Planet Interactive Fiction

Zarf Updates: A note on content restrictions

2026-10-03T19:07:57+00:00

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

Thanks to Stuart Langridge for the screenshot.

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

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

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

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

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

-- BBC News, 25 March 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zarf Updates: Infidel goes wild

2026-10-03T00:17:48+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desert You are in the desert, a vast wasteland of sand and heat.

>DROP AXE, SHOVEL pick axe: Dropped. shovel: Dropped. A brief but strong gust of wind comes up off a dune, whipping sand in your face, blinding you for long enough to lose track of the shovel.

>EAST Desert You are in the desert, a vast wasteland of sand and heat.

>WEST Desert You are in the desert, a vast wasteland of sand and heat. There is a pick axe here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what's at that address?

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

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

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

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

Desert You are in the desert, a vast wasteland of sand and heat. A small lizard pokes its head up from You sands and asks You shortest route to Times Square. You scratch your head for a moment and when you remember You proper subway line to recommend to it, you notice it's disappeared.

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

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

Okay! Bug demonstrated! What have we learned?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choice of Games LLC: Author Interview: Samuel Gohra, “A Blade for the Emperor”

2026-10-02T16:07:37+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are you working on next?

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

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

Renga in Blue: Happy Bushman: Meeting a God at the End of the Earth

2026-10-02T03:52:42+00:00

(Read part 1 on Happy Bushman here.)

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

Original PC-88 version, from Yahoo! Auctions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better than Solid Snake.

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

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

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

I like how matter-of-fact this is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choice of Games LLC: The 2026 Steam Autumn Sale is on!

2026-10-01T19:08:43+00:00

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

Zarf Updates: Visible Planetfall is now available to all

2026-10-01T04:04:15+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming work:

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

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

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

IFReviews.org RSS: Photopia

2026-09-30T05:31:21+00:00

James wrote a 9 Stars ifreview of the game 'Photopia' (Adam Cadre; 1998; Inform6; English; 9 IFReviews.org Stars).

You too can add your own ifreviews, simply register yourself at www.ifreviews.org and share your opinion, with the rest of the IF Community, on this or any other of the 9814 IF games listed.

Thanks for reading the IFReviews.org RSS feed,
RootShell

Renga in Blue: Happy Bushman (1983)

2026-09-29T20:17:38+00:00

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

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

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

From the 1958 version. Source.

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

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

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

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

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

— Via a 2003 news story

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

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

One of his 1983 albums, via Discogs.

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

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

Source.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key & Compass Blog: New walkthroughs for September 2026

2026-09-28T23:54:55+00:00

On Monday, September 28, 2026, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of interactive fiction at Patreon and Ko-fi.

Tableaux Vivants (2026) by Neil Shaw Cohen

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

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

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Ruined Temple (2026) by Alex Crossley

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

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

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

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

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

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

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Out by Midnight (2026) by Arthur DiBianca

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

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

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

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

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

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

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Black Thumb (2026) by Bridget Hoang

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

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

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

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

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

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

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Try Again (2016) by Tom Devereaux

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

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

top expert: who gets to go first?

2026-09-28T21:19:11+00:00

More thoughts on a combat system.

adding combatants to the system

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can make some enemies in the same way.

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

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

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

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

the player is Chad.
Chad is in the Foyer.

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

but seriously. who goes first.

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

That sounds like a table to me.

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

Here’s my initial thinking on these items:

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

Let’s make a rulebook!

initiative is a rulebook.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Renga in Blue: Land of Tezrel (1983)

2026-09-26T18:45:43+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Computer, Dec. 1986 issue.

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

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

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

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

Via World of Dragon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll return here later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zarf Updates: Twenty years without a Christmas card

2026-09-25T04:02:05+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Renga in Blue: Eye of Min: Verb-Hacking

2026-09-23T20:05:39+00:00

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

From the Microbee Software Preservation Project.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4411 from the scroll.

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

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

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

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

Renga in Blue: Eye of Min: Knowledge Traps

2026-09-22T21:12:16+00:00

(Continued from my last post.)

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

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

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

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

Or maybe fliers for an unlicensed heavy metal concert.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside is what I assume is yet another knowledge puzzle.

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

Which order. e.g.2143.

Entering the wrong code is death.

The room fills with poisonous gas.

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

Renga in Blue: Eye of Min (1983)

2026-09-18T18:25:39+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Electronics Today International.

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

From the front cover of the issue.

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

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

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

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

Source.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a map drawn by myself to compare:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian: The Lamentable Later Life of Lemmings

2026-09-18T15:39:55+00:00

This article tells the last part of the story of Lemmings.

For a while there in the early 1990s, there seemed to be good reason to believe that Lemmings was on its way to becoming one of gaming’s perennial franchises. Developed by DMA Design of Dundee, Scotland, the original Lemmings game took the world by storm upon its release in 1991. From its first home on the Commodore Amiga, its Liverpool-based publisher Psygnosis brought it to no fewer than 23 other platforms, from natural habitats like MS-DOS and the Apple Macintosh to such refugees of the 8-bit era as the Sinclair Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC, from cutting-edge multimedia appliances like the Philips CD-i and the 3DO to handheld gadgets like the Atari Lynx and the Sega Game Gear. In all of its incarnations, it outsold any other game ever to have passed through the hands of Psygnosis by a veritable order of magnitude.

The combination of simplicity, juiciness, addictiveness, and cuteness was truly a lethal one. Psygnosis had to set up an entire call center in the United States to deal with the avalanche of frustrated players begging for hints on this or that devious level. The little creatures made appearances in newspapers, glossy magazines, and mainstream news broadcasts all over the world, even as playing the annual holiday Lemmings mini-games that could be found stacked as stocking stuffers next to cashier stands threatened to become a new Christmas-morning tradition for families. Lemmings joined Tetris and SimCity as one of the computer games that the zeitgeist deemed acceptable for those who did not self-identify as gamers to indulge in. Like those two others, it was an early harbinger of the casual revolution in gaming that would begin to arrive in earnest a decade later.

But whereas Tetris and SimCity would be grandfathered into that revolution at the turn of the millennium — SimCity spawning The Sims, the 800-pound gorilla in the new space — Lemmings would have flamed out by then, being remembered, to whatever extent it was remembered at all, more as a kitschy fad than as an enduring entertainment staple. I quite like the early Lemmings games, for reasons that I’ve explained in detail in the past. Therefore I came to this article with a simple question: just how did the franchise manage to squander all of that early momentum so quickly and completely? And as usual, I found that the answer comes down less to the choosing of a single ill-advised fork in the road than to a series of smaller decisions that doubtless seemed like a good idea at the time, but were exposed as less than good in retrospect.

Lemmings 2: The Tribes, the big sequel to the original game — it was actually the third full-sized game in the series, coming after the less inspired Oh No! More Lemmings, which was largely filled with levels that had been rejected for its predecessor — was released in 1993 amidst huge anticipation and expectation. In many ways, it lived up to its advance press. In place of the suite of eight special abilities with which a player of the earlier games could invest her lemmings, it provided no fewer than 60 of them. The subtitle came from the fact that the lemmings were now divided into twelve tribes, each with their own abilities, appearance, and environments to traverse. The whole endeavor also boasted a new thread of narrative, about helping the twelve tribes escape from captivity. (The Biblical overtones were apparently intentional.)

As a player who had greatly enjoyed the first Lemmings, I found it to be a brilliant sequel. It was, however, every inch a sequel, being built strictly for the gratification of someone like me: someone who had a lot of experience with what had come before. This was not the best place to start your Lemmings journey, as the kids like to say today — not with all of the additional complexity, not with the disappearance of the gentle tutorial levels that eased you into the first game. Inspired as it was on its own terms, The Tribes‘s approach was questionable for a mass-market series of more or less casual games, which the customer should ideally be able to hop on and off of with the same aplomb as a subway rider. Then, too, the heavier weight of the game meant that it could be ported to only eight instead of 24 platforms. Lemmings 2 was a solid hit by all of the normal standards of the games industry, yet it failed to do much to further raise its franchise’s profile as a budding pop-culture staple. The original game, which was now available at a greatly reduced price, in all likelihood outsold it considerably even in the year of its release.

One of the problems, if we want to call it that, was a growing mismatch between the expectations of the market and the instincts and desires of DMA Design. The Scottish gang were gamer’s gamers of the old school, whose two creations before Lemmings had been the straightforward shoot-em-ups Menace and Blood Money. Lemmings had been something of an aberration for them; the cuteness had come about almost by accident, a case of mordant laddish humor ramming slightly askew. If DMA were to continue with the series, they wanted to make it more complicated, more difficult, more ambitious… in short, more hardcore. This was not a recipe for success in the space the first Lemmings had opened up for itself. After The Tribes failed to set the world on fire, DMA felt pressure from above to revert to the mean. This bred an atmosphere of resentment in Dundee that was hardly conducive to productive game development.

As was typical of such contracts at the time, the Lemmings intellectual property actually resided with the publisher rather than the developer. And the former was undergoing big changes. Just before the release of The Tribes, Psygnosis and its in-house studio — the same one responsible for most of the Lemmings ports — were acquired by the Japanese electronics giant Sony, which was looking for a Western partner to make games for its upcoming PlayStation console. This event, combined with the success of Lemmings, raised Psygnosis’s profile enormously, from a niche purveyor of graphically dazzling but often gameplay-deficient Amiga action games to a real force to be reckoned with on the modern entertainment landscape. The Children’s Television Workshop, the maker of Sesame Street, entered into talks with Psygnosis about a Lemmings television show.

It was a tempting prospect on the face of it, but it became problematic as soon as you started to dig into it. Television shows, whether aimed at adults or children, are built around memorable characters. DMA’s lemmings were not quite this. They were a generic mass, all of them identical, the very definition of a faceless horde. Each blobby little creature filled a space no more than ten pixels square on the screen. The lemmings were many things, but they were not Super Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog, much less Big Bird or Oscar the Grouch.

So, an edict went down from Psygnosis to DMA to find a way to give the lemmings more individualized personalities. For their next trick, DMA had been toying with a continuation of the story of The Tribes — or rather a whole set of continuations. The next four Lemmings games would each deal with the fate of three of the twelve tribes after they left the Ark the player had helped them reach last time around. The whole series would be called All New World of Lemmings. (In North America, it would take the name of The Lemmings Chronicles; unlike the vast majority of such re-christenings, this was actually a better name in my opinion.) To satisfy Psygnosis and the Children’s Television Workshop, DMA now promised to make the lemmings bigger, and to fill the menu and victory and failure screens with cute faces that looked different from one another and could play well on television.

If matters had transpired differently, All New World of Lemmings would have been the banner title of a new sub-series, with different subtitles for each of its entries. As it was, Psygnosis just dumped the would-be first entry of the sub-series out there on its own, sans subtitle, and abandoned the other nine tribes to their fate.

“I couldn’t think of any new way to take Lemmings at this point,” admits David Jones, the series’s mastermind from the beginning. Desperate for some sort of gameplay distinction from what had come before, DMA decided to combine the newly television-friendly presentation with yet more complications to the formula — complications that proved not to be much fun. You could no longer invest your lemmings with specific skills from a master pool of same just by clicking on them; now, you had to have them walk over loot boxes scattered around the levels, an incredibly fiddly and annoying mechanic. Meanwhile the increased size of the lemmings had unexpected knock-on effects. When the creatures were tiny, watching them die was funny even for people who reacted to the violence found in other videogames with horror and outrage. But when they became bigger, that changed; their deaths became grislier, possibly amusing for a teenage boy but less so for his mother. In addition to its gameplay issues, the tone of World of Lemmings was badly off in relation to the franchise’s established personality.

You have to walk your lemmings into crates like this one to give them special abilities now. Everything about the gameplay and aesthetics of World of Lemmings hits wrong, sometimes subtly so, sometimes blatantly. This was not promising television fodder.

Not long into development, a feeling took hold in Dundee that they were all just done with Lemmings, ready to come out from under the shadow of the casual monster they had accidentally created and return to making the games they wanted to make. As it happened, this was to be the last game of a six-game contract they had signed with Psygnosis back in the 1980s. Just get ‘er done became the watchword, so that they could take their Lemmings loot and do something more exciting with it. The new passion project around the office was a little something called Race ‘n’ Chase, which would evolve into a bigger something called Grand Theft Auto. “Lemmings 3 was a bit crap,” says DMA’s Mike Dailly, the artist who drew the very first eight-pixel-high versions of the creatures. It was done “more to end our commitment to Psygnosis than to actually do a good game.”

Unsurprisingly, then, it did not end up being a good game. Released in 1994, it made the concept that had seemed so fresh barely three years earlier feel trite and stale and kind of tasteless; even the soundtrack was annoying, the same two-bar fragment of circus music pounded into your head ad nauseam. DMA’s ennui oozed from its every slapdash pixel. This was a genuinely new thing under the sun: an outright bad Lemmings game. Evidently knowing it had a turkey on its hands, Psygnosis did virtually nothing to promote it, a huge contrast to the extensive outreach and advertising that had been done for The Tribes. It appeared on only two platforms, MS-DOS and the by now fast-fading Amiga. Those magazines that bothered to review it at all generally weren’t kind.

This first bad Lemmings game combined with a distracted Psygnosis, now busying itself making fresh games to order for the Sony PlayStation, to let all of the air out of the Lemmings balloon, practically all at once. The negotiation with the Children’s Television Workshop died on the vine. Lemmings was in acute danger of being exposed as a one-hit wonder, fodder for nostalgic “Where Are They Now?” retrospectives, rather than the enduring entertainment icon it had so recently seemed destined to become.

The following year the PlayStation dropped; it would go on to become the most successful single games console of the entire twentieth century, redefining the broader culture’s view of digital games forever with its edgy advertising and its deliberate courtship of the booming rave scene. Psygnosis was a big part of all that, through such early PlayStation hits as WipEout and Destruction Derby. Betwixt and between, it tried to get some more mileage out of Lemmings, efforts which came across rather like a child halfheartedly poking a dead dog with a stick. Having now parted ways with DMA Design, Psygnosis had to give its latest Lemmings projects to other developers with no previous connection to the franchise.

In 1995, we got Lemmings 3D from an outfit called Clockwork Games. The episodic approach of All New World of Lemmings was abandoned, in favor of the technological gimmick of the title. In a sense, the franchise became a pioneer one last time, albeit of a more dubious sort than before: Lemmings 3D was an early manifestation of an industry mania for stuffing 3D graphics into absolutely everything, whether they made sense there or not. “The fundamental core of the game of digging or building across the landscape to rescue the lemmings didn’t need an extra dimension,” says Gary Timmons of DMA Design, who could now only look on from afar as Psygnosis subjected their concept to ever more unfortunate contortions. Mike Dailly is blunter: “It was badly thought-out and just plain rubbish.” And truly, Lemmings 3D is agony to play; the newly mobile camera always seems to be pointing just where you don’t want it to be, forcing you to spend more time trying to get the viewing angle right than manipulating your lemmings. Nobody ever asked for this.

3D Lemmings Winterland marked the last gasp of the tradition of Christmas-themed Lemmings mini-games. The spirit was willing, but the 3D engine was lacking.

With the semi-traditionalist (but in 3D!) approach having failed, Psygnosis swung and missed in 1996 with Visual Science’s Lemmings Paintball — yes, really — and the in-house-developed The Adventures of Lomax. Here we can see the publisher still trying to do what the Children’s Television Workshop had once requested, turning the lemmings into characters to be moved in and out of different gameplay paradigms, something Nintendo had long done for its stable of trademarks with remarkable fluidity. But it was far too late in this case, and far too poorly done. The Adventures of Lomax gave a lemming a name of his own for the first and only time — for, of all types of game, a Super Mario Bros.-style platformer. The kindest thing to be said about it is that some of the art — pixel art again this time — is quite lovely, even as the gameplay is more or less acceptable in a workmanlike sort of way. But it never feels like it has much of anything to do with Lemmings.

After this, Psygnosis seemed to have decided to let the dead dog lie — until, that is, another, final Lemmings game popped up out of the blue almost four years later. It did not succeed in rescuing the franchise from oblivion; it came and went from the budget bins barely noticed by the gaming press. But it did succeed, against long odds indeed, in being a really, really good Lemmings game, by far the best since The Tribes. It’s hard to imagine any anticlimactic swansong acquitting itself much better.

Lemmings Revolution is not without a gimmick, but for once it’s a reasonably interesting one. Instead of stretching out from left to right, each of its 102 levels is wrapped around a giant pillar that you can rotate at will. The gimmick is not what I would call revolutionary in the non-physical sense, but it mixes the usual formula up in enjoyable ways when it’s at its best, and is never actively irritating even at its worst.

But more important to this game’s success than the gimmick are the cleverest, most inspired set of levels since The Tribes. The team who made it, who were housed at Psygnosis’s satellite studio in Leeds, brought a passionate whimsy to the project that the series had been sorely lacking in its last several installments. Co-designer Mat Thomas describes a creative atmosphere that resembles the one from back in the day at DMA Design, when the idea of Lemmings was still fresh and everyone was eager to get an oar in with a level or two.

The entire development team were delighted to work on such a famous series, and we took the challenge. We had a fabulous editor developed by a programmer called Ben Dixon. It was very easy to mock up and create levels. The key to level design with Lemmings is trying to think of ways to use the skills presented to the player in different ways. Inspiration came from each other, and other mediums such as the earlier Lemmings games and, dare I say it, films! Goonies — one of my levels — was inspired by the named film. I tried to put in many gadgets to give that feeling of technology driving the level. Our team created nearly 200 levels for Lemmings Revolution, which allowed us to pick the cream of the crop.

The “Goonies” level mentioned by Mat Thomas.

The finished game goes back to the roots in many ways. The suite of abilities with which you can equip your lemmings is the exact same collection as the original game: the familiar climbers, parachutists, bombers, and bridge builders, plus the three kinds of diggers. Seeing them again feels like meeting old friends.

Yet by no means is Lemmings Revolution a carbon copy of the first game in the series. In addition to the revolution mechanic itself, there are any number of new obstacles and affordances within the levels: switches, saws, lasers, instantaneous transporters, and, most ingeniously, gates that reverse the force of gravity to make your lemmings walk on the ceiling. All of this contribute to a slightly more mechanized feel this time around. There are now weasels to contend with as well; these consider a lemming to be a delightful snack, and must be either avoided or — more satisfyingly — done away with in one way or another. Another new wrinkle comes in the form of special lemmings who are impervious to either drowning in water or being scorched by acid, the better to handle the pools of same that are occasionally found in their way. Exits are now hot-air balloons that must be reached, and sometimes there are more than one of these, with each only able to accept a limited number of riders. The most important point is that all of the additions feel organic to the experience rather than tacked on by some focus group somewhere. Thankfully, no attempt is made to individualize the lemmings and turn them into fodder for television. We’re back to the juxtaposition of generic cuteness and morbidity that made the series stand out during its glory days.

For the first time since The Tribes, these lemmings look like they should.

All told, then, playing this Lemmings game is like going home again. Early training levels yield to more fiendish ones that will have you scratching your head by the middle stages, pulling your hair out by the last ones, as you have to make use of every single affordance at your disposal to succeed. As many of you know by now, I adore games that build up gradually in just this way to challenge their players. And I’m proud to say that my wife and I rose (gradually) to the challenge; we made it all the way to the end.

That Lemmings Revolution succeeds as well as it does in so many ways begins to seem still more remarkable when one considers the rest of its development history. After first agreeing to pay for this last kick at the can for the franchise, Sony abruptly pulled its funding just as it was nearing completion. Through some last-minute scrambling, Psygnosis’s management was able to place the game with the rival publisher Take Two Interactive and see it released for Microsoft Windows if not for the PlayStation.

Granted, some scars from the trauma were left behind. Several levels were bugged badly enough in the initial release to be impossible to complete, until Take Two came out with a patch. Even in the final version of the game, one level — the one called “Lock In” — can be completed only by exploiting a glitch in the game engine. It’s so at odds with the rest of the level designs, which are sometimes diabolical but always scrupulously fair, that I can’t believe this was intentional. I even fancy I can see how the level was supposed to be solved. At any rate, if you decide to play the game, I recommend that you save yourself a lot of frustration and just turn to a walkthrough when you get to this level.

One nice touch in Lemmings Revolution is the ability to choose to some extent what level you tackle next. The green dots represent solved levels, the yellow those you haven’t yet completed. Once you beat a level, you open up the two that are connected to it by arrows. It’s a little hard to see here because I’m boring and just tackle the levels in order, top to bottom and left to right. But if you’re less stubborn and methodical than me, you can take a break from a level that’s giving you trouble and work on another one for a while. Like so much else here, this is just really good, player-friendly game design.

It’s obvious that Lemmings Revolution didn’t have an overly lavish budget even before Sony pulled the plug on it. A thin glaze of story — something or other to do with those weasels who can sometimes be found lurking in the levels — is presented via an opening movie that probably absorbed about half the budget on its own. It’s never mentioned again afterward — not that it really matters. We are given only as many bells and whistles as are necessary to make the levels go and remind us that we’re playing a Lemmings game. The closing movie lasts all of seven seconds; the operative philosophy was apparently that it’s better to tempt the punters in the shops who might buy the game than it is to reward the already captured players who have put many hours of their life into it.

All of which is fine really. By the turn of the millennium, so-called “mid-priced releases” like this one — Lemmings Revolution sold for just $20 from its very first day on store shelves — were often more interesting and innovative than the expensive AAA opuses, whose publishers felt more of a need to protect their investment via micromanagement and risk aversion. Certainly the production values of this Lemmings game are no worse than those of the original. We never came to Lemmings to participate in epic stories; we come to face puzzles and to curse and stomp and almost throw our mice across the room, until a light bulb goes off somewhere in the old noggin and the fingers do what they’re supposed to and we solve that level. At which point it’s on to the next level, to repeat the procedure. We are strange creatures, we humans, aren’t we? Even stranger than lemmings, one might want to say.

Anyway, this humble game called Lemmings Revolution is one of my favorites of all the ones I’ve played from the year 2000 for these histories. I’m happy to give it a place in my personal Hall of Fame and to recommend it to all of you — especially any of you who might have enjoyed the more famous and popular Lemmings games, and thought the later ones had nothing comparable to offer. You were mostly right — but only mostly.

For better or for worse, there isn’t much else to say about the series after Lemmings Revolution came and went with so little fanfare (or, one has to suspect, sales). There have been occasional remakes over the past quarter-century, mostly for mobile platforms, but nothing that displays much in the way of design or commercial ambition. As late as 2010, the franchise was frequently mentioned as being “ripe for revival” for a new era where unabashedly simple and cartoony casual games were by some reckonings out-earning the hardcore ones. But for whatever reason, that revival was never seriously attempted, and the cultural window for the franchise is probably closed by now, what with most of us who were there when it was so huge having entered into our fifth or sixth decade of life by this point.

This is no tragedy. Lemmings came to the zeitgeist and then it went; such is the fate of most pop culture. Good game design, however, transcends trends and fads. If you’re a fan of puzzle games and you haven’t played these ones, know that Lemmings, Lemmings 2: The Tribes, and Lemmings Revolution, the three high points of the series, can still be very vexing and satisfying indeed. This is as true today as it was a quarter-century ago, as true as it will still be a quarter-century on. Even if everyone stopped making games tomorrow, we would still live in an era of unprecedented ludic riches.

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

Sources: The books Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders: How British Video Games Conquered the World by Magnus Anderson and Rebecca Levene and Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto by David Kushner. Retro Gamer 39; Computer Gaming World of September 2000.

Online sources include “The Making of Lemmings” by Rich Stanton for Read-Only Memory, “An Ode to the Owl: The Inside Story of Psygnosis” by Damien McFerran for Time Extension, a Lemmings Universe interview with Mat Thomas, and Damian Katz’s gamebook page.

Where to Get Them: Oddly, none of the vintage Lemmings games are currently available for purchase. You can find downloadable versions of the original Lemmings and Lemmings 2: The Tribes in my earlier articles associated with those games. As for Lemmings Revolution, the third of the three Lemmings games that are well worth revisiting today: you can find it on a certain well-known archiving site if you only search for it. After you install it, you will need to install a patch to make it run properly on modern versions of Windows (and Linux systems under WINE).

Choice of Games LLC: Hunter: The Reckoning — Day for Night is out now! In Hollywood, everyone is dying to be famous!

2026-09-17T16:29:49+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

top expert: pew pew pew!

2026-09-16T19:56:33+00:00

a primitive design for determining attack success.

it’s a numbers game.

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

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

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

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

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

a shotgun is a weapon.

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

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

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

It isn’t hard to start.

to-hit is a rulebook producing a number.

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

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

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

attacking it with is an action applying to two things.

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

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

repurposing in-use commands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

understand "[enemy]" as vaguely attacking.

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

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

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

some output.

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

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

…and an every turn attack by any enemies present:

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

The results are not terribly exciting yet:

>gurgler
Your attack strikes gurgler!

Gurgler’s attack misses!

>g
Your attack strikes gurgler!

Gurgler’s attack misses!

>g
Your attack misses!

Gurgler strikes you!

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

next.

who gets to attack first?

The Sharpee Blog: A maze of twisty little passages...

2026-09-16T06:43:58+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Status Line might get:

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

While the inline text might be:

The Well Room

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

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

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

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

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

The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction: September meetups UPDATED

2026-09-15T17:21:04+00:00

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

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

Renga in Blue: Twin Kingdom Valley: The Secret of Life

2026-09-15T13:06:42+00:00

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

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

— Mark James Hardisty, Classic Adventurer 13, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zarf Updates: Late summer mysteries

2026-09-15T01:53:13+00:00

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

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

The Mermaid Mask

by SFB Games -- game site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Bed We Made

by Lowbirth Games -- game site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cognition Method

by Team Cognition -- game site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He Who Watches

by Bobby Vanden -- game site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choice of Games LLC: Author Interview: Josh Labelle, “Hunter: The Reckoning — Day for Night”

2026-09-14T19:58:28+00:00

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 a one-million-word interactive novel by Josh Labelle set in the World of Darkness. It releases this Thursday, September 17th, and you can wishlist it on Steam today! We sat down with Josh to discuss the game.

We’re so happy that you’ve returned to Choice of Games for another round! Your last title, A Crown of Sorcery and Steel, was high fantasy–pretty far away from the (sort of) real world of Hollywood that you’re writing in this time. What was the biggest shift for you in moving between genres? What felt liberating and/or constraining about moving to a grittier lower-magic setting?

It was so completely freeing to not have to make up everything that the player encounters in the world. I am a huge Hollywood and movie aficionado, and spent hours finding the exact right intersection or alley on Google Maps to set something at. It was also fun to slip in pieces of Hollywood trivia everywhere that I could.

World of Darkness source books were also a huge help and inspiration. When I needed to add a weapon or vehicle, I’d crack one open and pick something out or be inspired by one of the details about an NPC inside, and I tried wherever possible to capture the flavor of those source books.

The other advantage of writing a book set in a real place was that I could actually go and visit. I happened to be in Hollywood twice for work during the writing process, and I took the opportunity to marinate in the vibes and gather impressions and observations. That’s something you just can’t do when your book is set in a fantasy world of elves.

You’ve chosen a really distinctive literary style for the game, and an unusual structure as well. What drew you to those stylistic elements? What do you feel they bring to the game?

Day For Night is written in the style of a movie screenplay, with sluglines for scene headers, dialogue speakers denoted by character cues above each line, and at times even parentheticals describing facial expressions or performance subtext. Since the book is about Hollywood and moviemaking, and even allows you to play as a struggling ex-screenwriter, this seemed like it fit the subject matter. I wanted to put the player at the center of their very own monster-hunting action thriller.

I wish I could say that this was part of the initial conception and all part of my master plan, but the truth is that partway through working on the over one million words of this book, I hit a point where writing “Character X says” or finding some clever way to denote a speaker again was becoming less and less exciting. The screenplay format allowed me to break free of this kind of thing and keep the second person present tense prose breezy.

This also all felt in keeping with the vibe of World of Darkness source books where there are frequently sections written in the style of someone’s blog or some other in-world communication.

In terms of structure, Day For Night is focused on exploring Hollywood and tackling problems in any order you want. I was very inspired by Kyle Marquis’ brilliant Night Road and the feeling of freedom that created in me when playing.

One of my goals was to have as little of the book as possible on the critical path, and when I had to have things on the critical path, I tried to allow them to be tackled in different orders. Players are always given several quarries to focus on—investigating a werewolf sighting can be chapter 2, or 3, or 4, depending on how eager you are to get to it. Maybe on the next replay, you’ll tackle it last with more prep time, or first to meet a certain character faster.

Players can also completely ignore their quarries for a while and pursue Hollywood movie gigs, steal a Ferrari and go on a high speed chase, rob stores around Hollywood to acquire money (but watch out–you’ll be banned if caught), and splurge on cars, kit, weaponry, and upgrades for their skills.

Of the four major romanceable characters, three can die in the very first chapters that they’re introduced (some by the player’s hand!), while the fourth, you can choose to go the entire book without ever once meeting. There are entire sidequests involving cursed ventriloquist dummies, demonically possessed sitcom dads, vampires in cowboy boots, and suspected vampire sex murders that the player can completely miss if they choose not to engage with some factions. I’m hoping that players enjoy the level of freedom on offer, which is inspired by my experience playing tabletop.

Day For Night focuses on a veteran Hunter who has been dealing with the forces of darkness for more than five years now. Why did you choose to go this way instead of focusing on a Hunter at the beginning of their career slaying bloodsuckers?

Day For Night is a story about getting older, burning out, and navigating interpersonal relationships complicated by the hunt. To tell that story, I needed a Hunter with a history, who had been through some dark times already. I also felt that other Hunter books have told stories of becoming a Hunter quite well already, and I wanted to tell a different story.

When players first meet their Hunter, they’re at a low point, having just come off a disastrous hunt that left a good friend dead and most of their weapons and kit destroyed. Players will need to build themselves back up, face or run from their trauma, uncover their own past and baggage, deal with complicated existing relationships, and ultimately decide whether it’s time to call it quits.

…also, I figured that this would be the quickest way to get to the vampire killin’. Sue me!

Your other major ongoing work is for Disney Dreamlight Valley! Which I was excited to learn, because I’m a huge Disney fan. I imagine that it’s a lot of fun, but also a unique challenge to write in a canon with such well-established lore and such a dedicated fanbase–much like writing in World of Darkness! How do you approach playing in a sandbox like this?

My entire career has been defined by kind of a weird split. By day, I work on fun and colorful casual life sim games, and by night I write stuff with way more dragons, elves, vampires, and violence.

In the case of writing for World of Darkness, it was exciting and freeing to work on a property that’s known for tackling difficult and adult subject matter intelligently, and it was fun to get to go as gory as I wanted with action sequences.

In writing for these kinds of existing properties, I try to really soak in as much as I can of the source material and ask myself what fans might want to see or how I can play with their expectations.

In the case of World of Darkness, throughout the entire writing process, I kept a huge stack of the source books on my desk on one side while I had my Hunter: The Reckoning and Vampire: The Masquerade dice on the other. It helped to stay in the vibe.

The Los Angeles of World of Darkness is a wonderfully rich place to set a story. It was a complete thrill to incorporate Nelli G. into the book, allowing players to get more and more drawn into her web throughout the story if they so choose. As well, players should watch out for a chance to meet some of the Bone Gnawers of Griffith Park depending on some of their choices.

Players will eventually uncover a story that’s been happening in the background under the noses of the Anarch Barony throughout the past fifty years of Hollywood history, and this was incredibly exciting to get to weave into the fabric of this world.

Of course, if a player is completely new to the World of Darkness, Day For Night will introduce them to all of the elements above as a Hunter experiencing and discovering these strange things for the very first time. No prior knowledge required!

Day For Night shows a lot of love for Hollywood and filmmaking alongside its critiques of Hollywood culture. Who are some filmmakers that inspire you?

I went to film school and am a movie obsessive – I’m inspired by everything from film noir to old Hollywood musicals to ‘90s romcoms.

But during the writing process for this, I watched a lot of John Carpenter movies, and I hope his style infuses some of Day For Night.

I also spent a lot of time watching Shaw Brothers martial arts movies and other Hong Kong action flicks, as well as ridiculous ‘80s slashers (particular favorites are Blood Rage and Chopping Mall–check them out!), all of which inspired some of the completely gonzo action that happens throughout the book.

I hope players will particularly enjoy a fight scene on a waterbed where they can scissor off a vampire’s head with a pair of samurai swords (watch out for it, achievement hunters!), which is the kind of thing I never could have written if I hadn’t been watching movies like the above.

What are you working on next?

Well, first, it’s gonna be a really, really long nap, because it turns out that writing a million plus words of interactive vampire killin’ kind of takes it out of you. Then I’ll probably reconnect with some of the friends and family that I’ve been ignoring for the past two years while I frantically wrote more and more branches of this thing, completely unable to get myself to stop.

Ohhh, but you’re probably talking more like a next creative project. I’m not quite ready to leave Hollywood yet. I have another Hollywood vampire story set in the 1930 through ’50s that I’m very interested in telling at some point. (All after that really long nap, of course.)

top expert: don’t call it a “roguelike.”

2026-09-14T19:10:06+00:00

A project in flight.

notes from a crazed Resident Evil fan.

I’ve wanted to make a survival horror game with Inform since, well, before I even learned how to use Inform. You see, among my sophisticated and varied interests, such as cats, John Berryman, Infocom, Søren Kierkegaard, DC Comics, the narrative games of Autumn Chen, and first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, perhaps no interest is as sophisticated and varied as my regard for Capcom’s survival horror franchise, Resident Evil. Fellow fans among my readership may wonder: “There are so many types of Resident Evil fans. What kind of fan is Drew Cook?”

Favorite character: Jill Valentine
Favorite “modern” game: Resident Evil 2 (2019 remake)
Favorite “classic” game: Resident Evil (2001 remake)
Raid mode or Mercs: Raid
Favorite POV: 3rd-person
Favorite ship: I actually like imagining that everybody but Ada and Claire are aromantic (but I don’t ship them)
Favorite non-game media: Zach Cregger’s upcoming film. I haven’t seen it, but we all know it will be better than everything else.
Favorite weapon class: shotguns.
Least favorite character: I love Leon, but the fans have officially worn me out.
Least favorite “modern” game: Resident Evil IX: Requiem
Least favorite “classic” game: Code Veronica (X)
Least favorite game media: I’m no hater, but I can’t get into the Milla Jovovich movies.

Why am I telling you all of this? I am excited to announce, here, today, my own survival horror project, Inherent Depravity.

what is Inherent Depravity?

ID is what I have taken to calling a “rogueless,” a combat-heavy adventure across a fixed map. It’s a strange word, I admit, but “roguelite” doesn’t quite fit. One of the things I love most about Resident Evil games is that they become, on subsequent playthroughs, efficiency problems. How can they be beaten more quickly and with fewer resources? What strategies are necessitated if the ability to save the game is limited?

Modern games tend to award “achievements” or “trophies” for specific accomplishments, and some games offer in-game rewards, as well. These perks and bonuses more or less map to the “metagame” of roguelite designs. Unlike roguelikes, though, Resident Evil games rely on route optimization and mastery. Procedural generation, a staple of the roguelike/lite oeuvre, has no place in this model. I will list what I consider the signature features of a Resident Evil-style survival horror work with metagame elements.

Strong combat emphasis
Fixed maps with predictable enemy and item placements
Strategically malleable, ie, multiple paths to success
Varied weapons with different advantages and weaknesses
Healing and buffing items in fixed, limited quantities
Ammunition and other combat expendables in fixed, limited quantities
Saving the game is limited in some way (only possible in certain amounts, or at specific points)
Player power increases as the story advances
A variety of enemy types requiring a variety of tactics
Strong information management for the player: dynamic mapping, a system for organizing information uncovered during play.
Multiple playable characters with unique play features
Unlockable elements to scale power in future playthroughs, enabling a higher level of play (completion in less time, with fewer saves, and so forth)

In my experience, the best Resident Evil games each ship as two games in one. There is the first and most familiar game, which simply consists of completing the game’s story, and there is the second, deeper game of replay and optimization.

I have long wished to make such a game, and Inherent Depravity (also known as Inherent Depravity; Malevolent Occupancy or ID;MO) will be my attempt to do just that.

getting started.

This will be a big Inform game with a lot going on. Where to begin? The characters in Resident Evil games are such an important part of the experience. It makes sense to begin there.

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

If this is a design requiring turn-based combat, we will probably need to devise some statistics to govern encounters. That’s going to take a bit of thinking, certainly. Whatever the particulars are, our combatants will need some measure of health to safeguard, lose, or regain.

We could declare a “current health” and “maximum health” as new value properties.

a person has a number called current health.
a person has a number called max health.

the max health of a person is usually 5.
the current health of a person is usually 5.

That’s easily done! Of course, in a large game with 40 or so enemies, our program might get a little messy if we proceed in this manner, especially if a fully-built combatant has several other statistics to manage. I will use a table instead.

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

table of player characters
protagonist	max health	current health
chad	45	45
june	40	40	

an enemy is a kind of person.
some enemies are defined by the table of monsters.

table of monsters
enemy	max health	current health
zombie	5	5
hunter	7	7

As the documentation notes, Inform will, all on its own, determine that a protagonist has a number called max health, and, should we review the output from showme chad, we will see that things sit as they should.

>showme chad
chad - protagonist
location: out of play
unlit, inedible, portable; transparent, male; singular-named, proper-named
description: none
initial appearance: none
carrying capacity: 100
printed name: "chad"
printed plural name: "protagonists"
indefinite article: none
list grouping key: none
max health: 45
current health: 45

As new combatants are implemented, they can be added to a relevant table. Note that, if we have a more developed organizational strategy, we might break things up a bit.

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

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

table of z-types
enemy	max health	current health
gurgler	5	5
groaner	7	7

…and so forth. There’s more to do, of course. We have health, but no means of dealing damage, nor have we identified a way to calculate attack success and failure. While there is not yet an actual model for conducting combat, let’s quickly add some more statistics as food for thought.

table of player characters
protagonist	max health	current health	accuracy	speed	defense
chad	45	45	7	5	7
june	40	40	5	8	5

There. I imagine these are mapped as follows:

health: a measure of durability
accuracy: influences a combatant’s ability to strike in combat
speed: affects evasion and turn order
defense: a combatant’s ability to absorb damage

This should be enough to determine combat outcomes. I don’t mean to reinvent the wheel here: combat should move quickly according to small but impactful choices with a strong secondary goal of resource preservation.

This is not yet enough to stage a fight, though, as there does not exist a means for delivering damage. Perhaps that can be sorted soon! As I’ve already indicated, weapon variety is a significant feature in survival horror games, and Inherent Depravity should participate in that tradition fully.

Hopefully, we can get to that next time!

next.

Experiments with rulebooks producing results, weaponry, and so forth.

I hope to release Inherent Depravity during Spring Thing 2027, but only if it is finished. I have high hopes! The map is perhaps 2/3 complete.

The 64461-word source text has successfully been translated into a world with 63 rooms and 195 things, and the index has been brought up to date

Renga in Blue: Twin Kingdom Valley: Engulfed in Flames

2026-09-12T22:22:44+00:00

(Continued from my previous posts.)

Some of the C64 screens have animated clouds.

Last time I left off on a narrow fissure leading to Watersmeet, and a cave nearby that’s a maze. Also, just for the record, I had a brass key (from the very start) and a bronze key (from the witch where I traded the crystal ball). There was one gold door I was unable to unlock; we’ll get back to that today.

Regarding Watersmeet, I knew something special was going on because there’s some text about it in the intro of the BBC Micro version:

It is believed that the lake itself has some mystical properties which, some say, are derived from the many potions of witches and so forth, which have been split into the rivers and streams throughout the ages.

It is also said that a wise man may look upon the secret of life, which lies nearby.

I tried filling a jug and getting the same “refreshing” message I did with beer, so I was puzzled for a bit.

I pulled out the verb list and realized it had “swim”, so I tested it and found that swimming in the water healed wounds. There’s something else special going on, but I didn’t realize it until later.

The C64 graphic conveys a little more clearly this is a place you’d want to swim.

Analogous to Adventure having one “all different” maze and one “all alike” maze, this one required dropping objects to map things out. Fortunately, it’s relatively small; if you knew there was nothing else hidden you could find the two things inside without much effort (the paths tend to lead to them, rather than away from them).

The first thing is a “holdall”, a duffle bag for those Americans out there. It increases your inventory limit, but is a bit fussy to operate. In order to get any items in, you have to FILL HOLDALL, and then the game prompts each of your inventory items one at a time.

Also, make sure you don’t put a lit lamp in!

You can PUT THING IN HOLDALL to get something in just fine, but the only way I was able to get items was via EMPTY HOLDALL which dumped all of them at once.

For the second thing to find, you might notice from the holdall room four of the exits lead to Maze (4), and from there all of them eventually lead to a rock fall.

The upshot, in a maze-narrative sense, is that Hall wants the rock fall encounter right away, as opposed to making it a secret that may not be found for a while. A player normally wouldn’t have to do any mapping at all (except from their perspective they don’t know they’ve exhausted the maze).

At the rock fall you are informed you need to find the chest of the desert king if you want to pass.

From here I was stuck for a while; without the next revelation, I’m not sure if any more progress is even possible (although this author does like putting multiple entrances and exits to things, so I can’t say for sure until I’ve finished the game).

Back at Watersmeet, if you DRINK WATER straight from the source without filling a jug first, you’ll get a special ability: seeing secret doors.

This is a curious moment insofar as many players would not realize there is an issue here at all; someone who drinks straight from the water first would not know (nor would it be likely they’d test) that the water loses its magical potency once in the jug.

Unfortunately, with me getting the ability so late, it means I have to check everywhere I’ve been on the map. I’ve checked most places; back at the room-of-bones in the witch maze there’s a secret locked silver door to the west; as I have yet to find a silver key I do not know what is behind it.

The important secret door anyway is back at the cave I was just in, right at the entrance before the maze starts: there is a small hidden complex to the east: bedroom, kitchen, sitting room. Inside the kitchen is a gold key.

Conveniently, there’s a second secret door that leads right to the hall from last time that ended at a locked gold door. This goes to a dungeon which will eventually lead up to the domain of the Desert King, so the Forest King and Desert King areas are directly connected (you don’t have to go outside to travel between them).

Right away there’s two dungeon doors that take a bronze key (the kind I got from the witch); opening the first one frees a princess.

UNLOCK DOOR WITH BRONZE KEY
It is now open.

A princess flees. She doesn’t recognise you.

This happens so incidentally that it circles back to the author’s own mission statement about how you are not the main character of a story, but rather just the inhabitant of a world. It is possible the princess will come up later (I haven’t gotten back over the map yet to see where she ended up) but at least this particular moment felt like an anti-story of sorts (not in a derogatory sense, just in a “games can have different goals from each other” sense).

A second dungeon door had an “ill giant”. The giant was friendly so I tried handing over my axe; guards are on the floor above and it proceeded to wallop some of them off-stage.

The graphic that gets used for all the “dungeon breakout” rooms.

To see the aforementioned guards, just go up a trapdoor to a new section.

Remember, I don’t mark any of the wandering enemy locations because I don’t know where their “home base” is.

Once again (while mapping things out) I am mostly able to ignore the NPCs; I did get whacked once hard enough to die but I had a save close enough I didn’t lose any progress. For the most part the rooms are just scenery so information is progress.

There’s one “guard room” as shown here with a “uniform”, but the uniform seems to have no effect on the guards. “Wear” isn’t a recognized verb.

There’s a storage room and cellar that would normally be pure scenery except there’s beer in the cellar. The game does have a thirst timer and you will die if you don’t drink anything.

Just passing through and going up another floor leads to the main complex of the Desert King.

The ground floor has a study (scenery), dining hall (scenery), kitchen (scenery), and workshop (not scenery, there’s a cauldron of oil). My guess is in addition to a thirst-timer the game has a lamp-timer, but you can refill the lamp with oil from this cauldron.

The cauldron is depicted in the room, unlike most items, but it also is so heavy you can’t pick it up (even with all items dropped, the game says “you can’t carry any more”.)

Going back to the main stairs, and going up to the upper floors…

…it looks like from the map, other than locked doors, it’s still pretty much obstacle-free. It’s a little denser in guards, and you can find the Desert King himself wandering around, with a gold crown and a sword.

One of the doors is silver (like the one in the crypt) and one is given no metal-color at all, but I think that’s because to open it I need the master key. This is where the dragon from the cover art shows up.

Well, sort of shows up — again, no characters displayed in the graphics. I’ve been able to get the Desert King to follow me, so I’m wondering if somehow I could have him get inadvertently fried by the dragonfire.

Cover zoom-in, from Plus 4 World.

There’s one more tower that has a witch with a “gold staff”. I have not tried tangling with her yet. You can also leave the castle out the front drawbridge but it just leads to the desert on the north side of the chasm; I haven’t tried searching thoroughly but it doesn’t look like there’s anything to find other than more scenery.

To recap my obstacles:

1. two silver-locked doors

2. one “no description” locked door that presumably needs the master key from the dragon

3. the witch and the king in the Desert castle

I assume the chest is behind one of the locked doors, so I’m not counting it as an obstacle. Looking back at previous content, we could also count the dwarf holding onto a diamond ring; I haven’t found anything to trade for it yet. I did manage to simply kill the dwarf, and this was a very sad encounter where it just kept running away as I chipped away at its health.

The heaviest moment of “you are just like the random enemy NPCs” in the game.

I haven’t tried my secret-door vision absolutely everywhere (secret entrance in the mountains, maybe?) and there’s the eternal issue of me simply missing an exit, but I think I’m hovering close to the end and I really need to enact a strategy to handle the NPCs rather than just run away from everything.

In general, other than the moment with the water, there haven’t been “puzzles” in a regular sense; knowing that a gold key should be taken to a gold door is closer to what I’ve termed a natural action, and the NPCs clearly have enough randomness and multiple approaches that they feel more like obstacles (akin to a CRPG) rather than puzzles.

Gold Machine: Bureaucracy, or Michael Bywater Saves the Day

2026-09-12T13:15:56+00:00

Infocom goes to (development) hell.

Bureaucracy (1987)

Play game and review source files
Packaging, copy protection, etc (MoCAGH archive)
Packaging, copy protection, etc (Infodoc)
Internet Archive Query “Bureaucracy Infocom”
HTML Invisiclues
Archived (z5) Invisiclues
Map (Infodoc)

Opening Crawl

Important!

Our records show that you do not have a licence to operate this software.

Normally, you would be required to complete a Licence Application Form and mail it (with proof ofpurchase) to our Licensing Department, and then wait the customary four to six weeks for processing.

Luckily, for your convenience, we have, at the last minute and at great expense, installed a remarkablenew on-line electronic application form on this verydisk, which will be processed by our modern 24-hour computer service moments after you fill it in.

[Press any key to begin.]

[Your blood pressure just went up.]

You have been granted Licence Number 870602.

Thank you for your cooperation, Ms D. Have a nice day.

Well now, Ms D, aren’t you glad you left your previous job? The Deep Thought Corporation of America was of course a great company to work for, except for the no-coloured-socks dress code, and you really enjoyed being Vice President (Software Development), especially the opportunities it gave you to cause considerable inconvenience to many hundreds of thousands ofpeople you had never met.

But Happitec is going to be much more fun. The money’s better, it’s a great place to live and work and you’re really looking forward to your Paris vacation.

You’re pretty pleased with your new home, too, and don’t really mind that the removals company fouled up slightly due to a computer scheduling problem. After all, you won’t be using your new place for the next two weeks, and they promised to have everything installed by the time you return.

In fact, the only tiny cloud on the horizon is a silly bit of bother with your bank about a change-of-address card. You know the sort of thing? You send them a change-of-address card, and they say “Oh dearie me, that’s not our official change-of-address form, the computer won’t like it a bit, you’ll have to fill in a proper one, we’ll send one to you,” and they do, but they send it to your old address along with your new US Excess card and your cheque book...?

Of course you know the sort of thing. It’s exactly what has happened to you. But Happitec’s enlightened employee policies mean you don’t really care. After all, who needs money? Pick up your Happitec cheque, grab a bite of lunch, a cab to the airport and then you’ll be living high on the hog at Happitec’s expense. What a truly enviable situation you find yourself in, Ms D.

BUREAUCRACY
A Paranoid Fantasy
Copyright (C) 1987 Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
Bureaucracy is a trademark of Infocom, Inc.
Interpreter 1 Version C
Release 116 / Licence Number 870602

Front Room

This is the living room of your new house, a pretty nice room, actually. At least, it will be when all your stuff has arrived as the removals company said they would have done yesterday and now say they will do while you’re on vacation. At the moment, however, it’s a bit dull. Plain white, no carpets, no curtains, no furniture. A room to go bughouse in, really. Another room is visible to the west, and a closed front door leads outside.

Twelve and Counting

Making a game about impersonal corporate and governmental waste must have seemed a very Infocom thing to do. Zork had its Flatheads, and Planetfall‘s Stellar Patrol seemed to run on red tape. The social critiques leveled by those texts, we can surely all admit, were toothless and apolitical. Voters happily throwing money at Reagan’s Star Wars antiballistic program, as an easy example, did not feel personally attacked by jokes about the Frobozz Volcano Construction company, even if the two institutions had the exact same amount of nothing to offer their taxpaying citizens.

That isn’t to say that Infocom didn’t have a great deal to say about 1980’s America. It absolutely did, as we’ve maintained here all along, but it said many of those things because all texts must, in the end, say something. There were exceptions, of course, as A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity can attest, but those would prove to be singular works of courage that were both commercial failures in their time.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, one of Infocom’s bestselling games, indicated a third way, buoyed as it was by Douglas Adams’s good-natured humanism. If I had not written so much else besides, I might have made some observations regarding the bright vapidity of the Nutri-Matic or the Heart of Gold‘s artificial intelligence. Adams’s lampooning of corporate euphemisms, public relations speak, and computation-precipitated stupidity were both timely and prescient. It is not so hard to imagine chatGPT anthropomorphized as 20 Nutri-Matics in a trenchcoat.

Infocom’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a massive success, and the company must have been delighted at the prospect of another Adams game. Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of The Universe was already a twinkle in the board’s eye, presumably, but Adams had another idea, inspired by a very relatable and human experience with his bank, which would not, no matter how he tried, acknowledge his change in address. What if a game could be made of such a fiasco?

This must have been a novel idea in those days. Hadn’t modernists like Faulkner and Joyce elevated everyday human experiences, granting them sprawling and epic grandeur? Why couldn’t a computer game do what they had done? Thus germinated Bureaucracy, an idea that was entirely Adams and, it must be said, rather groundbreaking for its day. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had trod some of this ground. One town’s planning commission is another planet’s Vogon fleet, after all! What would it be like to stage a surreal, hilarious conflict with various financial and governmental institutions as a game?

The construction of Bureaucracy is a long and meandering yarn that I cannot do justice here. I encourage you to read Jimmy Maher’s accounting, which is filled with twists, turns, and, rather memorably, Brian Moriarty’s characterization of Douglas Adams as “lazy.” This is the closest that Infocom has come to what the discourse now refers to as “development hell,” a seemingly intractable period of non-production that threatens to leave a work permanently unfinished. Steve Meretzky, we know, had trouble getting time from Adams, and perhaps completion of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy must have sometimes seemed in jeopardy, but Bureaucracy was by comparison the real thing. It took years for it to ship, which must have seemed a lifetime at a studio with such dwindling prospects.

Would the Real Author of Bureaucracy Please Stand Up?

Although it might feel oddly estranged from Infocom’s production practices, Bureaucracy was touched by several implementers, and is credited to “Douglas Adams and the Staff of Infocom.” The packaging makes light of this unusual situation by inventing a fictional author meant to represent them all:

Original Implementer W. E. B. “Fred” Morgan was dragged out of an early retirement (spent developing new strains of Scotch) to collaborate on Bureaucracy. A prolific hacker, Fred worked on ZIL, the implementation language for Infocom games; Muddle, the implementation language for ZIL; and Zork I, Zork II, Zork III, Enchanter, Deadline, Wishbringer, Ballyhoo, Trinity, Cutthroats, and the sampler. Fred also helped develop Infocom’s database manager, Cornerstone. After Bureaucracy, Fred plans to re-retire, and begin work on a hooked rug, roughly the size of Delaware, representing the Great Underground Empire.

As funny as this all is, it masks the truth: it was Michael Bywater, British humorist, broadcaster, and capable harpsichordist, who pushed Bureaucracy over the finish line. I do not believe we can quantify how much of this frankengame should be attributed to him directly, but the record suggests that it would have been finished by Bywater or else by nobody at all. Some critics–perhaps not intentionally–have implied that we are left with Bywater as a consolation prize or “off-brand” Adams, and that’s really an unkindness I’d like to resist. Whatever the merits might be, Michael Bywater was a creative in his own right with a distinctive voice and not simply “somebody other than Douglas Adams or Steve Meretzky.”

Perhaps a lack of authorial clarity–it is hard to say who exactly wrote which specific parts–has engendered a dearth of critical enthusiasm. Even though Bureaucracy has many fans today, it is one of Infocom’s least remarked-upon works. It has, like Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur, Border Zone, Sherlock, and Journey, garnered only one review at the Interactive Fiction Database. By the time it released in 1987, three years after the blockbuster success of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, audience responses were similarly muted. Then and now, few have known what to make of this strange game.

I, perhaps unwisely, will try to make something of it! It is not, mechanically, a favorite of mine, but its interest in gamifying contemporary life is innovative and forward-looking. Bureaucracy is, even if we might need help remembering it, an important game that tried a new thing worth trying.

Next: Saving the Queen and Other Mistakes

Coverage continues with a look at the text and paratext of Infocom’s Bureaucracy.

Renga in Blue: Twin Kingdom Valley: The Maze of the Witch

2026-09-07T18:11:09+00:00

(Continued from my previous posts.)

I have the first two underground sections (the one from the locked grate, and the one from the cave at the trail) mostly mapped out and connected, so now seems like a good time to pause.

First entrance to the underground.

Second entrance to the underground.

It makes the geography a little clearer to start with the trail entrance, although in my playthrough I started with the grate and only connected it up later.

At the cave entrance there’s a metal door to the east (which is unlocked) and a passage to the west. Go west twice and you’ll end up in the Hall of the Forest King and tossed in a dungeon. I have yet to experiment with this section. (It sounds like they need a bribe; maybe this whole section is forced and it’s possible to retrieve the bribe, but it’s just as easily possible with this sort of game that you can avoid this encounter altogether.)

Prior to making it to the Forest King you can swerve down into a long hall and eventually reach a dead end with a gold door. The doors are helpfully color coded with keys (you’ll need a gold key for a gold door) but I don’t have the appropriate key yet.

Heading back to the cave entrance, and going through the open door, there’s a small section of rooms containing a “short wooden rod”, a “short dagger”, and a “crystal ball”. You might remember the crystal ball from last time; this is the area that links directly with the grate. Near the dagger is a locked bronze door (again color-coded, I’ll bring back the key later).

Also in this area is the part that took the most significant chunk of my time, an exit to a maze. The maze does not have graphics and swaps things to text-only mode.

The text-only mode is partly due to mazes being awkward to show graphics of, but also as a hint, as this is simply an “all different” style maze from Crowther/Woods. This starts in a “turny twisty little maze of passages” and different rooms have different names.

The different names can be used to make a map, but I admit I always find these kinds of mazes a headache. I went with old-fashioned object dropping. Fortunately, the different wandering NPCs don’t seem to want to brave the maze, so it doesn’t have a character like the Thief from Zork I picking things up. Unfortunately, your inventory capacity is too low to map all the rooms, but I remained stubborn and started moving objects to get rooms like “ROD 3” and “BALL 2” as I was mapping things out. Generally, the paths converge on a central area with a witch (if you move at random, you’re likely to eventually reach the witch).

The witch has no visuals attached (none of the NPCs do, but even the maze itself has no visual) so it’s just straightforward text. If you hang out for longer than one turn the witch starts to throw spells, and eventually you’ll die.

I took multiple tries at fighting (using the dagger) and had no luck; it’s possible I was causing damage via HIT WITCH WITH DAGGER but the game wasn’t giving any feedback.

Still, the witch didn’t start immediately attacking: maybe the witch is “neutral”? I had a crystal ball I wasn’t able to use for anything yet, so I tried GIVE BALL.

I still need to experiment with the moods of the NPCs and how far you can push them. There was an elf running around outdoors with an axe (the one the troll normally liked to hold) and I did ASK ELF FOR AXE and the elf just handed it over. I don’t know if “trade value” is a thing and if a series of swaps are possible; maybe the game can be won entirely by “diplomatic victory” rather than getting in standard RPG fights.

With the bronze key claimed, I went to escape the maze (I already had the exit mapped) and unlocked the bronze door. Unfortunately, the troll was waiting for me and gave me a heavy wallop. I fled through the bronze door, then locked the door behind me.

This gave some breathing space, but unfortunately led to a dead end: a stair going to a room with a diamond ring, some gold, and a dwarf. I haven’t tried contesting the dwarf over the treasure yet, but there’s no aggression so I suspect some more trade-swaps might be in order.

One last thing to mention with the witch maze: a side passage, leading to a room with bones:

The room has a shaft leading up to the Hall of the Forest King but it just results in you getting tossed in the dungeon again. I’m not sure if the shaft has a “reason” in a puzzle-solving sense or if it’s just meant to build more environment.

One last wrinkle, because I was trying to be completionist about my map: I already had everything mopped up when I tested one more exit leading back from the skulls to the maze. I didn’t know which room it was going to, but the all-different style of room name still applied, so I wrote down just this room description, then did a quick run through my already-made map to see what location it corresponded to.

I tried moving on to the third underground but it’s another maze. It makes reference to a Desert King, but I already burned my mapping energy on the first maze, so I’ll save that for next time.

Renga in Blue: Twin Kingdom Valley: Outdoors

2026-09-05T18:33:08+00:00

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

As is usual for one of these massive games of this era, the best place to start is outside. I’ll be showing it off in three sectors, the first being the environs around the starting cabin (the one that has the key / jug / lamp and is the place where the treasures go).

I originally thought perhaps this was going to be on a grid and I could do something more minimal, but no: this is a traditional Adventure map with twists and turns along with one-way paths. It does make creating the map feel less like “lawnmowing” and for certain swerves of landscape (like the mountains) breaking out from a grid makes some sense.

Description: The picture is your view west. You are wandering through high mountains, paths lead west, north west, south.

I ended up switching my mode fairly quickly to “picture first time, but not on second visit” since the game lets you just hit TAB to see the picture at any time, but also because the “first time” aspect is handy for mapping. If I arrive at a room that does not give a picture, I know I’ve already visited it, meaning I didn’t need to do any “breadcrumbs” like I was mapping out a maze; I especially found this helpful in a couple aspects where the map re-united in a way I wasn’t expecting. For example, the quarry to the west of the start — one of the first places you should visit for reasons I’ll get into later — has a flint stone. There’s two exits elsewhere on the map that land back on the quarry (one-way), and without the “no picture” clue I would have thought it was a different quarry.

That’s incidentally not saying the exits are south and east, but rather there’s just one exit “southeast”. There’s another unmentioned exit to the east which goes back the same way. Unfortunately despite the system constantly letting you know what you can find in different directions, enough directions are unmentioned I have to test all of them.

If from the start instead of heading west to the quarry but take the road east instead, it leads to The Sword Inn. The inn is drawn farther away and then closer (applying the system I discussed last time which draws “objects” rather than scenes and can change the size).

This is important not only in the technical application of Trevor Hall’s system, but also in his philosophical approach on how to treat space. Especially with modern text adventures having a road of multiple “rooms” can be considered fluff and is best cut; despite the wandering creatures (which I’ll get to) there’s a fair amount of empty space on the Twin Kingdom map. From one of his interviews:

It’s boring if you only have 20 places to visit. If you don’t have some ‘dead’ locations with nothing happening, you go from one nasty disaster to another, which is too intense. You need padding, to get lost before you find something.

He’s likely thinking of Scott Adams (who was tight by necessity); we recently had a Marc Leduc game make terrific use of tiny space so this is more of a general standpoint than an absolute rule. However, it does fit in with his goal of creating an “environment” rather than just a story (that in a graphical sense feels vaguely like walking around a modern open world game).

The inside of the Inn has a “keeper” and some “beer”. You can fill your jug with the beer (it “refreshes” you if you drink it).

This led me directly to wonder what kind of character interaction was possible: could I have a conversation? The game helpfully gives a complete verb list from the start:

help option inventory score draw picture view look quit end drink swim wave wait ask empty pour fill give off on light unlock open close shut lock get take drop throw cut hit

The only commands on there that are “social” are give and ask (I guess “wave” could be here that’s for a “wave wand” kind of command). I was able to give my key to the keeper, then ask for it back. Maybe it’s useful to have an NPC hang on to things for you? (Not the keeper, since you can just stash things in the cabin, but there might be a section later where this comes up.) No way to ask about rumors or the like.

Speaking of NPCs, wandering around the aboveground I’ve found at least two elves, one gorilla, and one troll. The gorilla and troll are both pains; they will sometimes follow you and whack you with whatever weapon they have at hand. (The gorilla specifically will “throw” its items while the troll will “hit” you.) I’ve just been trying to map things out but occasionally I suffered a death in the middle of testing exits or whatnot.

NPCs can fight each other; here the troll has whacked an elf. You might also notice the troll carrying a flint stone; that’s the flint stone (the only one in the game) nabbed from the quarry, so assuming you’re in this circumstance you need to extract it from the troll in order to use it, and given the flint is used to light the lamp, it becomes important fairly quickly. I find it easier to just nab the flint first and avoid the problem.

The map I started this post with includes one of the three ways underground: just west and north of the starting room.

It’s the most elaborate room in terms of the graphics trying to depict the grand span of the environment.

You are in a clearing. North is a forest path. East is a forest path. South you can see a road. Down is a locked brass grate through which you can see a narrow passage.

While I haven’t placed any of the moving characters on my map (due to the fact I don’t know for certain their home bases) I’m pretty sure after enough attempts the gorilla always starts here with a wooden club. It’s possible to ignore it, unlock the gate, and run on by. I’ll show the first two rooms of the underground but I’m staying with the outdoors otherwise.

There’s a crystal ball here, but I haven’t gotten it to work yet.

Moving north…

…there’s not much new to see. (Unless I’m missing a secret, of course.) It’s just meant to be a pleasant forest environment, although rather oddly there are two one-way exits leading over to the mountains.

Notice how the game consistently tells you what the direction the view is in, and this direction changes based on the room (and not some kind of relative-direction setup based on where the player came from). This is pretty rare but it showed up in The Palms.

To the far north there’s a “Top of Waterfall” and going north farther has you dive into a crocodile pool, which you immediately are forced out of by the game.

This is a canyon where you can go west and see the spring farther in the distance (again, using the “object” paradigm rather than completely pre-cooked “scenes”).

Going even further you can find a cave (the second underground entrance). A very brief look at the cave (which I’ll save for a later post):

The cave in context (on the northeast side of the map):

Most of these rooms are just connective tissue; the sloping trail which enters the cave connects back up to the forest, and the forest lets you go south to eventually reach the quarry (that’s the one-way passages I mentioned earlier), west to a “cliff top” (which lets you quickly loop back to the first map) and a fissure.

You are on the south edge of a deep fissure. North you can see down a dangerous fall.

Despite the game saying “you are dying” if you go north, you can actually survive the fall, landing in a narrow canyon! Going west in the canyon leads to a narrow fissure with Watersmeet at the end, and a cave (the third underground entrance) right beforehand.

Just a brief look at the cave in the fissure.

Going east just lands back in the canyon with the crocodile pool, so that’s everything (probably) on the outside. I admit I haven’t tested every single direction in every room (the room exits it gives usually are right) and of course one of the underground sections may pop back outdoors again (like to the north side of the canyon, I imagine). I also don’t know if the three undergrounds I’ve found merge together or if all three are separate.

There’s still a lot to explore with the NPCs; I haven’t tried fighting back yet (they’re pretty possessive of the weapons, and I’ve been focused on mapping anyway). I do know you can arm the “allied” NPCs and have them fight as well, so even if all the game is tracking is how good your weapon is, there could be some interesting strategies involved.

The Sharpee Blog: Who draws the line break?

2026-09-05T02:03:44+00:00

Apparently, not the Author.

A post came through Planet IF this week about wrangling line breaks in Inform 7. It is a good post, in the sense that it accurately describes what an Inform author has to do. That is what bothers me about it.

The setup is a bowl of ice cream whose description cycles through three flavors, and an every-turn rule that nags you to eat it. The output has a stray blank line between the description and the nag. The post then walks through the fixes: append a substitution to the end of the string, no change; move it into the say phrase, no change; attach it to each individual sentence, that works. Then the improvement: define a substitution that prints Unicode character 46 so that the period at the end of a sentence is not a period as far as the compiler is concerned. Then a rulebook that prints a stanza of Berryman using a substitution meant for command clarification, because that substitution happens to suppress the engine's paragraph logic and nothing else does.

The author's own line is the tell. "None of this quite feels like sitting down to write, though, does it?" No. It does not.

Why Inform is like this

Inform 7 is built on top of Inform 6, and it kept Inform 6's output model. Text goes to the Z-machine or Glulx screen stream the moment a say phrase runs. That stream is one way. The Glk specification says it in a sentence: "A window stream cannot be read from, only written to." The Z-machine offers no way to ask where the cursor is either. So the runtime has no way to look at the screen and ask whether it is at the start of a line or whether a line was just skipped.

Graham Nelson says as much in the comment at the top of the paragraphing code in the Inform kits, and it is worth quoting because it is the whole story:

Most users probably imagine that it's implemented by having I7 look at where the cursor currently is (at the start of a line or not) and whether a line has just been skipped. In fact, the virtual machines simply do not offer facilities like that, and so we have to use our own book-keeping. Given the huge number of ways in which text can be printed, this is a delicate business. For some years now, "spacing bugs" (those where a spurious extra skipped line appears in a paragraph break, or where, conversely, no line is skipped at all) have been the least welcome in the Inform bugs database.

The bookkeeping is two global flags. The compiler sets the first one before every say phrase, and the runtime checks it at "divide paragraph points" between rules and prints a skipped line if it is set. The sentence-ending punctuation rule is not even a runtime check. The compiler looks at the last character of the literal text in a say phrase and, if it is a full stop, an exclamation mark or a question mark, compiles in a newline. That is why the post's fix only works when the substitution sits right next to the period, and why printing the period as a character code works at all: the compiler is looking at the source string, and a character code is not a full stop.

Layout, in short, is a side effect of printing, computed from the text itself, at the moment each fragment goes out. Inform 7 put a natural-language surface on that stream without replacing the stream. Every substitution in the post is a way of poking one of those flags from inside a string, because the string is the only place an author can stand.

That design has a consequence that no amount of substitution vocabulary can fix. The prose and the layout instructions live in the same string. When the layout is wrong, you edit the prose. When you cannot edit the prose without changing what the reader sees, you disguise the prose so the engine misreads it. Printing a period as a character code is exactly that: lying to the layout engine about what you wrote.

A thirty thousand word story written this way carries hundreds of these disguises. Every one of them is a place where the author stopped writing and started negotiating.

What Sharpee does instead

In Sharpee the story never prints anything. Actions and phrases produce text blocks during the turn, and when the turn is over the report service assembles them. Paragraphs are structure, not punctuation. A phrase is a block. A blank line inside a phrase body is a paragraph break. A single line break is a {br} marker. The renderer owns the margins between blocks, and the theme decides what those margins look like.

Nothing in that pipeline reads your sentences to decide where a paragraph goes. A period is a period. Here is the ice cream in Chord.

create the Lab
  a room

  A bowl of ice cream rests on the counter. {ice-cream-look}

  on every turn while the ice cream is on the counter
    phrase eat-it
  end on

create the counter
  a scenery supporter in the Lab

create the ice cream
  aka bowl
  on the counter

define phrase ice-cream-look, cycling
  It looks like delicious vanilla.
or
  Chocolate! My favorite.
or
  Strawberry with real chunks of fruit in it.
end phrase

define phrase eat-it
  You had better eat that ice cream before it melts!
end phrase

The description is one block. The every-turn nag is another block. The space between them is the paragraph margin, the same margin every paragraph in the story gets, and it is the same on the first turn, the fortieth, and after every flavor. There is nothing to tune because there is nothing computing it from the text.

The poem is the same idea with the other marker.

define phrase dream-song-14
  Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.{br}
  After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,{br}
  we ourselves flash and yearn,{br}
  and moreover my mother told me as a boy{br}
  (repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored{br}
  means you have no
end phrase

Each {br} produces a line that stacks flush against the previous one. If the stanza needs a gap, you leave a blank line, and it is a paragraph. No rulebook, no borrowed substitution, no trailing break rule to cancel a break that appeared from somewhere else.

A different split

The post ends with "do not accept defeat," which is a strange thing to have to say about typesetting a paragraph. An engine should not be an opponent. The reason Inform's is comes down to one decision made a long time ago: that the printing routine is where layout gets decided. That was a choice with real benefits. Building on Inform 6 gave Inform 7 the Z-machine and Glulx, every interpreter ever written for them, and twenty years of library behavior that already worked. The paragraphing flags are the price of that choice, and it is a price paid by every author, on every project, in every string.

Sharpee and Chord make a different bet. The virtual machine pattern bought portability by fixing a byte code and asking every platform to write an interpreter for it, and the price of that portability was an output model from the era of the teletype: a stream of characters with no structure the interpreter could see. The web is now the runtime that every platform already has. A story delivered to a browser inherits its portability from the browser, and it gets to deliver structure instead of characters. Sharpee's engine hands the client a list of text blocks with keys and classes, and the client lays them out with the same tools every web page uses. A paragraph is an element. The space between two paragraphs is a style. Neither of those facts has to be reconstructed from a flag after the text has already gone by.

I should be honest about where that bet still has gaps. Vorple has been putting Inform stories in a browser with real HTML and JavaScript for years, and Hugo shipped graphics and sound in its own runtime a long time before that. Both offer visual capabilities Sharpee has not tested against yet. Sharpee has sound, and it has minimal image placement, and neither is at the level those two systems reached. What Sharpee has settled first is the thing this post is about: the shape of the text. The rest is work I know is ahead.

The one place I expect an argument is this. What happens when two rules both report on the same turn, and the author meant them to be one paragraph? In Inform the answer is to reach for the run-on substitution and hope the flags cooperate. In Sharpee the default is that two reports are two paragraphs. If two things happen independently, they are two facts, and the reader gets two paragraphs. When the author knows they belong together there are two ways to say so, both in the source. A phrase can splice another phrase into its own prose with a marker, which is what the ice cream description does with its cycling flavor. And a phrase can be tagged as running on, so that wherever it fires, its text joins the paragraph before it.

on every turn while the ice cream is on the counter
  phrase eat-it
end on

define phrase eat-it, run-on
  You had better eat that ice cream before it melts!
end phrase

The tag is a property of the phrase, not of the place it is called from, so the author decides once where the text lives. The joining is done in the source, where the author can read it, not at the output, where nobody can. The engine never guesses. It either has one paragraph because the author said so, or it has two because the author did not.

The marker splice is current capability. The run-on tag is filed and not yet built.

Sharpee's split is that the story says what is true and the presentation layer says how it looks. The same story renders in a terminal, in a browser, and in Chord Writer, with different themes, and the author has not written a single character of layout for any of them. When an author wants a different look, they change the theme, not the prose. When a tester pins a transcript, the text is the text; there is no whitespace to fight over.

The best argument for this is the one the post makes by accident. Authors want to sit down and write. The tool that lets them do that is the one that never asks them to hide a period.

Note: I did use Claude to help write this entry because I wanted a deep comparison of text emission from VM-based IF platforms to Sharpee/Chord. Claude is able to look into code and validate how things work and dig up salient quotes from Graham about this subject. Nonetheless, the original line break post is one of the central catalysts for building Sharpee at all and for how I designed text-emission. It also exposed a small gap where run-on is required. TL;DR - I hated managing text output in Inform 7 and honestly this is probably an outcome from having designed Channel IO back in the FyreVM/Textfyre days.

The Sharpee Blog: Sharpee 5.3, Chord 3.6, Chord Writer 1.4

2026-09-04T22:28:48+00:00

Three things shipped together this week: Sharpee 5.3.0 on npm, Chord 3.6.0 (the story language), and Chord Writer 1.4.0 (the Mac app you write in). The last public release was 5.1.1 and Chord 3.3.0 in mid-August. Everything below happened in the two and a half weeks between.

Most of it started with porting Secret Letter to Chord, and about every third scene ran into syntax issues. So I updated the syntax to help out.

Chord

Timers came first. A timer belongs to a character or to the player, runs through named turns, and can carry prose and chance rolls on the way.

define timer search for the wandering mercenaries
  arriving
  lingering
    Those mercenaries are getting uncomfortably close.
  meanwhile, one chance in 5
    phrase merc-idle
end timer

You control it, read it, and react to it in plain words.

start search
stop search
restart search
reset search
interrupt search

while search is lingering
while search has expired

when search expires
  phrase merc-spotted
end when

There are more places to move things to. Here means where the player is standing. Offstage means nowhere, and the thing keeps its state and can come back later. A random adjacent room is picked one open exit away at the moment the line runs. A region can declare a landing, so you can move someone to the Grounds and the story knows which room that means.

move the guards here
move the monkey offstage
move the player to a random adjacent room

create the Grounds
  a region
  containing the Market Square, Commerce Street
  landing the Market Square

The player is a role now, not a block. You no longer create the player. A character is marked playable, and the story says who holds the role. The same line swaps the player mid-game.

create Alex
  a person
  playable
  starts in the Market Square

before the game starts
  change the player to Alex
end before

Every clause names its actor, and the word it is gone from clause heads. A line reads on its own now, without holding the whole block in your head.

on the player taking
after the guard entering

Characters can act in a single sentence. That character performs the real action through the same path the player's commands take, and a goal plan can use the same sentences as its steps.

the guard opens the door
Teisha talks to the player

goal secure-the-key, high
  seek the player
  take the brass key
  go east
end goal

Chapters are an extension that declares chapters as events, and once declared they can be used anywhere a condition goes.

story
  title: The Secret Letter
  use chapters

define chapters
  market - Chapter I: Grubber's Market
    begins when the game starts
  commerce - Chapter II: Commerce Street
    begins when the player visits Commerce Street for the first time
end chapters

on the player talking during commerce
  refuse no-time-to-chat
end on

A pile of smaller things landed too. Imports can import. Proper names work on any create block, not only people. An exit can be one-way. A marker can ask for a noun with no article. Possessive names resolve everywhere.

import "regions/market"

create Grubber's Market
  scenery, proper

create the Market Square
  a room
  north to the Alley, one-way

define phrase another-one
  No one notices you picking up another {bare item}.
end phrase

while the Weaponsmith's Stall is blocked

And a couple dozen loader and parser defects found by playing the port, all fixed.

Sharpee

Under the language, NPCs now act through the platform's own action pipeline. When a character does something, it is the real action, validated and interruptible, and the narration knows who was present to see it. The story's own reactions run before the platform moves the characters. There is a new static analysis, the World Index, that reads a compiled story and reports its map, what can be reached, and what looks unfinished. And a long list of text fixes: articles on plurals, third-person names, room descriptions on arrival, answering and saying goodbye in conversations.

Chord Writer

The app speaks Chord 3.6 and bundles the 5.3 toolchain, so there is nothing to install. New since 1.3: imported fragment files are first-class source in the sidebar and editor, with New Import and Extract Selection to Import in the File menu; a World tab showing the World Index; a menu-less Play pane with a Publish option; and the usual editor fixes. This is the first version that arrives as an auto-update to existing installs.

Documentation

sharpee.net has new guide pages for timers, chapters, the player role, sound and images, and testing with the tree document. Every guide was swept against the current syntax.

Where to get it

Chord Writer is at sharpee.net/chord-writer/download, one build for Apple silicon and one for Intel. The platform is on npm as the sharpee packages at 5.3.0, with the devkit package as the command line. The Secret Letter port is not done, so do not expect a game yet. Expect the language to keep moving as it gets there.

Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian: Porsche Unleashed

2026-09-04T15:55:22+00:00

This Porsche is very much leashed. The one I got wasn’t even a turbo model.

I’ve had a running joke with my wife Dorte for almost as long as we’ve been a couple. I reasoned back in the day that, since she was going to be a doctor — a more reliable source of income than writing about computer games — she should be expected to buy me the Porsche of my dreams at some point. Needless to say, I’m still waiting. I had to learn the hard way that a doctor in Denmark doesn’t earn quite as much as one in the United States. (On the other hand, a doctor here doesn’t have to work such ridiculously long hours or have to pay ridiculous insurance premiums either, so it all balances out.)

The closest my dream ever did come to fruition was not that long after we moved to Denmark, when Dorte decided to empty out much of our meager bank account to rent me a Porsche for a weekend as a birthday present. But bless her heart, she didn’t know one model from another. So, what with our finances being so stretched, she just took the cheapest one when she booked the rental online — something called a Cayenne.

This was not the Porsche of my dreams. It was a hulking SUV of the sort that… well, I won’t say that I left the United States just to escape them, but I did enjoy not being surrounded by so many of them on European roads, especially given that my standard mode of conveyance in my new life was a bicycle. Having had no idea where we were going when we climbed into a bus that morning to get to the rental place, I was more confused than disappointed as I handed over my freshly minted Danish driver’s license to the man behind the desk in order to drive away in the least interesting vehicle on the premises.

Of course, it didn’t take me that long to work out what had happened. When I did, I didn’t know whether to laugh at the best wife in the world or hug her as I observed her dismay. So, I did a little bit of both. It was like landing in an O. Henry story — but with Porsches.

In that same “Gift of the Magi” spirit, the Cayenne turned into the gift that kept on giving. We drove down to Germany that weekend to visit my in-laws, whom Dorte had informed of my big surprise beforehand. Their faces showed as much shock as hers had when they saw what we rolled up in. I then had to inform everyone, in my insufferable car-nerd way, that this Porsche was no real Porsche at all, that it was just a rebadged and gussied-up Volkswagen, with an automatic transmission, for Pete’s sake. My father-in-law thought this speech was the best part of all. He still talks regularly about the “Volksporsche” Dorte found for me.

In the end, then, we all got more pleasure out of that frumpy Cayenne than any Boxster or 911 could have given. Even Dorte has come around to admitting that the whole episode was pretty darn funny.

She hasn’t tried again; in fact, I haven’t driven another Porsche since. (In real life, that is; more on the virtual breed momentarily.) The next time Dorte led me to an undisclosed location on my birthday, it was to meet the kitten she’d picked out for me. Thankfully, unlike my Porsche, the kitten was just exactly perfect.

As the car enthusiasts among you are doubtless already raising hands to point out, the irony of my Volksporsche story is that the two brands — the one so utilitarian, the other so prestigious — have always been intimately linked. The Volkswagen Beetle was, after all, designed by a fellow named Ferdinand Porsche. And for most of the second half of the twentieth century, Porsche sports cars and that humble Volkswagen were the only mass-produced cars to sport rear-mounted, air-cooled engines. This is just one of the things that you will learn if you spend some time with Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed, a rather unusual entry in Electronic Arts’s signature series of aspirational driving games.

Porsche Unleashed is a digital love letter to the marque. No other driving game has ever been so laser-focused on a single brand; even the police cars in this game are Porsches. You could say that it all amounts to an extended corporate infomercial, and you’d be completely correct. But what an infomercial!

Like all aspirational driving games, Porsche Unleashed is a snapshot of the moment it was created. Released in March of 2000, it captured the storied sports-car maker as it charged into the new millennium with renewed purpose and optimism. Porsche had recently survived a near-death experience, and, like many a survivor of same, it had emerged determined to seize life by the throat and make up for lost time.

In 1986, Porsche had a record year, turning out 50,000 cars. In 1993, it made 14,000. Between these two data points lay a brutal sales collapse, exacerbated by a global economic downturn but primarily caused, said many, by arrogance and complacency. Hemorrhaging money, facing the very real prospect of bankruptcy, the company turned to a 38-year-old wunderkind engineer named Wendelin Wiedeking to turn things around. He remains a polarizing figure among Porsche enthusiasts to this day.

For Wiedeking utterly remade the company, turning it from an old-school maker of semi-handcrafted vehicles to an efficient, ultra-modern mass manufacturer. He went to Japan to tour the factories of Toyota, Honda, and Nissan, then returned to Porsche’s hometown of Stuttgart to implement the same processes there. In five years, he reduced the amount of time it took to make a Porsche 911 from 128 hours to 70 hours, increasing throughput in terms of cars per employee per year from 4.9 to 9.1.

The Boxster, the car which did much to pull Porsche back from the brink. Unsurprisingly, it features prominently in Porsche Unleashed.

More controversially, he revamped the model lineup, saying it was no longer possible to survive by making vehicles that appealed exclusively to the kind of uncompromising sports-car connoisseurs who had bought Porsches in the past — the sort of people who regarded heel-and-toe braking as an essential life skill and weren’t bothered in the least by fiddly maintenance procedures or a complete lack of luggage space. He introduced the Boxster, a mid-engine roadster that was cheaper than the flagship 911 model, more livable, and less demanding to drive and maintain. Porsche sold 16,000 of them in their debut year of 1996. For his next trick, Wiedeking gave the world a more robust and practical variant of the 911 itself, the first ever to be powered by a water-cooled engine; the anguished cries of the purists can still be heard echoing down through the years. By the turn of the millennium, Porsche’s total vehicle production had returned to its 1984 levels, with profit margins that were much higher. The financial pages were calling Porsche the automotive turnaround story of the decade, calling Wendelin Wiedeking a genius. Not content to rest on his laurels, he had moved on to his next trick: a luxury SUV called the Cayenne, based on a Volkswagen design, that was set to reach dealers in 2003. The purists (hey, that’s me!) would soon have more cause than ever to howl.

As of the year 2000, though, Porsche was still a maker of sports cars only, with a proud past, a winning present, and a bright future. It felt it had something to celebrate. And indeed, Porsche Unleashed was nothing if not a celebration.

This, then, was Porsche’s motivation. That of Electronic Arts is slightly harder to discern. Like so many other driving and sports games, the Need for Speed series has always been a bit of a black box, lacking the big public-facing personalities who place their stamp on the more design-centric genres. The decision to go in a more historical, simulation-focused direction with Porsche Unleashed is counter-intuitive on the face of it, in that this was the opposite of the direction the series had been trending over its last couple of installments — and, for that matter, the direction it would continue down as soon as this installment was done. It may be relevant to note here that Hanno Lemke, the series’s guiding light from its inception until 2007, seems to have had the least to do with this entry; he is credited here as only the executive producer rather than a line producer.

For whatever reason, Porsche Unleashed is in some ways of a piece with what came before — it’s still every inch an aspirational driving game — while being quite dramatically different in tone and feel. It is, dare I say it… classier? The only tacky part of this game is the name; Porsche Unleashed sounds more like branding for a man’s razor or a sexual supplement than a vital creative work.

I originally played it not long after its release, attracted by its Porsche-centric focus and by a stellar review from the long-defunct Games Domain, my favorite gaming website lo those many years ago. I vaguely remember loving it, but my most indelible recollection is of breaking at least three driving wheels — pulling the shift paddles right off, I believe — in my over-enthusiasm to finish first. When I picked the game up again last year, I was curious whether my jaded middle-aged self would respond to it in the same way. I didn’t buy a driving wheel, for two reasons: because it seemed incompatible with my present-day preference for playing games from the couch, and because I knew that Dorte would laugh at me as soon as I emerged from my office with such a contraption just as much as I’ve laughed at her for the Cayenne fiasco over the years. But even with a plain old Xbox controller, the magic was still there for me.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you at this point something that you may have already gathered for yourself: that Porches have always been the exception to my general disinterest in high-priced, high-powered sports cars. This may be down to their shared heritage with Volkswagen, a brand with which I was quite enamored and could actually afford in my younger days. The very first Porsche-branded car was the 356, built in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, by some reports with money looted from a factory for military vehicles which Ferdinand Porsche and Anton Piëch, the company’s patriarchs, had set up in Stuttgart. That first 356 was little more than a Volkswagen Beetle with a different body, a stiffened-up chassis, and a souped-up engine capable of churning out all of 40 horsepower. (If that doesn’t sound like much, know that it was almost twice what you could expect from a Beetle in those early days.)

Prior to the tenure of Wendelin Wiedeking, there was a clarity of purpose — almost an austerity — about Porsches that I have always adored. They didn’t chase trends. In fact, they scarcely changed at all over whole stretches of years (which, yes, was doubtless a big reason for the morass the company had sunk into by the beginning of the 1990s.) They remained rear-engined and air-cooled long after even Volkswagen had given up on that design. To drive a car of such a design fast, you really had to know what you were doing. If you didn’t, that heavy rear end would start to come around on you, you’d hit the brakes trying to plant it down again, and in the best case you’d find yourself sitting in a roadside ditch with the hood pointing in the wrong direction entirely. Some people, myself included, found something deeply appealing about such an uncompromising vehicle. You bought a Ferrari or a Lamborghini to show off to others. You bought a Porsche for yourself. Looking back on the late 1980s — my formative years in car culture, as they were those of the modern aspirational driving game — I find that the Porsches from that time have aged a heck of a lot better than their slightly more expensive companions in games like Test Drive, even if the company wasn’t selling as many of them as it might have wished.

So, all of this is surely bound up with my appreciation for Porsche Unleashed. But I think a difference is discernible in this Need for Speed game regardless. Certainly you won’t find a sleeker and more stylish game from the turn of the millennium, a time when tastes in gaming aesthetics in general were often still those of nerdy adolescents. Although it was made in Canada, the feel of the game is more European than North American, which is only appropriate given the subject matter. The chilly house beats that play behind the proceedings are a perfect match for the airbrushed discotheque-ready sheen of the rest of the production.

https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/opening.mp4

Another thing you’ll notice before you actually set yourself behind the wheel are the gallery of photographs and press clipping awaiting your perusal, now or later. Although I’ve never been to Porsche’s official museum in Stuttgart, I can imagine that its mood might be a lot like this, at least if they’re doing it right.

But of course, none of this would matter at all if the cars weren’t fun to drive. Happily, then, fun they are. Really, really fun. Porsche Unleashed lands in exactly the right sweet spot between an obviously artificial arcade game like the old Outrun and a fiddly, rigorous simulator like the NASCAR games from Papyrus Design. It is, in other words, an aesthetic simulation par excellence; it feels like you’re actually driving one of these cool cars. The 911s are the highlight of the experience, as they by all rights ought to be. You have to learn that, when that infamously squirrelly rear end comes around on you, you can’t follow your natural instinct to hit the brakes, for that way lies a disastrous spin. No, you have to step on the gas, which will transfer the car’s weight to the rear and let those loosy-goosy tires grip the road again. When you figure out that you can throw your car into the curves, let the back end drift around deliberately, and then down-shift and clomp down on the accelerator to power out of them, it’s an awesome, well-nigh revelatory moment. I’m not sure that I can recall a more satisfying feeling in all my decades of playing videogames. Spend some time with this game, and you will begin to understand why people love those vintage 911s so much.

The streets of Monte Carlo.

All of the courses you can drive are located in Europe. They include the streets of Monte Carlo, the German Autobahn, and a rather generic industrial zone that could be found on any of six continents. But most of them put you on twisting smaller roads, mostly in France. While this is in some ways an odd choice for a game about a legendary German automaker, the end result is so lovely that I’ll let it pass without further comment.

These courses are all a blast to drive and explore, with plenty of the shortcuts and hidden byways that virtual motorists love. They looked spectacular in the year 2000, and still stand up surprisingly well today; this game is almost as effective an advertisement for France as it is for Porsche. It seems weird to use the word “bucolic” in reference to a franchise called Need for Speed, but for this installment it really is applicable. I sometimes like to take an old, slow 356 out just to practice my line through the courses and enjoy the scenery. Call it a reminder of what driving a sports car used to mean: driving well, and having a great time doing it, even if you weren’t going all that fast in absolute terms.

Out for a Sunday drive in a 356. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s funner to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow…

Just one year after Need for Speed: High Stakes introduced a longer-term meta-game to the franchise, Porsche Unleashed gave you two of them, both equally well-done. Its direct equivalent to the High Stakes career mode is called Evolution. Just like in the previous game, you start out with a single modest car and an equally modest sum of cash, with the dictate to go forth and win races to improve the state of your garage and your bank account. But Porsche Unleashed adds a larger historical chronology to the proceedings. As you open up new races to enter, you also advance through time from your starting point in 1950, when the only car you can buy is a Porsche 356 that sways and rolls more than a fat man on a bender and is powered by what sounds and performs like a lawn-mower engine.

In one of the few reflections of the direction the franchise took after this game, Porsche Unleashed lets you tune your cars in career mode. I must admit that this sort of thing exceeds my patience level. I find it easier just to buy new cars instead of mucking about with my existing ones.

In addition to its other attractions, the Evolution mode is another fine history lesson, this time an interactive, hands-on one. When the 911 comes onto the stage in 1964, well after the 356 has overcome its humble origins to get pretty darn good, you might feel like many a 356 aficionado did at the time: skeptical of the newcomer, to put it mildly. But rest assured that the 911, an automotive icon for a reason, will win you over quickly enough.

To its credit, the Evolution mode includes lots of Porsches that aren’t the 356s and 911s around which the brand built its reputation. The 914 is here — this being the semi-infamous Volksporsche which combined a Porsche chassis with the exact same motor that powered the Volkswagen bus I owned all those years ago. (I kid you not.) And we can have a go with the 944, a later lower-end sports car, and the 928, the grand tourer that Porsche made twenty years before the Cayenne was a gleam in Wendelin Wiedeking’s eye. None of these cars is as fun to drive as the fishy-tailed 911, but it’s great to see them nonetheless. Ditto the real oddballs, such as the Porsche 550 Spyder, which looks like an overturned bathtub and is a terrifying handful on the road, such that you can understand all too well how the actor James Dean could have met his death in one in 1955. All told, playing through the entirety of the Evolution mode, from that first 356 to the Y2K incarnations of the Boxster and 911, is quite a trip. A course that used to take you six or seven minutes to traverse will be done in barely two by the time you’ve finished assembling your garage full of Porsches. Evolution indeed!

The 914, the ugly duckling of the Porsche flock.

The other meta-game here is a dramatic new innovation for the series. The Factory Driver mode is a sign of the changing times in gaming circa 2000, when more and more genres were finding ways to include set-piece story lines. The story here isn’t a particularly good one in the abstract, mind you, but it’s notable for existing at all. More importantly, it’s at least as entertaining as the Evolution mode in practice.

On the skid pad in Factory Driver mode.

You’ve come to Porsche to work as a test driver. Over 34 assignments, you have to prove your mettle and fend off various challengers from among your colleagues. Some assignments take place on a slalom course right there in the factory parking lot, but most repurpose the same roadways that you race on in Evolution mode. Realism is not a priority; I certainly hope that the real Porsche doesn’t deliver its cars to the port for shipment by racing them at breakneck speeds over public thoroughfares. Some of the assignments are really hard, at least for a middle-aged man like me; it took me more than an hour of trying to complete an embarrassing number of them. But boy, are they fun, and boy, is it satisfying when you win a race against the clock that had seemed impossible at the outset.

Yes, I am proud. It wasn’t easy, let me tell you.

In fact, I think that I adore this part of the game even more than the rest of it; I don’t even mind that you’re mostly driving 1990s-vintage Porsches in Factory Driver mode, with only the occasional blast from the past. This mode is actually an excellent place to start with the game, as it will teach you skills that will serve you well when you move on to Evolution mode. The only drawback to this ordering is that, if you’re at all like me, you may find that Evolution mode, good as it is, pales just slightly in comparison.

As has surely become all too clear by now, I have very little bad to say about this game. Normally, when I’m writing about a game, I try to temper my criticisms by reminding myself that there is someone out there who likes it a lot more than I do, who cares about it more than I do. Well, that may not be the case with Porsche Unleashed. Even grizzled, jaded critics like me have those special games that stick in our craw for reasons that we may not be entirely able to articulate. Porsche Unleashed is one of those games for me. It seems that all I can bring myself to do is gush over it.

Yes, it’s easy enough to call it too slick by half, to call it corporate propaganda. But it’s just so well-done, so aesthetically masterful and so carefully calibrated for the maximum enjoyment of yours truly, that I don’t care. Part of me feels bad that I haven’t found any other driving games to fall in love with in the same way as this one. Another part of me — the bigger part, I think — feels that, when a driving game is as good as this one, what’s the point of having any others?

Despite reviews that tended to be almost as gushing as the one I’ve just written, Porsche Unleashed was less commercially successful than its predecessors in the Need for Speed series. That disappointment prompted a franchise course correction — or rather re-correction, back to the direction the series had been trending before this detour into a single marque’s history. I feel like I ought to write that this was a shame, but, honestly, what would more games in this spirit have looked like? Ferrari Unleashed? Lamborghini Unleashed? I suppose you could try, but somehow it wouldn’t be the same. Or maybe that’s just the Porsche lover in me talking once again.

As it was, the Need for Speed series soared to new commercial heights early in the aughts by capitalizing on the craze among the youth for “tuning” and (illegally) racing more ordinary and accessible cars, as celebrated by the 2001 cinematic blockbuster The Fast and the Furious and its sequels. For many post-millennial driving-game fans, Porsche Unleashed remained relevant primarily for the sixteen-year (!) exclusive license Porsche had granted to Electronic Arts; this meant that their cars could not appear in anyone else’s games, even as EA’s own were now favoring Hondas and Nissans and even Volkswagens over Porsches and Ferraris and Lamborghinis. When the long moratorium finally ended in 2016, it was front-page news on many a gaming website. (Would we have gotten more exclusively Porsche Need for Speed games if the first one had been more successful? It’s tempting to wonder — but, again, what else could those games have done that the first one didn’t?)

Today, the expired status of the same license agreement means that Porsche Unleashed is not available for purchase anywhere. But you can still find it in the musty back hallways of the Internet, including at a certain archiving organization. It can be tricky to get running well on modern hardware, but it’s not impossible. A good place to start is with the “Combined Patch” by Tsalikon. Just make sure to play the Windows rather than the Playstation version; the latter is so dramatically stripped down as to be for all practical purposes a different, inferior game altogether.

Naturally, you will have to decide for yourself whether it’s worth the effort to track down the game and get it running. I can only say that it was most emphatically worth it for me to renew my relationship with this old flame. I am, it seems, a driving-game monogamist. What I lack in my breadth of appreciation for them is made up for by the depth of my attachment to this one.

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

Sources: I drew my brief summation of Porsche’s recent history and situation circa 2000 from a Harvard Business School case study by Jeffrey Fear and Carin-Isabel Knoop. And let me recommend the book The Nazi Billionaires by David de Jong to anyone who wants to explore the darker side of Volkswagen and Porsche’s origins, the stuff you will never see in a slick propaganda piece like this one.

top expert: where will it end? who will draw the line (break)?

2026-09-04T01:39:24+00:00

Please help, I can’t hold all these line breaks.

If you’ve been messing with Inform for a little while, this has probably happened to you.

>l
lab
A bowl of ice cream rests on the counter. It looks like delicious vanilla.


You had better eat that ice cream before it melts!

>

See that extra line space up there? Between “vanilla” and “You had better?” Sooner or later, we all will produce a passage with either too few or too many line spaces. In some cases, it may seem impossible for us to hit the right number.

WI §5.8 Line breaks and paragraph breaks from Writing with Inform takes an optimistic view: there are perhaps only few adjustments needed, so only a few adjustments are possible. This is true nearly all of the time! We can fix this case, for instance. Let’s look at the offending code.

lab is a room.

the interderminate ice cream is on the counter. "[IC_desc]".
the counter is a scenery supporter in lab.

IC counter is initially one;

to say IC_desc:
	say "A bowl of ice cream rests on the counter. ";
	if IC counter is one, say "It looks like delicious vanilla.";
	if IC counter is two, say "Chocolate! My favorite.";
	if IC counter is three, say "Strawberry with real chunks of fruit in it.";
	increment IC counter;
	if IC counter is four, now IC counter is one;
	
every turn when the interderminate ice cream is on the counter:
	say "You had better eat that ice cream before it melts!";

Where is the line space coming from? There are hopefully only two places to look. The first is in the third sentence, "[IC_desc]". The second is in the actual description for [IC_desc].

We know that the [run paragraph on] substitution can suppress line breaks. According to the documentation:

This text substitution produces no text. It’s used only for a side-effect: it prevents a paragraph break occurring after the present text is printed, in case Inform might be tempted to place one there. Example:”

Well, let’s give it a try!

If we revise our third line of code to match the following:

the interderminate ice cream is on the counter. "[IC_desc][run paragraph on]".

Nothing changes. Let’s try adding something to the end of our substitution, instead.

to say IC_desc:
	say "A bowl of ice cream rests on the counter. ";
	if IC counter is one, say "It looks like delicious vanilla.";
	if IC counter is two, say "Chocolate! My favorite.";
	if IC counter is three, say "Strawberry with real chunks of fruit in it.";
	increment IC counter;
	if IC counter is four, now IC counter is one;
	say run paragraph on;

That doesn’t change anything either! In this particular case, we’ll want to stay close to the punctuation. Inform makes these spacing decisions at the end of sentences, even if the influencing factors aren’t always clear. In this case, for instance, we could decorate our individual sentences so:

	if IC counter is one, say "It looks like delicious vanilla.[run paragraph on]";

That should do it! All we have to do is type those words in those brackets every time we write a text substitution. That shouldn’t add up to much in a 30k word project.

lets not run so far or so long, [run paragraph on]

Or mightn’t it? Most of us like to avoid typing when we can. We can shorten that up in a few ways. Since the inflection point is the period symbol (.) in our text, we could always approach that a different way. Credit where credit is due: Zed Lopez suggested this to me while I was fighting my way through Repeat the Ending, which has an outlandish amount of printed text.

What are we to do? Inform checks for punctuation at the end of our quoted passages, but it doesn’t check to see if we are displaying punctuation characters. How do we print a period without putting it into our sentence? We print its Unicode character. In inform, we can use a special text substitution that invokes a Unicode character code. The Unicode character code for period, for instance, 46. Where do we get this information?

Unicode references are ubiquitous. The main thing we Inform authors need is one that contains decimal codes (hex codes are apparently more popular). Wikpedia has a full list. Note that we can’t use all Unicode characters, and many of our favorites will lie tantalizingly beyond reach, as the highest possible code in Inform 10 is 65535. Humble Unicode 46 is certainly doable. We can try these:

To say dot:
	say unicode 46;

To say fs:
	say unicode 46;
	
To say p:
	say unicode 46;

All will print a period. I’m partial to dot, though p is more economical. Some of our English friends might prefer fs for full stop. Any will do, as our extra space is now happily gone:

to say IC_desc:
	say "A bowl of ice cream rests on the counter. ";
	if IC counter is one, say "It looks like delicious vanilla[dot]";
	if IC counter is two, say "Chocolate! My favorite[fs]";
	if IC counter is three, say "Strawberry with real chunks of fruit in it[p]";
	increment IC counter;
	if IC counter is four, now IC counter is one;

alternatives

We don’t have to do it that way, though. We could strip the periods out of our substitutions altogether, and place one in initial our description code, and then append [run paragraph on] to the end of it.

the interderminate ice cream is on the counter. "[IC_desc].[run paragraph on]".

We’re already halfway to a Frankenstein text, with our first “A bowl of ice cream…” floating above the other options. We could put a single period on a line at the bottom.

to say IC_desc:
	say "A bowl of ice cream rests on the counter. ";
	if IC counter is one, say "It looks like delicious vanilla";
	if IC counter is two, say "Chocolate! My favorite";
	if IC counter is three, say "Strawberry with real chunks of fruit in it";
	say ".[run paragraph on]";
	increment IC counter;
	if IC counter is four, now IC counter is one;

None of this quite feels like sitting down to write, though, does it? We don’t carry loose periods in our pockets around with us or else paint period-shaped specks on our screens when we write, after all.

Nevertheless, with some judicious added touches, we can usually get things to look the way we want them to.

further adventures.

Let’s say, for some reason, we wanted to make a rulebook that printed, line by line, the first stanza of John Berryman’s “Dream Song 14.” As anyone peeking under the hood of my own Portrait with Wolf might tell you, it can be hard to lay out poetry in Inform, but we can manage this one easiliy enough:

before jumping:
	follow the typesetting rules;

typesetting is a rulebook.

a typesetting rule:
	say "Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.";
		
a typesetting rule:
	say "After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,";
	
a typesetting rule:
	unless one is one, say paragraph break;
	
a typesetting rule:
	say "we ourselves flash and yearn,";
	
a typesetting rule:
	say "and moreover my mother told me as a boy";
	
a typesetting rule:
	say "(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored";
	
a typesetting rule:
	say "means you have no";

If we park our text at the top of a jumping action, we’ll get this:

>jump
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no
You jump on the spot.

It isn’t quite right, but we can get there! We’ll need to enforce a page break between “say so.” and “After all,” because that’s how the poem goes.

If we just assert one, as in "Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.[line break]";, we’ll come away with an extra line space.

>jump
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,

We can use the familiar Unicode trick, or else we can append [command clarification break]. We aren’t clarifying any commands, obviously, but we are asking the [command clarification break] to do what the documentation says that it will. Specifically:

This text substitution produces a line break, and then also a paragraph break if the text immediately following is a room description brought about by having gone to to a different room and looking around, in which case a line break should be added.

[command clarification break] is, whatever its intended purpose, an excellent means for suppressing Inform’s default tendencies to make complex determinations regarding line breaks. Since we don’t usually use the specific code that the Standard Rules uses to print room descriptions while going, we aren’t likely to ever prompt unwanted extra line breaks via [command clarification break] (see here for more information).

In other words:

a typesetting rule:
	say "Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.[command clarification break]";

Is this a superior option to typing [dot]? It requires more characters, which is certainly a strike against it! Let’s look once more at the entire output. There’s a paragraph break missing there. That’s because there’s no period ending the final rule:

a typesetting rule:
	say "means you have no";

Adding a period would solve everything, but what if we don’t want one? If we simply add a [run paragraph on] substitution, we’ll end up with two breaks. The answer is another [command clarification break] at the end:

a last typesetting rule:
	say command clarification break;

do not accept defeat!

I’ve struggled with stubborn line breaks in past projects, but I’ve been able to figure them all out (so far). I hope I haven’t jinxed anything by saying so! For further reading, consult this forum thread for other suggestions, tactics, and commiserations.

Zarf Updates: Hugo Award stats, 2026

2026-09-04T00:21:40+00:00

Back in April I took a look at the Hugo Award finalists, with an eye to seeing how the votes might divide up. I did this because the 2025 Best Game voting showed an interesting split between "indie" and "big company" voters (in some sense of those very subjective terms).

Well, the 2026 Hugo Awards were announced this weekend, and the results are... boring. No! I don't mean boring; we got a great lineup of new works across SF media, and I was excited to see them. But as statistics, there's not much to say.

(The 2026 Hugo Full Statistics report can be found on the LACon Hugo Award site.)

Best Game

The winner for Best Game was Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a game which has already won so many award slates that the developers have run out of champagne and are now toasting with Grape Nehi. If we look at the (still very cool) Sankey diagram:

Best Game 2026 runoff. Click for larger version.

...we learn that the voters were heavily in favor of Clair Obscur from the kick. After each other candidate was eliminated, its partisans leaned towards Clair Obscur. So Clair Obscur won. Indie vs AAA? Narrative vs combat? Sorry, people just liked the game. That is all there is to say.

Okay, Hollow Knight voters had a thing for Hades 2, which is mildly interesting.

I was of course rooting for Blue Prince, which made a respectable second-place showing. (BP has also won a metric ton of awards, so don't take my snarking above too seriously.)

It's worth noting that when Blue Prince was eliminated in the last round, almost half its votes dropped out. That is: a large fraction of the people who listed Blue Prince did not rank Clair Obscur on their ballot at all. This indicates a strong voter split between fans of cryptic puzzlefests and hair-trigger combat mechanics... But you didn't need me to tell you that.

As for me, I still can't parry for crap so Clair Obscur is not going on my wishlist.

Since the report provides it, let me add the list of nominees that didn't make the finalist cut:

Split Fiction
Tiny Bookshop
The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship
Strange Antiquities
Type Help
The Alters
Blue Planet
The Séance of Blake Manor
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
Daggerheart

Yay for Type Help and Strange Antiquities! Blake Manor was also worth playing but didn't really work for me. I am sort of interested in The Alters but thinking about survival games makes me tired.

This shall not be the last you hear of Type Help. I expect to be a Hugo voter next year, and I absolutely intend to nominate The Incident at Galley House.

Best Related Work

I also paid attention to Best Related Work, because I am a fan of both Ada Palmer and Elizabeth Sandifer. (I support Sandifer's Patreon.) Here again the fans had a favorite and stuck with it, although the challengers were closer.

Best Related Work 2026 runoff. Click for larger version.

"Last War in Albion" (the Gaiman essay) was a hell of a piece, but it just didn't have a strong constituency.

Back in April I said "I want to read Inventing the Renaissance but I have not yet dug in and done it." Guess what, I still haven't. This time for sure. As soon as I finish the books I picked up at NecronomiCon, and the fourth Heaven's Vault book which has been making sad eyes at me for months...

Nominees that did not make the finalist cut:

We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories About Political Protest, Resistance, and Hope (Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older)
Enshittification (Cory Doctorow)
When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident (Grigory Lukin)
Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles (Jaroslav Olša, Jr.)
Nigerian Speculative Fiction: The Evolution (Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke)
r/fantasy 2025 Book Bingo (r/fantasy Bingo Team)
The Outspoken and the Incendiary (Terry Bisson)
Mark as Read Column (Molly Templeton)
The Martian Trilogy (John P. Moore, et al)
Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling (Henry Lien)

(I have not read any of these. Wait, I must have read some of the original "Enshittification" essay, but the nomination went to the book. Anyhow the word "enshittification" immediately outgrew Doctorow and that's the part I now remember.)

In conclusion

Blogging about Hugo statistics is boring. I should read/play/watch more works and blog about them instead. Onward to Montreal in 2027!

Choice of Games LLC: God of Chaos—Shatter civilization as the world’s last surviving god!

2026-09-03T15:20:32+00:00

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

It’s 30% off until September 10th!

Shatter civilization and avenge your pantheon as the world‘s last surviving god! Will you liberate humanity from tyranny, or let the world burn?

God of Chaos is an interactive dark fantasy novel by Brennan Gilpatrick. It is entirely text-based, 325,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Once you were known as the Sovereign of Lies. The Master of the Fey. The God of Chaos. Humanity feared you and hated you. An outcast even among your fellow gods, no one minded when an Alchemist order sealed you in a prison of pure darkness, away from the land of Vildmara.

After a millennium, you have finally broken free—but Vildmara is nothing like the home you left.

In your absence, the Alchemists went on to murder all of the other gods, conquer all mortal kingdoms, and force humanity into submission. Undead soldiers patrol the streets. The Fey have been hunted to near extinction. A sentient machine rules supreme. They even outlawed the name ‘Vildmara’; everyone lives in the Iron Shelter now.

Desperate to overthrow the Alchemists, a tribe of druids has freed you from the void. You are a shapeshifting, curse-slinging, charming-as-hell deity back on the scene, and in a land ruled by tyrannical order, chaos has the power to move mountains. You are the only god they couldn’t kill.

Will you aid the druids in their quest to heal the natural world, seeking out a mystical artifact that can revive the land itself? Or will you regain the trust of your ancient allies the Fey, and rally them to your cause? Maybe you’ll join the Rustmongers, and help them tear the Iron Shelter down and watch everything burn. Will you show mercy to the descendants of your captors, or subject them to sweet, twisted revenge?

Will you become a savior, conqueror, or destroyer?

Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, bisexual, monogamous, polyamorous, asexual, and/or aromantic.
Choose your form: an infernal imp, a strikingly beautiful human, a shadowy elf, or a devious primate.
Romance or befriend a renegade druid, an anarchist mercenary, or the descendant of your most hated enemy.
Take command of the machine that rules the Iron Shelter, dismantle it safely, or sabotage it to plunge civilization into madness.
Show mercy to the descendants of your captors, or subject them to sweet, twisted revenge.
Hypnotize a masquerade ball. Command an undead legion. Ride a freakin’ Jabberwock.

The heavens sit vacant: the world is yours to shape.

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

The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction: September meeting (online)

2026-09-03T02:30:38+00:00

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

UPDATE: Change of date! See next post.

We are still aiming at an in-person meetup in early October. The date is not yet settled. We’ll post here when we know more.

IFComp News: Welcome to the 32nd Annual IFComp!

2026-09-01T21:59:18+00:00

The 2026 Interactive Fiction Competition has officially begun!

For the next seven weeks, players and judges around the world will be diving into this year’s crop of brand-new interactive fiction. We’re delighted to share that 71 entries have been submitted this year. We’re excited to see what this year’s authors have created, and we hope you’ll find plenty to discover and enjoy.

As always, you don’t need to play every entry to be a judge. You only need to play and rate at least five entries to submit a ballot. Whether you’re a seasoned IFComp veteran or joining us for the very first time, welcome!

Judging is open now and runs through October 19.

A Note About Content Warnings

Authors may provide content warnings for their entries, and those warnings are shown by default. If you would prefer not to see them, whether to avoid spoilers or for any other reason, you can turn them off using the setting at the top of the ballot.

The Colossal Fund

Our annual Colossal Fund helps provide cash prizes to the authors of the top two-thirds of IFComp entries, while also supporting the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation and its work.

This year, we’re using Zeffy to process donations. Zeffy does not charge IFTF any processing fees, which means more of your donation can go toward authors and IFTF’s work. Zeffy will ask whether you’d like to make an additional, optional contribution to support their service. You can change that amount to whatever you’d like, including $0.

Our goal this year is $8,000, with a stretch goal of $10,000. If you’d like to contribute cash or donate another prize, you can learn more at https://ifcomp.org/about/prizes.

What’s New in 2026

Last year, we said that we planned to revisit IFComp’s rules around generative artificial intelligence after hearing from the community. We did, and IFComp incorporated a new rule for 2026.

All player-facing content in an IFComp entry must now be created by humans, including prose, cover art, and in-game assets. Entries also may not require judges or players to interact with external AI or generative services during play. You can read the complete rule, along with all of our author rules, here. Thank you to everyone who shared feedback with us as we worked through this change.

For Our Judges in the United Kingdom

The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act continues to affect the availability of some IFComp entries to users in the UK.

As we did last year, we have taken a case-by-case approach rather than restricting the entire competition. Authors were asked during registration to identify whether their entries contain content that could be subject to the OSA, and our Curation Team reviewed entries for potential concerns as part of our pre-competition review.

As a result, UK judges may find that some entries are not available to them. As of launch, 15 of this year’s 71 entries are geoblocked in the UK. We continue to dislike restricting access to creative work, but we are required to comply with UK law. Our goal remains to limit those restrictions as much as reasonably possible.

Our Awards Ceremony

We’ll celebrate the conclusion of this year’s competition with our annual virtual awards ceremony, where we’ll announce the results and recognize this year’s authors.

The awards ceremony will be held on Twitch at 4:00 PM Eastern on October 24.

Until then, there’s a lot of IF to play!

Anything we haven’t covered? Still got questions? Email us at ifcomp@ifcomp.org.

Thank you in advance for judging, and welcome to IFComp 2026!

Jacqueline Ashwell
September 2026

Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online: Solution Found: Wm. Trent’s “Search for the Key” Mystery

2026-09-01T17:39:40+00:00

In the March 1991 issue of the Eamon Adventurer’s Guild Newsletter, Wm. Trent described a mystery involving Donald Brown’s The Search for the Key:

Dear Tom,
One of my favorite games is a short game (only 20 rooms) called “Search for the Key” (#80) by Donald Brown. For the casual player this game probably doesn’t do much for them. You cannot enter this game with a powerful character but as a beginner. I note that it is rated as a 2. My rating for it since it is such a challenge would be about 7. I have played it at least 200 times and have lost only about 5 times in the last 150 times. I would say that I know more about this little game than the author. Usually I lost because of broken weapons so that I had no way to eliminate the black panther. I usually finish up with $80,000 to $100,000 and four of the best weapons that money can buy. I don’t know anyone who ever was able to get more than two weapons. At one time I was running it as the Eamon Challenge on our BBS offering anyone who could come out of the game with $40,000 a $25 prize. No one solved the mystery so I have not revealed it. I doubt if the author even realized the quirk in the game which allowed me to win this way. I wonder if you or any of the other adventurers can figure out how I do it. - Wm. Trent

Nobody solved his challenge.

Years later, when I corresponded with Trent, he could no longer remember how he had done it.

In 2026, with considerable help from ChatGPT, I believe the mystery was finally solved.

Reverse-engineering the actual Eamon disks

The breakthrough began almost by accident.

I recently realized that ChatGPT could now Apple II .dsk disk images. Rather than relying only on walkthroughs, reviews, or surviving documentation, ChatGPT could examine the disk catalog, Applesoft BASIC programs, room and artifact data, monster statistics, and special game logic.

I first uploaded John Nelson’s standard Eamon conversion of The Search for the Key, Eamon #80.

ChatGPT reconstructed the dungeon and found several quirks that were not obvious from the published reviews. Among them was an unintended way to avoid fighting the Black Panther: the player can FLEE into the Key room, GET KEY, and then use the Key as described in the introduction by entering:


    SAY <your character's name>

The player is then teleported home.

But that still did not explain Trent’s extraordinary amount of money or his four excellent weapons.

More importantly, something Trent wrote did not agree with Nelson’s converted version:

“You cannot enter this game with a powerful character but as a beginner.”

Nelson’s standard #80 contains no such restriction.

That suggested we were looking at the wrong disk.

The original tournament version

Fortunately, a copy of Donald Brown’s original tournament version of The Search for the Key survives. I had never actually seen this version before. After locating it on Huw Williams Eamon Wiki, I uploaded the tournament edition of the game and we were able to compare both:

Donald Brown’s original self-contained tournament disk.
John Nelson’s later conversion into standard Eamon #80.

The tournament disk was the missing piece.

Unlike the later conversion, it contains its own character generator, Main Hall, weapon shop, spell shop, character records, and tournament-specific game launcher.

And buried in that code were the answers to virtually every clue Trent had given us.

Trent really did have to use a beginner

The tournament version explicitly checks the adventurer before allowing entry.

It totals the character’s armor expertise and five weapon abilities. A brand-new character begins with a total of exactly 25.

If the total has risen above 25, the game rejects the player with:


    FOO! YOU HAVE ALREADY GOTTEN THE KEY!

So Trent’s statement was correct.

He really could not simply bring an experienced Eamon character into the adventure.

John Nelson removed this tournament restriction when he converted the game to standard Eamon, which helps explain why people studying #80 years later could not reproduce what Trent described.

The perfect “beginner”

The tournament character generator gives the player 48 points to distribute among Hardiness, Agility, and Charisma.

No attribute may be below 3 or above 24.

That means the player can deliberately create:


Hardiness: 24
Agility:   21
Charisma:   3

This is an exceptionally powerful fighter who nevertheless qualifies as a brand-new character.

The extremely low Charisma turns out to be the key to the entire mystery.

The Main Hall pricing bug

Every time the player visits Marcos or Hokas, the program creates a temporary Charisma value.

The relevant code is essentially:


    C2 = CH + INT(11 * RND(1) - 5)
    C2 = C2 + (C2 = 0)
    RTIO = 10 / C2

The program accounts for the possibility that temporary Charisma might become zero, avoiding a division-by-zero error.

But Donald Brown apparently never considered what would happen if it became negative.

With a permanent Charisma of 3, the random adjustment can produce:


    C2 = -1

The resulting price multiplier is:


    10 / -1 = -10

Prices become negative, and the purchasing routine then subtracts the price from the adventurer’s gold.

So if the price is -30,000:


    GOLD = GOLD - (-30000)

The player's gold increases by 30,000.

In other words, Hokas and Marcos start paying the adventurer to buy things from them.

The $91,000 clue

Hokas sells four spells.

At the -10 price multiplier, their prices become:


BLAST    -30,000
HEAL     -10,000
SPEED    -50,000
POWER     -1,000
----------------
TOTAL    -91,000

Buying all four spells can therefore increase the adventurer’s wealth by approximately:

$91,000.

That was the moment the solution became difficult to dismiss as coincidence.

Trent had written:

“I usually finish up with $80,000 to $100,000…”

The bug naturally produces almost exactly the amount of money Trent reported.

The player can repeatedly return to Hokas until the favorable temporary-Charisma roll occurs, making the process reproducible.

Four of the best weapons money can buy

With approximately $91,000 in hand, Trent’s other mysterious claim becomes straightforward.

Marcos will sell a “very good” sword with:


    Complexity: +10
    Damage:     1D8

The tournament Main Hall permits the adventurer to own four weapons.

So the player can buy four top-quality swords:


    SWORD
    SWORD#
    SWORD##
    SWORD###

This also explains Trent’s comment that his rare losses usually happened when his weapons broke and he could no longer defeat the Black Panther.

The four swords were not merely trophies.

They were spare weapons.

We reproduced Trent’s result

We then tested the theory on the actual tournament disk.

I created a character called TEST2 with:


    HD = 24
    AG = 21
    CH = 3

Using the negative-price exploit, I learned all four spells, acquired plate armor and shield, and bought four +10, 1D8 swords, then went on the adventure.

The resulting character screen showed:

That is almost exactly the result Trent described in 1991:

A beginning character.
Four of the best weapons money could buy.
Between $80,000 and $100,000.

One exploit beyond Trent

Our analysis of Nelson’s later conversion also uncovered another quirk.

The Black Panther, normally the final serious opponent, does not actually have to be killed.

The player can FLEE south into the Key room, then:


    GET KEY
    SAY <character name>

and teleport home.

Interestingly, Trent apparently did not use this method. His letter says that his occasional losses occurred when all of his weapons broke and he could no longer kill the Panther.

If he had known the FLEE trick, broken weapons would not necessarily have prevented him from completing the adventure.

So in one respect, our investigation may have found a shortcut that even Trent did not know.

Why the secret remained hidden

The mystery survived for decades partly because The Search for the Key existed in two significantly different forms.

Donald Brown’s tournament version included its own Main Hall and New Characters routine.

John Nelson’s 1984 conversion retained the adventure itself but transformed it into a conventional Eamon adventure.

The economic exploit that made Trent’s feat possible was therefore largely outside the dungeon that later players knew as Eamon #80.

Someone searching the converted adventure for a hidden treasure room or a gold-duplication trick would never find the real answer.

The secret was in the tournament Main Hall.

Solution found

ChatGPT’s ability to inspect the original Apple II .dsk images made it possible to reconstruct both versions of the game, compare their BASIC code, identify the tournament-only beginner restriction, discover the negative-Charisma pricing bug, and test the resulting strategy.

We then reproduced Trent’s published claim on the original tournament disk:

$95,301 in gold and four +10, 1D8 swords.

After approximately 35 years, Wm. Trent’s Search for the Key challenge appears to be solved.

---------

Disclosure note: This summary was made with the assistance of ChatGPT.

Zarf Updates: The Visible Witness is now available to all

2026-09-01T04:10:39+00:00

September is upon us, and with it that least regarded of the early Infocom games: The Witness.

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

I wouldn't say The Witness is unfairly disregarded. It's Infocom's second mystery game, a followup to Deadline. Deadline was groundbreaking interactive narrative; it presented a huge New England mansion and a cast of dynamic characters with their own plans and schedules. (Until you, the detective, barge in to upend them.) The Witness was... more of the same, except with fewer characters, a smaller house, and a shallower mystery to solve.

The Witness is mostly remembered in the IF community for three things:

First, it's the Infocom game which can be solved in the fewest commands. People got competitive about finding minimal paths to the winning outcome. (See this comment by eriktorbjorn, for example.)

Second, the 1938 period atmosphere. It's really the game's best quality. You start out schlumfing up those mean streets (or a mean driveway) on a chilly Los Angeles night with a storm moving in. Thunder crashes, Monica's grey eyes flash, and the language never lets up. The packaging and the text glitter with love for the noir era.

I wrote a whole other post about this matchbook from the game package.

(Okay, not noir exactly. You're still a police detective rather than a down-at-heels private eye. Still, it's a scene you can get your teeth into.)

Third, the flip side: the weirdly toothless portrayal of Freeman Linder's weirdly Orientalist household. As Drew Cook points out, The Witness is a double period piece: 1930s California as depicted by 1980s Boston tech guys. The result is Phong the butler, described as "obviously Asian, but no definite nationality". Nor does he have a definite first name, or any definite motivation or personality other than sniffy resentment of his boss. The player is apparently expected to accept this and never inquire more deeply than Linder does.

At least Phong's dialogue is pointedly free of comedy Asian dialect. This is a step up from Deadline's panto Scots gardener and Black-unless-she-isn't housekeeper.

Actually, there's a bit more to note about Phong. The game never gives him another name, but we have an archived design document which refers to him as "Hui Phong". (Design doc is SPOILERS if you haven't yet solved the mystery!) Indeed the game accepts HUI as a synonym for PHONG.

But this raises a question. By the time I graduated college, "Phong" didn't come off as an ambiguously Asian name at all. It was immediately recognizable as the given name of Bùi Tường Phong, a Vietnamese scientist in the brand-new field of computer graphics. (I hope I copied the right diacriticals.) Anybody who studied CGI around 1990 would know what "Phong shading" was.

But would game developers in 1983 have known? Bùi Tường's paper was published in 1975, shortly before the man died of cancer. (Shockingly young, and very possibly as a consequence of US defoliants in the Vietnam war.) Had "Phong shading" made the rounds at MIT by 1983? Did the Infocom crew select "Phong" as a generically Eastern name, or was it intended to read as Vietnamese -- or a reference to a specific person -- to the knowledgeable eye?

I honestly have no idea. But I wanted to add that context to the discussion.

One more quirk of the month. The Witness is the first Visible Zorker game I've tackled with no source code for a released version.

We have source code, yes. But it's not the source code for The Witness release 22, the version on the Masterpieces CD and the last official release of the game. The source code is for release 23 -- a dev version which was in progress (and apparently abandoned) in late 1984.

In fact, the source code doesn't even match release 23 perfectly. In a few places, the source code was clearly updated, but never recompiled. (There is no "r24".) The most obvious example is the game banner:

The WITNESS: An INTERLOGIC Mystery
Copyright (c) 1983 Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
WITNESS and INTERLOGIC are trademarks of Infocom, Inc.

The r23 and r22 game files have the same banner, as does every known earlier version. But if you look at the source file, it's quite different:

    <TELL
"The WITNESS
Infocom interactive fiction - a mystery story|
Copyright (c) 1983 by Infocom, Inc.  All rights reserved.|
">

Someone went through and rubbed out the "INTERLOGIC" trademark, which Infocom was discarding around 1984. They also commented out the TANDY bit check. Neither of these changes are visible in the playable r23 game file, nor in the intermediate compile stages verbs.zap or verbs.xzap.

This left me with a problem. I always prefer to use the Masterpieces release of each Infocom game for the Visible Zorker. That's the version which almost everybody sees these days, whether on an archive site, GOG, or a dusty CD off Ebay. But I had no r22 source to work from.

(I tried comparing r23 to r22 but the differences were too great to paper over. Mostly having to do with rearranged code, rather than changes to game behavior. Still: too much to account for.)

My only option was the r23 game file. Again, this is an in-development version and may have bugs. Okay, sure, every Infocom release has bugs. But this version may have bugs that would have been caught during QA! Keep an eye out.

Then there's the differences between the archived r23 source and the r23 game file. Fortunately, these were minor. The banner trademark and a couple of tweaked messages seem to be most of it. I have done my best to revert the source code to the exact state it was in when the r23 game file was generated. I may have missed a spot; I apologize if so.

Upcoming work:

Visible Planetfall will be the next public release on October 1st. Enjoy your visit to Resida, land of foonetik speleeng.

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

And finally, no September 1st IF post would be complete without a link to the Interactive Fiction Competition! It's not quite open, but it will pop sometime on Tuesday. Scores of newly-hatched IF games for you to play and (I hope) rate. Enjoy.

EDIT-ADD: In fact, 71 new games, available now.

Key & Compass Blog: New walkthroughs for August 2026

2026-08-31T18:31:07+00:00

On Monday, August 31, 2026, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of interactive fiction at Patreon and Ko-fi.

Kinophobia (2025) by Bruno Dias

In this spooky game, you play as an exorcist hired to spiritually cleanse the abandoned and haunted Armature Studios of its twenty-four ghosts who each died in a different year. To banish them, learn their names, causes of death, and years of death. Ari, your research assistant, is just a text away.

This game was an entry in Ectocomp 2025’s Le Grand Guignol (English) division, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Grand Island Bank Robbery (2026) by Mathbrush

It’s Valentine’s Day, 1925, in Grand Island, Washington. In this triptych story of crime, justice, and love, you play as Cooper “Coop” Johnson, a would-be ne’er-do-well. To become the newest member in Boss Hogg’s gang, find and collect all the treasures hiding in the Grand Island Bank. Can you do it? Should you? What would the boss say?

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

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Dead Man’s Chest (2026) by Garry Francis

In this game, you play as a nerd who, while doomscrolling old newspapers in the library, read that the treasure chest of the notorious pirate, Captain Cutter, is hidden somewhere in or near his now-abandoned Scottish mansion. This is your chance to be the treasure hunter you always wanted to be! You plan to break in and find that dead man’s chest for yourself.

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

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Acid Whiplash, or, Rybread Celsius Can’t Find a Dictionary (1998) by Ryan Stevens (as “Rybread Celsius”) and Cody Sandifer

In this surreal extravaganza, you seek fulfilment by learning more about Rybread Celsius, that fabled interactive fiction author who is both regaled as a master wordsmith and reviled as a gibbering gargoyle. Find a dictionary and enjoy mad textdumps! Hic! Haec! Hoc! Who loves ya, baby?

This game was an entry in IF Comp 1998 where it took 23rd place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

The City (1998) by Sam Barlow

In this odd small game, you play as a man in a featureless room with a video recorder, a tape, and a control. The sole exit leads to a dead end where a suited man is standing. Play the tape, ask the man your questions, and learn what you can about the city.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 1998 where it took 13th place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

The End Means Escape (2000) by Steve Kodat (as “D.O.”)

In this short but exceedingly surreal game, you start in a room where everything moves and talks on their own. Later on in this adventure, you’ll escape from a dictionary, meet people who don’t move or talk at all, and orbit a sun.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2000 where it took 21st place. At the 2000 XYZZY Awards, it was a finalist in the Best Puzzles category.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Nerves of Silicon (2026) by Dissolved (aka DissoluteSolute)

In this short sci-fi game, you play as Sam Nave-Trench. You drew the short straw, so you’re the first to wake from suspension. Your coldsuit is here to protect you from Antarctica’s chill. You find a memory of you, Acacia, and Janet at your wedding. And there’s the mindstrate in which your essence recently resided within its spooky silicon nerves. But you have a job to do. You may well have forever, but let’s not waste it.

This game was a participant in Shufflecomp 2025, where it placed 12th overall, and 13th place in the Use of Songs.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

A Very Strong Gland (2024) by Arthur DiBianca

In this sci-fi puzzlefest that uses limited commands, you are abducted by aliens to their vessel so they can test your intelligence gland. During the testing, the vessel crashes. Gain their trust and help them fix their own vessel, proving you have a very strong gland indeed!

This work was an entry in IF Comp 2024 where it took 19th place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Renga in Blue: Twin Kingdom Valley (1983)

2026-08-30T22:23:48+00:00

It’s not your world. You arrive there and you’re a person, a creature, just like all the others. You see something shiny and think maybe you could go get it, so off you wander. You’re not controlling the game – you’re part of it.

— Trevor Hall, interviewed in 2006

With this, we reach one of the most well-remembered games of 1983.

Your Computer, December 1983 issue.

It is often mentioned in the same context as The Hobbit, and this includes advertising from the time (“EAT YOUR HEART OUT BILBO!”) The setting is a “mythical place where two kings reside” who “hate each other”; you are an “adventurous, bounty hunting, greedy human” and your goal is to “finish the game with as much wealth as possible”. This is a standard treasure hunt, in other words, but it has illustrations for all the rooms, and it has dynamic NPCs (the latter point being why it gets compared to The Hobbit).

The author, Trevor Hall, has an unfortunate namespace clash with a more famous musician, but fortunately he’s done multiple interviews (1, 2, 3, 4) so I’m able to give some history.

P. M. Skinner is Pete Skinner, a friend of Trevor’s.

Trevor Hall studied Computer Science in Manchester, getting a taste of arcade games at the student union and obtaining his first computer, the text-only Acorn Atom. By 1982 he started publishing with Bug-Byte.

I think I did what many others wanting to publish did (and presumably still do):
1: Find a game publisher who already exists, and has some titles available, and adverts in mags etc.
2: Send the game for evaluation.
I think Bug-Byte was the first I tried, and they offered a good royalty rate. I don’t know where the company got its start up cash, but there were 3 main players who handled (or mishandled) all that. They had some advantages, like a good artist, a very good deal on rent in a new unoccupied building, their own tape duplication machines. They built a good name from the Spectrum Manic miner series, BBC micro stuff from me and others, and some C64, but lost the Manic Miner programmer to another company. That was probably a bad turning point for them.

In this case he did not simply send games to be independently evaluated (like Simon Wadsworth where his second game Time Warden fell down a black hole and he switched to making games for Artic): he had demo games impressive enough to be a regular contract worker for Bug-Byte. The company has featured here enough times (including the Manic Miner kerfuffle) I won’t recap their history other than to say they were one of the most prominent software houses soliciting games from anyone.

Bug-Byte was getting 20 or 30 games submitted some days and most of them were useless and went straight in the bin but some were excellent.

— Chris Cannon, who selected games for publishing at Bug-Byte, via Acorn: A World in Pixels

Hall has four games credited for 1982, and two more for 1983 prior to Twin Kingdom Valley, all for BBC Micro: City Defence, Galaxy Wars, Space Invaders, Dogfight, Sea Lord, and Oblivion. Space Invaders is worth a screen as Trevor credits working on the game as how he learned assembly language.

The single-pixel bullets mean the barriers last a bit longer than regular Space Invaders.

Hall’s first experiences with adventure games were his friends playing Crowther/Woods which appeared on “big computers” at the university:

I never got very far in Adventure. There was some version of some system at the university, which we found fun to play, but, time on those systems was limited, and we had to study sometimes.

He remembers one of his friends commenting on the characters “standing still” with the same puzzle to solve whenever a character is encountered. He saw some home computer games with the same issue:

The troll was always standing by the bridge. It made no sense! So I thought, why not make every creature in the game, including oneself, pretty much the same. Make everyone able to walk around, pick things up and fight. Let them interact.

In other words, he wanted a game where you are not the protagonist of a story, but rather part of a world.

He and some friends drew maps (using “little green pieces of paper he’d swiped from the computer science lab”) and worked out how connections to other places could be described in a “few bytes”. He describes the parser as “easy” (“tokenize the text, and recognize a verb and an object”) but had more trouble with the graphics. He wanted 3D but found it to be too slow, so he used scaled pictures instead with flood fill. The general idea was to have scenes not thought of as being single pictures (like Sierra) but compositions of objects; he modified the code so “program wouldn’t attempt to draw underneath something that was already there.”

Road outside wooden cabin at the start of the game. The game states outright “the picture is your view north”.

The trees from the scene above are both the same object image, drawn at different scaling levels. Sierra’s Time Zone and Melbourne House’s The Hobbit would have both trees drawn as individual graphics. Rather than a “picture book” model, Hall aimed to make an “environment” akin to modern 3D worlds. Note that Hall’s “priority drawing” system glitches a little bit with one of the flowers; it gets drawn in whole but then some of the tree lands on top, while most of the tree is drawn “behind” the flower even though it appears on the screen after the flower. When Hall talks about Pete Skinner drawing “many of the objects” he really means objects, not entire scenes.

His world-representation paradigm (thinking of the world as “3D space” even though it isn’t) applies not just to graphics but to text. Graphics are reused where you see things from farther away or closer, but the rooms are designed such that things seen from afar can be included in the textual description. Despite the BBC Micro being relatively plentiful on space this sort of maneuver was needed in order to include all 175 rooms he was aiming for.

Hall talks more about his NPC design in his interviews but let’s come back to that when we have some more context, and get into the game itself. From the start there is again the eternal question: which version? The original is BBC Micro; there’s also the Electron, Spectrum, and C64, and I know at least the C64 has more rooms than the BBC Micro version does (so revisions happened, like The Hobbit). Still, comparing all the graphics, the BBC Micro version looks the most “intended”; the graphics appear designed for a screen with a particular color scheme and resolution.

C64 version. Notice how the flowers look a little mangled. There’s an animated hopping bunny, though!

The game helpfully gives six options for how text and graphics work:

1 Draw picture if room unvisited, give long description
2 Draw picture if room unvisited, give short description
3 Draw picture always, give long description
4 Draw picture always, give short description
5 Don’t draw picture, give long description
6 Don’t draw picture, give short description

For the moment I’ve set things to always show pictures and long descriptions, but let me show long vs. short in the starting rooms.

You are on a road.
North you can see a wooden cabin.
North east is a forest path.
East you can see a road.
West you can see a road.
South is a wooden fence through which you can see forest.

?N

You are inside a wooden cabin
South you can see a road.
There is an empty stone jug here.
There is a brass key here.
There is an unlit oil lamp here.

The “short” version cuts out all the direction descriptions: just “You are on a road” and “You are inside a wooden cabin” without mentioning what is east/north/etc.

The cabin is where the treasures go.

The map is not only large but immediately open, so I’ll save giving the lay of the land next time, but one quick visit to another place:

The gorilla is an enemy you can fight that can also follow and randomly thwap you with the club it is holding. The enemies can pick up weapons that happen to by lying around; again, this feels strongly like MUD behavior. An elf was nearby and later the gorilla had nothing and the elf had the club; it appears the elf simply stole the club.

A gorilla is here with nothing.
An elf is here with the following
A wooden club

Allegedly the puzzles aren’t elaborate (at least compared to The Hobbit) so this really does give a different feel than a standard adventure game. I’ll report back in next time if that holds up.

Renga in Blue: The Temple: Dangerous to Move In the Dark

2026-08-27T02:12:17+00:00

(Continued from my previous post about what is likely the first adventure game written in Sweden on a home computer.)

I may not have squeezed out every single piece of working game from The Temple, but I’ve squeezed out most of it. Once past the initial issue, the game’s crashes don’t come back until later, but they come back spectacularly.

The only Janic bag I’ve found multiple pictures of, from Tradera. They were the company that later picked up Commodore products and ended up sending their PET computers to Datatronic when they went bankrupt.

Exterior of Janken Minidata, where the PET computers eventually ended up. Source.

I switched to just using v1 (although anyone adventurous enough to edit the game might want to look at the early version of the game as well). After fixing the “burn” issue (where I changed “go” into “goto”) and I made sure to use directions with abbreviations (“n” instead of “go north”) I was off and running again. It took a while before another hard crash. I still am not clear if this was “left unfinished” or just undone by the bugs (caused by bad transfer issues, perhaps?).

To recap the action, we start in a cell with a bed that has a pillow and matches, and nothing else useful. If you hang out long enough in the toilet room someone arrives to deposit an item.

Me messing around with random directions in case leaving room directions out is one of the game’s issues.

Regarding the “kn” typo above, I assume the intent is the word “in”. In PETSCII the binary for “k” is 01001011 and the binary for “i” is 01001001, exactly one bit difference; of course it could be a perfectly ordinary human-made typo, but this sort of thing does make me suspicious. (See “Scgtt Adams” from The Golden Voyage, clearly a one-bit error.) The game also uses KNVENTORY rather than INVENTORY.

Going back to the main cell, there’s a bowl with food, and inside the food is a saw-blade. It looks like we have a friend on the inside, on our mission, which is to (????). (Really, I still don’t know. There’s dragons later and a diamond but the game just being a treasure raid doesn’t mesh with something else you’ll see later. Maybe it’s a mixed quest where we have multiple goals.)

You can then cut the door with the saw (“That was a hard work”) and get farther inside.

The first of three maps.

There’s a “gray corridor” with a locked door we can take care of in a moment; going upstairs to the kitchen, you can find a knife in a cupboard (which will get used much later).

There’s also a warning about “watchers” in the room to the east which you fortunately don’t need to heed too closely.

They’ll only wake up if you PRESS BUTTON which sets off an alarm.

The keys can be used to both the window and the downstairs door. It’s better to unlock the window first because once you unlock the downstairs door (another cell) you’ll lose the keys going in.

You’ll lose the keys even if you drop them off elsewhere first and aren’t holding them, so this counts as a bug, but maybe it’s a bug in a “plot continuity” sense; you need the wire to get out of prison, and there’s more keys outside the prison, so this is a clean way to avoid referring to two sets of keys. Just: it’s a softlock if you lose them too early.

So far, the items: matches, pillows, wire, knife, explosives. Heading outside the window, there’s a fire-escape going up, another locked door, and an exit to the west. There’s another locked door (which you need those keys for!) although the door is jammed from the other side so you can’t go through anyway.

To the west in the prison yard there’s a parked car, but you can’t do anything with it yet, so it’s time to go up the fire-escape and use the wire as a rope.

Can you climb a wire in real life? It happened in Ferret as well.

This is not an intensely guarded prison, but I’m guessing our Man on the Inside might have helped with that.

The landing spot has some driftwood and a boat at a sea. If you try to swim in the sea, you die; if you try to go via boat, you die.

It is faintly possible this is not just intended as a death-trap; while this is a “biome journey” of sorts like Wizard and the Princess nothing is one-way. In fact, it seems to be useful to maybe go back into the prison.

The reason you can’t unlock and go through the front door of the prison is the stone as seen above. I would think the explosives would take care of that problem but I never got them to work. If you do this, when you get the car-keys later (which you’ll see shortly) I think you can possibly drive the entire car out and do things with it.

Moving on from the unexploded rock, heading north there’s a ferry. Get on and you can find a radio, the car-keys (told you) a book, and a button. Pressing the button causes the ferry to move to a new destination. You can re-press the button to go back.

Voilà, the third map:

Straight off the bat you can find a pistol (if you try to KILL anything before finding the pistol the game says you need one). Then there’s a bit of branching, including:

▸ a desert with an note, a torch, and a cactus; the note says the nose can be very useful.

▸ relatedly, on a “narrow ledge” you can find a pamphlet mentioning you can TURN the nose in all directions

▸ a “high wall” with some scratchings; reading them reveals the word DIRAM, although I tried to use it and crashed the game

▸ a “liane” in a swamp which baffled me for a while; I realized after a bug I’ll show off later that it was referring to liana vines but for a while I thought it was a person and tried to talk to them

▸ with the liane you can tie it to a pillar at a collapsed bridge and retrieve some ratsbane

The use of the word reminds me of Citadel Adventure using the word “embrassures”. Sure, it’s technically a word in English (spelled wrong) but it’s extremely rare compared to all the other English words; this is the sort of move someone who learned English as a second or third language would make. I would guess the Swedish equivalent (lian) is more common? Mooware on Bluesky pointed out that liane is vine in German (spelled that way) so maybe Stefan Modin was just mixing languages generally.

Now, for that bug that led me to realize it was a vine in the first place: if you go north from where you find the pamphlet, you’ll end up in a dark place.

I was able to goto 7 and keep the game going, but without light. I tried “go hole” and usually died…

…but one time I successfully made it, coming across a treasure with dragons and a chest.

The buggy room has a letter you can read and find the word LOUZI; trying SAY LOUZI teleports you to a new area.

The new area includes a pit with rattlesnakes and a shovel. I have tried digging many places with the shovel although I admit I have not tried digging all the places with the shovel (that is, taking it all the way back to the prison yard etc.) I feel like I’ve hit the “broken threshold” enough that I can’t distinguish between a puzzle and a bug, so this seems like a good spot to close things up for now. If I ever get confirmation the game is fixed to the point of being completable (maybe not all the bugs) I’ll take another swing.

For now, we’re headed back to England, as coming up: Twin Kingdom Valley.

The Sharpee Blog: Actors are Actors

2026-08-25T15:54:06+00:00

Admittedly, both Sharpee and Chord are still very young and cranky. I continually find seams in both through working with Chord. In my latest set of activities, I started to port my old Textfyre game, Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter, to Chord. I'd talked to Mike Gentry earlier in the year about making a new version with specific changes and he loved all of it. Sadly, he's moved on from IF and was not interested in helping. I'll eventually have a separate post about these changes, but I'll summarize by saying I'm opening the world up and removing the rails (those were intentional for the target audience) and changing the main character in a very important and present-day meaningful way. I am using Claude to port the code, but all content changes are mine, including puzzles/logic/text.

A problem surfaced from complaints I had about event capturing in actor/npc blocks in Chord. There was a lot of what I call inelegant phrasing to the syntax. That led to digging into the differences between the player character and NPCs in Sharpee and Chord and this seam was telling me that NPCs needed to be dissolved into the platform and Actor was a singular architecture concept.

This is the offending language that started everything...

after entering it, while the stall is blocked
  phrase keeper-yells
  move the player to an adjacent room, randomly
end after

I was bothered that a) the target actor is not identified here, and b) 'it' is ceremonial and not really necessary. Pushing on those two seams followed this progression:

create the sword
  on taking it
    refuse sword-not-for-you
  end on

create the sword
  on the player taking
    refuse sword-not-for-you
  end on

In the below example, we explicitly say who the event capture is targeting...in this case the Actor currently designated as the player.

create the Grocery Stall
  a room
  states: open, blocked

  after the player entering, while the Grocery Stall is blocked
    phrase keeper-yells
    move the player to a random adjacent room
  end after

The only exception is an actors own block:

create Jack
  a person
  playable
  starts in the Northwest Junction

  on going while the wandering mercenaries is aggressive
    refuse merc-held
  end on

In this case, there is only one target actor so explicitly naming the actor would be redundant.

And for 'it' and 'its', they survive in one place: Trait definitions...

define trait kick-escape
  on the player kicking
    refuse when it is oblivious: merc-dont-provoke
    phrase merc-break-free-kick when it is aggressive
    change it to approaching
    reset its lunge
    start its recovery
  end on
end trait

This also led to the player being a role that can be changed.

Before...

create the player
  starts in the Northwest Junction
  kick-yourself
  wears the old gray cloak
  wears the woolen cap
  wears the boots
  carries the cloth satchel

  Jack Toresal, who has been a boy in this market for as long as anyone here has
  bothered to look.

  on going while the wandering mercenaries is aggressive
    refuse merc-held
  end on

  after going while hunted
    restart waiting
  end after

And now that will be...

create Jack
  a person
  playable
  starts in the Northwest Junction

  Jack Toresal, who has been a boy in this market for as long as anyone here has
  bothered to look.

  on going while the wandering mercenaries is aggressive
    refuse merc-held
  end on

With the new block...

before the game starts
  change the player to Jack
end before

Which allows us to change the player character when we choose...

create Viola
  a person
  playable
  starts in the Chapel

  Viola.

create the Chapel
  a room

  A chapel.

  after Jack examining the seal
    phrase cut-to-viola
    change the player to Viola
  end after

And now all actors in chord are the same and one is the player character at any designed time. All of their actions thread through the platform exactly as the player character does today. (and no, this was not the case for the current npc-plugin architecture).

This is a very big change to Sharpee and Chord, so needs full regressions with both and the platform and chord sample stories.

Choice of Games LLC: Author Interview: Brennan Gilpatrick, “God of Chaos”

2026-08-24T18:49:58+00:00

Defy nature’s laws and avenge your slain pantheon! Humanity once feared and hated you, but now, awakened from a thousand-year slumber, you are their only hope. Will you liberate them from the tyrants who now rule over them, or let the world burn? God of Chaos is a 325,000-word interactive dark fantasy novel by Brennan Gilpatrick. It releases next Thursday, September 3rd, and you can wishlist it on Steam today! We sat down with Brennan to discuss the game.

You’re coming to Choice of Games with a lot of videogame-writing experience, most notably for the first-person shooter Payday 2. What was it like writing for an established franchise? How did you approach writing within the boundaries of an already-created property?

Payday 2 will always have a special place in my heart. My friends and I played that game to stay connected during the pandemic, so joining that narrative team not long after was incredibly exciting. It was also a big responsibility. The Payday franchise has a devoted and vocal fanbase; they’ll let you know if you get something wrong.

When writing for an established franchise, my first priority is to understand the characters. I study their personalities, histories, relationships, et cetera. Through this, I receive crucial insights about the storyworld. Personalities show me the story’s tone. Histories reveal the rules and mechanics of the setting. Relationships teach me what behaviors are “believable”. Characters are the first aspect of a story that audiences connect with, and Payday 2’s ensemble cast is particularly beloved. Once I felt I could write those characters, everything else came together.

In God of Chaos, you’ve created the potential for a massively powerful PC, which had to be a lot of fun! How—if at all!—did you constrain the PC’s power? And conversely, what’s your favorite wacky thing that the PC does with their power?

Writing the PC in God of Chaos was a blast! Whenever I read about different mythologies, the trickster deities always seem to have the most fun. I really wanted to capture that free-spirited mayhem here.

However, I knew the PC’s power couldn’t go totally unchecked. The stakes would feel nonexistent. My solution was not to nerf the PC, but to raise the danger of the world around them. Early in the story, an Alchemist faction develops an arcane crystal that can, among other things, kill a deity. When they conquer the land, the Alchemists integrate this crystal into their weapons, their machines, everything. The one thing that can harm the PC becomes woven into the very fabric of civilization. Boom! Stakes galore.

My favorite flex of the PC’s power happens near the middle of the story. During a ballroom fight scene, the player receives the opportunity to: A) present themself as a massive cosmic entity, B) take command of the gruesome undead soldiers present, or C) hypnotize the Alchemists into a group dance Beetlejuice-style. Each of these scenarios was so much fun to write, and I think this moment really captures the PC’s versatility. You can be epic, horrifying, and downright absurd; all are equally valid to the character.

There’s some fascinating worldbuilding in God of Chaos: you’ve got Fey creatures and divine magic on the one hand, and railroads and flying ships on the other. What’s the dynamic between magic and technology in this world?

The dynamic is combative to say the least. In the beginning of the story, Vildmara is a land of gods, monsters, and everything in between. The human race grows desperate for some sense of control, and they use technology to achieve it. In classic human fashion, they overstep. Vildmara becomes the Iron Shelter, an empire of machines and industry.

Technology in this world seeks to eradicate magic, and vice versa. As the last living god, the PC has a chance to decide how things play out. They can favor chaotic magic above all else, or embrace technology and the control it represents. Or, they can strive for balance. Or ignore the struggle entirely and just wing it. It’s up to them!

In addition to your extensive game-writing career, you’re also a novelist! Your debut novel Battery Life is set in a sci-fi dystopia–a very different world from the one in God of Chaos. Where did the seed of that story come from?

It’s so funny you bring this up! I was recently comparing Battery Life to God of Chaos, and while the settings are very different, I noticed some thematic overlap. Both stories concern the painful transformation of a world. In Battery Life, it’s our Earth plunging into a neon-soaked dystopia. In God of Chaos, it’s a fantasy world forced into an industrial revolution. I must have dramatic, world-shifting cataclysms on the mind. Wonder what that’s about!

I wrote Battery Life from a story that I outlined with my best friend since high school. It’s an amalgamation of all our favorite sci-fi concepts from books, movies and video games. It’s also a meditation on the unreliability of mentor figures; something I was working through while writing. The story involves a young woman whose remote space station crashes back to war-torn Earth, landing her in the path of a charismatic and untrustworthy scavenger. It’s a love letter to post-apocalyptic roadtrips. If people like God of Chaos, they should check it out!

What are you working on next?

Great question! I’m currently doing narrative design for an RPG project in its early stages. I can’t say too much about that yet, but the team is very talented, and I think we’ll have something cool to share soon!

Regarding personal projects: I have a few ideas for a new interactive fiction game, and I’m about to DM again for the first time in ages. I also have an outline for a dark romance horror novel, inspired by my strange late-night drives while living in LA. I’m very excited about all of these concepts; I just need to decide what to tackle next. Stay tuned!

Renga in Blue: The Temple (1982)

2026-08-23T21:30:09+00:00

The last time this blog visited Sweden was with Stuga a full 15 years ago; one day, I will go back to that game and toss in the history of Swedish mainframes and academic computing alongside.

A 1963 photo of the BESK, via Stelios Kessanidis on Facebook. The BEST (1950) and follow-up BASK (1953) were the earliest Swedish computers.

However, we’ve got a complicated story with enough threads as-is. The threads will eventually unite in the late 70s. Let’s start in Italy–

I graduated in 1953, precisely the year the first transistor was presented by my old professor under a showcase in a display case. Those were truly different times, there was everything to do, everything to invent, everything to build.

— Massimo Rinaldi, via a 1992 interview with M&P Computer

One way to arrive at the mini-computer, the computer small enough for a regular business, was to start with the design of giant mainframes and work down; that’s how Data General worked, as told in my story on Thissala. Another way was to start with simpler machines and work up. This was the method adopted by Massimo Rinaldi.

After his graduation in 1953 he spent a brief time with the company Hasler (design, they were a competitor to IBM) followed by some work at Raytheon (radar and telemetry). He broke out on his own in 1959 and founded Transimatic Italiana, intending to make his own calculating devices. He had great success in ’62-’63 selling what he dubbed the ED 114 straight out of his garage. It went for 3,135,000 Lira in 1962 (about $53,000 in modern USD) and had “addition, subtraction, multiplication and statistical functions, but not division”. Despite his success, when he made his next product (first dubbed the elma 3000 with his garage version, later named the IME 84) he had trouble getting it off the ground as he needed partnership with a real company with a real factory. (It was more of a mass-production product, rather than one expensive enough where he could custom-make one for each customer.) It took him a year (and multiple brush-offs with Olivetti) but he finally found one with Edison S.p.A., selling his company and becoming head of research and development.

The IME 84 came out in 1964, and while it was not the first desktop digital calculator (see my story on the British company Sumlock), it was one of first fully transistorized ones, or you could say “modern” ones. (The “one of the” phrase is because the Friden Model 130 and Sharp CS-10A both came out in 1964. Rinaldi did have patents and successfully defended his US patent against Sharp.)

Source.

It still had a foot in the past; for example, the multiplication and division signs had different equal buttons, and addition was still counter-based rather than binary-based; this was improved on two years later with the 86S model.

By the end of the 60s he had founded a new company with the Mael line, and while he called it a “calculator” in an interview, the Mael 4000 is sometimes cited as being a computer. It’s not really a “desktop computer” as much as a “desk that is a computer”, but it does do the majority of operations one might expect to buy a Data General Nova for, and it is technically programmable (although designed to stay only with accounting operations). It came with 2K of memory (expandable).

Via technikum29. Source. The electronics are in the cabinet to the right.

Mael’s products eventually diverged into regular computers, although nothing that was a serious “hit” for the general public; their products after tended to lean more to calculation devices for business, rather than trying to surf the hyperwave of personal computing.

Mael is the first company involved in this complex web; next up comes Diehl, from Germany.

Diehl was founded in 1902 and did precision metal forging (like door handles); they started making mechanical calculators in the 1950s (see example video above) and by the 1960s made their own electronic transition. They landed a little later than the IME 84 (by two years) with the Combitron. The electronics were designed by an American, Stanley Frankel, formerly a physicist with the Manhattan Project.

A portion of the Combitron’s layout, via Facebook.

Similar to Mael, they entered the computer market from the bottom-up, making their computation devices elaborate enough to do the same accounting you could do on a computer (not play Spacewar, alas). Also similar to Mael, they finally had what people would recognize as “proper” computers by the late 70s, with almost no effect on the market.

Source. These sold from 1977 to 1981.

Since we’re not juggling enough balls yet, let’s go back to the 50s yet again, this time in Sweden. Handic Bolagen was founded in 1952 (president: Gunner Wennerström, vice-president: Stig Wennerström). They focused on audio equipment like radios and broadcast receivers, mostly produced with a distinctive orange color, although they also had a line of sports equipment (golf, skiing, boating, the “high end” sports).

Ad from the Jan. 1975 issue of the Swedish magazine Radio & Television.

In 1977 they were sold to the investment company Svenska AB Navigator. I’ve seen a source say this means they were now state-owned but it’s a little messier than that. Svenska AB Navigator was formed in 1969 as a sort of “collector of companies” with the main purchasers being affiliated with state enterprises and a pension fund. As of January 1976 28% was with state enterprise, a third was with the pension fund, a small portion was cooperatives, and the rest (28%) was holdings by private owners of the original companies; they had non-voting shares after selling out to Navigator. Essentially this was a back-door method of state company ownership without a vote from Parliament.

Two more threads to follow! The first is Datatronic. They were founded in 1968 by Torsten Frey and Hans Sundén and started selling mini-computers (of the “calculator” bent) to businesses in 1970, specifically the Mael line. They picked up the Diehl line in 1975; based on the timespan, this means they were selling the Mael 4000 (the combination desk-calculator) before switching to Diehl and then being bought by them outright. By 1977 Diehl wanted to drop them, although I’ll return to that point in a moment.

Our final thread is still in Sweden and the company Janic, founded by Jan Bergekrans. In the earlier years of the company they did handbag sales. The founder one day had read about Commodore and their calculators, and decided he wanted to diversify. (It’d be an absurd leap if he decided to sell the desk-computers straight off the bat, but these were devices where “you can fit it in your purse” was part of the sales pitch.) He had great success along with Commodore, and he started to add the Commodore PET to his sales in 1977.

Radio & Television, December 1977. The same issue has ads (from other companies) for the IMSAI 8000 and the Sol-20.

So just to recap, before reaching the apocalypse of 1977/1978 that’s about to happen:

Mael: Italian calculator manufacturer, eventually getting into business computers
Diehl: German calculator manufacturer, eventually getting into business computers
Handic: Swedish consumer electronics, bought by a “state corporation” in 1977
Datatronic: started to sell (not manufacture) calculators, initially Mael before switching to Diehl and becoming wholly owned
Janic: Swedish handbag manufacturer which got into calculators through Commodore and eventually the Commodore PET

All of these companies (except Handic) had major exposure to the calculator market, and while it was already dropping, in 1977 the market utterly fell off the map. Calculators that were going for $300 back in 1971 could now sell for $20 or less; price drops from warring companies like Sharp and Texas Instruments were so frequent that retailers were skittish about owning too much stock.

A retailers’ greatest problem occurs when Texas Instruments or some other manufacturer cuts prices without warning, leaving the retailer stuck with expensive inventories. Most manufacturers offer 30‐day price protection. This is little consolation however, for a store carrying a two‐month or three‐month inventory.

There was an entire ecosystem built around having slow, personal service around desk-sized calculators/computers; this was getting undermined by not only cheap calculators but by the ability of businesses to now buy personal computers. It was possible to transition and survive (Mael, for instance, still kept going strong with products like point-of-service machines) but certainly something in these companies needed to change.

Diehl in particular needed to get out of Sweden. Outside investor/consultant Mats Gabrielsson (and two employees of the company) bought the struggling company for a single Swedish krona, switching it over from Diehl back to Datatronic in name early in 1978.

Despite Janic hooking up with Commodore who went on to later success, the 1977/1978 period gave them too much exposure to the calculator crash, and Jans made a plan to declare bankruptcy. He contacted Mats Gabrielsson (from being a consultant through the 70s, he knew everyone in the industry) and asked about buying the Commodore agency, selling the 50 PET computers he had in stock as part of the deal. The contract was signed October 30 and the PETs were meant to be collected October 1. That was a Sunday, so the driver needed to be bribed with four Pong games.

Mats with a Commodore PET. Source.

One other company worth mentioning with the Janic bankruptcy story: Janken Minidata. They were the second computer store in Sweden, and the first to sell Commodore machines. The store was owned by Kenneth Palmestål and Jan Eliasson. Kenneth Palmestål had visited the Stockholm Technical Fair in 1977 and saw a Commodore PET 2001 (exhibited by Janic); he ordered one which arrived in December, and when he tried to start it up the computer broke because it had been too cold.

He still had a determination to sell computers, and with his friend Jan Eliasson (who had been working selling calculators, of course) he formed his computer store. He had heard about the approaching Janken bankruptcy and had made a deal with Jan Bergenkrans to buy the remaining machines, but when he rented a truck to pick them up he found out the machines had already been sold. He eventually got his supply from Datatronic instead.

Inside Janken Minidata. Source. They also sold the KIM-1, NASCOM, and TELMAC 1800 kit computers in ’79, and in later years sold the Apple II and the Luxor ABC (a Swedish computer I’ll discuss in some future post, as it does have adventure games, including the first in Swedish on a home computer).

Returning to Datatronic and their ambitions to sell Commodore, two important points: first, Commodore used Datatronic as an agent, and never entered the market directly until later in the 80s (this is in contrast to Denmark, where they did battle with the ZX Spectrum directly). Second, because of Datatronic’s past, their network contacts and sales expertise were hooked up with the business desk-calculator companies (Mael and then Diehl) so they didn’t have the reach needed for a mass-consumer product. While they (re-)launched with initial success (with computer stores like Janken Minidata), they needed to get the network of a consumer firm, which is why a few years later they purchased Handic.

This divested Handic from the “state” control into the hands of Datatronic. (One reason why it’s false to say Handic was nationalized is that this didn’t require an act of Parliament.) They created Handic Computers and Handic Software both as spinoffs although they weren’t strict about their naming conventions. The motivation for the purchase was straightforward access to the company’s distribution network, meaning nearly all foreign subsidiaries (Denmark, Germany, US) were sold; they only kept the one in Holland, as they were too tightly integrated, so they split operations of that subsidiary 50/50 with Commodore. They weren’t done building a network, also buying Ekman Import (a distributor of electronic equipment) in 1982. By this time the VIC-20 had come out in Sweden and was wildly successful.

This manual is marked as being from “handic electronic ab”.

Datatronic/Handic heavily encouraged the growth of computer clubs. For example, the Westerås VIC club came from the company Rastionell Programutveckling (RPU); they became close with Handic, with members of the club sometimes going on to work there (quoting my source, “in some cases with the delay of a few years, as the young people first wanted to finish high school”).

Westerås club members via Vic News 2-1 published by Handic.

Our author today, Stefan Modin, hails from Skultuna, fairly close to Västerås (spelled Westerås in older documents). He is presumably somewhere in the photograph above.

Skultuna in red, Västerås and the club to the southeast in blue. Eskilstuna is also near and will be important in a future post.

According to the research of regular commenter (and expert on Nordic computing history) Rob, Stefan Modin formed his own company name “SkultSoft” to riff off his hometown name, and wrote three adventures: The Temple, Spider Mountain, and The Mutant Spiders. The Mutant Spiders was picked up by Granda Software (we’ll get to them in a future post). For now, let’s just focus on The Temple, which you can download off a forum thread (look for “rpu-adventures.zip”).

Unfortunately the files we have are broken (according to Anders Carlsson who did the preservation, it’s “really tough to get somewhere”) but we’ve had this kind of situation here before. Poking through the source code, the game “feels” complete, just it’s getting some erratic bugs. Some may be linked with this being on a Swedish VIC-20. There were differences; the PET was (for instance) modified to include the letters Ä, Ö and Å. Since it’s relevant here, some VIC-20 specific details:

An expansion kit modified the [, £, and ] keys to print, respectively, the diacriticised characters Ä, Ö, and Å, but this required alterations to the Kernal decoding tables, the keycaps and the Char ROM; these changes obviously messed with programs using the brackets and £ symbols, and also, because the new keyboard mapping obliterated the graphic characters on the @ key, made it just about impossible to type in certain programs. Peter Karlsson says that the Swedish characters were added after the Z (in both lower and upper case modes) in the order defined by ISO 646-10, rather unhelpful because the ISO order is not alphabetical and so simple ASCII sorting didn’t work correctly. Some graphics symbols also got altered when shifting to upper/lowercase mode.

Based on the nature of the errors, I don’t think these modifications are what’s causing the problem, but given what happened with Citadel Adventure, I can’t discount anything at the moment.

Just as a reminder, on VIC-20 screens I have been squaring them up for readability. This would be twice as wide on a real VIC-20.

You start in a cell. There’s a toilet to the east, and you can also go on the bed. Note that it does not give a room description anywhere unless you “LOOK” first; it’s a little like playing an Infocom game on SUPERBRIEF in that way. It makes some sense on a VIC-20. The only previous games the author likely had access to (based on a VIC News article) are the ones from Scott Adams, and they don’t have that behavior (no “split screen”, but the screen clears and a room description displays when entering a place).

Trying to “go bed” in the “pre” version immediately results in a crash.

?type mismatch error in 45200
ready.
list 45200

45200 if b$<>”row”andb$<>”boa”andb$<>”fer”andb$<>car”andb$<>”bed”andb$<>”sta”then45300

Notice there’s a quote mark (“) missing from car. Retyping the line exactly as is with the quote mark fixes the problem. (It’s already fixed in v1.)

Getting the pillow and matches and then using “go up” to leave results in another type mismatch (in the “pre” version).

Trying to do the same thing in the “v1” game results in an entirely new bug.

Just typing “u” works though.

There’s one other accessible room to the east of the cell.

This is on v1, pre crashes when you examine the toilet.

Trying to “go toilet” gets the response “AH! That was better!”

I proceeded to then try to do something with the pillow and matches with no luck.

The source code in question has:

if x<>19orx<>20thenprint”It wont ignite.”:go7

The issue is “go7” which should be “goto7”. Line 7 is the main parser. That wouldn’t be caused by character issues, would it?

With the number of bugs I’m not going to put myself on the hook for going any farther (I don’t even know what the goal is!) but it quite likely is the first adventure game from Sweden on a home computer so it’s worth some effort. It doesn’t feel like a systemic kind of issue (one POKE in memory and everything works) but more like Marooned with an abandoned work in progress. Still, we were eventually able to get through Marooned (thanks to exploradorrpg) so I’m not going to call this one impossible.

Zarf Updates: Rusty Lake and Hidden Town

2026-08-22T00:14:41+00:00

I am always happy to see another Rusty Lake game. It's not a high-velocity studio, but they're reliably high-quality and enjoy experimenting with their chosen form. (Co-op gameplay! Short film!)

I am also always happy to see another Rusty Lake knockoff. These are pretty common; creepy-haunted is not a complicated vibe. I've got a whole folder on these on my iPad. The Strange Case series; Hotel Orpheus; Forgotten Hill...

...My folder is labelled "Submechanical", because when I first played a Rusty Lake game -- or "Cube Escape", as it was titled back then -- I decided it was a Submachine knockoff. It turned out to be a speciation event instead; but of course that's hindsight. My point is that there's nothing wrong with being a knockoff, especially at three bucks on the mobile store.

Now I have played both the new Rusty Lake and a new batch of "if you enjoyed that, why not try...?"

Servant of the Lake
Hidden Town (series)

Servant of the Lake

by Rusty Lake -- game site

This year's Rusty Lake experiment is... realism? Okay, not really. But Servant of the Lake is distinctively not set in a hallucinatory dream-box. It's populated by living (if Gorey-esque) Vanderbooms, not corrupted souls. And you are almost certainly not dead.

Not to say that the Rusty Lake crew has never taken this tack. But Servant of the Lake has a more grounded storyline than most of the series. You arrive at the manor house as an extra hand, helping Aldous Vanderboom and his housemaid with a weekend family gathering. You will clean, cook, and serve dinner for three days. Then you will depart.

The game is framed around that schedule and your task list. Also the manor, which opens up as you progress through the weekend. It's a steadier basis than we usually get. And while there are plenty of puzzles mixed in, you're generally after some straightforward goal like "porridge". ...Until you're not, of course.

It's a pretty substantial game overall. The individual tasks are bite-sized, but there's a lot of them. Then there's a big list of side tasks which you can go back to if optional-bonus-stars are your thing. They're generally not my thing, but there's also a hint of extra storyline which I have not yet investigated. Hm.

I know it sounds weird to say that linear time and a mappable world are delightful innovations. For once, they are. Expectations, ya know? I'm sure that the next venture to Rusty Lake will be off-beat in a different direction.

By the by, I name-dropped "Vanderbooms" as if we all knew the Rusty Lake continuity by heart. In fact I cheerfully disregard it. There's a family tree in one of the games, isn't there? No clue how Servant fits in. It has a 19th-century vibe (you arrive in a horse-drawn carriage) but nothing is definitive. If there's some kind of over-arching plotline, the developers have never tried to sell me on remembering it.

EDIT-ADD: Whoops, forgot a document at the start that specifies the year 1839.

Hidden Town (series)

by Dark Dome -- game site

As I said, I occasionally browse the App Store for this kind of game. A couple of weeks ago one popped up with the title Hidden Memories. This was, in fact, a series of nine games that launched on iOS all at once. No, it's not somebody turning a vibe-coding crank. It's a studio called Dark Dome which has been releasing games on Android for years; then they got ported to iOS en masse. Also coming to Steam at the end of this month! I don't know if they'll break out, but the devs are giving it their best shot.

So what are the Hidden Town games like? You've already gotten the idea. You're locked in a room, or a few rooms. Something Creepy Happened. There's locked doors and drawers and cabinets. Each one requires either a key or a four-symbol combination. Combinations are hidden in modestly clever clues or environmental puzzles. Repeat until shocking conclusion.

I'm making it sound rather formulaic, but really that's just because I binged several years' worth of games in a week. I did that because they're pleasant and diverting and when you finish one you're happy to jump into another one.

The games are on the narrative side, like Servant. But Hidden Town doesn't have the hard edge of Rusty Lake. It doesn't go for body-fluid humor, and the characters are all cuties. (As opposed to the haunt-raddled wrecks who populate Rusty Lake.) Then again, the cute art only adds to the sting when somebody turns out to be evil or possessed or whatever's on this week. Hidden Town isn't a happy place.

One minor confusion: each game ends with an epilogue chapter labelled "Premium Content". On iOS, this is not a separate add-on; it's part of the base game, which you pay for up front. (I guess the iOS versions are all "premium content".) I assume it worked differently in Android-land. My guess is that Steam will work like iOS, but we'll see.

As with Rusty Lake, the games are lightly tied together. The epilogue chapters generally feature characters from other stories dropping in or getting caught up. As with Rusty Lake, this is flavor, not crucial. You can play the games in any order, and you definitely don't have to make a crazy-string wall to keep track of the connections.

The Dark Dome developers are based in Peru. The English localization (or writing, I don't know their process) is sometimes shaky. On the up side, they can mix a bit of authentic Inca mythology into the general cult-creepy setting. They don't go overboard it with; only a couple of of the games really delve into that aspect. But it's a nice change of pace from "witches".

An enjoyable binge, anyhow.

Renga in Blue: Citadel Adventure: Everybody Might Be a Member of the KGB

2026-08-21T21:24:53+00:00

(Continued from my previous post.)

First, a resolution of the technical mystery with the caps-swap, courtesy of Andrea Pachetti in the comments (who has a blog dedicated to the history of Italian videogames, I liked this post on patents).

By Louis Mittelman, Jr. Via the Smithsonian, Usage Conditions Apply.

As I theorized, this was ported from a Commodore PET; Andrea found it was specifically a PET 2001 (the first model) with a 32K memory extension added. (The main smoking gun was a “POKE 59468,14” command in the source code which causes the PET to switch to a mode which “looks better for typing, but has fewer graphics characters”.) In the VICE emulator you need to choose that particular machine, then pick “32k” for memory which will make the model list as “unknown”, then load this file Andrea prepared; this allows for the original BASIC source to run with normal capitalization. For the remaining screenshots I’ll be giving them on PET. (For the most part. The save states were having issues due to the strange character set handling so I played on C64 first before making a run on PET.)

Using the PET clue, Andrea went on to find a classified ad with an address, then cross-checked that to find the likely author: Hans-Dieter Ihlenfeldt. He was a German botanist born in 1932 (died in 2023); Wikispecies lists him as authoring 15 taxon names and he has an incomplete set of papers up at ResearchGate. This ends up explaining something in the game you’ll see later.

From a 2005 article about the decline of the quiver tree Aloe pillansii.

Past that: a resolution to the 4711 mystery, which I got from multiple people both on and off my comments (thanks to everyone)! There’s a particular German perfume with that name. It’s famous enough that searching “4711” alone gets a bunch of perfume hits; I admit I was in the mental space of assuming a self-contained puzzle (without outside references). Normally I’d still consider the puzzle unreasonable since we’re solving from the word PERFUME and getting a number too short to be a phone number (also, there’s lots of different numbers perfumes could be) but I am reliably informed that in Germany 4711 being associated with perfume is strong enough for meme-status.

“4711 – ECHT KÖLNISCH WASSER – KÖLN HBF” by Metro Centric, CC BY 2.0.

The same is true for the number 0815 in the text…

Commander Columbus speaking.
We’ve got a special mission for you. We just received informations about a theft of global dimensions. For the sake of all of us we won’t tell you exactly what it is, we know you’ll find it out yourself. Phone us again when mission completed. We want both objects.10.6.9.5
Hard luck, agent 0815.
Click.

…which is named after a machine gun which was “run of the mill”, “ordinary”, or “uninspired”, like our main character apparently is. All this, plus some translation-dictionary-accidents you’ll see later, lead me to think that this was originally written in German and translated to English, as opposed to being written in English by someone struggling; we just happen to have the English version only (this happened with Caves of Olympus, although I was eventually able to find the German version).

The 10.6.9.5 part I guessed had to refer to the codebook, giving the message poison-bomb-lead-microfilm. I have finished the game and I have no idea what this means.

Back to the action! After the 4711 info I was simply unable to move a car. Before I get to how that works, I should mention that while the car appears empty, it has stuff in it if you OPEN TRUNK and OPEN BONNET, neither which are mentioned anywhere. (I had to look up the word “bonnet”. I use “hood”.) Also, the items you get from both you then find by going inside the car.

The fuel, torchlight, rope, and battery are all useful. I guess the idea is that it’s an open-top sportscar, but this still doesn’t make sense to me why you’d be outside the car to drive it.

So to be clear, you drive the car by standing outside the car, and then you get things from the trunk and ~~hood~~ bonnet by going inside the car. Also you need the battery in because it will be dark when you drive otherwise (so when you take it out, and you’ll need to take it out, make sure you put it back in!)

To drive the car without crashing, rather than typing DRIVE CAR, type DRIVE (DIRECTION), like DRIVE WEST to start. Then you can DRIVE NORTH safely to an intersection, then DRIVE EAST to a field with an unfortunate name, or rather a normal name with an unfortunate namespace clash.

It’s rapeseed. Language translation issues aside, I could easily see a botany professor not even thinking about this reading awkwardly.

The tool shed contains a turn of phrase which suggests translation dictionary trouble (“The wind is blowing through the rifts”) as well as a shovel which is a complete red herring.

At least the initial result of using it suggests it might be a joke item. This is making fun of the Scott Adams style *treasure* hunt games.

The saw and bucket are absolutely required. Hopping back in the SPORTSCAR and driving east incidentally kills the player in a swampy bog; the only thing to do is drive west and north and arrive at a gate, the Citadel of the title.

The deadliness continues if you try to GO GATE, as it is electrified and will zap you dead. I found I could DRIVE GATE and get through just fine. I later found out from the walkthrough you can PUT RUG which will interpret the act as covering the gate (as opposed to just dropping, like PUT does everywhere else) and the rug serves as protection against electrocution. You can then climb over.

This represents what I think is a true alternate solution on the author’s part. Maybe the car entering was a bug? The car gets trapped on the other side of the yard.

I’m in a yard of an citadel. Main building ahead.

Obvious exits: door

Visible items: SPORTSCAR. TREE. BLOWPIPE. CHAPEL. WELL. SWIMMING POOL. GATE.

Yet: when the way to escape is made, it applies to both if you entered via climbing or car, and the car can’t escape until you’ve done it. As long as you are holding the fuelcan from the car you are able to operate the powersaw from the shed and CUT TREE:

This was the variant reality where I tested the rug-climbing entrance. The sportscar is parked to the south.

This crushes the gate and lets you escape south either by foot or car. Note though this is premature if you do it right away, as you need to climb the tree first before cutting it. Let’s get the map out and start explaining the layout:

There are five exits from the yard: chapel, well, tree, pool, door. The door is locked; you can nab a key easily from the chapel…

…but when trying UNLOCK DOOR from the yard the game informs you the key only works from the inside. Hence you need to climb the tree:

This gives you a route through the window and downstairs, where you can unlock the door from the inside and pass safely in and out of the building normally. After you’re done with this it is now safe to cut down the tree.

You might notice another passage linking out of the chapel, but I didn’t discover it until much later in my gameplay, so let’s visit the two other places connected to the yard, and then explore the building. You can find yourself a quick death by typing GO WELL.

I’m in a deep well.

Obvious exits: UP

Visible items: IRON GRATING

Yaahhh… Falling.

SCORE: 0%

You can PUT ROPE (from the car) in order to get in safely, but you’re then just stuck by the iron grating. There will be an item to take care of this later.

Then there’s the pool, which I had trouble even parsing with the dictionary-accident troubles:

I’m in a astonishingly deep pool. Down there something is glooming blue. Warm!

Obvious exits: UP

Visible items: WATER. CORK.

Just to recap, from the car we have a saw (used with a fuel can on a tree), a torchlamp (used with a battery), a rope (used on the well), and a bucket. The bucket, the only unused one, can scoop up some water here. Going inside the door and to the west, you can find a fireplace and put it out (PUT WATER)…

…then go downstairs to find a cellar with a MASSIVE WALL which is really the main obstacle of the game. (I don’t know what “concrete drops” are referring to.)

I’m in a musty cellar. Concrete drops on the floor.

Obvious exits: UP

Visible items: HACKSAW. MASSIVE WALL. BLUE GAS BOMB.

Other than the saw and the blue gas bomb added to our stash, and the TAPE RECORDER, WHISKEY BOTTLE, and POCKET LIGHTER next to the fireplace, you can find around the house you can find PLASTICINE in a refrigerator in the kitchen (tasty!)…

…a DIVING SUIT and RED GAS BOMB next to the upstairs window (entered via tree), and some RUSTY ARMOUR in the entrance hall (which we’ll get to last). Here I was incredibly stuck until I realized that while I entered the house’s attic through a window, if you go back through the window you land in an entirely different location.

I’m in a dusty attic. There’s a window with lots of webs in front of the pane.

Obvious exits: DOWN

Visible items: DIVING SUIT. RED GAS BOMB. WINDOW

Command? GO WINDOW

I’m in a shingle roof. There’s a window to the left.

Obvious exits: UP

Visible items: WINDOW

Going up higher there’s a roof with a RING.

GET RING responds with “it’s fixed” but I was able to PULL RING and yank out a whole trap-door leading to a study room.

I’m in a study room.

Obvious exits: UP

Visible items: CBM COMPUTER. MAGNET.

I had a lot of trouble working the computer, You can START COMPUTER and then PLAY RECORDER (that separate tape recorder, playing it somehow translates into playing it for the Commodore).

Keep in mind the “voice recognition”, that will come back later (in a baffling way). You can leave by heading back to the tower and going DOWN; if you peek back at the room description you’ll see the pool is below and you’ll land in safely. (The walkthrough puts in the dive suit before doing this; as far as I can tell you can do this entirely safely with no problem.)

Looking back at the obstacles left, there’s the wall still in the cellar, the grating in the well, and the item “glooming blue” in the pool. The hacksaw from the cellar takes care of the well issue.

This leads to a tunnel where you can find a TIME FUSE, followed by a chapel containing a COFFIN and some SKULLS. The coffin is one of the treasures you need, bizarrely enough! (It also is heavy, so you pretty much need to dump everything and work in the dark. Fortunately there’s no tripping around in this game, and once you have your pathing worked out having a light is optional.)

There’s an alternate route here where you PULL LAMP while in the chapel, exposing a hole you can go down, but then you’re trapped at the grating if you haven’t sawed it open yet. This is still good in a seeing-what’s-ahead sense.

The TIME FUSE and the PLASTICINE are sufficient to handle the wall: DROP PLASTICINE, START FUSE (ugh), PUT FUSE, get out of there. I need to test some more but I don’t think the fuse even needs to be with the plasticine.

Slipping in with a C64 screenshot indicating this can go terribly wrong. I think it’s based on real-time and I had the system going too fast?

The explosion happening properly, although there’s a secondary explosion as well later.

With that taken care of there’s a vault with a safe inside further. I admit I had to check the walkthrough for this part, as you’re supposed to put the magnet on it, then play the tape recorder. This will let you nab a microfilm inside. (I tried to match the poison-bomb message to it but I couldn’t see a connection.)

The microfilm is of course one of the items you need, but there’s one more, and this one’s very cryptic to get: the mysterious pool item. Take the blue gas bomb, dive suit, and rusty armour from the house. Hop in for a swim.

Now, follow this series of instructions: OPEN BLUE (the gas bomb), GET CORK, PUT BLUE. (I am copying direct from the walkthrough. No clue what’s going on.) This will somehow manifest a PLUTONIUM-NUGGET.

That’s everything, and it’d be nice to just go home, but there’s one last wrinkle.

This isn’t nearly as bad as the previous shenanigans except for a verb issue. It turns out the telephone is lurking back in the shed (where we found the useless shovel and the useless diamonds). Take it back here and FIX TELEPHONE (!!!) and then you can DIAL 4711 and finish the mission.

I feel no guilt whatsoever at exposing the game’s secrets. I still don’t know what’s going on with the book’s message or the nugget, or why we were supposed to figure the magnet would work on the safe combined with the tape recording, and why the tape recording had data in one circumstance but when used a second time gave a voice command.

(It is fun, though, that once again Valley of Cesis is echoed. At the end of that game it says “don’t tell anyone else how to do it”.)

Some of this might be German-English confusion but some of it definitely isn’t. The strange thing is, looking back, I do see mounds of creativity: there’s some clever attempts at difficulty and trying to make a complicated world be as compact as possible. A careful editor and a saved-game feature might turn this from unfair into … well, maybe not fair, but playable.

Coming up: A game from Sweden the same year as Citadel Adventure, written in English.

Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian: A Need for Speed

2026-08-21T15:36:02+00:00

Your humble author in 2009, with his last even vaguely cool car, a 2000 Volkswagen GTI. I sold the GTI and left the United States that same summer. I wouldn’t own another car for ten years.

Looking back from the vantage point of today, it’s hard for even me to believe, but it’s true all the same: I used to be a full-blown car guy. I bought my first car, a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle, for $800 in 1989, when I was sixteen years old. The bad thing about a Beetle was that you could generally expect no more than 60,000 miles or so out of the motor; the good thing was that you could rebuild the motor in your garage over a long weekend and make it good as new again. My inner Luddite, who seems to become stronger almost by the day in our current era of feverish tech-sector nonsense, still feels that something was lost when we stopped making cars that were so amenable to shade-tree mechanics.

I had a couple of other Beetles over the decade and a half that followed that first one, along with a number of other vehicles that made them look like the height of sober-minded practicality.

I had a 1965 Ford Mustang that was rusted out so badly it was literally on the verge of breaking in two. (I maybe should have taken a look underneath before I bought it.) I sold it to a fellow who ran an import/export business; the plan was to send it to Finland for restoration and resale, which means my old Mustang may have beat me to northern Europe by about fifteen years.

I had a 1969 MGB that was determined to prove every cliché about the quirky unreliability of British sports cars to be the gospel truth. I learned that there’s a reason that Lucas Industries, which was responsible for the electrical systems in those cars, is known in enthusiast circles as “the Prince of Darkness.” That MGB is the only car I’ve ever driven where you had a choice between headlights and windshield wipers; there wasn’t enough juice to run them both at the same time. Then again, you probably didn’t want to be driving in the rain anyway, because never was an MGB made without a top that leaked like a sieve. All that aside, the car was a hell of a lot of fun whenever the weather was good and it decided it was in the mood to start.

I had a 1975 Nissan — or Datsun, as they were known in the United States back then — 280Z. It was more fun to drive than any car I’ve ever owned, even the MGB, with an in-line six-cylinder engine that was the stuff of which car-nerd wet dreams are made. For some reason, I decided to swap that 280Z for a 1981 280ZX. I knew I had made a terrible mistake within a week, even if the new car did have the exact same engine. It was like trading the svelte Elvis of 1956 for the fat one of 1976.

But the all-around funnest vehicle I’ve ever owned — not just fun to drive, but fun in general — was a 1972 Volkswagen camper van. It would do about 50 miles per hour flat-out on level ground. Driving it felt weirdly like guiding a boat, and not only because the engine was chirping away about fifteen feet behind you when you sat at the wheel. You could expect a delay of several seconds to any control input as it bobbed and swayed gently on its well-worn springs. So, you just kind of pointed it in the general direction you wanted to go and hoped for the best. Looking back on it, it was a good thing that it wouldn’t go any faster.

That little Volkswagen bus could sleep four people — or rather two couples, assuming you didn’t want to cuddle too much with mere friends. There could be two in the back and two under the pop-up roof, with just a thin net between them and the great outdoors. It had a little refrigerator, a little stove, and even a little heater that ran on — I kid you not — pure gasoline. It’s a wonder that we didn’t blow ourselves up at some point during the weekends that we drove the magic bus up from Dallas to southern Oklahoma’s Arbuckle Mountains.

The joys of all of these oddball vehicles started to pale a bit for me as I entered my thirties. (Come to think of it, it was at about this same point that I started to feel too old for backpacker hostels; this must have been the borderline that marked the onset of a belated adulthood.) In 2004, I bought a Volkswagen GTI that was just a few years old instead of a few decades. It was a nice enough car, but it was kind of soft and heavy in the same way that the Datsun 280ZX had been. Still, it did have the advantage of being (more or less) reliable.

Then I moved to Denmark in 2009 with my new wife, and that was that for the car life. We didn’t even own a car for ten years thereafter. I re-familiarized myself with the lost (to me) art of biking, which is certainly a healthier way to get around as one closes in on middle age. These days we have a Hyundai Plug-In Hybrid, which is… fine, but it doesn’t exactly get the blood pumping, you know? Discounting the odd roadside emergency, I haven’t looked under a hood with deadly intent in seventeen years. I can’t even tell one (modern) car from another anymore.

And yet nothing that we have done and been in our lives ever truly and completely leaves us, does it? Our current house, which we moved into four and a half years ago, has quite a big yard, such that I have to cut the grass with a garden tractor. I still feel a certain quickening in my soul when I smell gasoline and oil and hear the motor fire up, still enjoy doing the maintenance myself. In fact, I just bought a new (to me) tractor this year; I’ll go so far as to say that it’s the best one in our village. I do like to ride around on it, the child being the father to the man and all. As one of my wife’s uncles likes to say, every man should have a tractor of his own, whether real or metaphorical.

But that’s far as I go these days. Sometimes I muse about getting a project car, but I know that I don’t really have the time, and probably not the long-term desire either. I content myself with the occasional veteran bil exhibition (as they’re called here in Denmark) and with seeing what’s on Jay Leno’s Garage each week on YouTube. (If it’s something old, I’m in; if it’s something new, I move on; if it’s something borrowed or something blue, I’m as confused as you are.)

Here’s the weird thing, though: I never had all that much interest in driving cars on the computer, even when my passion for the real McCoys was at its peak. Of course, there are various sub-genres of driving games, as there are of all other types. I’m not so surprised that I never got into the hardcore racing simulations, where it becomes all about grip and downforce and gear ratios and wind-tunnel coefficients and many other numbers I don’t really understand. God bless those who like that sort of thing, but I never had the patience for it, whether the vehicle being modeled is an airplane, a ship, a submarine, or a racing car. Yet I never cared much more about what we might call the aspirational driving games: you know, the ones that assemble a bunch of exotic street cars and set you loose with them, on the premise that, if you can’t afford them in the real world, you can satisfy at least some of your lust for them vicariously on the computer.

I think the problem for me here was that I didn’t aspire to what these aspirational games were offering. At some point many years ago now — definitely before I learned to drive in the real world — high-end sports car reached a level of performance that made them, in my opinion, less rather than more fun. They started to not just include but require traction control and all manner of other driver-assistance measures just to make them controllable, which detracted from the purity of the experience. At the same time, they became so ridiculously fast in comparison to the traffic laws of the realm that I’m left wondering what you’re actually supposed to do with them, assuming you don’t want to be a jerk who endangers everyone else on the road and likely gets himself thrown in jail and his car confiscated before all is said and done. (Denmark isn’t known for being tough on crime, but they do love to confiscate cars here…)

There’s an old saying that has long been my mantra on this subject: “It’s more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow.” Just last year, my wife and I took a holiday to Zagori, a mountainous region in the northwest of Greece, close to the border with Albania. We were there to hike, but I had just as much fun driving our rental car, a Ford something-or-other with a gerbil wheel attached to a couple of rubber bands for an engine, up and down switchback mountain roads that sometimes had me shifting all the way down to first gear. I know that electric cars are the socially responsible future and all, but I’m a little sad that I most presumably won’t be able to rent a simple, basic traditional car like this one for much longer, then proceed to wring every last bit of potential out of it in the old-fashioned, manual way. In my book, that’s a lot more fun than driving a Ferrari responsibly on the same roads would be.

Waiting for goats to cross the road in the Pindus Mountains. A little later, the goat herder emerged, and we had a “conversation” that relied principally on smiling and gesturing. It may be a romanticized whimsy, but I kept thinking that his life wasn’t all that different from that of his ancestors of 1000 years ago. There’s a part of me that hopes his descendants are still living the same way 1000 years hence.

In short, then, the aspirational driving sims were sold on the premise that you really, really wanted to own the exotic cars they featured, and I never particularly did; if we’re being completely honest, I find most post-1970s supercars to be painfully tacky-looking in addition to everything else. This goes a long way toward explaining why I’ve scarcely seen fit to mention driving games in these histories before today. On top of my personal proclivities, I would add one last factor. Some gaming genres, I’ve come to learn, age better than other ones, and thus do more to encourage re-visitation. If you ask me, adventure, puzzle, and action games age the best, followed by CRPG and strategy games. (The latter tending to be more complicated genres in general, they do often fall completely or partially victim to shifting interface conventions; we’ve learned how to present information and let the player twiddle the knobs so much better over the decades that going too far back can be a pain.)

At the bottom of the heap in this respect are undoubtedly sports games and vehicular simulations. As purported simulations of the real world, such games foreground technology more than they do design, meaning that there’s less reason to revisit them when the technology moves on and can present simulations of a better fidelity. If you were to create a list of the most prominent and respected designers of gaming’s various ages, you would find that virtually none of them worked in these genres. (The only name I can think of off-hand is Sid Meier, who did so very early in his career, a fact that I hear trotted out from time to time as a curious anecdote: “Did you know he used to make flight simulators before Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon and Civilization?”)

Sports games and sims tend to be as ephemeral as they are anonymous. The former are generally cranked out on an explicitly annual basis, with the year appended right there to the name, with all of the teams and athletes of right now. If you’re still stuck with an earlier year’s edition, and if you don’t happen to be a very special sort of cultural time traveler indeed, you’re left out, bereft and bereaved. You can still find plenty of die-hard partisans of Civilization II or IV or VI. I presume that you can also find footie fans who insist that FC 24 is where it’s really at and the later versions are pants — you can find anything on the Internet if you look hard enough — but they seem to be a lot less common. Driving games are for all practical purposes the same. Each new annual or biennial edition of the big franchises comes chock-a-block with all of the hot cars of that moment. Who wants to be stuck with a bunch of old cars? (I do! I do! But much older…)

All of which helps to clarify why a quick glance around the retro-gaming blogosphere reveals a CRPG Addict, a Wargaming Scribe, an Adventurers’ Guild, an All the (Text) Adventures project, even a Space Game Junkie, but no one seems to be documenting every iteration of Tiger Woods PGA Tour or Microsoft Flight Simulator in similarly granular detail. Call it the rest of the explanation of why I too have given those genres short shrift in these histories.

Nevertheless, said histories do try to capture the landscape of gaming as it was viewed at the time, not just the nostalgic, fannish perspective of today. Sports games and vehicular simulations were a huge part of that landscape, representing as much as 40 percent of the market at times during the 1980s and 1990s. So, today I’ll try to remedy my neglect at least a little bit, by tracing aspirational driving games back to their point of origin. (Sports game will have to wait for another day.) This will lead us nicely into a big exception to the general rule I’ve just belabored at such length: the one vintage driving game that I actually do dig, even today.

The exception to another rule, that of me ignoring driving sims in the past, is a game called Test Drive, to which I devoted a handful of paragraphs many years ago. Developed by a Vancouver-based outfit called Distinctive Software and published by Accolade in 1987, Test Drive was a fine place to break my silence on the subject of driving sims, however briefly, in that it was arguably the most important such game ever to appear on personal computers. I say this not because it generated enormous sales — it was a big success by the standards of its time, but later driving sims would sell many, many times more copies — but because it was the template for countless games to come. For it introduced the driving sim as an aspirational lifestyle product, almost as much an exercise in branding and promotion for the car makers whose vehicles were included as it was a self-contained game.

Test Drive offered up five of the cars whose posters could be found stuck to the wall in teenage-male bedrooms from sea to shining sea: a Porsche 911 Turbo, a Ferrari Testarossa, a Lotus Esprit Turbo, a Lamborghini Countach, and (for those with slightly less exotic tastes) a Chevrolet Corvette. You got to pick one of these cars, then drive it up a twisting mountain road as quickly as possible, dodging slower traffic and trying to stay ahead of the police cars who were in somewhat inept pursuit. The meta-game that took place when you weren’t behind the steering wheel extended no further than trying to get your time on a high-scores list. It wasn’t much in comparison to what these games would become — but it was enough. You got the chance to drive a car you weren’t likely to ever even ride in, and you got to do it in all the reckless ways that only a maniac would in real life. For the car manufacturers, being featured in sleek and stylish games like this one would soon become an important promotional strategy, creating the customers of tomorrow from the teenagers of today. It was an early step in gaming’s integration into the larger consumer economy, one which happened at almost the same time that sports games began to move toward a season-by-season model that kept them in tune with the latest headlines on ESPN.

Just to further blur the lines between game and advertisement, between game and aspirational lifestyle product, Test Drive helpfully included the sticker prices of each of its cars on the information screen alongside all of the other statistics.

The bona fides of games like these as simulations was a case of a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, you didn’t want to make the cars too dauntingly difficult to drive, in the way of so many hardcore flight simulations — or for that matter some hardcore motorsports simulations, such as Papyrus Design’s IndyCar and NASCAR series. On the other hand, you wanted to ensure that the player could tell the difference between a Countach and a Corvette. You wanted to convey the impression of what it would be like to drive a supercar, in a way that remained accessible even to kids who might not have a driver’s license for the family minivan yet. Michael Bate, a designer for Artech, another Canada-based studio whose works were published by Accolade during the 1980s, called games hewing to this impressionistic philosophy “aesthetic simulations,” a neologism I’ve returned to again and again ever since I first heard it. Hanno Lemke, the producer of Test Drive, describes that game’s goals in classic aesthetic-simulation terms: to “create the most immersive, visceral, and relevant kind of car experiences [emphasis mine] you could imagine.”

When I grew up, it was the white Lamborghini poster in your bedroom or the red Ferrari, and it was very much about [how] the exotics mattered back then. And so, immersion was really important — getting into the driver’s seat, that virtual fantasy, you know. No real-life consequences — I can drive as fast as I want, the cops can chase me, but largely it was all about what it would feel like to drive these exotics.

Each dashboard in Test Drive was a painstaking re-creation of the real thing. This is, believe it or not, that of a Porsche 911. I would have expected a bit more for my money…

Accolade published sequels to Test Drive in 1989 and 1990, alongside separate boxed add-ons with new cars to try out and scenery to traverse, thereby pioneering the model of the driving game as an entire ecosystem you bought into. (Today, that model is driven by the ubiquitous DLC packs.) By Test Drive III: The Passion, other staples of modernity were creeping in as well, such as the ability to rewatch and share your exploits after a particularly good (or bad) run and even a radio where you could select your own station, although we were still a long way from the times when bands and singers would lobby almost as aggressively as car companies to have their music included in such products.

Despite its innovations, the third game was not as well-reviewed or well-received as the ones before. Accolade had developed this installment in-house instead of letting Distinctive do it; this may be the reason that many gamers found it to be lacking a certain ineffable feel for the road. Then, too, some of the design choices were just weird: Test Drive III made keeping your windshield clear of bugs into a central aspect of its gameplay. The franchise effectively ended here, not to be revived until years later, as an also-ran rather than a pioneer.

The third game’s shortcomings notwithstanding, if you’ve played or even seen any of the modern driving sims, and try out any one of these Test Drive games today, you’ll immediately sense the same vibe, even if you are less impressed by the implementation. That’s a remarkable thing to contemplate all these decades later. For all that gaming has changed, it’s amazing how much it’s stayed the same in some of its core genres.

Distinctive was acquired by Electronic Arts in 1991. The new EA Canada focused more than ever on, for lack of a better term, “lifestyle games.” Being Canadian, it was given responsibility for creating the annual installments of the EA Sports National Hockey League franchise in the exploding console-game space. It has continued to this day to crank out a new edition every single year: 34 installments and counting as of this writing. This must surely be a record of some sort.

Driving games soon returned to the agenda as well. EA negotiated a deal with Road & Track, a slick magazine that sold an only modestly more grounded version of the fantasy of fast cars with expensive price tags than had Test Drive. Hanno Lemke was put in charge of Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed, with many of the same people who had helped him build Test Drive working under him. It was to be a launch title for the 3DO, a new games console cum “multimedia appliance” whose finances were thoroughly muddled up with those of EA: Trip Hawkins, the founder of EA, had left that company with his board’s blessing and plenty of their investment dollars to embark on this new venture. The 3DO was envisioned as a sort of lifestyle console, appealing to an older demographic than the likes of Nintendo and Sega. It requires no great imaginative leap to understand why a game like The Need for Speed could be a good fit with that vision. If all went according to plan, the same people who perused Road & Track might soon be picking up 3DOs.

The 3DO’s not-so-secret weapon was to be the CDs on which all of its games would ship. These CDs would in turn enable lots and lots of digitized video and sound sourced from the real world, a possibility which would have seemed like science fiction just a few years earlier. The Need for Speed embraced said possibility with all the enthusiasm that was expected of a 3DO game; you didn’t see a computer-drawn car on your screen until you settled down into the driver’s seat of one.

The video clips were typical of the era — which is to say, amazing simply for existing at the time of the game’s release in 1994, but ho-hum at best today. The worst decision was to add a shakily acted fellow named Mr. X to serve as the player’s antagonist, popping up from time to time with some trash talk. This was exactly as grating as it sounds like it would be, especially after you had seen him deliver every one of his limited repertoire of one-liners multiple (dozen?) times.

Mr. X has something to say about your performance. He is aptly described by a contributor to MobyGames as “a face you love to punch.”

The means of production of all this video reflected the fact that the games industry, for all its rapid evolution, still had a ways to go before it would be competing on a level field with Hollywood. EA didn’t even have the clout to borrow cars from the manufacturers whose vehicles were included. So, Hanno Lemke and his friends had to go begging. Luckily, Road & Track had whole filing cabinets full of still photographs of the cars in question that were ripe for digitizing. In the category of the moving image, the Ferrari Testarossa seen in the video clips belonged to Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame, the Lamborghini Diablo to Richard Garriott of Ultima fame, and the Porsche 911 to an EA Canada executive. Other cars were scavenged by still more humble methods, being vehicles that the team simply spotted driving by and chased down to ask the owners if they were interested in making a cameo appearance in a videogame.

Speaking of people with punchable faces: Chris Roberts’s Ferrari. (I kid! I kid!)

Once you got past all of the multimedia-age gilding, however, you found a very credible aesthetic simulation waiting for you. The Need for Speed reinvented no wheels; it was a recapitulation of Test Drive on a larger canvas, right down to the vaguely hapless cops who lay in wait to chase you down public highways. Once again, you had a selection of mouth-watering sports cars to hand, updated to reflect the latest developments in the field. (This time, the Japanese got a chance: no fewer than three of the eight cars — the Mazda RX-7, the Toyota Supra, and the Acura NSX — came from the Land of the Rising Sun.) But it was all done better, reflecting the seven years of steady technological advancement that separated The Need for Speed from the original Test Drive.

The game nailed the look and feel it was going for. No one would accuse this of being a hardcore simulation of driving — not when you could bump and bash and grind against the other vehicles with impunity, when even crashing head-on at speed into the side of a building resulted in little visible damage to the car. (This was a requirement of the contracts with the manufacturers, who had no desire to see their halo vehicles getting smashed up and exploding on screens; such requirements are still the rule in the contracts of today.) Even the non-police computerized drivers you could race against — another advancement over Test Drive — were more interested in showing you a good time and keeping the adrenaline level up than they were in earnestly trying to win. As one reviewer put it, “the AI drivers don’t race; they shadow.”

Driving a Dodge Viper, one of the new supercars that had appeared on the scene since Test Drive.

The point was that it was fun, being just close enough — but not too close — to what racing cars such as these might really be like. The game presented an alternative universe where you could not only afford a supercar, but one where insurance premiums didn’t exist and the police would give you no more than a ticket and a stern talking-to if they caught you driving 170 miles per hour down a heavily trafficked road. This was a universe that teenage boys everywhere — even the ones who happened to be in their twenties, thirties, forties or fifties — could well and truly get behind.

But sadly for everyone involved, the 3DO console was a marketplace flop. On the supply side, a scheme for renting out the console’s specifications and firmware to multiple consumer-electronics makers proved a recipe for confusion, while the slightly older folks who wanted to play multimedia videogames in their living rooms of an evening in lieu of watching television proved rather less plentiful than anticipated. Still believing they had a good thing on their hands, one which was just on the wrong platform at the moment, EA Canada reworked The Need for Speed for ordinary personal computers. This allowed them to turn it into the biggest game ever to be born on Trip Hawkins’s misbegotten console.

Released in 1995, this incarnation of The Need for Speed dialed back on the most annoying aspects of the 3DO version — Mr. X got the well-deserved axe — while keeping everything that had made it appealing. In its review, Computer Gaming World magazine made note of the tightrope it walked with such aplomb: “Realistic elements are usually compromised for the sake of a quick learning curve and blazing arcade action. But Need for Speed is kind of an anomaly: it borrows some from both styles and thrills the senses along the way.” It became a huge hit on personal computers. It was then ported to the Sony PlayStation, a new CD-based console which had set out to do much of what the 3DO had, and would pull it off much better. The Need for Speed took off there as well. Indeed, in some ways games like these were always more natural fits for consoles.

“Balloons ahoy!” in the computer version of The Need for Speed.

So, out of the smoking rubble of the 3DO, a long-running driving-game franchise arose. Need for Speed II came out in 1997. Along with the definite article in the name, it dropped the Road & Track partnership; EA now had more than enough clout to get all of the glamor shots and test models it could want from the manufacturers. Some complained that the advancement was all in the department of graphics and sound, but that was fine for most fans of this most deeply experiential of all gaming genres. “Little details like hearing the shift click mattered back then,” says Hanno Lemke, who would continue to act as the franchise’s primary producer until 2007. “Watching the dials move mattered.” (There is a reason that I like to call these games aesthetic simulations.)

The series was moving now toward an annual release schedule, just like the sports games. In that spirit of ongoing perpetuity, Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit, which came out in 1998, was the last installment with a Roman numeral and the first with a subtitle. To further press home the notion of Need for Speed as a subculture you bought into rather than a single game you bought, EA began to regularly put up new, downloadable content — most importantly, new supercars to add to the ever-growing list of same — on its website.

The police have upgraded their stodgy cruisers to Camaros in Need for Speed III.

In a decision which was polarizing in some circles but doubtless exhaustively market-researched, this installment leaned further toward the arcade game at the expense of the simulation. As its subtitle would imply, it heavily emphasized the police-chase aspect. The cops, who had verged on being little more than props at times in the past, could now go so far as to set up roadblocks ahead of you, complete with tire spikes. But, as Computer Gaming World’s reviewer captured, the core attributes of the aspirational lifestyle game, as deft at promoting the cars it featured as it was at being good fun in its own right, remained as pronounced as ever.

During the time I was writing this review, I went driving in the mountains. As I cruised along narrow, twisting roads, I kept thinking about how much the experience reminded me of playing Need for Speed III — at least as far as handling the car went. I wasn’t being chased by the police, and I wasn’t pushing my Lamborghini much past 60 miles per hour. Okay, so I don’t own a Lamborghini. But after playing this game, I sure wish that I did.

Need for Speed: High Stakes appeared right on time in 1999. In order to give the Buford T. Justices of the world some redemption, it let you become the police instead of forever being chased by them. But the less gimmicky, vastly more significant addition was that of a career mode, which finally provided a proper meta-game to bridge and give context to your exploits on the highways and raceways. You started with only enough money to buy what passed for a budget car in this august assemblage: a Mercedes SLK or a BMW Z3. You had to earn your way into the more exclusive rides by winning ever more challenging tournaments, whilst keeping your repair bills to a minimum in the process. High Stakes wasn’t quite the first aspirational driving game to introduce a career mode — that distinction belongs to Gran Turismo, a PlayStation-exclusive competitor — but it was a huge step forward nonetheless. Suddenly the individual races had… well, high stakes, that extended beyond the moment-to-moment maneuvering on the road, that might even cause you to exercise a modicum of caution out there from time to time. And as you progressed, you slowly amassed a garage full of tricked-out, exotic sports cars. I trust that I’ve flogged my hobby horse sufficiently by now to not have to tell you what this meant for these games as aspirational lifestyle products.

Your garage in High Stakes looks like a car dealer’s showroom. This is not a coincidence…

All of this was great, if you were interested in buying what these games were so explicitly selling. I must confess that I really wasn’t, even back in the day. The cars that were featured weren’t generally the ones I lusted after, and I found the whole presentation a bit too boy-racer for my tastes. But then Need for Speed took a surprising detour — one that would prove a bit of a blind alley for the franchise, but one that I enjoyed immensely. I’ll tell you all about that next time.

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

Sources: Edge of October 1994; Retro Gamer 59 and 178; Computer Gaming World of February 1988, April 1991, November 1995, August 1997, March 1998, and January 1999; the Harvard Business School case studies “Electronic Arts in 1995,” “Electronic Arts in 2002,” and “Electronic Arts: The Blockbuster Strategy.”

Online sources include “A Distinctive Lineage” by Chris LaVigne for The Escapist, “How Need for Speed Became the World’s Biggest Racing Game” by Mack Hogan for Road & Track, and an interview with Hanno Lemke conducted by John Davison for 1UP.com.

Where to Get Them: Unfortunately, none of the games discussed here are available for legal purchase, presumably due to the expiration of the various licensing agreements with automobile manufacturers. It’s another reason that these sorts of games are so easily forgotten by history…

Zarf Updates: Visible Zorker search feature

2026-08-20T23:22:36+00:00

Apparently today is the worst possible day to post about Zork the text adventure? See articles about Duskbloods if you don't follow FromSoftware news, which, to be clear, I don't. Spoiler: everybody's hot for a playable goon named "Zork".

But I shall defy the Trending News gods! I have deployed a new Visible Zorker feature: a search box in the Source pane.

The source pane of Zork 1, showing a search for "axe".

You can search for the name of any object, routine, global variable, or constant. The search will also find printable strings containing your search term.

Clicking on a search result will jump to where that symbol is defined. Note that it doesn't find every location where the symbol is used. It's not really a full-text source search. But it's handy for poking around and seeing how things work -- which is what the Visible Zorker is all about.

Naturally, the search box is available on all current and future Visible Zorker pages.

The source pane of Starcross, showing a search for "spider".

In other news, Visible Enchanter is now in progress. It will be available to Patreon supporters on September 1st. I've also posted (with no paywall) my scans of the Enchanter folio package.

This is not the copy I played when I was young. I snarfed this package off Ebay. Actually, two packages; the Infotator I found came with a mix of Enchanter and Sorcerer feelies. I wound up with two spell lists. That turns out to be a win, because one of them was stained by the degrading "red wax" (plastic) seal. Adds to the air of authenticity, I say.

I'll see you in September with the open-source release of The Visible Witness.

Zarf Updates: GDC status updates

2026-08-20T02:12:50+00:00

Back in March I made a lot of hay about the decline of GDC. I didn't confidently predict that GDC'27 would be cancelled, but cancellation wouldn't have surprised me.

Well, GDC'27 isn't cancelled. Which we knew. They would have had to announce a cancellation at or immediately after GDC '26. Turning a ship of that size takes a year of lead time, minimum.

Instead, as Cmdr. Takashima almost once said, GDC '27 is open for business. There's a shiny "What's New" page. To quote a couple of lines:

Introducing a new Business Hall at Moscone West, built specifically for meetings, networking, partnerships, pitches, and getting business done.

Opening the Festival Hall Tuesday through Thursday (previously Wednesday through Friday).

Making several pass and pricing changes designed to provide more accessible ways into GDC.

Oh, and I was right about Ball-Park Monday being a flop. That's off the list.

The important part is the new price list. $500 standard; $300 for student/indie; $150 for the expo hall alone; $100 for the "business hall" alone.

In some sense, this completely contradicts GDC's new mission statement:

The GDC Festival of Gaming is where the entire B2B games industry comes together.

That's from an og:description metadata tag on their front page, which is surely the most official possible source. It used to say "the game industry's premier professional event", but this "B2B" language came in last year. Similarly, their 2025 rebrand announcement talked about "the world's premier B2B gaming industry event".

But look, $150 for the expo hall is not a B2B pitch. It's a "get some foot traffic" pitch. It's aimed at curious passers-by and the Yerba Buena Park crowd, who might be willing to pay a small sum to go inside and check out the fun stuff. (Meaning the IGF and alt.ctrl.gdc.) (And hopefully Twine....)

In some sense this is an admission that GDC is not a premier event for the entire game industry. It's a bunch of unrelated ungulates in a trenchcoat.

What about the business hall? ("Designed around how business gets done at GDC.") I read that as an attempt to bring back all the offsite meetings. Last year, companies were renting GDC-adjacent spaces (and, indeed, entire GDC-adjacent hotels) to avoid the GDC booth tax. GDC will surely still charge three arms and a leg for a big fancy booth. But if you're just there to schmooze, they're willing to pare that revenue stream back to zero (almost zero; zero by corporate standards) in order to fill Moscone up again.

This fits well with the idea that GDC has a multi-year Moscone contract; they have to keep running the show. (Not a confirmed fact, but widely understood.) If so, the next couple of GDCs are effectively loss leaders for a more dominant future event.

So total attendance is the metric to keep an eye on. 30k in 2025; 20k in 2026. If it rebounds in 2027, GDC will keep going more or less as it has been. If it keeps dropping...

Don't look at me; I don't know.

As for me, I feel less connected to GDC than ever. Yes, I had a lovely time last year. But I no longer have any ambitions -- or even wild hopes -- connected to the game industry. Showing off the Visible Zorker to a large audience was the last of that, and it's done.

As far as I know, IFTF will be back on the show floor in 2027. (Not a confirmed fact but I'm pretty sure.) GDC is still willing to bring in the indie and nonprofit groups for free. That's all good. I haven't decided whether I will be there working the booth. I'd really like to hit all of Worldcon, Mysterium, and NarraScope in 2027. That may consume my travel budget for the year.

The Sharpee Blog: Characters and Conversations

2026-08-18T20:43:06+00:00

Based on the requirements of two of my WIPs, I needed robust character and conversation systems. Normally these would be game-specific since the story dictates how dialogue is presented and executed. These two additions are general system implementations, but bring a great deal of potential to storytelling.

I did not make any attempt to chase Versu's capabilities. I was specifically looking at NPC agency. How can an IF story be written so that its PC and its NPCs have full autonomy and agency within a story.

This means having personalities with moods, goals, friendships, enemies, and more. These come in the form described below:

Character model — the state

create Jonas Reed
  a person, proper, very impulsive, slightly honest
  temperament duty over fear
  never betrays a confidence
  mood anxious
  feels devoted to Marta Kell
  knows the-ledger-burning, witnessed, certain

Piece	What it holds
Personality & temperament	Stable traits, and which pressure wins when two collide (`duty over fear`)
Principles	Lines they will not cross (`never betrays a confidence`)
Mood	The volatile layer — what they are feeling now
Feelings & knowledge	Who they care about; what they know, how they learned it, how sure they are
Goals	What they are trying to do, with priority and gating (`active when it is breaking`)
Influence & face-acts	Pressure they exert on others — intimidation, charm — and how it lands (witnessed / resisted)
Conscience	What they are `burdened by`, and what that costs them to keep

Conversation — the selection

Construct	What it decides
Manner	How a reply is delivered, by mood — a `beat` of business, or a `voice`
Greetings	First time, on return, again so soon, after days, asked again, on leaving
Topic recency	Whether a subject is `fresh`, `recent`, or `stale` — and what that changes
Exchanges	A question they asked, awaiting your answer; may be `blocking`
Initiative	When they speak unprompted — open floor, subject change, harm
Threads	A subject they will carry across turns, beat by beat, until it concludes
Continuation prompts	The player pulling the next beat: tell me more, continue, go on, and?

A taste of each of the three that do the most work:

define exchange the-offer for Will Kemp, blocking
  answer "yes", "aye", "sworn":
    phrase kemp-sworn
    change Will Kemp to sworn
  on leaving:
    phrase kemp-calls-after
    leave
  on silence:
    phrase kemp-offer-silence
end exchange

define initiative for Will Kemp
  on an open floor, when it is cheerful:
    phrase kemp-interjects
  on an open floor, when it is stung:
    hold their tongue
  when the subject changes:
    deflect to "the offer"
end initiative

define conversation the-defection for Will Kemp, blocking
  about "the rose", "the offer", "henslowe"
  opens when the grievance was discussed and the-blow-up is stale
  beat:
    phrase kemp-names-his-price
    then asks the-offer
  on refusing:
    phrase kemp-holds-the-thread
  on resuming:
    phrase kemp-takes-it-up

This is most certainly a first version and changes/additions are likely, but this is built into the latest version of Chord Writer now available on https://sharpee.net/.