Dark Camelot] that we had the best definition on and the best detail on were all breaking into Camelot, meeting up with someone, getting a clue, stealing something, whatever. As we did more work in that direction, and those continued to be the missions that we could explain best to other people, it just started going that way. Paul [Neurath] had been pushing for a while that the thief side of it was the really interesting part, and why not just do a thief game?

And as things got more chaotic and more stuff was going on and we were having more issues with how to market stuff, we just kept focusing on the thief part. We went through a bunch of different phases of reorganizing the project structure and a bunch of us got sucked into doing some other project work on Flight [Unlimited] and stuff, and there was all this chaos. We said, “Okay, well, we’ve got to get this going and really focus and make a plan.” So we put Greg [LoPiccolo] in charge of the project and we agreed we were going to call it Thief and we were going to focus much more. That’s when we went from lots of playing around and exploring to “let’s make this Thief game.”

It surely comes as no revelation to anyone reading this article that most game stories are power fantasies at bottom, in which you get to take on the identity of a larger-than-life protagonist who just keeps on growing stronger as you progress. Games which took a different approach were, although by no means unknown by the late 1990s, in the decided minority even outside of the testosterone-drenched ghetto of the first-person shooter. The most obvious exponents of the ordinary-mortal protagonist were to be found in the budding survival-horror genre, as pioneered by Alone in the Dark and its sequels on computers and Resident Evil on the consoles. But these games cast you as nearly powerless prey, being stalked through dark corridors by zombies and other things that go bump in the night. Thief makes you a stealthy predator, the unwanted visitor rifling through cupboards and striking without warning out of the darkness, yet most definitely not in any condition to mow down dozens of his enemies in full-frontal combat, Quake-style. If you’re indiscreet in your predations, you can become the cornered prey with head-snapping speed. This was something new at the time.

Or almost so. Coincidentally, two Japanese stealthy-predator games hit the Sony PlayStation in 1998, the same year as Thief’s release. Tenchu: Stealth Assassins cast you as a ninja, while Metal Gear Solid cast you as an agent of the American government on a top-secret commando mission. The latter in particular caused quite a stir, by combining its unusual gameplay style with the sort of operatically melodramatic storytelling that was more commonly associated with the JRPG genre. That said, Thief is a far more sophisticated affair than either of these games, in terms of both its gameplay and its fiction.

The titular thief and protagonist is a man known only as Garrett, who learned his trade on the streets of The City, a mixture of urban squalor and splendor that is best described as Renaissance Florence with magic — a welcome alternative to more typical fantasy settings. Over the course of a twelve-act campaign, Garrett is given a succession of increasingly daunting assignments, during which a larger plot that involves more than the acquisition of wealth by alternative methods does gradually take shape.

Although the mission tree is linear, nothing else about your experience in Thief is set in stone. It was extremely important to Looking Glass that Thief not turn into a puzzle game, a series of set-piece challenges with set-piece solutions. They wanted to offer up truly dynamic environments, environments that were in their own way every bit as much simulations as Flight Unlimited. They wanted to make you believe you were really in these spaces. Artist Daniel Thron speaks of the “deep sense of trust we had in the player. There isn’t a single solution to Thief. It’s up to you to figure out how to steal the thing. It’s letting you tell that story through gameplay. And that sense of ownership makes it unique. It becomes yours.” In the spirit of all that, the levels are big, with no clearly delineated through-line. These dynamic virtual spaces full of autonomous actors demand constant improvisation on your part even if you’ve explored them before.

Looking Glass understood that, in order for Thief to work as a vehicle for emergent narrative, all of the other actors on the stage have to respond believably to your actions. It’s a given that guards ought to hunt you down if you blatantly give away your presence to them. Thief distinguishes itself by the way it responds to more subtle stimuli. An ill-judged footstep on a creaky floor tile might cause a guard to stop and mutter to himself: “Wait! Did I just hear something?” Stand stock still and don’t make a sound, and maybe — maybe — he’ll shrug his shoulders and move on without bothering to investigate. If you do decide to take a shot at him with your trusty bow or blackjack, you best not miss, to steal a phrase from Omar Little. And you best hide the body carefully afterward, before one of his comrades comes wandering along the same corridor to stumble over it.

These types of situations and the split-second decisions they force upon you are the beating heart of Thief. Bringing them off was a massive technical challenge, one that made the creation of 3D-graphics engine itself seem like child’s play. The state of awareness of dozens of non-player characters had to be tracked, as did sound and proximity, light and shadow, to an extent that no shooter — no, not even Half-Life — had ever come close to doing before. Remarkably, Looking Glass largely pulled it off, whilst making sure that the more conventional parts of the engine worked equally well. Garrett’s three principal weapons — a blackjack for clubbing unsuspecting victims in the back of the head, a rapier for hand-to-hand combat, and a bow which can be used to shoot a variety of different types of arrows — are all immensely satisfying to use, having just the right feeling of weight in your virtual hands. The bow is a special delight: the arrows arc through the air exactly as one feels they ought to. You actually get to use your bow in all sorts of clever ways that go beyond killing, such as shooting water arrows to extinguish pesky torches — needless to say, darkness is your best friend and light your eternal enemy in this game — and firing rope arrows that serve Garrett as grappling hooks would a more conventional protagonist.

Looking Glass being Looking Glass, even the difficulty setting in Thief is more than it first appears to be. It’s wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that Thief is really three games in one, depending on whether you play it on Normal, Hard, or Expert. (Looking Glass apparently wasn’t interested in the sorts of players who might be tempted by an “easy” mode.) Not only do the harder settings require you to collect more loot to score a passing grade on each mission, but the environments themselves become substantially larger. Most strikingly, in a brave subversion of the standard shooter formula, each successive difficulty setting requires you to kill fewer rather than more people; at the Expert level, you’re not allowed to kill anyone at all.

Regardless of the difficulty setting you choose, Thief will provide a stiff challenge. Its commitment to verisimilitude extends to all of its facets. In lieu of a conventional auto-map, it provides you only with whatever scribbled paper map Garrett has been able to scrounge from his co-conspirators, or sometimes not even that much. If your innate sense of direction isn’t great — mine certainly isn’t — you can spend a long time just trying to find your way in these big, twisty, murky spaces.

When it’s at its best, Thief is as amazing as it is uncompromising. It oozes atmosphere and tension; it’s the sort of game that demands to be played in a dark room behind a big monitor, with the phone shut off and a pair of headphones planted firmly over the ears. Sadly, though, it isn’t always this best version of itself. In comparison to Ultima Underworld or System Shock, both of which I enjoyed from first to last, Thief strikes me as a lumpy creation, a game of soaring highs but also some noteworthy lows. I was all-in during the first mission, a heist taking place in the mansion of a decadent nobleman. Having recently read Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus and written quite a lot about Renaissance Florence, my receptors were well primed for this Neo-Renaissance setting. Then I came to the second mission, and suddenly I was being asked to fight my way through a bunch of zombies in an anonymous cave complex. Suddenly Thief felt like dozens of other first-person action games.

This odd schizophrenia persists throughout the game. The stealthy experience I’ve just been describing — the boldly innovative experience that everyone thinks of today when they think of Thief — is regularly interspersed with splatterfests against enemies who wouldn’t have been out of place in Quake: zombies, rat men, giant exploding frogs, for Pete’s sake. (Because these enemies aren’t human, they’re generally exempt from the prohibition against killing at the Expert level.) All told, it’s a jarring failure to stick to its guns from a studio that has gone down in gaming lore for refusing to sacrifice its artistic integrity, to its own great commercial detriment.

As happens so often in these cases, the reality behind the legend of Looking Glass is more nuanced. Almost to a person, the team who made Thief attribute the inconsistency in the level design to outside pressure, especially from their publisher Eidos, who had agreed to partially fund the project. “Eidos never believed in it and until the end told us to put in more monsters and have more fighting and exploring and less stealth, and I’m not sure there was ever a point [when] they got it,” claims Doug Church. “I mean, the trailers Eidos did for Thief were all scenes with people shooting fire arrows at people charging them. So you can derive from that how well they understood or believed in the idea.”

And yet one can make the ironic case that Eidos knew what they were doing when they pushed Looking Glass to play up the carnage a little more. Released in November of 1998, Thief finally garnered Looking Glass some sales figures that were almost commensurate with their positive reviews. (“If you’re tired of DOOM clones and hungry for challenge, give this fresh perspective a try,” said Computer Gaming World.) The game sold about half a million copies — not a huge hit by the standards of an id Software or Blizzard Entertainment, but by far the most copies Looking Glass had ever sold of anything. It gave them some much-needed positive cash flow, which allowed them to pay down some debts and to revel in some good vibes for a change when they looked at the bottom line. But most importantly for the people who had made Thief, its success gave them the runway they needed to make a sequel that would be more confident in its stealthy identity.



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


SourcesThe book Game Design Theory & Practice (2nd. ed.) by Richard Rouse III; Next Generation of March 1997 and June 1997; PC Zone of December 1998; Computer Gaming World of September 1995, June 1996, August 1997, April 1998, and March 1999; Retro Gamer 117, 177, and 260; Los Angeles Times of September 15 1995; Boston Globe of May 3 1995.

Online sources include the announcement of the Intermetrics acquisition on Looking Glass’s old website, InterMetrics’s own vintage website, “Ahead of Its Time: A History of Looking Glass” by Mike Mahardy at Polygon, and James Sterrett’s “Reasons for the Fall: A Post-Mortem on Looking Glass Studios.”

Where to Get Them: Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri and Thief Gold are available for digital purchase at GOG.com. The other Looking Glass games mentioned this article are unfortunately not.

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 Dornbrook wound up signing on with a tiny startup called Harmonix Music Systems, which in 2005, after years of diligent experimentation with the possibilities for combining music and games, altered the landscape of gaming forever with Guitar Hero.

Zarf Updates

The Making of Myst, remastered

Bit of news on the historic preservation front. Cyan has posted the "Making of Myst" video from 1993, remastered in high-resolution from the original video files. Credit to Ted Sase for a fantastic job. This 13-minute video was included on the ...

Bit of news on the historic preservation front. Cyan has posted the "Making of Myst" video from 1993, remastered in high-resolution from the original video files. Credit to Ted Sase for a fantastic job.

This 13-minute video was included on the original 1993 Myst CD-ROM. Because CD-ROMs were enormous, and they had all this free space left over...! The original Quicktime movie data was a whopping 73 megabytes. It looked kinda like this:

Robyn and Rand Miller sitting on a bench outdoors, circa 1993. The resolution is terrible and everything is rather green-shifted. The Making of Myst as viewed from the 1993 CD-ROM.

Okay, that's a Youtube rip, so it's probably worse than what I watched on my Mac Centris 610. But this was highly compressed video data. Also color grading hadn't been invented.

Comparison, today's version:

Robyn and Rand Miller sitting on a bench outdoors, circa 1993. The image quality is much improved. The Making of Myst as reconstructed by Ted Sase.

How is this possible? A couple of years ago, the Video Game History Foundation got permission to scan and digitize a pile of videotapes from Cyan's vault.

With that material available, Ted Sase was able to recover the original recordings and recreate the original video in 4K res. I'm pretty sure he redid all the titles, the transitions, the lot. In-game footage re-recorded from the game, of course. Ooh, is that a fixed aspect ratio? Nice.

There's a couple of brief shots that haven't improved. (See "Testing", 11:45.) I assume that footage was not found, so Sase couldn't do anything except color-correct the CD-ROM version. And of course the images filmed from CRTs have no more pixels than they did in 1993. (Although the monitor desync stripes have been cleaned up!)

But I'm just nitpicking to reassure the creator that his efforts have been appreciated. This is an amazing effort. My congratulations.

Thursday, 02. October 2025

Choice of Games LLC

Eldritch Tales: Inheritance–Keep your soul intact as the house hungers.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play! Five years after graduating high school, you and your old friends are drawn back together by a mysterious letter. Through it, you inherit a Gothic manor and a fortune beyond belief. There is only one condition: you must live in the manor together. Eldritch Tales: Inheritance is 33% off until October 9th! Dariel developed this game using ChoiceScript
Eldritch Tales: Inheritance

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Five years after graduating high school, you and your old friends are drawn back together by a mysterious letter. Through it, you inherit a Gothic manor and a fortune beyond belief. There is only one condition: you must live in the manor together.

Eldritch Tales: Inheritance is 33% off until October 9th!

Eldritch Tales: Inheritance is a 210,000-word interactive novel by Dariel Ivalyen that blends psychological, supernatural, and cosmic horror with drama, investigation, and romance. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

When you arrive at Blackthorn Manor, strange events begin to unfold. Shadows move on their own, nights grow unnaturally dark, and every corner hides a secret. And the more you uncover, the less you understand. As the atmosphere thickens, you will have to decide whether to trust your companions—or even yourself.

  • Play as male, female, or nonbinary.
  • Customize your appearance, personality, and sexuality.
  • Choose from six distinct backgrounds—Astronomer, Songwriter, Egyptologist, Gardener, Detective, or Librarian—each with a unique story path and an exclusive ending.
  • Forge friendships or romances with a wealthy playboy, a no-nonsense scientist, a protective ex-soldier, or a free-spirited artist.
  • Balance your sanity, health, and relationships—or suffer the consequences.
  • Explore hidden rooms, secret passages, and places beyond human imagination, and learn—or risk learning—the truth behind your inheritance.
  • Experience randomized events and discover multiple endings, ensuring no two playthroughs are alike.

What darkness lies within Blackthorn Manor? Will you turn away in time—or will you uncover
truths that consume you forever?

Dariel 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.


Dragon of Steelthorne has placed third in IntroComp 2025 and is on sale this week!

Congratulations to author Vance Chance, whose Hosted Game Dragon of Steelthorne has won third place in this year’s IntroComp. To celebrate, we’re putting it on sale this week: it’s 40% off on all our platforms until 10/09! Rule a mighty city, fight battles, and go on adventures as the Ardent or Ardessa of the city of Lake Steelthorne. Find love, power, and a secret that could chan

Congratulations to author Vance Chance, whose Hosted Game Dragon of Steelthorne has won third place in this year’s IntroComp.

To celebrate, we’re putting it on sale this week: it’s 40% off on all our platforms until 10/09!

Rule a mighty city, fight battles, and go on adventures as the Ardent or Ardessa of the city of Lake Steelthorne. Find love, power, and a secret that could change the world.

Vance 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.


Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian

DOS Game Club

I had a long talk recently with some nice folks at the DOS Game Club podcast. Our subject was one from the early days of this site, the Infocom game Planetfall. Maybe some of you will find it interesting. You can get it from the DOS Game Club homepage, or more than likely wherever you get […]

I had a long talk recently with some nice folks at the DOS Game Club podcast. Our subject was one from the early days of this site, the Infocom game Planetfall. Maybe some of you will find it interesting. You can get it from the DOS Game Club homepage, or more than likely wherever you get your other podcasts. My thanks to the hosts for their kind invitation, and to the other guests for their patience with my historical rambling! (I’m told that this is the longest episode of the podcast ever.)

See you tomorrow with some fresh written content!


Renga in Blue

Adventure in 1K (1983)

Today’s post you could think of as a “bonus game”. It appears in the April 1983 edition of Personal Computer World, followed by the first issue of Personal Computer Games that summer (same publisher) and is directly next to the game I was going to be writing about next. To explain in context, when the […]

Today’s post you could think of as a “bonus game”. It appears in the April 1983 edition of Personal Computer World, followed by the first issue of Personal Computer Games that summer (same publisher) and is directly next to the game I was going to be writing about next.

To explain in context, when the Sinclair ZX80 (and ZX81) came out, they had only 1K worth of memory by default, an absolutely miniscule amount to do much of anything with. Companies still put out tapes and books intended for that target memory size, the most significant from this blog being from Alfred Milgrom (of The Hobbit) and the duo behind Pimania, who started their game publishing with experimental 1K games. Adventure in Murkle was in the same spirit but in a much more generous 4k.

Adventure in 1K is the only game, article, or product of any kind I can find by Ian Stansfield which will “run on any micro you care to name”. Instead of being like the games above, well, let’s just give a transcript–

YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
E
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
W
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
S
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
E
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
E
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
Q
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
X
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?

You get the idea. It’s simply printing the text, taking an input, and then looping, without even bothering to read what the player entered. As a courtesy, both BASIC and C source code are provided. (This is the first time I’ve ever seen source for a type-in given in C!)

“Hours of fun and entertainment for all the family.” So yes, this is a joke game, not just on adventures but on the concept of selling 1K games, but it’s the sort of meta-textual joke came I had thought (before embarking on my journey) would not show up until much later, as a Usenet joke from the 90s or an entry into the TWIFcomp (which asked competitors to fit an interactive fiction game into a tweet, 140 characters). However, by this point I’m not surprised, because we’ve had…

  • Crystal Cave include a “realistic” cave where the treasures break if you touch them and a park ranger throws you out
  • Stuga drop into a choice-game section involving the Muppets
  • Acheton put in the classic grate-opened-with-keys to start, but where entering immediately kills the player
  • House of Thirty Gables skewering multiple adventure game conventions all at once, including a troll you aren’t supposed to kill

…such that meta-textual play with the whole concept of the adventure happened almost immediately. It’s with this sort of metatextual play that you eventually get the “escape room” concept (where the entire game plays out in a single room, like Suveh Nux) or the “single turn” concept (where the game resets after a turn, allowing many stories, like Aisle) or even the “one puzzle” game where there’s no limit to moves but the only obstacle is a single puzzle (my own game More fits in that category).

So this is worth marking down as a historical footnote, at least. (We incidentally will see not just one but two serious “single room game” efforts in 1983.)

COMING UP: The actual type-in I meant to do, followed by Suspended.