Planet Interactive Fiction

Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian: The Mystery of Rennes-le-Château, Part 1: The Priest’s Treasure

2026-03-06T16:50:42+00:00

(Wikimedia Commons: Jcb-caz-11)

This series of articles chronicles the history, both real and pseudo, behind Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned.

Believe that there is a secret and you will feel an initiate. It doesn’t cost a thing. Create an enormous hope that can never be eradicated because there is no root. Ancestors that never were will never tell you that you betrayed them. Create a truth with fuzzy edges; when someone tries to define it, you repudiate him. Why go on writing novels? Rewrite history.

— Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

Before all of the conspiracies, there was just a village.

Rennes-le-Château sits perched atop a 300-meter-high promontory in the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains. It has today a permanent population of fewer than 100 souls, who are clustered together on a plateau approximately 200 meters long by 100 meters wide. The only way to reach the village is by walking, cycling, or driving up a single narrow, twisting four-kilometer road that leaves from the closest neighboring town of Couiza (population 1100) and terminates here. But if there is only one physical road to Rennes-le-Château, there are a thousand or more imaginative ones. It is the Rome of the conspiratorial view of history, the place to which all conspiracy theories seem to lead sooner or later. Once you reach the village, whether in person or merely in spirit, there is literally nowhere else to go.

It may feel like a place out of myth, but it is not one without a website. During the high season, at least half of the single access road’s traffic consists of tourist buses. Their windows act as frames for the portraits of their eager passengers, visions of arcane mysteries swirling almost visibly around their heads like halos or thought bubbles, placed there by the guide at the front of the bus who knows perfectly well what stories she needs to recite to butter her bread. When the visitors pour out of their buses at the top of the hill, the villagers greet them with a smile, if sometimes a weary one. Whatever its drawbacks, living in one of the world’s most unlikely tourist traps is an undeniable improvement over the farming or mining by which their parents or grandparents made a living.

Rennes-le-Château owes its place on so many package-tour itineraries to the insatiability of the human appetite to believe weird shit. For every man, woman, and child who lives in the village today, there have been six or seven books published that prominently feature it. If we wind up nuclear-bombing or fossil-fueling or populist-politicking our way back to the Stone Age in the near future, there will still be some of us sitting around in our caves after the apocalypse, prattling on about Mary Magdalene and holy bloodlines and Knights Templar — always Knights Templar — to distract from the wolves howling in the lonely desolation outside. For a really good sinister conspiracy theory is counterintuitively cozy, what with the way it collapses the amorphous mass of real history, where cause and effect are as muddled as are heroes and villains, into a comforting clockwork mechanism of cogs in cogs. Small wonder that pseudo-history tends to thrive best when real life seems most vexed and confusing.

Rennes-le-Château lies within Occitania, the most southeasterly of the eighteen administrative regions of modern-day France. But for centuries the largest portion of this region, including the one that contains our village, was known as the Languedoc, a name by which it is still colloquially referred to this day. The Languedoc has long been characterized by a stubborn independent streak and an uneasy relationship with the powers that be in far-off Paris. To this day, some of the locals there prefer to speak their own language of Occitan, a direct descendant of the Latin spoken by the Romans who first settled here a century before the birth of Jesus Christ, rather than the language spoken by the rest of France.

Humans have been living in the Languedoc for hundreds of thousands of years; prehistoric cave dwellings have been found in many of the cliff faces that dot this craggy region. When the Romans arrived circa 120 BC, they brought with them bureaucracy, literacy, and in time Christianity in return for the ores and minerals of which the earth of the Languedoc is rich, from iron to copper, lead to gold. They may have built a village on the promontory where Rennes-le-Château stands today, or a villa, or a temple, or a fortress, or most probably nothing at all.

The Romans were eventually displaced by the Visigoths, who were on a tear after sacking Rome itself in AD 410. They evolved a civilization far more sophisticated than their barbarous reputation. Once the most febrile stage of their conquering was over, the Languedoc came to mark the northernmost part of their empire, which otherwise filled most of the Iberian Peninsula to the south. Further north was the burgeoning kingdom of the Franks, the forefather of the nation we know as France.

Some have connected our promontory with a major regional center of the Visigoths, which appears in some of the scant surviving records from the period under the name of Rhedae. But this idea appears to be, like so much about the story of Rennes-le-Château, an example of wishful thinking. Rhedae was supposed to have had a population of up to 30,000 people, meaning it would have had to have sprawled well beyond the promontory itself. Yet there is no trace in the surrounding countryside of the debris a settlement of that size should have left behind. Coins, jewelry, and axe blades should have been regularly churned to the surface by the farmers who have worked the land around here for centuries — not to mention the thousands of amateur archeologists who have descended on the area since Rennes-le-Château became such a nexus of conspiracy theories.

At any rate, the end came for the Visigoths at the beginning of the eighth century, when the Iberian Peninsula was invaded by Arab Muslim armies which had crossed the Mediterranean from Africa. The Muslims pressed northward from Iberia, taking the Languedoc and the entire southern half of modern France, until they were finally stopped by the Franks near Poitiers in 732. The Franks then pushed them back roughly as far as the modern border between France and Spain.

Yet the same Frankish kings who had triumphed over the fearsome Muslim armies found the settled inhabitants of the Languedoc a tougher nut to crack. The craggy landscape, it seemed, bred equally craggy souls. The region became a patchwork of small fiefdoms, home to a people who continued to hew to their own culture and language. Even the vaunted Charlemagne was able to fully assimilate the Languedoc into his empire only briefly.

One of the independent lords built a castle — a château in French — along with an accompanying church at the top of our promontory around the year 1000; this marks the first point where we can say with absolute certainty that people had begun to live there year-round. We don’t know precisely who built the castle, or why, beyond noting that high ground like this is always a natural place to fortify. It is likewise unclear by what name the complex was known. The name of Rennes doesn’t appear to have marked the site until the eighteenth century, Rennes-le-Château not until the nineteenth — by which time, ironically, the titular castle was no more than a romantic-looking ruin.

In the middle of the twelfth century, the Languedoc demonstrated its independent streak in the most flagrant possible fashion, when it became the locus of a breakaway sect of Christianity known as the Cathars, one of a succession of “proto-Protestant” groups who predated Martin Luther. In fact, the Cathars’ ideas were much more radical than those of even that radical reformer. Borrowing from the texts of the ancient Gnostic Christians, they thought that Jesus Christ had been an angel, an ethereal being whose physical form was only an illusion, who by his very nature could not have been physically killed and brought back to life, who had only created the illusion of these events. As if that wasn’t heretical enough, they also believed that there were two gods rather than one, an evil God of the Earth who was the protagonist of the Old Testament and a loving God of the Heavens who had announced his arrival in mortal affairs through the angel Jesus. They believed that the popes in Rome were the servants, wittingly or unwittingly, of the bad god rather than the good.

Of course, such a slate of beliefs was a recipe for trouble in Medieval Europe, and trouble the Cathars soon got. Pope Innocent III declared a Crusade against them in 1208. Savage warfare consumed the Languedoc for decades; whether and in what capacity the castle at Rennes was involved is unknown. Matters finally came to a head in 1243, when the heart of the Cathar army was besieged at the Château de Montségur, just 35 kilometers west of Rennes. On March 12, 1244, the starving remnants of the Cathar defenders embraced their martyrdom willingly, marching out of their castle’s gate with linked arms to face grisly death at the hands of the papist antichrist’s minions.

But it has long been said that, before they did so, they managed to sneak some great treasure past the enemy and hide it away somewhere. Some say it was the treasure of Solomon’s Temple, which was stolen from Jerusalem and taken to his own capital by the Roman general Titus in AD 70, then stolen again and brought to the Languedoc by the Visigoths. Some say the treasure might include the Holy Grail that was used to catch some of Jesus’s sacred blood at the crucifixion. (The fact that the Cathars didn’t believe that Jesus had a physical form from which to bleed real blood seems to have bothered remarkably few of the seekers of this “Cathar Treasure” over the years.) There is a legend about a Languedoc shepherd boy who in 1645 fell down into a hole while searching for a lost lamb; there he found skeletons surrounded by great heaps of gold. He filled his hat with gold and returned to his village, only to be stoned to death as a thief. (Justice was apparently even harsher than we imagine it to have been in that century, and the normal spirit of human curiosity strangely lacking.) This, then, is the original would-be treasure of the Languedoc. Rest assured that there will be others.

With the crushing of the Cathars, the Languedoc was firmly incorporated into the kingdom of France for the first time. From here, its history becomes a part of the history of France, much though some of its people may resist that notion. At the risk of offending these folks, we shall skip forward now, all the way to the late nineteenth century, by which time the castle on our promontory has been long abandoned and the rest of the misnamed Rennes-le-Château is a tidy if nondescript village of farmers and miners, population about 300 people, enough to support a Catholic priest of their own in their little Church of Sainte Marie-Madeleine. (This church may or may not be the one that was first built in the year 1000 or earlier; a fifteenth-century map of the local diocese shows two churches on the promontory, the other one being known as the Church of Saint Pierre. Even if it is the newer of the two, however, the Church of Sainte Marie-Madeleine is still at least 700 years old, because it is mentioned by name in an inventory dating from 1185.)

François-Bérenger Saunière.

In 1885, Rennes-le-Château was assigned a 33-year-old priest named François-Bérenger Saunière, a native of the Languedoc who had been ordained in Carcassonne, the nearest cathedral town. Initially, he seemed to serve his flock faithfully and unremarkably enough. For six years after his arrival, nothing untoward occurred.

Then, in 1891, he took it upon himself to repair the high altar of his church. Inside one of the altar’s pillars, workers found some hollow wooden tubes containing documents written in Latin. They took them directly to Saunière, he being the only person in the village with the ability to read them.

Not long afterward, Saunière launched a new program of building and renovation, on a scale dwarfing the repair of a single altar. He remodeled the interior of his church in a striking and often jarring Gothic style, built a new chapel in the cemetery, laid out a decorative grotto, built a water tower for his parishioners, and graded the road still used by all of those tourist buses of today. The crowning glory was an elegant Mediterranean-style residence which Saunière dubbed the Villa Béthanie. Behind its high fence could be found a dramatic garden running right up to the edge of the promontory, an ornate orangery, and a neoclassical observation tower offering gorgeous views. In the base of this latter structure, which Saunière named the Tour Magdala, was to be found his library, housing his impressive collection of occult books.

Villa Béthanie as depicted in Gabriel Knight 3.

The villagers would continue to talk about the salad days of Saunière for decades after the priest was no longer with them; some of their descendants continue to talk about them today. It is said that opera divas, high-ranking members of the French cabinet, and scions of the Habsburg dynasty came to stay in the villa. Saunière himself was frequently away from home, on jaunts that seemed to span the width and breadth of Europe. No one knew for sure where the money for all of this was coming from, but the rumor mill had it that the priest must have found a hidden treasure somewhere close to the village. The money certainly wasn’t coming from the Catholic Church, whose representatives were as flummoxed by what was going on in Rennes-le-Château as everyone else.

In 1910, the bishop of Carcassonne demanded that Saunière tell him plainly how he was funding all of this construction. Saunière flatly refused to do so. As a result, he was defrocked by an ecclesiastical court on December 5, 1911, temporarily at first and then permanently, once it had become clear that he intended to remain obdurate on this issue.

But Saunière simply refused to leave Rennes-le-Château in the aftermath of the verdict. He set up an altar inside his house and held Masses there for any who wished to come, in competition with the new priest who performed the same service inside the church that Saunière had remodeled so audaciously. He stayed a squatter on the territory of the Catholic Church until his death in 1917. When he was lying on his deathbed, a priest grudgingly agreed to come in from a neighboring parish to hear his Confession and administer the Last Rites. Real or purported witnesses have said that this priest came out of the sickroom looking visibly shaken, muttering that Saunière’s sins had been so immense that he had been unable to give the dying man the absolution he required to enter the Kingdom of God.

Albert Salamon, right, sits with Noël Corbu, on the boozy night in January of 1956 that injected the treasure of Rennes-le-Château into the mass-media bloodstream.

The foregoing have been the broad historical facts surrounding Rennes-le-Château, to whatever extent we are able to discern them. The story of how these facts evolved — some might say, were twisted — into one of the most prominent conspiracy theories of modern times is in some ways even more interesting. This tale begins less than three decades after the death of Bérenger Saunière, with the arrival in Rennes-le-Château of an inveterate dreamer, schemer, and chancer named Noël Corbu.

A venturesome streak ran through the Corbu family; Noël’s older brother Pierre had been an aviator who disappeared while trying to fly from Paris to New York in an experimental aircraft, just weeks before Charles Lindbergh became one of the most famous men in the world by accomplishing the feat in reverse. (So thin is the line between historical oblivion and eternal fame.) Born in Paris in 1912, Noël Corbu invested in airlines rather than becoming a pilot himself, then ran a pasta factory and tried his hand at writing detective novels. During the Nazi occupation of France, he started a black-market-smuggling operation in the Languedoc town of Perpignan, providing luxury goods to the Germans and French alike, whoever could afford to pay him. Alas, what he had seen as nothing more nefarious than a business opportunity primed for the taking got him tarred as a collaborator once the Nazi-installed Vichy regime was toppled. In 1945, he and his wife and two children made a hasty exit to the town of Bugarach, just twelve kilometers from Rennes-le-Château.

His new neighbors told him some of the rumors that swirled around the tiny but imposingly situated village and its former priest — rumors which were at this time still local to the area. If Bérenger Saunière’s will was to be believed, he had died penniless, except for the beautiful residence in which he had expired. This he had willed to, of all people, his housekeeper, a woman named Marie Dénaraud who, it was rumored, may have done more for him in his bedroom than wash the rugs, drapes, and linens. If Saunière had found a treasure, his home was surely the most logical first place to look for the booty, or at least for a clue as to its current whereabouts. Dénaraud was still living in the villa in 1945. Thoroughly intrigued, Noël Corbu decided to go and see her.

Marie Dénaraud as a younger woman.

One glance at the Villa Béthanie was enough to tell him that, if there was treasure still hidden inside its walls, Marie Dénaraud hadn’t figured out how to make it liquid. She had sold the priest’s occult library to an antiquarian bookstore in Britain well before the war, but she hadn’t been seen hawking any gold or jewels. The place was in serious disrepair: the garden overgrown with weeds, the shutters falling off the windows, the once-gleaming steel frame of the orangery now more rust than metal. The woman who answered his knock on the front door was in no better condition. Dénaraud was a slatternly scarecrow who looked like she hadn’t eaten a decent meal in years.

Negotiations ensued between the two, about which we know sadly little. Was the savvy black marketeer played by the even savvier old woman, who could surely sense his mercenary motives? Did she drop hints about what might lie hidden somewhere inside the falling-down house? Maybe. Or maybe there was more mutual understanding and affection than that cynical interpretation allows for. At any rate, Corbu became a regular caller at the house, and on July 22, 1946, the two signed a contract. In it, Dénaraud gave the Villa Béthanie to Corbu outright, in return for a pledge from him that he would allow her to remain living there for the rest of her days.

If Corbu had signed the contract in the hope that Dénaraud would then let him in on some lucrative secret, that hope was frustrated soon after, when Dénaraud suffered a stroke which left her unable to speak. Corbu did find a substantial quantity of documents in the house: bills and work orders for the many construction and renovation projects, account books, legal records of Saunière’s difficulties with his bishop, even some personal journals. But none of it seemed to explain where his money had come from; nor did it have anything to say about any treasure that might still be hidden somewhere. If the Latin documents that had been found in the altar’s pillar were among the ones in the house, Corbu was not enough of a scholar to recognize them for what they were.

More years went by, during which the villa only grew more dilapidated. Dénaraud seldom poked her head out of doors, and Corbu too was rarely around, being engaged with business ventures that took him as far away as Morocco, where he made and just as quickly lost a small fortune in the sugar industry. In 1953, Marie Dénaraud died. She was buried next to Bérenger Saunière in the churchyard in accordance with the terms of her will, prompting a fresh round of tongue-wagging from the village old-timers.

Dénaraud’s death came shortly after Corbu’s Moroccan sugar disaster. Perhaps not coincidentally — on either point — he now began to take a serious commercial interest in her old residence for the very first time. He brought teams of workmen in to clean the place up, intending to turn it into a restaurant and hotel. But Corbu needed an angle compelling enough to make people drive up the twisting road that dead-ended here. He needed a reason to put Rennes-le-Château on the map, as it were. He turned to the same reason that had caused him to knock on Marie Dénaraud’s door for the first time eight years earlier. For if it had worked on him, he reasoned, it ought to work just as well on others.

He bought himself a tape recorder and recorded a précis of the strange case of Bérenger Saunière and his mysterious riches. His operative theory at this point was that the treasure Saunière had uncovered had once belonged to the French crown. In 1248, just a few years after the Cathar movement had been decapitated and the Languedoc incorporated firmly into the kingdom of France, King Louis IX had invaded Egypt at the head of the Seventh Crusade. He had left his mother, Blanche of Castile, to look after things in Paris while he was away. But the city had been plagued with unrest during this period, being stuffed to the gills with wayward noblemen who couldn’t see their way to being ruled by a woman. Corbu now concluded that Blanche must have emptied the royal treasury to keep it out of unfriendly hands, sending the whole kit and caboodle to the war-ravaged Languedoc, the part of the kingdom that was farthest from its capital in both geography and spirit. Who would think to look for it there? No one, it seemed, until Saunière had found some record of it hidden inside his church.

But in order to connect these two dots, Corbu had also to explain why the treasure had never been recalled to Paris after Louis IX had returned to the capital and things had settled down there. By way of doing so, he noted that Blanche had died in 1252, two years before her son’s return. (The hapless fellow had gotten himself captured by the Egyptians and spent four years as their hostage before he was ransomed.) Amidst the shuffle of regents and monarchs, the royal family had just plain forgotten where they’d put the treasure, in the same way that I can never figure out what drawer my wife has put the batteries in when she goes off to a conference and leaves me all alone at home.

It was a theory anyway. Corbu set great store by the fact that Philip IV, king of France from 1285 to 1314, had been infamously cash-poor, to the point of having to counterfeit money to keep his government from collapsing. Surely this was because silly Blanche had misplaced most of his inheritance a few decades earlier. No mention of the confusion appeared in any historical documents because the whole mess was just too embarrassing to talk about.

Based on no particular evidence, Corbu declared confidently that the royal treasure found by Saunière consisted of 18.5 million gold coins weighing 180 tons, plus countless jewels and religious objects; together it would be worth 4 billion francs in 1950s money. For all practical purposes, the store of wealth would have been inexhaustible. The primary purpose of Saunière’s many foreign trips had been to turn Medieval coinage into present-day francs, by melting the coins down and selling the lumps of raw metal that resulted. “A person from Carcassonne who is still alive assured me that he saw in the priest’s house a chest full of gold ingots,” Corbu insisted. Who could doubt such ironclad testimony?

In 1954, Corbu opened his restaurant. His taped story of Bérenger Saunière and the royal treasure was played to all of the diners during their meals. “Thus in this quiet village with its magnificent view and glorious past, there is one of the most fabulous treasures in the whole world,” he said at the end of the tape. Tell your friends! Don’t they deserve to bask in the mystery too?

The restaurant did well enough that Corbu could afford to convert the Tour Magdala into a hotel the following year. Meanwhile he continued to look for ways to get the word out to folks beyond the immediate vicinity of Rennes-le-Château. He hit pay dirt in January of 1956, when he lured in Albert Salamon, a journalist for the newspaper La Dépêche du Midi (“The South of France Dispatch”). Under the banner headline “The Fabulous Discovery of the Priest with Billions!”, Salamon laid it on thick. The trilogy of articles he wrote for his newspaper opens like a Gothic horror story, more Bram Stoker than Edward R. Murrow.

Dusk was advancing rapidly over the countryside as my friend’s cantankerous car carried us with steady rhythm along the steep winding road to the “high place” of Rennes-le-Château. At the top of the hill, the car was swallowed up among the centuries-old stones of an ancient queenly citadel, and then the tower appeared, a black shadow on the starry background.

The aim of the nighttime excursion? To answer an invitation to meet with M. Noël Corbu, founder and proprietor of the Hôtel de la Tour at Rennes-le-Château. I was eager to make the acquaintance of the brother of the test pilot Pierre Corbu, who died in 1927 with his comrade Lacoste on the Bluebird while he was trying for the third time to cross the Atlantic.

Mme. Corbu served us a meal of chicken, accompanied by fine wines. In the dining room, my curiosity was aroused by a portrait of a priest with a piercing gaze. “A relation, M. Corbu?”

A thick file was placed before me. The diary of the priest, plus hundreds of letters, bills, plans, estimates… and the story began.

These last words would prove true in a more all-encompassing way than Salamon could ever have dreamed at the time. For the media story of Rennes-le-Château really does begin precisely here. He was the first in a long line of credulous or calculating writers — the jury is still out for many of them — who have spun yarns around the little village that are as exciting and enticing as any avowedly fictional thriller. Seen in this light, it feels only fitting that the process culminated almost 50 years after Salamon’s articles in a bestselling, zeitgeist-defining novel and blockbuster movie.

For now, though, Salamon left the Villa Béthanie with a head stuffed full of mythical imaginings.

It is one o’clock in the morning. The ghosts that sat down at the host’s table in the course of this thrilling story have kept secret right to the end the mysterious hiding place whose “open sesame” the abbé had stumbled upon. And when the door of the Hôtel de la Tour was opened onto the night, and I held out my hand to M. Corbu in au revoir, there seemed to me to be shining, where a moment ago there were stars, millions of golden pieces of the fabulous treasure…

It seems to have been the imagination of Salamon rather than the equally prodigious one of Corbu which added a new twist to the story, one that would become very important in the course of time. At the very end of his third and last article, Salamon mentioned the longstanding legends about “Cathar treasure, including the famous Holy Grail” being hidden somewhere in the Languedoc. Might it actually have been this treasure rather than that of the French crown that Saunière had stumbled upon? It did seem more plausible in some ways. Corbu too would gradually adopt this theory of the case.

Over the years that followed Salamon’s articles, Corbu’s Hôtel de la Tour marked the center of a slowly expanding circle of curiosity and greed. The phenomenon was nothing like what it would become, but it was sufficient to support a hospitality business in this rather far-flung location. The smoky air inside Corbu’s restaurant was filled with the speculations and arguments of mystics, cranks, and dreamers.

By 1960, the circle had expanded enough to reach the Parisian headquarters of the ORTF, France’s national broadcasting service. A film crew came to Rennes-le-Château to shoot a television documentary about the village and the mystery; these were quite possibly the first moving images ever captured in the place. The program aired throughout France in April of 1961, under the name of La Roue Tourne (“The Wheel Turns”). As far as I have been able to determine, only a single clip has survived, just 40 seconds in length. It reenacts of the discovery of the mysterious Latin documents inside a pillar next to the church’s altar. Corbu has gamely put on priestly vestments to play the role of Saunière as the documents are handed to him by a member of the work crew.

Outside of this clip, we have only a handful of newspapers reviews to fall back on. These serve to remind us that the more things change, the more they stay the same. One of them, which appeared in L’Indépendant, mentions a “hypnotist” cum treasure hunter named Domergue, who “based on the revelations of his medium, thinks that the famous treasure is actually contained in fourteen barrels, but that one of them has been emptied by the abbé. Even if only thirteen remain, however, their discovery would still cause a considerable stir around the marble escarpment of Rennes-le-Château.” (This is an understatement!) Our friend Domergue is sanguine about his prospects of success: “I’ll be resuming my excavations in June. I’m not very far away from my target, and before the end of the summer I’ll have reached the gallery leading to the barrels of gold.” The journalist chronicling all of this wonders, a little plaintively, “Will the secret and the mystery which surround the treasure be resolved one of these days?” The naïve fellow has no idea that “the secret and the mystery” are just getting off the ground.

The documentary caught the attention of at least one sober-minded historian as well. René Descadeillas had lived most of his 53 years in Carcassonne, whose municipal library he had headed since 1950. He knew the area’s past and present intimately. In December of 1962, he deposited into his library’s archives the results of a careful factual inquiry into Bérenger Saunière’s controversial tenure in Rennes-le-Château. In some ways, his investigation still stands as unique, in that it was undertaken early enough that some of the events in questions were still within living memory. Trolling through the documents of the period and interviewing witnesses and their descendants, he uncovered some interesting facts and testimony that cut against more fantastical interpretations of the case.

René Descadeillas.

He learned, for example, that Saunière had already conducted some renovations of the church before 1891, for which he had paid the less than piddling sum of 518 francs, which was itself far beyond the means of his modest priestly stipend; he must, in other words, have had some alternative source of money even before the discovery of those Latin documents. Further, there were reports that Saunière had been explicitly asked by the village mayor what said documents were about, and had replied that they dealt strictly with technical details of the construction of the church. He could have been lying, of course, but his manner hadn’t struck anyone present at the time as particularly suspicious.

Descadeillas put forward a freshly prosaic explanation for Saunière’s sudden influx of cash after 1891, assuming he had been the beneficiary of one at all. It involved a windfall discovery of a sort, but one of a more modest scope and scale than our hypnotist friend’s fourteen barrels full of gold, much less Corbu’s 180 tons of the stuff. During the chaos of the French Revolution a century before Saunière’s arrival, when atheism had briefly become the order of the day throughout the country, an elderly village priest named Antoine Bigou was reported to have “buried his savings at the same time as the religious objects that he wished to preserve for the future.” As Descadeillas described it, “this was not a ‘treasure’ in the usual sense of the word, but a nest egg.” He actually talked to a still-living stepsister of Marie Dénaraud, who was “adamant” that Saunière had found “a pot of gold pieces” — but only the single pot — during the renovations of 1891. This fortuitous find could easily have planted the seed for the rumors of a lost treasure — rumors which would only grow in the telling, as such things inevitably do.

Still, the fact remained that such a comparatively modest quantity of gold couldn’t have paid for all of Saunière’s construction projects. Descadeillas strongly suspected that the rest of Saunière’s wealth came from criminal enterprises rather than from buried treasure. His younger brother Alfred had also been a priest, a known corrupt one who had gotten himself excommunicated in 1904 for stealing from his flock and fathering a child with one of them; he had then drunk himself to death the following year. An intriguing letter from Saunière to his lawyer described this brother as his “middle-man for generous deeds.” Descadeillas was convinced that one part of the brothers’ mutual activities had been “the selling of the Mass,” a way for people who were living less than righteous lives — such as gangland operators, perhaps? — to buy absolution for themselves; family members of the newly deceased unrighteous could likewise pay the priests to buy their relatives a ticket into Heaven. Descadeillas tracked down a postal worker in Couiza who remembered Saunière stopping in almost every day to pick up and deliver suspicious little envelopes — envelopes full, Descadeillas was certain, of money going one way and certificates of absolution going the other way. This sort of thing, known historically as the selling of “indulgences,” had once been accepted practice in the Catholic Church, had in fact been the proximate cause of Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation. Now, however, it was known as simony, one of the gravest sins which a member of the clergy could commit. The old story about the priest who went to deliver the Last Rites to Saunière, only to come out of the sickroom looking shocked to the very core of his being, suddenly made a lot more sense in this light.

But it seemed unlikely that even simony would have paid well enough to fit all of the facts of the case. The brothers must have been up to other sorts of corrupt dealings; of this Descadeillas was sure, even if he couldn’t prove it. He noted one more piece of circumstantial evidence: Saunière’s financial situation seemed to have taken a dive during the years after his brother’s death in 1905. He had funded little to no new construction after that point, and he had even had to take out a substantial bank loan in 1913 just to maintain his villa. Was this due to the loss of his “middle-man?” It seemed that he might truly have died as penniless as his will had claimed. The bank had finally forgiven the loan after Saunière’s death, when it decided that Marie Dénaraud had no realistic means of paying it back. Bankers usually have a sense about such things.

Much remained unexplained, but Descadeillas believed that the explanations, should they ever come, would prove to have more to do with everyday corruption and criminality than any centuries-old treasure trove. “The treasure of Rennes does not exist,” he wrote in conclusion. “But the secret of the priest of Rennes is real. And it is there that the mystery resides.”

All of this was perfectly reasonable and sensible, but it was always going to be doomed to have a tough time competing against tales of a grandiose Cathar treasures hoard. It didn’t help that René Descadeillas was a quiet, scholarly man by nature, content to write his report, drop it into his library’s archive for posterity, and move on to the next project. No film crews came around to get his side of the case. That said, we haven’t heard the last of Descadeillas, a rare and therefore invaluable voice of reason in the story of Rennes-le-Château.

For the time being, though, life went on as usual at the Villa Béthanie. The treasure hunters streamed through, each of them leaving empty-handed but full of new esoteric theories about where to dig next time. They became a nuisance for the local landowners, who were constantly finding new holes in the most likely and unlikely of places, as if their holdings had been infested by giant moles. In 1965, the municipal government issued a decree: no more excavations allowed without a permit. That helped somewhat, but the most dedicated seekers just took to digging under the cover of night. It was more atmospheric at night anyway.

Gabriel Knight 3′s Aussie treasure hunter John Wilkes, who takes an elaborate high-tech approach to the search, is of a type well-known to the locals around Rennes-le-Château. In the 1960s, metal detectors, Geiger counters, and dowsing rods were the tools of choice, but the spirit remained the same.

That same year, Noël Corbu sold the Villa Béthanie to a man named Henri Buthion. Restless serial entrepreneur that he was, Corbu had set up a side business making ladies’ fans and lampshades in the villa’s orangery. It was going pretty well; he wanted to expand it, but there just wasn’t enough space to do so in such a little village. Meanwhile much of the fun of running a hotel and keeping the mystery of Bérenger Saunière alive through year after year in which nothing concrete was discovered had run its course for him and his wife. So, he sold out and went on to the next adventure. Sadly, though, the adventure of life was almost over for him: he was killed in a car accident in 1968.

But the ball that Corbu had set rolling now had an unstoppable momentum of its own. Buthion continued to run the Hôtel de la Tour pretty much as his predecessor had, albeit with slightly less dramatic flair. He would be the witness and benefactor rather than the instigator of the next chapter of the saga of Saunière’s treasure. The whole thing was about to get a massive injection of plot inflation from a couple of new voices on the scene. This shit was about to get a whole lot weirder.

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 Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln; Bloodline of the Holy Grail: The Hidden Lineage of Jesus Revealed by Laurence Gardner; The Treasure of Rennes-le-Château: A Mystery Solved by Bill Putnam and John Edwin Wood; The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend by Richard Barber; Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions by Ronald H. Fritze; The Tomb of God: The Body of Jesus and the Solution to a 2,000-Year-Old Mystery by Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger; Rennes-le-Château et l’enigme de l’or maudit by Jean Markale. Skeptical Inquirer of November/December 2004; La Dépêche du Midi of January 12, 13, and 14 1956; L’Indépendant of April 22 1961.

Online sources include the websites Rennes-le-Château: Where History Meets Evidence and Priory of Sion.com

Choice of Games LLC: Our Hosted Games Hidden Gems Are On Sale!

2026-03-05T14:35:48+00:00

The 2026 Hosted Games Hidden Gems Sale is here!

You’ve cast your votes and chosen five underrated Hosted Games—ChoiceScript games created by players like you and published by us—that haven’t (yet) gotten the attention they deserve! These “Hidden Gems,” selected by a highly scientific poll conducted on our forums, are on sale on all platforms this week! Pick them up for discounts up to 40% off until March 12th on the platform of your choice: Android, the Android Omnibus app, the iOS Omnibus app, the website, and on the Amazon Android Marketplace! Don’t Wake Me Up and Community College Hero: Fun and Games are also available on Steam.

Gold Machine: Read the Manual

2026-03-04T19:16:40+00:00

Pairs of paratexts and a pared-back text.

Paratext in the 8-bit Era

While Infocom is remembered fondly for its packaging and documentation, other game publishers of the 1980s and 1990s extended the texts and contexts of their products through pack-ins and in-universe content. It was fairly common for games–even those packaged without frills or extras–to ship with manuals written with an in-universe or mimetic voice. Consider this short passage from the manual for Telarium’s Nine Princes in Amber (1985):

The Language of Amber
Artful communication is of great importance in Amber, and the Thari language reflects this, for half of our verbs are “communication” verbs.

Though dialogue must be precise and short, by its nature it suggests a great deal more than is actually spoken.

Even if the results were sometimes imprecise, manuals were often leveraged as a means to extending the narrative frame of a game.

At other times, the presentation limitations of platforms mandated that manuals provide essential information about the contents of a game’s world. For instance, most (all?) players of Atari’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982) would have needed the detailed descriptions and narrative backgrounding included with its manual to understand what the game was attempting to dramatize.

In those early days, paratext was often the only way to gamify certain types of narrative complexity. When approached creatively, paratext could serve as more than a bandaid, instead creating one-of-a-kind gaming experiences. An early and transformational example is, of course, Infocom’s Deadline. What began as a way to work around the presentation and memory limitations of 1982 microcomputers became a well-wrought narrative innovation.

The best packages of those days turned technical limitations into opportunity and, just as my favorite poets do, make the most of constraint.

Temple of Apshai (1979)

Automated Simulation’s (later Epyx) Temple of Apshai, one of the first computer role-playing games sold for home micros, shipped with a manual positively stuffed with text descriptions for rooms, treasures, traps, and enemies. Setting aside very real considerations of memory and storage, there simply wasn’t anywhere within the game’s interface for presenting these various quantities of text.

We are in “room no. 3,” and here is the manual’s description:

Room Three-A finely carved and painted mural fills the east wall of the passage, opposite the opening, depicting men tilling the soil. A ransacked backpack rests under the mural. A roaring sound can be heard from the north.

The on-screen enemy, a skeleton, is described as follows:

Skeletons-are the animated skeletons of men which now stalk the underground passages in search of victims. They are said to devour the soul of their victim as it exits the dying body.

Temple of Apshai hasn’t aged very well, mechanically. Long load times, eccentric controls, and repetitive play will likely limit its audience to historians and nostalgiacs, but this manual is both more interesting and less difficult to consume. The designers’ commitment to atmosphere and mood is nothing short of stunning. A significant portion of the manual’s supplemental text has no ludic function (some of it provides hints regarding secret doors and traps). There are 233 room descriptions in total, as well as 73 treasure descriptions and 25 monster descriptions. Considering its vintage, Temple of Apshai is a vividly-rendered place despite its highly constrained computing and presentation context.

Pool of Radiance (1988)

SSI’s landmark CRPG Pool of Radiance shipped with an “Adventurer’s Journal”” containing texts and drawings discovered in-game. Like Temple of Apshai, PoR‘s interface was not suited to displaying these paratexts. Players would additionally need to refer back to these texts during play, which would have necessitated a kind of “journal” interface that was almost certainly beyond reach.

Compare this interface with the content of the journal, and it becomes clear why paratext was a necessary solution to one of PoR‘s design challenges.

Like Temple of Apshai, PoR features paratext that is not merely compensatory but additive. The “Adventurer’s Journal” adds worldbuilding and narrative framework to what would otherwise be a more abstract, rules-based simulation.

Moonmist (1986)

The paratext accompanying Moonmist is something of a mixed success. Its gray box packaging includes a letter from the protagonist’s friend Tamara, a copy of Legendary Ghosts of Cornwall by a “Lady Lisbeth Norris,” a “Welcome to Tresyllian Castle” brochure, and, curiously, a Moonmist iron-on.

Legendary Ghosts of Cornwall

Although its “Festeron Public Library” inset (cf Zork trilogy and Wishbringer) doesn’t quite land as an Easter egg, this collection of ghost stories is a fun read with appealing, woodcut-style illustrations. Effectively contextualizing the legend of Tresyllian “White Lady” within a wider cultural phenomenon of what faraway Americans might imagine as a “haunted England,” the ghost stories foster a stronger sense of place.

Illustration for “The Haunted Orchard of Penzance”

A Letter from Tamara

Tamara’s letter consists of three pages of handwritten cursive on cream-colored Tresyllian Castle stationary. It’s a massive exposition dump, as every in-game character (and two besides) gets a paragraph of their own. We learn, for instance, about Tamara’s feelings toward Iris Vane:

One person I could do without is Iris Vane (she’s really called the Honorable Iris Vane, but you won’t catch ME calling her that). She’s a Mayfair debutante who came on as an instant friend of mine. But there’s something bitchy about her, and I think she’s secretly in love with Jack. I guess castles breed romantic tangles…

The use of “bitchy” is a bit jarring, I think, in a text that deliberately aims for the younger side of young adult, but I suppose we 1980s kids grew up fast. Tamara is also weirdly glib about the untimely death of Deirdre, one of the mysteries the protagonist sets out to unravel.

Deirdre’s death is really fueling the imaginations of some of the castle servants. Supposedly this place is haunted by an ancient ghost called the White Lady. Now they’re saying that the White Lady has been seen in the newer Residential Wing of the castle (like any good ghost she used to stick to the old section) and that she looks just like Deirdre. WHOO-EE-OOO!

Now, perhaps “servants” do have overactive imaginations, and alleged ghost sightings might be funny, but Deirdre’s death is untimely and its circumstances are mysterious. In Tamara’s defense, she isn’t the only one who hasn’t let Deirdre’s death get in the way of a laugh or two. I’ll revisit this in a future post.

The prose is clearly utilitarian, and one imagines its author(s) running down a checklist of things to explicate. I don’t object, though. A lot of content in the Pool of Radiance “Adventurer’s Journal” similarly prioritizes function, and the game is nevertheless better because of that paratext. The same can be said of Tamara’s letter: it adds useful content in a way that the in-game text of an Infocom game could not. The formatting, obviously, would have been impossible and likely undesirable. Likewise, craft conventions would prohibit this kind of worldbuilding avalanche. Finally, the form of this text—a letter—has a useful function, possessing as it does an in-universe rationale and distinctive (for good or ill) voice.

While the content of the letter may invite future criticisms, Tamara’s missive is more additive than compensatory.

The Moonmist Iron-on

There’s no use overthinking the inclusion of a Moonmist t-shirt iron-on. It may not be useful to think about it at all. While I don’t typically criticize games in terms of mimetic fidelity, I am comfortable supposing that the fancy castle people of this story do not wear t-shirts to dinner parties, if they wear them at all.

“Welcome to Tresyllian Castle”

Moonmist’s most commented-upon paratext is the tourist brochure that Tamara encloses with her letter. It effectively approximates the rhetoric of such documents, reading more naturally than Tamara’s latter. Even if it also has a distinct utilitarian feel, tourist brochures are by their very nature utilitarian. This representative snippet from the document’s conclusion is the type of does exactly what we might ask of it, as we are, after all, tourists:

It is in Cornwall that King Arthur held court, at a spot now known as Camelford. Across these moors rode Galahad and Lancelot. On these shores Iseult pined for her lost love, Tristram. And on these mighty cliffs Jack killed the giants Cormoran, Galligantus, and Thunderbore.

The provided map is a little undercooked for my tastes, with seven rooms labeled “bedroom.” Nevertheless, it will likely come in handy for navigating a game world that is only intermittently vivid (cf the previous post in this series).

It might surprise readers that most critical assessments of this document, which seems perfectly fine on its face, tilt negatively. The reason for this is, as we have previously discussed, is that Moonmist frequently feels underimplemented by the standards of its day. I have suggested that Infocom’s idea of expansion embraced breadth rather than depth, and that players would likely have preferred one fulfilling game over four unfulfilling ones.

I return to this critical thesis because many rooms in Moonmist are barely described at all. They are instead described in the tourist brochure. Consider, for instance, the in-game description of the sitting room:

It looks even lovelier than it sounds in the tourist brochure.

It’s a comfy place to read a book, play the piano, or just relax.

Meanwhile, in the tourist brochure, we find this:

The Sitting room is a delightful time to spend an idle afternoon. It is filled with warm colors and invitingly comfortable furniture. The yellow silk brocade has covered the walls for over a hundred years, and the faded carpet patterned with peacocks and chrusanthemums was purchased in India by Lady Gayle Tresyllian in 1912.

A guest at the castle might write a letter at the Louis XV writing desk that once belonged to Marie Antoinette. Or play a romantic melody on the grand piano especially built by the Klugenhofer Klavierwerke in Germany. Or curl up with a book on the window seat, charmingly decorated with small carved wyverns projecting like gargoyles from either end.

Some of this content would be overkill for a parser game of the time (many players might think it’s too much for a contemporary game). Such descriptive generosity would have a natural home in a feelie. However, many of the nouns mentioned only in the brochure are, in fact, implemented in-game. The only way for a player to know about them is to consult the brochure.

In this post, I’ve attempted to demonstrate the value of including essential in-game information in paratext. Why have players criticized this practice in Moonmist, while accepting the examples explored above? In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Pool of Radiance, and Temple of Apshai, paratext overcame the limits of their mediums to enhance player experience.

Most reviewers of Moonmist, on the other hand, seem to resent consulting paratext for room descriptions and implemented nouns. Parser games are expected to provide this information as a matter of course. While I have always asserted that packaging and pack-ins are essential to any Infocom experience, I do not think that they should substitute for what most people consider the most basic features of a parser game. While Temple of Apshai had no ready means of printing descriptive text, the same thing cannot be said of an Infocom game releasing nine years after the PDP version of Zork first appeared.

Why did this happen? While copy protection might have been a consideration, Moonmist clocks in at the absolute size limit for the Commodore 64 and could not have contained more descriptive passages. The tourist brochure is an effective piece of in-universe text, but its rhetorical situation has negatively affected its reception over the years. I hope that contextualizing Moonmist among more effective games of the 8-bit era can explain why.

What actually is in Moonmist, then? Is there even anything to talk about? My answer is “yes,” even if its sparse gameplay probably cannot fill an essay on its own. While I would hate to spoil any surprises, I’m sure we can find something to discuss. Stay tuned for the conclusion of this series, “Dead Girl.”

Zarf Updates: The Game Narrative Kaleidoscope

2026-03-04T15:05:50+00:00

The Game Narrative Kaleidoscope is a collection of lightning articles (I just made that term up) about narrative design. It's out today! I'm in it! Along with approximately a zillion other authors and designers.

You may recognize: Sharang Biswas, Naomi Clark, Paris Buttfield-Addison, Bruno Dias, Jason Dyer, Gwen C. Katz, and you know what a list of names is silly. Also I don't know half of them as well they deserve, and less than half of them half as well as I should like.

The book sprouted from a chat between Lynn Cherny (who I worked with briefly at SpiritAI) and Jon Ingold (of Inkle). A self-published anthology by writers about writing? Sounds easy! Just ask around! Jon did, and a few days later he had hundreds of people expressing interest.

The essays are cheerfully disorganized. They're connected by "see this related topic" links, but by his own admission Jon added the links in a hurry. You can follow them on a networked walk through the book, or ignore them and read in order, or -- my recommendation -- open to a random page and say "'Ere, what's all this then?"

As for my contribution, here's a sample line from my essay:

often I learn a game’s chapter count from the achievements list on its Steam

Pick up your own copy to learn how that sentence begins and ends!

You can buy The Game Narrative Kaleidoscope from Lulu in paperback or hardback form. Probably other online book outlets too. I don't know how that works.

Oh, and Jon's doing a podcast series with some of the authors. See link above. I'm not currently scheduled but who knows.

Oh, if you're at GDC, I'll have a copy at the IFTF table.

(Note: I will receive a small share of the revenue from this book. If it makes enough to be worth distributing.)

Renga in Blue: Misadventure 5 (1982)

2026-03-02T19:43:08+00:00

This is a continuation of the story of Bob Krotts, which I wrote about here, so you should read that post before you read this one. Krotts ran a “Softcore Software Company” which published seven TRS-80 games, six of them landing in 1982, and I had played the first three.

I still can’t play Misadventure 4, Casino of Pleasure, but I can link to the Launchbox entry which includes a tape picture as well as cover art.

The blurb reads:

Your first problem will be finding the hidden casino! This is accomplished by using traditional adventure-type methods.

If (and when) you make it to the casino with the money, you must increase it so that you have enough money needed to pay-off the gangsters who await you at the casino exits! Beware the pit boss! Don’t have too many free drinks brought to you by sexy young drink girls! Above all, enjoy the many gambling devices…

This suggests a dual-gameplay, starting with “traditional” adventure and turning into a straight gambling game after. Perhaps the game will show up someday, but for now let’s get to that sexy, sexy, existential dread of Naked Nightmare.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History.

I’m not kidding with the existential dread, not just in the weird image on the cover (Krotts ran a photo studio so I’m sure this was intentional) but the blurb on the back.

In Naked Nightmare you awake with no memory and no clothes! It will take all of your cunning to successfully complete this Misadventure! Beware the helicopter of death! Avoid the lethal laser beams! Try to find out why the naked lady laughs at your groin!

WARNING before moving on: early on there is a slur for a little person. No need for a not-safe-for-certain-work-environments notice this time, though.

The opening drops you in what is essentially a random-message maze; locations are fixed, some places have fixed descriptions, but lots of places pull a message from a random pool.

At the start, you have the choice between going north or east, but east kills you with hidden laser beams.

AUTOMATIC LASER BEAMS SLICE YOU
INTO A USELESS MASS OF FLASH!!!

Going north leads to the first random description room.

Other possibilities include:

YOU SEE NOTHING IMPORTANT AT THE MOMENT.

YOU SEE A RAT LAZILY CRAWL AWAY FROM YOU!

YOU SEE A BAT FLYING DOWN THE LONG HALL.

YOU SEE AN INSANE WOMAN RUN PAST!

As all the exits are north/south/east/west, I decided to try a grid style map rather than a node style map. However, since there are “jumps” (because otherwise rooms would land on top of each other) I’ve marked each room with a dot (for “random” rooms) or words (for things fixed in place). I first saw this trick with an article by Richard Ramella so let’s call it a Ramella-style map.

The spirals indicate to me this might be what the author had in mind in the first place.

The “sign & kicked” is just two steps away from the start, where a VIBRATING SIGN claims that PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE – SOMETIMES!

The sign is a clue that sometimes, actually quite rarely, you’ll have an encounter in this room (just leave and come back repeatedly). I only came across it via luck on a reset, as I had tested this theory with 20 no-shows in a row.

Following the path past all the “random” rooms…

…eventually leads to a button.

Pressing the button causes a sound in the distance. I wandered a bit trying to figure out what that was; this included going all the way back to the start and testing the laser defense. The dead end immediately adjacent to the first button now shows a second button.

After pressing the second button, I went searching again; the spiral up to the north passes by a “sign” which says BEWARE CIRCLEVISION and a red telephone. The reverse 7-4-1 clue suggests DIAL 147 but that gets no answer. Where the 147 goes to instead is at the end of the hall, where a portrait on the wall has moved aside.

DIAL 147 gets a third button, and again you are left to search all over the map to hunt down an effect. Nothing seems visible now, because it turns out the laser grid to the east of the start room (marked with a ! on my map) is finally down.

No indication otherwise this would happen. This reminds me of Asylum where you find a key and have to hunt over previously-searched territory.

Continuing with a new map…

…going south results in an ALARM where YOU ARE CAUGHT! (No more detail than that. Stormtroopers? Ninjas? Old ladies with deadly purses?) Going all the way to the end to the east results in another laser beam barrier.

Most of the side rooms are deadly, too; three of them have ropes where if you PULL ROPE you either have the ceiling drop on you or the rope turns out to be a snake and you die.

One room has a ladder, but it, too, is death. (This is feeling a lot like the office-building maze from Misadventure 2 with lots of trial and error.)

The exit is at a room with a dresser, where you can climb it and then pull a rope to reveal an attic. Before that I should mention you can MOVE DRESSER to find some pants, then WEAR PANTS. There’s no inventory tracking other than if you have pants or not.

Getting into that aforementioned attic, it is described as completely dark. Taking a cue from Sewers of Moscow (Misadventure 3), just FEEL is enough to make progress.

The door can be bashed open with just KICK DOOR, leading to a roof.

Things get a bit dicey here; I found a cord on the flagpole from examining it, tried PULL CORD, and found that it sent my pants up to the top.

YOUR PANTS ARE NOW AT THE TOP OF THE FLAGPOLE!

UH OH… A HELICOPTER IS APPROACHING!

IT DROPS A BOMB – YOU DIE!

(Suddenly it feels like I’m playing Lost Pig.) Somehow, it works to examine your pants (which describe a belt loop with no belt) and CLIP LOOP; then when you pull the cord you go up the flagpole with the pants. But how did they go up when you were just pulling the loop? It’s almost like there was an implicit action there of hanging the pants if you don’t do the beltloop trick.

Now you need to get the attention of the helicopter, but if you just WAVE (my first impulse) you fall off and die. I had some visualization trouble here, because I assumed the player is clinging to the pole here, but following the steps above, you are being held solely by your pants. You need to HOLD FLAGPOLE (I got this from the source code) and only then WAVE. The helicopter will lower a ladder; you can unclip the loop, then CLIMB LADDER to victory. It is unclear why they were bombing us in the other reality, other than the lack of pants.

Sewers (Misadventure 3) was mostly “clean” but still had one scene; here I have no idea why this game falls into the series other than the “naked” part. I wonder if anyone bought the game and was disappointed purely for that reason (not that it’s mostly a random maze of death where you have to push buttons and pull ropes in the right order, except for the final puzzle with some guess-the-verb tossed in). I think the final 1982 installment ramps the action back up, so to speak, so coming up: Misadventure 6, where you are a super hero with unusual powers.

Renga in Blue: Death Star: The View From Outer Space Is Breathless

2026-02-28T16:58:53+00:00

…I thought “well this could mean, shall we say, a mass market piece of hardware. Shops were springing up, not that many but they were springing up, retail computer shops, and they were selling software and hardware and I thought “well this is an opportunity”. So I thought “well why don’t we try it?” I put together a number of games, packages to sell, did all the artwork, bags, you know we’d copy those, we’d staple the bags together at night, and I’d take one or two days off during the week and run around to the few computer retail outlets that were here in Victoria and direct sell. And I sold a lot. I sold a hell of a lot.

— Reynolds quoted in Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality by Melanie Swalwell

I finished the game; this continues from my previous post.

Since I pulled the verbs from the walkthrough, I spent a while trying to keep from checking hints the rest of the way, and that was a mistake.

Last time I had, after immense struggle and finally giving up, realized the game shifted the verb SHOOT to the verb BLAST, and immediately after a long tape load you needed to BLAST TROOPER on the very next turn. (Even if I had the patience to apply my verb list to a game where the verbs swap every few rooms, it wouldn’t have helped here.)

The elevator, as already mentioned, is a trap: you’ll end up skipping the next (required to win) section, although there’s an aspect that makes this obvious before the next screen appears: the tape load time is given as a whopping 128 seconds, because the tape has to move farther.

Avoiding this trap-exit and heading north…

…is another Jillyan, although this one is peaceful. (I am glad the author didn’t go the route of allowing another BLAST — the weapon is out of juice — because I could see reflexively killing the Jillyan and softlocking as another “puzzle”.) This might have been harder to work out except with the verb list available (BLAST, GET, LOOK, DROP, TALK, SAY, GO, PRAY) there was no other way of being aggressive, so the right word is TALK. The trooper asks

DO I KNOW YOU?

and the right response is the word PAX that was learned by rubbing the prism.

While I came across this immediately (again, nothing much to do with the verb list) I was very frustrated by it, because there really is no reason a prism in a sealed case would give us a codeword to pass on to a spy. There’s a tendency among adventure games I’ve taken to terming Codekey Anywhere Syndrome, where a clue for unlocking something across the map is given in a place where it makes no logical sense. With a physical key there’s no problem having it land just about anywhere on a map, but authors tend to treat “information” keys the same way even when the logic doesn’t make nearly as much sense. This isn’t just a cranky nitpick, as sometimes the nonsense nature of the connection can make the puzzle hard to solve; rather than a puzzle solved by thinking about the plot, this is a puzzle solved by ignoring the plot. Epic Hero 1 had a moment where numbers you saw through a telescope somehow matched a safe underwater, but at least in that circumstance one can imagine a person seeing the numbers first and setting their combination accordingly (…still admittedly dodgy, though).

Moving on, the spy gave us a ring and told us about an idol. The idol isn’t hard to find. Just to the east:

This reveals a BALL which turns out to be an explosive.

Going through all this also reveals a secret exit to the east and allows exit to the next (correct) tape load.

Smoothly going through the prior section, I was confident the verbs would pull me through this time (LOOK, CLIMB, INSERT, OPEN, TURN, THROW, READ, CRAWL, JUMP) but the game found another way to make the parser painful. The goal here is to get to the east side of the corridor and turn the wheel (which is only distantly visible on the west side). Your way is blocked by invisible lasers.

The CRAWL and JUMP immediately came to mind as helpful, but neither verb was understood! I tried CRAWL EAST and JUMP EAST with similar bad luck, so I assumed I needed to set something else up first, and struggled for far too long for a minimalist VIC-20 game. (The RING and BALL are still being held and the ring can activate the ball as an explosive, so I was noodling with that, but it’s only supposed to be used later.) I finally had to check the walkthrough again and I found I needed to

CRAWL BEAM

that is, even though there’s no way to know about the beam except by dying, you’re supposed to apply it as a noun in your parser command! I can’t think of another instance where this has happened. (Even including Ferret, the king of pre-knowledge games!)

As the text says, this is just the first beam. You can CRAWL BEAM to repeat for a second beam, but if you do it again for beam number 3 you’ll get fried. The trick is to switch to JUMP BEAM, and then CRAWL BEAM again for a fourth (and final beam). This is another circumstance where the verb list made the process much easier.

At the end of the hall you can TURN WHEEL (which opens the reactor) and then repeat the same beam steps but backwards: CRAWL, JUMP, CRAWL, CRAWL.

Now at the reactor, you get even more issues, as you need to INSERT RING in the BALL, then TURN RING to start the ball ticking.

Then you can throw the ball in, and now it’s time to escape! Next tape load.

This is meant to parallel the scene with Luke and Leia at the chasm in the Death Star, so I get to share this bit from the Empire of Dreams documentary which explains how it was done without stunt doubles:

Back to the battle against the Jillyans, I spent a little while looking for a grappling hook before I realized I could just JUMP. Not if you’re holding the power cell, though.

And here there is yet another infuriating parser moment! It immediately occurred to me to try to THROW things so I tried THROW RING (which I still had) and the game just said SORRY, which made me put it out of my mind. The ring isn’t actually too heavy, so you can still be carrying it; THROW CELL on the other hand sends it to the other side properly.

Once on the other side, you can find a SPACE SUIT in a cubicle, and I tried dropping my ring in order to pick it up and the game wouldn’t let me.

There’s an inventory limit of two items (which I always knew) but it turns out, more evilly, there is a room limit. If you have the cell and the ring and you are looking at the suit, you have softlocked the game, because you are unable to drop anything (too many items in the room!) You can’t THROW the cell back now either. The right approach is to drop the ring first before jumping over the ledge, even though there’s no logical reason you couldn’t dump the ring after finding the suit.

Once the suit is on the door is open and you can escape.

Last tape load! At least this section is straightforward.

Although this appears to repeat the content of earlier, going west or east now has the game respond SORRY TROOPERS ARE EVERYWHERE.

With the suit on and the fuel cell held you can push the button on the panel and go in a lifeboat; then you can put the fuel cell in a slot, and pull a lever to escape.

There’s one last issue to all this I don’t fully understand. Referring back to Garry’s walkthrough, there are two bug fixes. One is for the INSERT command crashing the game; the other is for something that didn’t happen to me.

As each part runs another part, it needs to maintain state between parts and it does this by POKEing values before running the next part and PEEKing these values during initialisation when the next part runs. When the bomb is activated, part 3 POKEs a value to indicate this, but part 4 fails to PEEK this value. As a consequence, it is impossible to finish the game without 6.6 billion people being killed by the Death Star. To fix this, add the following lines to the file ‘death star 4’:

204 IFPEEK(822)=6THENO=1

205 RETURN

I am unclear why I didn’t have this issue; maybe there are different dumps to the game? But at least on Garry’s copy, even when he did everything right the Death Star killed Terra.

Darryl’s later games are well regarded, so I’m not going to judge too much based on this early effort which tried to push the VIC-20 far harder than was reasonable. We’ve only had one other VIC-20 game try to use the tape loading trick to break things up (Grave Robbers) but that was only in two sections; I think the reason this ended up so ambitious was the attempt to downgrade from TRS-80 to VIC-20. This is possibly due to the greater prevalence of the cheaper VIC-20 for the Australian market; the reason Darryl even had a TRS-80 is he had bought one for his previous business making playground equipment. Just like we’ve seen elsewhere, the business purchase ended up shifting to an entertainment one.

Coming up: Some actual TRS-80 games, and then a return to the Apple II for a game you’re likely not expecting.

Key & Compass Blog: New walkthroughs for February 2026

2026-02-27T16:57:56+00:00

On Friday, February 27, 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.

Time: All Things Come to an End (1996) by Andy Phillips

In this game filled with learn-by-dying and read-author’s-mind puzzles, you play as a scientist from 1997 who finally gets his translocation machine to work. You arrive inside a garbage bin in 2065 where you witness a murder in the alley outside. This begins a time-travel epic waged between you and a woman with psychotic blue eyes for control over humanity’s destiny and the stability of time itself.

At the 1996 XYZZY Awards, it was a finalist in three categories (Best Game, Best Story, and Best Puzzles).

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

The Party Line (2020) by Robin Johnson

In this treasure hunt game, you play as someone invited to a strange and inexplicable party at Sinister Mansion. “Find the treasures – Solve the mystery – Lift the curse,” the invite said. Well, it’s not like you were doing anything else tonight.

This work was written in Gruescript and was made for the AdventureX Jam 2020.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Zodiac (2025) by Charles Moore, Jr.

In this James Bond-inspired game, you play as Arthur Blonde, MI5’s least-talented agent. Nevertheless, you’re given a mission: go to Zdratz, Dynobia, find the hidden Zodiac base where the villainous Dr. Dipole and his new super-weapon are lurking, and destroy it. Everyone else was busy, so it’s your turn. Good luck, agent Blonde.

This game was an entry in PunyComp 2025 where it took 2nd Place overall, 1st Place for Writing, 2nd Place for Puzzles, and 5th Place for Playability on 8-bit computers.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

The Seeds of Evil (2026) by Garry Francis and Gianluca Girelli

In this horror game, you play as Murray Shannon. An urgent telegram from your cousin summoned you to Creek Town, Louisiana, but your car had an electrical failure when it entered the edge of town. The smell of death is everywhere. Find Alan, fix your car, and find out what happened here.

It’s an adaption and English translation of Murray Shannon: I Semi del Male, by Bonaventura Di Bello.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Every day I get emails (2025) by Emery Joyce

In this horror-comedy satire, you play as an unnamed editor who spends a lot of time at the office just redirecting emails outside your responsibility to the appropriate coworkers. But what do you do when those redirected emails start bouncing? What’s happening to your coworkers?

This story was written in Twine and was an entry in Ectocomp 2025’s La Petite Mort (English) division, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

I Have No Verbs, and I Must (2025) by Dissolved

In this short surreal horror game, you, whoever you are, it’s really difficult to tell, are facing a horrible slavering beast in the ruins of your living room. It’s racing towards you, but you have no verbs, and you must— you must what?

This game was an entry in Ectocomp 2025’s Le Grand Guignol (English) division, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

The Loneliest House (2023) by Tabitha O’Connell

In this bittersweet story, it’s a bright autumn day. You felt compelled to climb the hill and take a closer look at the lonely old house on the hill. It’s been abandoned for as long as you’ve lived here, just part of the scenery for everyone else, but for you, it’s a mystery and a promise waiting to be fulfilled.

This story was an entry in Ectocomp 2023’s La Petite Mort (English) division where it took 9th place. It was also an entry in The Bare-Bones Jam.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Reference and Representation: An Approach to First-Order Semantics (2016) by Ryan Veeder

In this short game about abstract thought, knowledge acquisition, and survival, you play as a caveman before language was invented. Your mate sits on the furs, clutching her head, and squeezing her eyes shut. You don’t understand a lot of what your mate does, but when you act like that, your head hurts. Does her head hurt? You don’t want her to hurt. Go find that special tree bark she likes to chew on.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Interactive Fiction, 'Wake Reality: Thursday February 26, 2026 - 1776Wake.com updates

2026-02-26T23:33:00+00:00

Since Saturday July 4, 2026 is closing in, I've updated the "1776 Wake .com" website today!

www.1776Wake.com

The tagline on the 1776Wake.com website is: "1776Wake.com - Finnegans Wake to read the 1776 Founding Fathers properly"

Renga in Blue: Death Star (1983)

2026-02-25T19:21:52+00:00

We’ve had semi-famous adventure game writer Brian J. Betts featured here already with The Secret of Flagstone Manor, but today we feature the other semi-famous bedroom coder from Australia, Darryll D. Reynolds.

Just like Brian, Darryl started with the TRS-80 before switching to Commodore 64, although he went through Tandy Color Computer and Vic-20 on the way. He started with self-publishing and later worked through agents, first under the name Gameworx and later under the name SoftGold (meaning an example credit might be “from Gameworx, published by Computer Classics”). Commenting in a thread about his work from 2012:

Thanks for all the comments (good or otherwise) and it pleases me to see there is still an interest in this style of game. Back then when I saw an opportunity to write my own games I was playing with a Tandy TRS 80 until the Commodore Vic 20 appeared – what a lot of fun, hardly any memory, rudimentary graphics, tape storage. At the time, use of keyboard graphics for an adventure game was a real novelty but it added more to a plain text adventure. When the c64 appeared it was paradise !

For TRS-80 (and CoCo) he had three games advertised. We don’t have any of them in either format.

Australian Personal Computer, April 1983.

“AFRICAN ODD” is the most obscure of the set. It might be a mis-spelled attempt to write “African Odyssey” but with an abbreviation applied. It may be the same game as King Solomon’s Mines (not to be confused with the Betts game King Solomon’s Mines; the double-naming ended up creating a copyright dispute between Reynolds and Betts). Castle Tollenkar and Death Star both got versions for VIC-20; unfortunately, while we have the box art, we currently don’t have a copy of Castle Tollenkar in VIC-20 format either.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History.

Castle Tollenkar incidentally shares a made-up-fantasy-proper-name with a 1980 TTRPG campaign from the United States: Tollenkar’s Lair published by Metagaming, design by none other than Steve Jackson (of later GURPS and Munchkin fame). While Tollenkar’s Lair involves a labyrinth underneath a forest there is a faint chance the naming is not coincidence based on the bizarre plot description of Castle:

You stand on a windswept crag overlooking an eerie castle. Below you is the Black Forest, dark and menacing. You must gain entry to the castle, find any items needed and recover Castle Tollenkar’s treasure, but watch out for the occupants – any traps set by them.
Can you find the treasure?
Better still, can you find the castle?

We are overlooking a castle and a forest at the same time, and the castle is hard to find? A Commodore newsletter’s attempt at a review just says

We couldn’t even get into the castle in this one, very frustrating! Even with a cheater’s peek at the listing we were still stumped, any ideas?

This suggests something more like the hidden labyrinth of the Steve Jackson campaign, but it really may just be a coincidence. If/when a copy of the game is rescued we’ll have to test this theory further.

(My guess is “when”, for if nothing else, there’s a Darryll Reynolds collection at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, which is far more preservation than most our adventure authors get.)

Tollenkar himself from the front cover of the “Adventure Supplement”, with a system far more obscure than D&D (Fantasy Trip) and far less likely to make it over the globe from Texas. Still, it’s possible.

Hence I’m going to start with Death Star (even though it seems to be one of the later VIC-20 conversions, based on the ad, it technically was written first); it has the added bonus attribute that it didn’t get remade later in the familiar C64 format most people remember (along with other platforms like Plus/4) so VIC-20 is the only way we can experience it now.

The Rim War of 2685 has reached its final stage. The Jillyan super weapon “DEATH STAR” approaches Terra on the final mission of destruction. You have been secretly teleported aboard with instructions to destroy it at all costs. Your escape is of secondary importance. Can you set your demolition charges and escape before the deadline is reached? Good luck. You are Terra’s last chance!

— From the game instructions, via the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

It was written for a regular TRS-80 (16K of memory) but runs for VIC-20 on an unexpanded VIC, that is, about a quarter of the same amount. There’s some precedent for this, as Brian Howarth cut down his TRS-80 version of The Golden Baton into 8K for a conversation, but that’s still not the same amount of reduction! This game manages the reduction via splitting the game into six parts and as you transition from one to the other you wait for the next tape load to happen.

From the original 1977 Star Wars.

Tape load number one is just the introduction, including music.

We are to be teleported into the enemy base, so it isn’t exactly like Star Wars.

Having this done in a “slide sequence” rather than one text sequence is another go at trying to make the VIC-20 “cinematic” like Secret Mission.

The first loading screen (there already was one tape load to get here).

You land at a SMALL CABIN where, conveniently, a locker has a LASER and a CHARGE, as long as you remember to do LOOK not once but twice. I’m used to it but I’m really starting to get grumpy at this convention (examine a container multiple times to unearth more things).

The VIC-20 only has 3.5 KB of space for BASIC programs, so here’s the entire chunk that starts the game:

Despite the simplicity — you can just walk to the “exit” with the next tape load — this area turned out to be a bear, mainly because of verb issues. In fact, the very start you need an “isolate verb”, a verb I have never seen before in an adventure game and quite possibly never will see again. With the LASER and the CHARGE, you are supposed to ARM LASER to put the two together. Trying to INSERT CHARGE crashes the game.

UNDEF’D STATEMENT
ERROR IN 58

Trying to LIST 58 gets a blank response; the game is using tricks to keep the source code from being easily visible, which only works well when you don’t have a crash bug to worry about.

It doesn’t prevent LIST altogether, but it causes lines to get drawn on top of each other and line numbers to be jumbled.

To the south of the start there’s a CASE.

I AM IN A STORE DEPOT

I SEE CASE.

Typing OPEN CASE gets the response

I CAN’T TRANSLATE

which is the game’s “I don’t understand” message. I really had no idea what to visualize here; the game neglected to mention this is a “locked” container (or at least sealed) so we are supposed to SHOOT it. (Please remember the verb SHOOT, it will come up again momentarily.)

Shooting the case reveals a prism; LOOK PRISM indicates it is green and glows. That’s all the direction you get, and like a fantasy game, you’re supposed to RUB it.

While the prism will roll over in inventory to the next tape load, RUB will not work on it anymore; you’ll get the I CAN’T TRANSLATE response instead. Every time the tape loads the verb set of the game changes. This gets very nasty soon, but first, let’s show off going east from the start.

If you press the button right now, you’ll get ejected into space and die. Also, if you go east…

…and go east again, you’ll get caught by a ~~stormtroopers~~ Jillyan marines and die.

The only way forward is up the ladder, which is the next tape load (63 seconds!)

Now we get to the astonishing part:

The verb SHOOT no longer works. If you SHOOT TROOPER you will die. Furthermore, it isn’t clear that this is a wrong-verb issue; the game just says “THE TROOPER CHARGES” if you try to shoot. Despite SHOOT being the verb used already, now the game wants BLAST, and by this point I had reached for a walkthrough by Garry Francis.

I also read the walkthrough’s general advice, and some excerpts:

If you GO ELEVATOR in part 2, that bypasses a part. As you can’t return to a previous part, this makes the game unwinnable, so don’t GO ELEVATOR. If you get killed, you are given the opportunity to restart, but it only restarts that part. In most cases, this won’t help, so you’ll have to restart from scratch.

Each part has its own vocabulary with just a handful of verbs and they aren’t the same verbs in each part. For example, GET and DROP don’t work in part 3.

All verbs are identified by the first two letters, so there is no distinction between PUSH and PULL for example. Despite this, the parser assumes a verb length when parsing the noun, so LO LOCKER will not work, but LOOK LOCKER, LOCK LOCKER, LOVE LOCKER and LOZZ LOCKER will all assume you want to look at the locker.

The walkthrough includes a list of verbs for all the parts, but the whole sequence above already exhausted me enough so I’m going to pause for the moment and hope the verb list gets me to the end next time.

Zarf Updates: 1989 in context

2026-02-25T04:31:15+00:00

One of my goals with this project is to put the Infocom games, and the code, into context. Context is the fun part.

Some of my friends got into it about this quote:

The other four tokens—ON-GROUND, IN-ROOM, HELD, and CARRIED—are incredibly confusing, and no one really understands them except Stu, so he should probably write this bit.

-- Learning ZIL, chapter 9.6

Or, from Appendix A:

CONTFCN: I never use this, why should you?

Or Appendix B:

Frankly, I think the SEARCHBIT is a stupid concept, and I automatically give the SEARCHBIT to all containers.

Several other sections say "Stu should write this" as well.

Let's set aside what these ZIL terms mean. The question is, how is this flippin' useful? In a reference manual? Who writes documentation like this?

The title page says "Comments to SEM" -- Steve (Eric) Meretzky. So that answers who. "Stu" is clearly Stu Galley, one of the original Implementors and the architect of the "new" (V6) parser.

But that's the author, not the context. For the context, let's take a look at the entire title page:

Learning ZIL, title page

Suddenly we know a lot more! What happened in May of 1989? (Aside from me passing my first college programming course.) That's right -- the shuttering of Infocom as a Cambridge studio.

Quoting from Jimmy Maher's article on the fall of Infocom:

The axe fell over the course of that long afternoon and evening [May 4th]. Infocom would be “moving” to California, where it was to be reconstituted and re-imagined as a more closely coupled subsidiary of Mediagenic [aka Activision], under a “general manager” named Rob Sears. Just 11 of the 26 current employees were offered positions at this new version of Infocom. [...] Suffice to say that those Mediagenic decided were desirable to retain often weren’t the pivotal creative voices you might expect, and that only 5 of the 11 accepted the offer anyway. [...] For the other old-timers, it was all over. Another six weeks or so to finish a few final projects and tidy up the place, and that would be that.

-- "Moving to California", Digital Antiquarian, July 2016

The five who stayed on definitely did not include Meretzky:

Steve Meretzky had been scheduled to attend the Computer Game Developers’ Conference that very weekend in Sunnyvale, California. He was still allowed to fly out on Infocom’s dime, but replaced the company’s name on his badge with “Make Me an Offer!”

(That would have been the third CGDC, which reached the stunning total of 300 people in 1989. The event I'm attending next month will be probably 100 times that size... give or take...)

So. We have a manual which was written either a couple of months before the axe fell, or a couple of weeks after. Nothing exactly says which, but my sense is "before". This is a document written for an incoming writer who wants to make a game. It's not a historical document written for posterity.

However, there's clearly a sense of resignation hanging over the whole endeavour. The document's subtitle gives you that up front. Infocom was already down to a quarter the size of its 1985-ish heyday, with no recent hits and no real prospect of a new one.

EXERCISE THREE Design and implement a full-size game. Submit it to testing, fix all the resulting bugs, help marketing design a package, ship the game, and sell at least 250,000 units.

-- Learning ZIL, chapter 16

So.

Footnote 1: Is it possible that the document was written earlier, and was just updated through 1989?

Some of it, possibly. But the "Stu?" sections give the sense that this was interrupted in mid-draft, not written as a complete document and then later updated.

Also, it mentions YZIP (Z-machine version 6), albeit not in a great deal of detail. (One line just says "see YZIP Spec for more details".) The first YZIP game was Zork Zero in October 1988; the YZIP Spec document is dated "11/30/88". The design work would have started earlier, but this still puts a pretty sharp lower bound on the writing span for Learning ZIL.

Footnote 2: The document is also tagged as "Conversion to Microsoft Word -- SEM -- 8/1/95". In 1995, Meretzky was off at Boffo Games, his new studio. What prompted him to pull a six-year-old text file out of his (copious) archives and update it into a "modern" format?

I have no idea, actually. Maybe the assembly of the Masterpieces of Infocom CD-ROM collection, which had a number of bonus items on it. (Including my first IFComp entry!) The Learning ZIL document wasn't among them, but it might have been part of a round-up of resources.

Renga in Blue: ZENO: Program Your Way Out of Trouble

2026-02-23T20:37:55+00:00

(Continued from my previous posts.)

Complexity in ZENO is reserved for the computer system it embodies. Your survival is totally dependent on your ability to program your way out of trouble.

— from the instructions for the game

I’ve “finished” the game. It feels like a “first stab” at content from the author who intended more versions (as quite explicitly mentioned in the game itself). It’s quite possible Mitchell was distracted by his new job within IBM, as he wrote Zeno in January and February of 1983, and he started work the same year on the official launch of the IBM Personal Computer in Europe; the launch gets press mention in a March 1983 issue of Practical Computing. I might follow that and say “so he was done with Zeno” except: he did do a sequel of sorts. More on that at the end!

To make one thing clear right away for visualization purposes: this is the USS Zeno, that is, we’re on a crippled starship, not a base.

Last time I had explored the area…

…and was attempting to a.) program the robot and b.) deal with the alien invasion. (In the middle you can have a power shutdown, which turns off the air pump.)

The game mentions “robots” plural and “aliens” plural at points but there’s only one alien (I’m guessing the plural part was aspirational). So you can think of this as a short story where we are on a remote outpost and get attacked by aliens (one at a time), and need to handle it by sending the robot. The alien always invades in the hangar, so you don’t have to have some kind of rotating complex setup in the code. There’s a second crisis after the alien which I’ll talk about when I get there.

The robot is on the second floor; it needs to go to the fourth floor where the action is.

The alert program on. It turns out you don’t really want the shields on — the alien can bust through anyway, and it just drains energy.

It’s easier to stay on floor 1 at first as the computer is fully capable of editing; while terminals can run programs, they can’t edit them (at least by default; the game implies there is a way to enable terminal editing, but I never figured out how). So we need, in sequence

a.) the elevator to go to floor 2
b.) the elevator door to open
c.) the robot to enter the elevator
d.) the elevator door to close
e.) the elevator to go to floor 4
f.) the elevator door to open
g.) the robot to leave the elevator

Entering the hatch seems to be optional, as the aliens will seem to arrive just inside the hatch rather than outside.

This is, straightforwardly:

LIFT_DOOR = CLOSE
LIFT_FLOOR = 2
LIFT_DOOR = OPEN
ROBOT = DOOR
LIFT_DOOR = CLOSE
LIFT_FLOOR = 4
ROBOT = WAIT
ROBOT = WAIT
LIFT_DOOR = OPEN
ROBOT = DOOR

I also made a separate program to send the lift back to the first floor so I could get back on.

LIFT_DOOR = CLOSE
LIFT_FLOOR = 1
LIFT_DOOR = OPEN

Turn 24 is when the alien(s) arrive (“MSG at 24 from Rigel IV: aliens in your sector”). There are other messages which seem to not necessarily be consistent; I’ve seen

from Beta Crucis III: USS Enterprise lost to aliens

and

from Fomalhaut IX: destroy USS Enterprise on sight

and

from USS Enterprise: surrender or die!

but not always, and I’m not sure if there’s some system to it. When the aliens appeared I applied a program where ROBOT = LASER was executed multiple times (I think only once is needed, but I wanted to be safe).

Regarding the “power surge” message, every once in a while the air pump turns off. I’ve been turning it back on manually, because I’ve done everything from the computer room, but you could implement code that automatically checks if the pump is off and turn it on again if so.

I was prepared to stop there and had a post ready last week, but I tested out waiting for more turns and found one more wrinkle to the plot which forced me to play for longer.

At 200 turns exactly a photon storm hits and kills you if you are on the ship. So the only way to survive is to … be off the ship! One way to do this is to simply fling yourself through the hangar door while wearing a space suit.

The full list of descriptions:

A klick or so away is the huge, crippled bulk of USS Zeno. While far off to your right can be seen the strange geometry of an alien battle cruiser.

You are falling slowly towards the moon. High above you is the USS ZENO.

You are falling rapidly towards the moon. It looks as though you will impact somewhere west of the Alps.

You are about to hit the lunar surface, near the crater Aristoteles.

You are standing in the centre of a small crater.

On the crater you have nothing to do now but wait for your suit to run out of oxygen. Unless you’ve planned beforehand!

Remember this game has a matter transmitter. I hadn’t noodled with it yet, but found rather than using the “desk terminal” (which you can do by setting MT_MODE = MANUAL) I had an easier time just writing programs.

MT_MODE = AUTO
MT_BEAM = 565-23 84-212

This will teleport the robot at the start of the game from the second floor to the first floor.

The numbers can come from the robot itself, with the simple program

probe = ON
say location now POSITION

although while I state that with authority now, the actual gameplay puzzling out everything above took over an hour.

Due to confusing wording in the instructions, I hit this a few times. You need to apply a number to WAIT, it does not default to 1.

I was able to get the robot to jump out of the ship but unfortunately the probe was not giving me correct locations! There seems to be an outright bug here as the robot is visible in all the “in space” locations even though based on my time it should have only been visible at the crater.

This means I had no method of figuring out the coordinates for saving myself, and I’m not sure if the game provided one (because, again, the robot seems buggy, which indicates what happened to me is unintentional). I resorted to checking the source code. Fortunately, REXX code really is easy to read.

coordinates = ’84-212 46-975 565-23 690-34 54-367 89-021 385-34′ ,
’76-421 17-400 20-615 95-461′

84-212 is the start room (I knew this from the robot probe). The later numbers are the ones in space. Unfortunately I couldn’t just activate the transmitter straight away when I needed to escape because you must be wearing the space suit, and you can’t type while wearing a space suit (fair). So my escape program came out like this:

MT_MODE = AUTO
WAIT 2
MT_BEAM = 84-212 95-461
WAIT 9
MT_BEAM = 95-461 84-212

This gives just enough time to step away from the terminal and put on the space suit before being yanked away. Then after a set time (when the storm has ended) it reverses the teleport back to the start.

Given I can then wait an unlimited number of turns from here, I call that victory.

As I already mentioned, Mitchell clearly had other plans but got yanked away by job obligations given the timing of the IBM PC launch in the UK. Fortunately, he was able to return to ZENO several years later with a book and accompanying DOS program.

Courtesy Gunther Schmidl.

I’m not going to give details right now, other than the game still has a robot to command, but you now also can use normal adventure-movement commands (it wants a verb and a noun, shock!) and there’s a full plot and so forth. So ZENO mainframe could even be considered the template for the book version of the game.

You wake.

You seem to be encased in a misty whiteness that presses in on you. For a moment you panic, then you remember Dr. Flyte telling you that this is how it would be. “Just push” he said. It seems a long time ago.

You are sitting in a hibernation pod. It’s closed. The control knob for the pod is turned off.

The book-game is also short (by necessity of it being from a book) but we’ll save looking at it in the future (copyright on the game is 1986).

Programming is very much a craft, and this original book is aimed at all those who are looking for something to broaden their programming horizons. The author uses the implementation of adventure or fantasy games as a medium for introducing the tasks of designing, programming and testing. Adventure games offer an amazingly rich vein for this purpose; there’s scarcely a corner of computer science they don’t or can’t touch. They offer a considerable challenge, even to the most skilful programmer, and provide stimulating intellectual puzzles, humour and real enjoyment.

Returning to the mainframe version of ZENO, I do think having a programming game embedded in an adventure was a marvelous idea. I did spend more than half my time struggling with non-adventure things, some of which was not the fault of the game (emulator crashes, etc.) and some which definitely was (ambiguous instructions). With the editor, I finally found that if I typed Input by itself, the game would make a big set of blank lines, and then I could mouse-click on the first line and paste from my computer’s notebook. (I’ve never used something so torturous before, and yes, I’ve used vi, and can even tell you the difference between exiting with :x and exiting with :q.) I otherwise found code-editing to be an enormous hassle and it was very easy to try to insert a line and have it in the right place, or push the wrong direction key and have the game refusing to acknowledge any input until you restore the balance (or accidentally hit a function key that’s not one of the designated one, which crashes the whole game). Still, the learning is what I call a “perfect embedding” which is rare for educational software; within the fiction of the universe created it makes sense to use the programming in its native format. Compare with the allegedly educational Microworld (1981) which required deciphering puns rather than concrete engagement with the internals of the computer.

Coming up: a return to Australia.

Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian: Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned

2026-02-20T17:24:46+00:00

This article tells part of the story of Jane Jensen.

I think I became convinced when I went to CES [in January of 1997] and I walked around the show looking at all these titles that were the big new things, and not one screen had full-motion video. I realized that if I wanted anyone to look at the game, it had to be in 3D.

— Jane Jensen

Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned is proof that miracles do occur in gaming. It was remarkable enough that the game ever got made at all, in the face of gale-force headwinds blowing against the adventure genre. But the truly miraculous thing is that it turned out as well as it did. In my last article, I told you about Ultima IX, the sad-sack conclusion to another iconic series. The story of Gabriel Knight 3′s development is eerily similar in the broad strokes: the same real or perceived need to chase marketplace trends, the same unsupportive management, the same morale problems that resulted in an absurdly high turnover rate on the team. But Gabriel Knight 3 had one thing going for it that Ultima IX did not. Whereas Richard Garriott, the father of Ultima, always seemed to be somewhere else when someone might be on the verge of asking him to get his hands dirty, Jane Jensen was on the scene from first to last with her project. Just as much as the first two games, Gabriel Knight 3 managed at the last to reflect her unique vision more than some corporate committee’s view of what an adventure game should be in 1999. And that made all the difference.

In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb right here and now and deliver this article’s bombshell up-front: in defiance of the critical consensus, Gabriel Knight 3 is actually my favorite of the trilogy. As always, I don’t necessarily expect you to agree with me, but I will do my best to explain just what it is that delights, intrigues, and even moves me so much about this game.

Before we get to that, though, we need to turn the dial of our time machine back another few years from 1999, to late 1995, when Jane Jensen has just finished The Beast Within, her second Gabriel Knight game. That game was the product of a giddy but ultimately brief-lived era at Sierra On-Line, when the company’s founders Ken and Roberta Williams were convinced that the necessary future of mass-market gaming was a meeting of the minds of Silicon Valley and Hollywood: it would be a case of players making the decisions for real live actors they saw on the screen. Sierra was so committed to this future that it built its own professional-grade sound stage in its hometown of tiny Oakhurst, California. Gabriel Knight 2 was the second game to emerge from this facility, following Roberta Williams’s million-selling Phantasmagoria. But, although Gabriel Knight 2 acquitted itself vastly better as both a game and a work of fiction than that schlocky splatter-fest, it sold only a fraction as many copies. “I thought we’d done a hell of a job,” says Jensen. “I thought it would appeal to that mass market out there. I thought it would be top ten. And it was — for about a week. I watched the charts in the months after shipping and saw the games that outsold [it], and I thought, ‘Ya know, I’m in the wrong industry.'”

The underwhelming sales figures affected more than just the psyche of Jane Jensen. Combined with the similarly disappointing sales figures of other, similar games, they sent the Siliwood train careening off the rails when it had barely left the station. In the aftermath, everyone was left to ponder hard questions about the fate of the Gabriel Knight series, about the fate of Sierra, and about the fate of adventure games in general.

No offer to make a third Gabriel Knight game was immediately forthcoming. Jane Jensen took a year’s sabbatical from Sierra, busying herself with the writing of novelizations of the first two games for Roc Books. While she was away, the new, more action-focused genres of the first-person shooter and real-time strategy completed their conquest of the computer-gaming mainstream, and Sierra itself was taken over by an unlikely buyer of obscure provenance and intent known as CUC.

Thus she found that everything was different when she returned to Sierra, bubbling over with excitement about a new idea she had. During her break, she had read a purportedly non-fiction book called The Tomb of God, the latest in a long and tangled skein of literature surrounding the tiny French village of Rennes-le-Château. The stories had begun with a mysteriously wealthy nineteenth-century priest and rumors of some treasure he may have hidden in or around the village, then grown in the telling to incorporate the Holy Grail, Mary Magdalene, the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the true bloodline of Jesus Christ, and the inevitable millennia-spanning conspiracy to control the world and hide The Truth. The bizarre cottage industry would reach its commercial zenith a few years into the 21st century, with Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code and the movie of same that followed. It’s unclear whether Jensen herself truly believed any of it, but she did see a way to add vampires to the equation — she had long intended the third Gabriel Knight game to deal with vampires — and turn it into an adventure game that blended history and horror in much the same audacious way as Gabriel Knight 2, which had dared to posit that “Mad King” Ludwig II of Bavaria had been a werewolf, then went on to make an uncannily believable case for that nutso proposition.

Sierra’s new management agreed to make the game, for reasons that aren’t crystal clear but can perhaps be inferred. It was the end of 1996, still early enough that a sufficiently determined industry observer could make the case that the failure of the adventure genre to produce any new million-selling hits of late might be more of a fluke than a long-term trend. Ken Williams was still on the scene at Sierra, albeit with greatly diminished influence in comparison to the years when he alone had called the shots. For better and sometimes for worse, he had always loved the idea of “controversial” games. The would-be Gabriel Knight 3 certainly seemed like it would fit that bill, what with being based around the heretical premise that Jesus Christ had not been celibate, had in fact married Mary Magdalene and conceived children with her in the biological, less-than-immaculate way. A few centuries earlier, saying that sort of thing would have gotten you drawn and quartered or burnt at the stake; now, it would just leave every priest, preacher, and congregation member in the country spluttering with rage. It was one way to get people talking about adventure games again.

Even so, it wasn’t as if everything could just be business as usual for the genre. The times were changing: digitized human actors were out, real-time 3D was in, and even an unfashionable straggler of a genre like this one would have to adapt. So, Gabriel Knight 3 would be done in immersive 3D, both for the flexibility it lent when contrasted with the still photographs and chunks of canned video around which Gabriel Knight 2 had been built and because it ought to be, theoretically at least, considerably cheaper than trying to film a whole cast of professional actors cavorting around a sound stage. The new game would be made from Sierra’s new offices in Bellevue, Washington, to which the company had been gradually shifting development for the past few years.

Jane Jensen officially returned to Sierra in December of 1996, to begin putting together a script and a design document while a team of engineers got started on the core technology. The planned ship date was Christmas of 1998. But right from the get-go, there were aspects of the project to cause one to question the feasibility of that timeline.

Sierra actually had three projects going at the same time which were all attempting to update the company’s older adventure series for this new age of real-time 3D. And yet there was no attempt made to develop a single shared engine to power them, despite the example of SCI, one of the key building blocks of Sierra’s earlier success, which had powered all of its 2D adventures from late 1988 on. Gabriel Knight 3 was the last of the three 3D projects to be initiated, coming well after King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity and Quest for Glory V. Its engine, dubbed the G-Engine for obvious reasons, was primarily the creation of a software engineer named Jim Napier, who set the basics of it in place during the first half of 1997. Unfortunately, Napier was transferred to work on SWAT 3 after that, leaving the technology stack in a less than ideal state.

Abrupt transfers like this one would prove a running theme. The people working on Gabriel Knight 3 were made to feel like the dregs of the employee rolls, condemned to toil away on Sierra’s least commercially promising game. Small wonder that poor morale and high turnover would be constant issues for the project. Almost 50 people would be assigned to Gabriel Knight 3 before all was said and done, but never more than twenty at a time. Among them would be two producers, three art directors, and three project leads. The constant chaos, combined with the determination to reinvent the 3D-adventure wheel every time it was taken for a spin, undermined any and all cost savings that might otherwise have flowed from the switch from digitized video to 3D graphics. Originally projected to cost around $1.5 million, Gabriel Knight 3 would wind up having cost no less than $4.2 million by the time it was finished. That it was never cancelled was more a result of inertia and an equally insane churn rate in Sierra’s executive suites than any real belief in the game’s potential.

For her part, Jane Jensen displayed amazing resilience and professionalism throughout. She had shot too high with Gabriel Knight 2, turning in a script that had to be cut down by 25 percent or more during development, leaving behind some ugly plot and gameplay holes to be imperfectly papered over. This time around, she kept in mind that game development, like politics, is the art of the possible. Despite all the problems, very little of her design would be cut this time.

The people around her were a mixture of new faces who were there because they had been ordered to be and a smattering of old-timers who shared her passion for this set of themes and characters. Among these latter was her husband Robert Holmes, who provided his third moody yet hummable soundtrack for the series, and Stu Rosen, who had directed the voice-acting cast in Gabriel Knight 1. Rosen convinced Tim Curry, who had voiced the title role in that game but sat out the live-action Gabriel Knight 2, to return for this one. His exaggerated New Orleans drawl is not to all tastes, but it did provide a welcome note of continuity through all of the technological changes the series had undergone. Recording sessions began already in November of 1997, just after Jane Jensen returned from her first in-person visit to Rennes-le-Château.

But as we saw with Ultima IX, such sessions are superficial signs of progress only, and as such are often the refuge of those in denial about more fundamental problems. When one Scott Bilas arrived in early 1998 to become Gabriel Knight 3′s latest Technical Lead, he concluded that “the engineering team must have been living in a magical dream world. I can’t find any other way to explain it. At that point, the game was a hacked-up version of a sample application that Jim Napier wrote some time earlier to demonstrate the G-Engine.” Bilas spent months reworking the G-Engine and adding an SCI-like scripting language called Sheep to separate the game design from low-level engine programming. His postmortem of the project, written for Game Developer magazine about six months after Gabriel Knight 3′s release, makes for brutal reading. For most of the people consigned to it, the project was more of a death march than a labor of love, being a veritable encyclopedia of project-management worst practices.

There was a serious lack of love and appreciation [from Sierra’s management] throughout the project. Recognition of work (other than relief upon its completion) was very rare, lacked sincerity, and was always too little, too late. Internally, a lot of the team believed that the game was of poor quality. And of course, the many websites and magazines that proclaimed “adventure games are dead” only made things worse. Tim Schafer’s Grim Fandango, although a fabulous game and critically acclaimed, was supposedly (we heard) performing poorly in the marketplace…

The low morale resulted in a lot of send-off lunches for developers seeking greener pastures. Gabriel Knight 3 had a ridiculous amount of turnover that never would have been necessary had these people been properly cast or well-treated…

After a certain amount of time on a project like this, morale can sink so low that the team develops an incredible amount of passive resistance to any kind of change. Developers can get so tired of the project and build up such hatred for it that they avoid doing anything that could possibly make it ship later. This was a terrible problem during the last half of the Gabriel Knight 3 development cycle…

Our engineers never had an accurate development schedule; the schedules we had were so obviously wrong that everybody on the team knew there was no way to meet them. Our leads often lied to management about progress, tasks, and estimates, and I believe this was because they were in over their heads and weren’t responding well to the stress. Consequently, upper management thought the project was going to be stable and ready to ship long before it actually was, and we faced prolonged crunch times to deliver promised functionality…

Most of the last year of the project we spent in [crunch] mode, which meant that even small breaks for vacations, attending conferences, and often even taking off nights and weekends were looked down upon. It was time that the team “could not afford to lose.” The irony is that this overtime didn’t help anyway; the project didn’t move any faster or go out any sooner. The lack of respect for our personal lives and attention to our well-being caused our morale to sink…

Gabriel Knight 3 became a black hole that sucked in many developers from other projects, often at the expense of those projects. Artists were shifted off the team to cut the burn rate, and then pulled back on later because there was so much work left to do…

Management, thinking that it would save time, often encouraged content developers to hack and work around problems rather than fix them properly…

All of this happened against a backdrop of thoroughgoing confusion and dysfunction at Sierra in general. A sidelined Ken Williams got fed up and left the company he had founded in August of 1997. At the end of that year, Sierra’s new parent CUC merged with another large conglomerate called HFS to create a new entity named Cendant. Just a few months later, CUC was revealed to have been a house of cards the whole time, the locus of one of the biggest accounting scandals in the history of American business. For a long stretch of the time that Gabriel Knight 3 was in the works, there was reason to wonder whether there would even still be a Sierra for the team to report to in a week or a month. Finally, in November of 1998, Sierra was bought again, this time by the French media mega-corp Vivendi, whose long-term plan was, it slowly became evident, to end all internal game development and leverage the label’s brand recognition by turning it into a publisher only. Needless to say, this did nothing for the morale of the people who were still making games there.

Sierra’s Oakhurst office was shut down in February of 1999. The first wave of layoffs swept through Bellevue the following summer, while the Gabriel Knight 3 team were striving desperately to get the game out in time for the Christmas of 1999 instead of 1998. In a stunning testimony to corporate cluelessness about the psychology of human beings, some of those working on Gabriel Knight 3 were told straight-up that they were to be fired, but not until they had given the last of their blood, sweat, and tears to finish the game. “Having a group of people who are (understandably) upset with your company for laying them off and actively looking for a job while still trying to contribute to a project is a touchy situation that should be avoided,” understates Scott Bilas. The words “no shit, Sherlock” would seem to apply here.

But the one person who comes in for sustained praise in Bilas’s postmortem is Jane Jensen, whose vision and commitment never wavered.

Gabriel Knight 3 would have simply fallen over and died had we had a less experienced designer than Jane Jensen. Throughout the entire development process, the one thing that we could count on was the game design. It was well thought-out and researched, and had an entertaining and engrossing story. Best of all, Jane got it right well in advance; aside from some of the puzzles, nothing really needed to be reworked during development. She delivered the design on time and maintained it meticulously as the project went on.

This was Gabriel Knight 3′s secret weapon, the thing that prevented it from becoming a disaster like Ultima IX. With Jane Jensen onboard, there was always someone to turn to who knew exactly what the game was meant to do and be. The vision thing matters.

When Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned shipped in November of 1999, it marked the definitive end of an era, being the last Sierra adventure game ever, the final destination of a cultural tradition that stretched all the way back to Mystery House almost twenty years before, to a time when the computer-game industry was more inchoate than concrete. During the graphic adventure’s commercial peak of the early 1990s, Sierra and LucasArts had been the yang and the yin of the field, the bones of endless partisan contentions among gamers. It’s therefore intriguing and perhaps instructive to compare the press reception of Gabriel Knight 3 with that of 1998’s Grim Fandango, the most recent high-profile adventure release from LucasArts.

Grim Fandango was taken up as a sort of cause célèbre by critics, who rightly praised its unusual setting, vividly drawn characters, and moving story, even as they devoted less attention to its clumsy interface and convoluted and illogical puzzle structure. Those who wrote about games tended to be a few years older on average than those who simply played them. Many of this generation of journalists had grown up with Maniac Mansion and/or The Secret of Monkey Island. They were bothered by the notion of a LucasArts that no longer made adventure games, and sought to make this one enough of a success to avoid that outcome. At times, their reviews took on almost a hectoring tone: you must buy this game, they lectured their readers. The pressure campaign failed to fully accomplish its goal; Grim Fandango wasn’t a complete flop, but it did no more than break even at best, providing LucasArts with no particularly compelling financial argument for making more games like it.

Alas, when it arrived a year later, Gabriel Knight 3 was not given the same benefit of the doubt as to its strengths and weaknesses. Some of the reviews were not just negative but savagely so, almost as if their writers were angry at the game for daring to exist at all in this day and age. GameSpot pronounced this third installment fit “only for the most die-hard fans of the series.” Even the generally sober-minded Computer Gaming World, the closest thing the industry had to a mature journal of record, came at this game with knives out. In a two-stars-out-of-five review, Tom Chick said that “you’ll spend a lot of time fumbling in limbo, wandering aimlessly, trying to trigger whatever unknowable act will end the time block.” Okay — but it’s very hard to reconcile this criticism with the same magazine’s four-and-a-half star, “Editor’s Choice”-winning review of Grim Fandango. In my experience at least, aimless wandering and unknowable acts are far more of a fact of life in that game than in Gabriel Knight 3, which does a far better job of telling you what your goals are from story beat to story beat.

What might be going on here? To begin with, we do have to factor in that LucasArts had historically enjoyed better reviews and the benefit of more doubts than Sierra, whose adventure games came more frequently but really did tend to be rougher around the edges in the aggregate. Yet I don’t think that explains the contrast in its entirety. The taste-makers of mainstream gaming were still in a bargaining phase when it came to adventure games in 1998, still trying to find a place for them amidst all the changes that had come down the pipe since id Software unleashed DOOM upon the world. That bargaining had been given up as a lost cause a year later. The adventure game, said the new conventional wisdom, was dead as a doorknob, and it wasn’t coming back. A pack mentality kicked in and everyone rushed to pile on. It’s a disconcerting, maybe even disturbing thing to witness, but such is this thing we call human nature sometimes. If the last few years of our more recent social history tell us anything, it is that cultural change can burst upon the scene with head-snapping speed and force to make yesterday’s conventional wisdom suddenly beyond the pale today.

Adventure games would soon disappear entirely from the catalogs of the major publishers and from the tables of contents of the magazines and websites that followed them. In a rare sympathetic take on the genre’s travails, the website Gamecenter wrote just after the release and less than awe-inspiring commercial performance of Gabriel Knight 3 that “now it seems people want more action than adventure. They would rather run around in short shorts raiding tombs than experience real stories.” This was the true nub of the issue, for all that the belittling tone was no more necessary here than when it was directed in the opposite direction. People just wanted different things; a player of Gabriel Knight 3 was not inherently more or less smart, wise, or culturally sophisticated than a player of Starcraft or Unreal Tournament.

So, then, at the risk of stating the obvious, the core problem for the adventure genre was a mismatch between the desires of the majority of gamers at the turn of the millennium and the things the adventure game could offer them. The ultimate solution was for the remaining adventure fans to get their own cottage industry to make for them the games that they enjoyed, plus their own media ecosystem to cover them, replete with sympathetic critics who wanted the same things from gaming that their readers did. That computer gaming as a whole could sustain being siloed off into parallel ecosystems was a testament to how much bigger the tent had gotten over the course of the 1990s. But as of 1999, the siloing hadn’t quite happened yet, leaving a game like Gabriel Knight 3 trapped on the stage of an unfriendly theater, staring down an audience who were no longer interested in the type of entertainment it was peddling. While the game was still in development, Jane Jensen had mused about the controversial elements that may have helped to get it funded: “I guess the worst case would be that no one would care, or even notice.”

The worst case came true. Gabriel Knight 3 became its woebegone genre’s sacrificial lamb, controversial only for daring to exist at all as an ambitious adventure game in 1999. It deserved better, for reasons which I shall now go into.

This final Sierra adventure game opens with something else that was not long for this world in 1999: a story setup that’s conveyed in the manual — or rather in an accompanying comic book — instead of in a cutscene. Four years on from their hunt for werewolves in Gabriel Knight 2, Gabriel and his assistant Grace Nakimura are asked to come to the Paris mansion of one Prince James, a scion of the Stuart line that once ruled Scotland and England. After they arrive, the good prince explains that he needs their help to protect his infant son from “Night Visitors” — i.e., vampires. Gabriel and Grace agree to take on the task, only to fail at it rather emphatically; the baby is kidnapped out from under their noses that very night. But Gabriel does manage to give chase, tracking the men or monsters who have absconded with the infant to the vicinity of Rennes-le-Château. Not sure how to proceed from here, he checks into a hotel in the village. The game proper begins the next morning.

At breakfast, he learns that a tour group of treasure hunters has also just arrived at the hotel, all of them dreaming of the riches that are purported to be hidden somewhere in or near the village. In addition to the fetching French tour guide Madeline (to whom Gabriel reacts in his standard lecherous fashion), there are Emilio, a stoic Middle Easterner; Lady Lily Howard and Estelle Stiles, a British blue-blood and her companion; John Wilkes, an arrogant, muscle-bound Aussie; and Vittorio Buchelli, an irritable Italian scholar. To this cast of characters worthy of an Agatha Christie novel we must add Gabriel’s old New Orleans running buddy Detective Frank Mosely, who, in a coincidence that would cause Charles Dickens to roll over in his grave, just happens to have joined this very tour group to try his hand at treasure hunting. Each member of the group has his or her own theory about the real nature of the treasure and how to find it, leaving Gabriel to try to sort out which ones really are the hopeless amateurs they seem to be and which ones have relevant secrets to hide, possibly involving the kidnapping which brought him here.

Gabriel has an unexpected meeting with Mosely.

Anyone who has played the first two Gabriel Knight games will be familiar with this one’s broad approach to its story. It takes place over three days, each of which is divided up into a number of time blocks. Rather than running on clock time, the game runs on plot time: the clock advances only when you’ve fulfilled a set of requirements for ending a time block. Grace arrives at the hotel on the evening of the first day. Thereafter, you control her and Gabriel alternately, just as in Gabriel Knight 2, with Gabriel’s sections leaning harder on conversations and practical investigation, while Grace delves deep into the lore and conspiracy theories of Rennes-le-Château. Don’t let the fact that the whole game is compressed into just three days fool you: they’re three busy days (and nights), busier than any three days could reasonably be in real life.

In this article, I won’t say anything more about the mystery of Rennes-le-Château. For the time being, you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that it’s an endlessly fascinating rabbit hole. In fact, it fascinates on two separate levels: that of the tinfoil-hat theories themselves, and the meta-level of how they came to find such purchase here in this real world of ours, which is — spoiler alert! — actually not controlled by secret cabals of Knights Templar and the like. I’ll be exploring these subjects in some articles that will follow this one. It’s a digression from my normal beat, but one that I just can’t resist; I hope you’ll wind up agreeing with me that it was well worth it.

Today, though, let me tell you about some of the other aspects of this game. One of Jane Jensen’s greatest talents as a writer is her skill at evoking a sense of place, whether her setting be Louisiana, Bavaria, or now southern France. If you ask me, this game is her magnum opus in this sense. The 3D graphics here are pretty crude — far from state of the art even by the standards of 1999, never mind today. Characters move more like zombies or robots than real people and look like collections of interchangeable parts crudely sewn together. Gabriel’s hair looks like an awkwardly shaped helmet that’s perpetually in danger of falling right off his head, while trees and plants are jagged-edged amalgamations of pixels that look like they could slice him right open if he bumped into them. And yet darned if playing this game doesn’t truly feel like exploring a sun-kissed village on the edge of the French Riviera. The screenshots may not come off very well in an article like this one, but there’s an Impressionistic quality (how French, right?) to the game’s aesthetics that may actually serve it better than more photo-realistic graphics would. When I think back on it now, I do so almost as I might a memorable vacation, the kind whose contours are blended and softened by the soothing hand of sentiment. If a good game is a space where you want to go just to hang out, then Gabriel Knight 3 is a very good game indeed.

The geography is fairly constrained, meaning you’ll be visiting the same places again and again as the plot unfolds. Far from a drawback, I found this oddly soothing too. I mentioned Agatha Christie earlier; let me double-down on that reference now, and say that the geography is tight enough to remind me of a locked-room cozy mystery. The fact that you’re staying in a hotel with a gaggle of tourists only enhances the feeling of being on a virtual holiday. Playing this game, you never sense the stress and conflict and exhaustion that were so frequently the lot of its developers. Call it one more way in which Gabriel Knight 3 is kind of miraculous; most games reflect the circumstances of their creation much more indelibly.

I suppose it could be considered a problem with Gabriel Knight 3 as a piece of fiction that the setting comes off so bucolic when the stakes are meant to be so high. But I don’t care. I like it here; I really like it.

Meet the story where it lives and let it unfold at its own pace, and you’ll be amply rewarded. Both the backstory of the historical conspiracy and the foreground plot with which it becomes intertwined, about finding the vampiric kidnappers, become riveting. I often play games on the television in the living room while my wife Dorte reads or crochets or does something else, popping up from time to time with a comment, usually one making fun of whatever nerdy thing I happen to be up to tonight. But Gabriel Knight 3 grabbed her too, something that doesn’t happen all that often. She had to go off to a week-long course just as I was getting close to the end. She informed me in no uncertain terms that I was not allowed to finish without her, because she wanted to see how it ended as well. Trust me when I tell you that that is really saying something.

The 3D engine that powers all of this is one of a goodly number of alternative approaches to the traditional point-and-click adventure that appeared as the genre was flailing against the dying of the mainstream light, aimed at helping it to feel more in tune with the times and, in some cases, making it a more friendly fit with alternative platforms like the Sony PlayStation. Few of these reinventions make much of a case for their own existence in my opinion, but the G-Engine is an exception. It’s a surprisingly effective piece of kit. Instead of relying on fixed camera angles, as Grim Fandango does in its 3D engine, Gabriel Knight 3 gives you a free-floating camera that you can move about at will. The environment fills the whole screen; there are no fixed interface elements. Clicking on a hot spot brings up a context-sensitive menu of interaction possibilities. And naturally, you can delve into an inventory screen to look at and combine the items you’re carrying, or to snatch them up for use out in the world. I really, really like the system, which genuinely does add something extra that you wouldn’t get from 2D pixel graphics. You can look up and down, left and right, under and on top of things. A room suddenly feels like a real space, full of nooks and crannies to be explored.

Admittedly, the setup is kind of weird on a conceptual level, in that you’re doing all of this exploration while Gabriel or Grace, whichever one you happen to be controlling, is standing stock still. This game, in other words, lends fresh credence to Scott Adams’s age-old conception of the player of an adventure game being in command of a “puppet” that does her bidding. Here you’re a disembodied spirit who does all the real work, pressing Gabriel or Grace into service only when you have need of hands, feet, or a mouth. You can even “inspect” an object in the room without their assistance — doing so shows it to you in close-up — although you do need them to help you “look,” which elicits a verbal description from your puppet. Gabriel Knight 3 doesn’t take place in a contiguous world; discrete “rooms” are loaded in when you direct your puppet to cross a boundary from one to another. Nevertheless, some of the rooms can be quite large. When you’re out and about on the streets of Rennes-le-Château, for example, the camera might be a block away from Gabriel or Grace, well out of his or her line of sight. It’s odd to think about, but it works a treat in practice.

One of the strangest things about the G-Engine is how the camera seems to have a corporeal form. You can get it hung up behind objects like this bench.

The G-Engine doesn’t add much in the way of emergent possibility. Reading between the lines of some of the reviews, one can’t help but sense that some critics thought the switch to 3D ought to make Gabriel Knight 3 play more like Tomb Raider — and who knows, perhaps this was even envisioned by the developers as well at one time. The game we have, however, is very much an adventure game of the old school, a collection of set-piece puzzles with set-piece solutions, with a set-piece plot that is predestined to play out in one and only one way. Some alternative solutions are provided, even some optional pathways and puzzles that you can engage with for extra points, but there’s no physics engine to speak of here, and definitely no possibility to do anything that Jane Jensen never anticipated for you to do.

That said, there are a few places where the game demands timing and reflexes, especially at the climax. These bits aren’t horrible, but they aren’t likely to leave you wishing there were more of them either. In the end, they too are set-piece exercises, more Dragon’s Lair than Tomb Raider.

Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek wrote Gabriel Knight 3 into gaming history for all the wrong reasons via their website Old Man Murray. They created fictional teenage personas for themselves, Erik being a “fat, girl-looking boy” and Chet being a kid who “likes Ministry and not much else.” How meta, right?

We can’t avoid it anymore, my friends. It’s impossible to discuss Gabriel Knight 3′s puzzles in any depth without addressing the elephant — or rather the cat-hair mustache — that’s been in the room with us this whole time. The uninitiated among you, assuming there are any, will require a bit of explanation.

During the burgeoning years of the World Wide Web, many gaming sites popped up to live on the hazy border between fanzines and professional media organs. One of these went for some reason by the name of Old Man Murray, a place for irreverent piss takes on the games that Computer Gaming World was covering with more earnestness and less profanity. Erik Wolpaw, one of the proprietors, took exception to one particular puzzle that crops up fairly early on in Gabriel Knight 3. He vented his frustration in a… a column, I guess we can call it?… published on September 11, 2000 — i.e., ten months after the game’s release, and well after its lackluster commercial fate had already been decided.

Gabriel needs to get his hands on some form of transportation in order to explore the countryside around Rennes-le-Château. Unfortunately, the motorbike rental lot right next door to the hotel mostly offers only sissy-looking mopeds of a sort that he wouldn’t be caught dead riding. The sole exception is a gleaming Harley-Davidson — but it has been reserved, by, of all people, his old buddy Mosely. Gabriel must engage in an extended round of subterfuge to pretend to be Mosely and secure the bike. This will turn out to involve, among other things, stealing the poor fellow’s passport and concocting a disguise for himself that involves masking tape, maple syrup, and a stray tuft of cat hair. I’ll let Erik tell you more about it. (The bold text below is present in the original.)

Dumb as your television enjoying ass probably is, you’re smarter than the genius adventure gamers who, in a truly inappropriate display of autism-level concentration, willingly played the birdbrained events. Permit me to summarize:

Gabriel Knight must disguise himself as a man called Mosley [sic] in order to fool a French moped rental clerk into renting him the shop’s only motorcycle.
In order to construct the costume, Gabriel Knight must manufacture a fake moustache. Utilizing the style of logic adventure game creators share with morons, Knight must do this even though Mosely does not have a moustache.
So in order to even begin formulating your strategy, you have to follow daredevil of logic Jane Jensen as she pilots Gabriel Knight 3 right over common sense, like Evel Knievel jumping Snake River Canyon. Maybe Jane Jensen was too busy reading difficult books by Pär Lagerkvist to catch what stupid Quake players learned from watching the A-Team: The first step in making a costume to fool people into thinking you’re a man without a moustache, is not to construct a fake moustache.
Still, you might think that you could yank some hair from one of the many places it grows out of your own body and attach it to your lip with the masking tape in your inventory. But obviously, Ms. Jensen felt that an insane puzzle deserved a genuinely deranged solution. In order to manufacture the moustache, you must attach the masking tape to a hole at the base of a toolshed then chase a cat through the hole. In the real world, such as the one that stupid people like me and Adrian Carmack use to store our televisions, this would result in a piece of masking tape with a few cat hairs stuck to it, or a cat running around with tape on its back. Apparently, in Jane Jensen’s exciting, imaginative world of books, masking tape is some kind of powerful neodymium supermagnet for cat hair.
Remember how shocked you were at the end of the Sixth Sense when it turned out Bruce Willis was a robot? Well, check this out: At the end of this puzzle, you have to affix the improbable cat hair moustache to your lip with maple syrup! Someone ought to give Jane Jensen a motion picture deal and also someone should CAT scan her brain.

A penetrating work of satire for the ages this column is not, but it nevertheless went viral, until it seemed to be absolutely everywhere on the Internet. In an ironic, backhanded way, Gabriel Knight 3′s cat-hair mustache puzzle became one of the most famous puzzles in all of adventure-gaming history, right up there with the Babel Fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Monkey Island’s Monkey Wrench. It became so famous that it has its own Wikipedia page today. At the same time, it became Exhibit Number One in the burgeoning debate over Why Adventure Games Died. Right up to this day, whenever talk turns to the genre’s fall from grace at the end of the twentieth century, a reference to the cat-hair mustache cannot be long in coming. For a considerable number of people today, Gabriel Knight 3 is not a game about vampires or the source material of The Da Vinci Code before Dan Brown discovered it; it’s a game about a cat-hair mustache.

So, what is a Gabriel Knight 3 apologist like myself supposed to do with this? First, let me acknowledge that this is not a great puzzle in strictly mimetic terms, in that it’s impossible to take seriously as a part of the game’s fiction. Setting aside all of the other improbable steps Gabriel has to go through, he steals and defaces — more on the latter in a moment — his good friend’s passport in order to work the scam. All of this instead of just, you know, asking his buddy to help him out. (Mosely is gruff on the outside, but he’s a good egg underneath, as Gabriel knows better than anyone.) Or he could just suck it up and ride a moped for a few days, given that the fate of an innocent baby and who knows what else may depend on it.

Of course, Gabriel Knight 3 is hardly the only adventure game that makes sociopathic behavior a staple of its puzzle tree. This is the root of the genre’s centrifugal pull toward comedy, which almost invariably injects a patina of goofiness even into allegedly serious games like this one. Stuff like this is more naturally at home in a game like Monkey Island. But leave it entirely out of any sort of adventure, and you run the risk of having a game without enough gameplay. If we aren’t afraid of a little bit of whataboutism, we might defend the adventure game by noting here that it’s hardly the only genre whose gameplay is frequently at odds with its fiction: think of putting saving the world on hold in order to hunt down lost pets and carry out a hundred other piddling side-quests in a CRPG, or researching the same technologies over and over from scratch in an RTS campaign. I’ll leave you to decide for yourself how compelling such a defense is.

For what it’s worth, there are reports that this puzzle was not in Jane Jensen’s original design, that it was swapped in late in the day in place of another one that had proved impractical to implement. Rest assured that you won’t catch me calling it a great puzzle, either in the context of this game or of adventure history.

But here’s the thing: mimesis aside, it’s nowhere near as terrible a puzzle as the one that our friend Erik describes either. I played this game a few months ago for the first time, knowing vaguely that it included an infamous puzzle involving a cat-hair mustache — how could I not? — but knowing nothing of the specifics. I went in fully expecting the worst, keeping in mind the design issues I remembered from the first two Gabriel Knight games. I was therefore surprised by how smoothly — and, yes, even enjoyably — the whole puzzle played out for me. Perhaps I was helped by the knowledge I brought with me into the game, but I never had the feeling that I was relying on it, never felt that I couldn’t have progressed without it. There are two hugely important mitigating factors which Erik neglects to mention.

The first is that there actually is a logic to Gabriel making a mustache for himself to imitate the clean-shaven (more or less) Mosely. He thinks that the facial hair will disguise the very different facial bone structures of the two men. Therefore he draws a mustache onto Mosely’s passport photo with a marker — how would you like to have a friend like him? — to complete the deception.

Notice that Mosely does have a mustache in his passport photo now.

The second factor is more thoroughgoing: the player is guided through all of the steps quite explicitly by Gabriel himself. (Who’s the puppet now, right?) In addition to “Look” and “Inspect,” many hot spots pop up a handy light-bulb icon when you click them: “Think.” These provide vital guidance on, well, what your character is thinking — or rather what Jane Jensen is thinking, what avenues she expects you to explore to advance the story. It’s not a walkthrough — what fun would that be? — but it does give you the outlines of what you’re trying to accomplish. In this case, looking carefully at and “thinking” about all of the objects involved turn a puzzle that truly would be absurdly unfair without this extra information into one that’s silly on the face of it, yes, but pretty good fun all the same. I’ve ranted plenty over bad adventure-game puzzles in the past, the kind where you have no clue what the game wants you to do or how it wants you to do it. This is not one of those. This puzzle doesn’t deserve the eternal infamy in which Old Man Murray draped it.

In point of fact, Gabriel Knight 3 is a major leap forward over the first two games in terms of pure design. Although it’s not trivial to solve by any means, nor does it seem to hate its player in the way of so many older Sierra games. The “Think” verb is one example. And for another one: once you solve the cat-hair-mustache-puzzle, get on your ill-gotten Harley, and start visiting the places around Rennes-le-Château, you can start to ask the game to show you where you still need to accomplish things in your current time block; this alone does much to alleviate the sense of “fumbling around in limbo,” as Tom Chick described it in Computer Gaming World. I don’t know whether the more soluble design of this game is a result of Jane Jensen improving her craft, unsung heroes on the team she worked with, or possibly even directives that came down from the dreaded upper management. I just know that it’s really, really nice to see — nice to be surprised by a game that turns out to be better than its reputation.

Solving the Le Serpent Rouge puzzle. Jane Jensen cribbed all this business about “sacred geometries” from the book The Tomb of God, which in turn borrowed it from Renaissance and Early Modern hermetic philosophy. (Johannes Kepler was very big on this sort of thing when he wasn’t developing the first credible model of our heliocentric solar system.) It may be nonsense, but it’s wonderfully evocative nonsense when it’s embedded in a story like this one.

The other puzzles here are a commodious grab bag of types. A few of them are every bit as silly as the cat-hair mustache, but most of them are more pertinent to the mysteries you’re actually trying to solve. The most elaborate of them all is a whole chain of puzzles that become Grace’s principal focus over the second and third days, and that are almost as well-remembered within hardcore adventure circles today as the cat-hair mustache is outside of them. The Le Serpent Rouge puzzle sequence — another one with its own Wikipedia page, if you can believe it — takes its name from a 1967 poem by an anonymous author that has become an indelible part of the conspiracy lore surrounding Rennes-le-Château. The reliably bookish Grace has to ferret out its coded meanings, verse by verse, using a variety of software tools on her laptop computer. Some reviewers have called it the best adventure-game puzzle of all time.

For my part, I can’t go quite that far. Like everything else in the G-Engine, the software Grace uses is more of a veneer over the set-piece design than a true simulation. At several stages, I more or less just clicked on things until the game told me I had it right. But if it has its limitations as a set of pure puzzles, Le Serpent Rouge succeeds brilliantly as interactive drama. You’re fully invested by the time it comes along, and the buzz you get as you close in on the heart of the mystery, step by step, is not to be dismissed lightly. In a more just world it would be these puzzles rather than the cat-hair-mustache one that have taken a place in mainstream-gaming lore. For they show just how exciting and gripping smart, textured, context-appropriate adventure-game puzzles can be.

Much the same sentiment can be applied to Gabriel Knight 3 as a whole, a rare Sierra adventure game that I find to be underrated rather than overrated. I’ve not always been so kind toward Sierra’s games, as many of you know all too well. But almost twenty years on, just before they turned the lights out for good, they finally got everything right. This game is my favorite of the entire Sierra catalog. It’s the antithesis of Ultima IX, as high of a note to go out on as that game was a low one. Let’s hear it for lost causes and eleventh-hour miracles.

Girls can ride Harleys too, y’all.

I have to admit that my experience with Gabriel Knight 3 has to some extent caused me to reevaluate the whole series of which it is a part. Bloody-minded iconoclast that I am, I find that I have to rank the games in reverse chronological order, the opposite of the typical fan’s ordering. I still can’t get fully behind Gabriel Knight I, even when I try to separate the story and setting from my nightmares about searching for a two-pixel-wide snake scale in a Bayou swamp and tapping out nonsensical codes on a bongo drum. Gabriel Knight 2, though… that really is an edge case for me. I still have my share of quibbles with its design, but its flaws are certainly less egregious than those of its predecessor, even as it has stuck in my memory in a way that very few of the narrative-oriented games which I’ve played for these histories have been able to do. Both the second and the third games make me feel emotions that aren’t primary-colored, that are more textured and complex than love and hate, fight and flight. And that is nothing to be sneezed at in the videogame medium.

So, readers, I think I have to put both Gabriel Knight 2 and 3 into my personal Hall of Fame. It was a long time coming for the former, but I did come around to old Gabe and Gracie eventually. It’s only too bad that their story had to end here, just when it was starting to get juicy.

Oh là là!

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

Sources: The book Gabriel Knight 3: Prima’s Official Strategy Guide by Rick Barba and Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games, Hidden Objects by Anastasia Salter. Computer Gaming World of February 1999, June 1999, and April 2000; Game Developer of June 2000; PC Zone of July 1998; Sierra’s newsletter InterAction of Spring 1999.

Online sources include Adventure Gamer’s interview with Gabriel Knight 3 design assistant Adam D. Bormann, Women Gamers’s interview with Jane Jensen, the vintage GameSpot review of Gabriel Knight 3, the Old Man Murray column discussed in the article, and a designer diary that Jane Jensen wrote for GameSpot during the game’s development.

Where to Get It: Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com.

Choice of Games LLC: Heroes of Tomorrow: Hidden Potential—Battle supervillains at a superhero academy!

2026-02-19T15:08:30+00:00

We’re proud to announce that Heroes of Tomorrow: Hidden Potential, 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 40% off until February 26th!

At our superhero academy, you’ll lead a team of teen heroes to battle supervillains! Will you fulfill your heroic legacy or forge your own path?

Heroes of Tomorrow: Hidden Potential is an interactive superpower novel by Eloy Lasanta, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 600,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Welcome to Evos Academy! As a member of the next generation of superheroes in a world where comic books record the deeds of real-life heroes, you don’t pass your classes by writing the correct answers on a paper; you do it by defeating a swarm of super-science automatons in front of a stadium full of cheering fans.

Develop your powers, practice working as a team with your classmates, and develop your own distinctive style while you learn from the greatest heroes that Earth has ever seen: valiant Gladiator, super-gadgeteer Gearhead…

…and, oh yeah, your mom.

Hardly anyone knows that you grew up as the sidekick to your mother, the famed hero known as The Cloak, keeping your gritty metropolis safe from the world’s worst villains. Some of your classmates are grappling with a legacy of power, too: Paragon’s father is the mighty hero Brilliant, and Red Claw’s mother is the villain Destroya. Each of you must choose what kind of hero you want to be. Do you want to be like your heroic parents, or do you want to blaze your own trail?

The choices just keep getting harder when it becomes clear that there’s more than your average supervillainy going on. Who keeps breaking into Evos Academy’s supposedly ultra-secure campus, and why? Why are your powers acting so strangely? What is the voice that whispers to you in your dreams? Why are all the villains’ plots suddenly focused on you? And what will you do when you discover that some of your idols aren’t so heroic after all?

Play as male, female, nonbinary, or genderfluid; gay, straight, bi, or asexual.
Choose your superpowers—elemental control, energy manipulation, super-physique, beast powers, or telekinesis—and customize your super-suit!
Romance or befriend a demon seeking redemption, a clever thief with a mysterious client, a powerful mage-in-training, or an already-famous heroic icon.
Protect the city and become the people’s hero, or let the world burn!
Banter with your foes, build super-tech gadgets, or let your fists do the talking!
Fight alongside—or against—your classmates and mentors in brutally high-powered action battles!
Battle supervillains that teleport, shapeshift, summon lava from volcanos, and turn the world into a videogame!
Uncover the secrets that the heroes have been keeping from you about everything—even about yourself!

Can you defeat criminals, cultists, demons, and midterms?

We hope you enjoy playing Heroes of Tomorrow: Hidden Potential. 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.

vaporware: interactive fiction: It's been a while

2026-02-19T01:01:00+00:00

or, In Which I Remember That I Had a Blog

A lot has changed in the last six and a half years!

ZILF finally had its 1.0 release. In fact, it's up to version 1.5 now, and it has a slick new website.
Zork I through III are now open source, and ZILF got a mention in the announcement.
I released another game, called Rascal.
Surely there's more. I feel like there's at least one other thing I'm forgetting. 🤔

These days, you're more likely to find me on intfiction.org, or the ZILF Discord server, or ifMUD, than here on Blogger.

vaporware: interactive fiction: ZILF 0.9 released

2019-08-30T06:14:00+00:00

Version 0.9 of ZILF was released recently! Highlights include easier setup for non-Windows platforms, compatibility with the unearthed Infocom source, and lots of bug fixes.

Get it at zilf.io.

My So Called Interactive Fiction Life: Port of Mainframe Zork Complete

2026-02-18T09:55:55+00:00

This also recognizes the release beta of Sharpee. I still have to update npm, but Sharpee is capable of building stories, web clients, and Zifmia story files.

The version you see above will flip to 0.9.91, but that's just housekeeping.

The website is updated as well: https://sharpee.net/.

I am officially transitioning from platform developer to story author.

Renga in Blue: ZENO: Powerful and Potentially Dangerous Devices

2026-02-17T20:39:02+00:00

(Continued from my previous post.)

I’m still trying to get my bearings on how this works.

1970 picture of a System 370, via IBM.

Back when I wrote about my favorite games of Tlön — essentially, imagining games from an imaginary universe where the usual rules may or may not apply — one of the ideas I tried to play with was the usual definition of a game. (Fun exercise for game designers: take a set of definitions of a game, and make a counterexample-game for each one, as Wittgenstein cackles in the background.)

Such definitions try hard to exclude, say, spreadsheets. So how could a spreadsheet (not something made in one, but the actual application itself) be a game? Theoretically, by making the operation of the software itself a puzzle to figure out; have unconventional UI tricks, and maybe convey everything in an invented language, and to even do your quarterly report you’d need to “solve” how the program works. Perhaps it could be inspired with elements from bad UI competitions.

I preface with this because operating ZENO is a little like my theoretical spreadsheet; puzzling out the editor especially (as in a text editor, for changing source code) has required dealing with cryptic documentation, and some of the documentation is tore off and located in other places on our space station/base.

(Or maybe spaceship; I think we’re “static”, like in geostationary orbit, but there’s enough weirdness going on I might be wrong.)

Consider the lift. I knew there was a “lift” program that you could run on the computer (by just typing “lift”) but I knew it only went to one other floor and back. The instructions are suggestive that there’s more floors.

Screenshot from last time.

After a bit of back-and-forth I realized I could type “edit lift” at the prompt and see all the code.

Here’s the first part of instructions for the editor:

line commands:
nnA adds nn blank lines (default nn is 1)
nnD deletes nn lines (including this one – default nn is 1)
nn” copies this line nn times (default is 1)
/ makes this the current line

I have no idea how to enact any of these. I had to just ignore them and move on to a second page, which has more instructions with different ways of doing the same operations. For example, I can type :5 to jump to line 5, then type DEL to delete it. The important thing I had to pick up on is that pressing TAB switches between what part of the screen your cursor is on, so you can hop directly to particular lines and edit them (as opposed to retype something, using the command INPUT INSERT_TEXT_HERE). For example, I can hit TAB until reaching line 7, and right-arrow over a bit…

…and then change the 2 to a larger number. What this does is check the floor number, and if the lift is out of floors, it will jump to the part of the routine where it switches the floor back to 1. By making the number bigger, you can now have access to floors 3 and 4. (While you’re at it, you need to change the next line to LIFT_FLOOR = LIFT_FLOOR + 1 which will roll through the possibilities rather than just setting the floor outright to 2.)

Of course, realizing that you can do this in the first place is a puzzle, but the editor itself ended up being one too! While some of what it is doing resembles editors like EMACS, some aspects (like forcing the whole word INPUT before typing in text) are unique to the world of ZENO, so genuinely make a spreadsheet-game of sorts.

It doesn’t help that the game always seems on the verge of crashing. If you open up the help but go to a page that doesn’t exist, the game crashes and you need to restart; I don’t think this is an emulator bug.

With the lift fixed, I was free to explore what turned out to be four floors. (Trying to get to 5+ just has the door stay closed, and before anyone asks, the same thing happens if you try for a “floor 0”. Now that I think of it, I haven’t tried every floor, so it’s still possible there’s a secret floor 32 or some such. There’s also another potential trick later that I’ll explain with the LIFT_DOOR variable.)

My map, so far:

More sections are predicated on secret things I’m missing, or the ability to use the matter transporter, which I haven’t been able to use yet. But let’s tour the floors in order:

FLOOR 1: Where everything starts, and the location of the main computer. (First order of business: log on to the computer and type “air” to get the air pump working, otherwise you will suffocate and die.) The main “User Guide” is here and there are references to a “System Guide”, “Editor Guide”, “Programming Manual”, “Robot Programming Guide”, and “Matter Transmitter Operator’s Guide”. The Guide has some pages ripped out: 13, 15, 17, 18, and 19, and the last page warns that

A full list is included as an appendix in the COMPUZZ System Guide. Please read this carefully. Since COMPUZZ computers are typically used to control powerful and potentially dangerous devices such as lifts, burglar alarms, lasers etc, failure to observe the recommended procedures can be fatal.

FLOOR 2: Observatory, with a COMPUZZ ROBOT. The only robot I’ve found so far (parts of the text imply there are others). Trying to touch the robot gets you killed by a laser.

I was actually intending to look more closely at the robot; this is one of the problems with an object-only interface.

The book is the Programming Manual. While there’s an index that indicates a complete book…

…most of the pages are gone. The only ones present are 2, 8, and 20, although there’s a bit of a joke on 16 and 17

The next page is intentionally left blank. This page is blank apart from this message.

(I’m pretty sure this is a joke on IBM manuals, which I remember being infamous for lots of INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK pages.)

I still haven’t tried playing around with the robot yet, although there is a sample program in the computer with two command lines:

robot = go to the door
robot = come into room please

(I think I accidentally ran this while in the room, which is why the robot ran into the elevator; if I waited another turn it would come back.)

There’s also a terminal in the observatory, but trying to use it gets the response that the terminal is disabled. There’s a program to enable it, but it doesn’t seem to work; it asks if you want the terminal enabled or disabled, and you type “enabled”, and the game responds that the terminal is disabled. I assume there’s an intentional bug here (“puzzle”) and I haven’t dug further.

FLOOR 3: You leave out to a storeroom…

You are in the storeroom. There is a staircase spiraling down.
There is a bulky space suit here, just your size.
There is an open door in the wall, leading to a cramped lift.

…and picking up the space suit wears it automatically. Note that this uses up air and if you run out of air you die, so unlike the notebook typing SUIT again will drop the suit. (The simplification makes sense, but the inconsistency still makes me grumble.)

Going DOWN the staircase you find a metal bottle on the stairs (this will swap with whatever air is on the suit), and two torn papers. The two papers are from the robot programming guide, with some highlights being: a.) they all have good vision and position sensors b.) they do not follow anything like Asimov’s laws c.) using speech with a ROBOT_VOICE command takes 1 turn and d.) you can overlap multiple commands all at the same time but it can lead to unpredictable effects.

Every other page of the robot manual is missing.

Heading down the stairs further is a matter transmitter desk.

You are at the foot of the stairs, which lead up from here.
Partly hidden by a pillar there is a large desk. An illuminated sign over the desk says. “COMPUZZ MATTER TRANSMITTER: OFF”

The prompt looks like this:

Pressing “help” here opens a matter transmitter guide, which has a page of technobabble, two extra pages of details, and mostly missing pages in between. I’ll give every single page this time:

I have not got things working yet. Even testing a small thing can take a while because it generally has to be implemented in the form of a program.

FLOOR 4: This has a hatch with a warning not to go through without a spacesuit. The hatch leads to an airlock.

You are in the hangar – an enormous cavern of a room.
To your left is the hatch of the airlock.
At the far end, the remains of the vast hangar door hang open, probably blasted by a hadronic beam.
There is a shuttle, large enough for two, parked here.
A sign on the side reads “Cardboard Mockup – DO NOT TOUCH” .
A small leaflet is posted on the wall.
There is a terminal here
Through the door you can see a corner of the Mare Imbrium, at its edge, hanging 200 klicks away.
You are wearing the space suit

The leaflet explains that the space shuttle is a “coming soon” feature and the intent is for ZENO to eventually let you travel through space and land on the moon. (This never happens, although Mitchell revisits ZENO in a printed book form — more on that when I eventually wrap up on the mainframe version.) The leaflet also implies that this version of the game is “deterministic”, that is, this isn’t a strategy game; there are particular things that will consistently happen.

The leaflet also gives a list of objectives, which is good because I believe there is no set “ending”. I’m not putting myself on the hook for any objective in particular, other than fighting off aliens.

determine the coordinates of all the places the robot can get to
write a program to detect and recover from power surges automatically
write a program to restart programs that fail
allow editing at terminals
kill off all aliens as soon as they get aboard
fill up all the disks

If you’re tempted to mess with the shuttle (despite it being cardboard) it kills you.

Next time I’ll discuss the robot control, the alien invasion, and hopefully use the former to fight off the latter. This might be not too far from the end, or (due to the programming taking so long to wade through, and the potential vistas the matter transmitter might open up) I might still need another two weeks to chew through everything.

The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction: February 2026 Post Mortem

2026-02-17T10:19:59+00:00

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday, February 16, 2026 over Google Meet. Kirill Azernyy, JP Tuttle, Michael Stage, Zarf, Michael Hilborn, Matt Griffin, Josh Grams, Doug Orleans, Allyson, and anjchang attended. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just a log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.

Opening: Retro-computing & Early IF Discoveries
Members kicked things off by sharing personal archives and early experiments with interactive fiction:

Zarf shared his recent post “The Beacon” https://blog.zarfhome.com/2026/02/the-beacon
He also resurfaced his collection of old Infocom transcripts https://blog.zarfhome.com/2025/10/old-infocom-transcripts
Matt and others reminisced about BASIC games, dot‑matrix printouts, and early fan‑fiction‑style IF attempts.

Kirill talked about hosting a panel of electronic literature and game‑studies scholars. He shared his digital literature site, https://illitera.com/, which features experimental writing, digital art, and critical theory. He presented ideas from his current research on digital interaction and the changing role of the reader in an AI‑mediated literary landscape. Key themes included:

the shift from authorship to readership/usership
how AI complicates authorship but heightens the importance of human interpretation
electronic literature as a form that demands active, embodied engagement
the tension between engagement and disengagement as part of digital reading
the need to understand how humans maintain meaningful reading practices as writing becomes increasingly machine‑generated

This sparked a rich discussion among attendees about failure states in IF, the cognitive interactivity of traditional literature, and how puzzle‑based IF evolved into broader interactive reading practices. We then moved on to recent discussion topics posted on the mailing list.

Other Topics Discussed
Iron Chif: A Game‑Show‑Style IF Challenge
The group revisited the Iron Chif (Iron IF) challenge — a playful, time‑boxed competition where two authors create games in a week based on a shared theme. Participants discussed the upcoming installment, daily progress posts, and the fun of watching authors work under constraints.

Videotome: Engine, Community & 2025 IFDB List
Josh and Matt introduced Videotome to those unfamiliar:

A family of engines for kinetic or lightly interactive visual‑novel‑style works.
Designed for plain‑text‑first creation.
Supported by a small but vibrant community, including the Domino Club.

The group discussed how Videotome works unexpectedly appeared in the 2025 IFDB awards after Freya encouraged nominations. The winning piece originated from a game jam using digitized museum laserdisc archives.

Referenced resources:

Iron Chif tagged discussion thread https://intfiction.org/tag/iron-chif
IFDB 2025 Awards https://intfiction.org/t/results-of-the-2025-ifdb-awards/79012
IronChif Season 1 awards https://intfiction.org/t/iron-chif-season-one-episode-1-lpsmith-vs-afterward-using-inform-7/78122
Words & Friction — a blog post on making Videotome https://itch.io/blog/454075/words-friction-syntax-stuff-i-thought-about-when-making-videotome
IFDB 2025 Videotome List https://ifdb.org/poll?id=31cspgvqngowkv1s
Iron Chif Pilot Episode https://intfiction.org/t/iron-chif-pilot-episode-pacian-vs-draconis-using-dialog/77128

Game Poems Magazine
Josh highlighted the January release of Game Poems Magazine, Issue 1:

Issue 1: https://www.gamepoems.com/issue01/?page=1
Indiepocalypse Radio episode featuring contributors (3 hours): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjTU5m667Cc

Members discussed the short, lyrical nature of the works and the need to clarify interactivity for new readers. Several attendees planned to explore more pieces.

Awards & Competitions Landscape
The group compared the major IF awards and competitions:

IFDB Awards / XYZZY Awards → analogous to the Hugos or Emmys.
IFComp & Spring Thing → compared to Cannes or Sundance.
Additional events: IntroComp, ParserComp, and others.

There was also discussion of the XYZZY Awards hiatus and how the IFDB Awards have partially filled that gap.

ShuffleComp 2025
The revived ShuffleComp wrapped up judging with 15 entries this year. Members expressed interest in playing through the submissions and seeing how authors interpreted their shuffled playlists.

My So Called Interactive Fiction Life: Orbiting the Planet Dungeon

2026-02-17T08:27:24+00:00

Getting so close to completing Mainframe Zork and Version 1.0.0 of Sharpee.

Here's a list of things I've accomplished in the last few days:

Full walkthrough of everything except the end game with some minor bugs in the Royal Puzzle.
New npm release 0.9.90.
New Windows, Linux (deb/AppImage) Zifmia installers while the MacOS installer languishes in Apple land's horrid dmg approval process.
New ADR-130 to offer npx sharpee build --installer option to allow authors to generate their own packaged Tauri executable and/or installer, including landing page image, icon, and embedded story assets.
Found and fixed a very nasty bug that only manifested because of the two hooks in the Dungeon Volcano.
Started working on Reflections, a story I hope to submit to the IFComp and a remake of Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter. Secret Letter will have the same setting and some of the same plot elements, but a new conversation system, new map, and an even bigger reveal than the original. Also a new ending. I talked to Mike Gentry and he's blessed my changes and the remake.
The story development process will involve using specification documents (markdown) to write and build the story in an iterative cycle. This is going to be a very interesting experiment.
I also made an executive decision for my port of Dungeon. I am leaving the gnomes out. Whoever added them was trolling players. The game is already complex enough you don't need to give players an option to put the game in an unwinnable state. I'm also adding my own puzzle. It's nearly an Easter egg and you won't find it unless you play the entire game.
I added a test bundle so you can run transcript and walkthrough tests in ~2s. this is extremely helpful for iterating on tests when the story hasn't changed.
I will note that the optimal OS to work with Sharpee is a newer Mac with the M4 or M5 chip. Holy Batman it's blazing fast.
Status updates for Sharpee and Dungeon are at my personal website: https://david.cornelson.net/.
IFWiki.org has also been updated with the latest Sharpee info.

I like this Sharpee! You know, it's exciting!

Choice of Games LLC: Coming Thursday! “Heroes of Tomorrow: Hidden Potential”—Trailer and demo out now!

2026-02-16T21:26:51+00:00

We’re excited to announce that Heroes of Tomorrow: Hidden Potential is releasing this Thursday, February 19th! You can play the first three chapters for free today, see the trailer on YouTube, and check out the author interview as well! And don’t forget to wishlist it on Steam! The more wishlists we get, the better the game will do on Steam on release day.

At our superhero academy, you’ll lead a team of teen heroes to battle supervillains! Will you fulfill your heroic legacy or forge your own path?

…and, oh yeah, your mom.

• Play as male, female, nonbinary, or genderfluid; gay, straight, bi, or asexual.
• Choose your superpowers—elemental control, energy manipulation, super-physique, beast powers, or telekinesis—and customize your super-suit!
• Romance or befriend a demon seeking redemption, a clever thief with a mysterious client, a powerful mage-in-training, or an already-famous heroic icon.
• Protect the city and become the people’s hero, or let the world burn!
• Banter with your foes, build super-tech gadgets, or let your fists do the talking!
• Fight alongside—or against—your classmates and mentors in brutally high-powered action battles!
• Battle supervillains that teleport, shapeshift, summon lava from volcanos, and turn the world into a videogame!
• Uncover the secrets that the heroes have been keeping from you about everything—even about yourself!

Can you defeat criminals, cultists, demons, and midterms?

Renga in Blue: ZENO (1983)

2026-02-16T20:46:16+00:00

Welcome to ZENO – a test of your initiative

The objective is to survive as long as possible against an increasingly hostile environment

IBM as a company has only come up here so far in passing, as a competitor to other companies like ICL or General Electric. Today’s game deals with IBM quite directly in a way that requires going back in time–

1963 photo of an IBM 1401, from George Dunbar in Toronto with more pictures here.

1954, MIT: in a discussion about a future where more people could use computers (that were at the time room-sized and used for one thing at a time) the legends Grace Hopper and John Backus (later famous for COBOL and FORTRAN respectively, amongst other things) brought up two opposing views. Hopper endorsed the idea of computers in parallel, many small computers linked together, while Backus instead promoted the concept of “a big computer” used as “several smaller ones”. John McCarthy, one of the time-sharing pioneers, already was thinking of the idea in 1955 and he made his first proposal in 1957, eventually using the current hardware available at MIT to implement what he called a lesser version of the idea:

This demonstration was called time-stealing, and was regarded as a mere prelude to proper time-sharing. It involved a fixed program in the bottom of memory that collected characters from the Flexowriter in a buffer while an ordinary batch job was running. It was only after each job was run that a job that would deal with the characters typed in would be read in from the drum. This job would do what it could until more input was wanted and would then let the operating system go back to the batch stream. This worked for the demonstration, because at certain hours, the M.I.T. Computation Center operated at certain hours a batch stream with a time limit of one minute on any job.

This was in 1959; the same year, Christopher Strachey (who created one of the candidates for “world’s first videogame”, see picture above) published a patent for his own time-sharing concept.

When I wrote the paper in 1959 I, in common with everyone else, had no idea of the difficulties which would arise in writing the software to control either the time-sharing or multi-programming. If I had I should not have have been so enthusiastic about them.

Hence, the idea was in the air: the technology just needed to catch up. The first actual working system was started in 1961 (based on McCarthy’s work) using an IBM mainframe. So while Dartmouth (with GE) was at the vanguard of computer time-sharing (1964), it is hardly surprising that IBM reached commercial time-sharing at essentially the same time, with the IBM System/360.

University of California, 1966. Source.

The original System/360 had a “Virtual Machine Monitor”; this was the overarching master system that made contact with the “metal” of the mainframe. Within this was built a CMS (Conversational Monitor System) which essentially appeared to the user like a “personal computer”; this was a way to do timesharing in a way that was essentially seamless. The user could treat the device in front of them as their own.

From IBM’s 45 (Official) Years of Virtualization.

A young Stuart Madnick started work on the CMS at the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center in June of 1966 while still a student at MIT. He started with developing the file system, basing it on MIT and Dartmouth’s time-sharing work, then (part-time during the school year) developed the EXEC system (originally called COMMAND). EXEC was a scripting system meant to manage computer commands in sequence; a program to run other programs.

You can create simple EXEC procedures that execute several frequently used commands or you can devise complex EXEC procedures that test several logical conditions before deciding whether or not to execute a command. The logical capabilities in the EXEC processor are controlled with statements similar to the IF/THEN, GOTO, DO, and LOOP statements familiar to high-level language users.

— From a 1975 EXEC user manual

For example, this sample from IBM compiles and runs COBOL code:

* RUNCOB2 EXEC *
&CONTROL OFF NOMSG
&IF &INDEX LT 1 &GOTO -ERR1
COBOL2 &1
&IF &RETCODE NE 0 &EXIT
GLOBAL TXTLIB VSC2LTXT CMSLIB
&IF &RETCODE NE 0 &EXIT
LOAD &1 (START
&IF &RETCODE NE 0 &EXIT
&TYPE RUNCOB2 EXEC FINISHED
&EXIT
-ERR1
&TYPE PROGRAM NAME NOT GIVEN
&EXIT

This was followed in the 70s by EXEC 2, which had more flexibility and user-defined functions; essentially, it took EXEC’s more practical approach and tried to make an all-purpose scripting language. However, it was still designed with the assumption that most lines were intended to run other programs (like COBOL compilers) and while it was possible to apply if-then logic and the like the notation in such cases was relatively cryptic.

Hence, another follow-up: the language Rex (later renamed Rexx), work started in 1979. To compare the change, here’s some EXEC 2 code…

COPYFILE &FNAME &FTYPE &FMODE = BACKUP =
&IF &RC GT 0 &TYPE Copy failed with return code &RC

…and here’s some Rexx code that’s equivalent.

‘COPYFILE’ fname ftype fmode ‘= BACKUP =’
if rc>0 then say ‘Copy failed with return code’ rc

The second “if” statement is more natural. Rex(x) prioritizes readability and is considered one of the predecessors to the ultra-popular Python language.

My first implementation of Rexx was made freely available over IBM’s world-wide internal network in late 1979 and rapidly became popular. The network made it easy for people to exchange ideas and make suggestions for improvements. Also, because the language was limited to one (large) organization, it was possible to make some rather large changes in response to these suggestions. For example, one change, in which the ARG instruction replaced an earlier ARGS instruction, required updating hundreds of thousands of Rexx programs.

As a result of this direct feedback, the language quickly evolved to meet the needs of its users through a number of releases over the next few years. By 1982 it had become essentially the language known in OS/2 2.1 today; its name gained an “X” to avoid any confusion with other products. Rexx was included in the third release of IBM’s VM/System Product, shipped in 1983.

— Mike Cowlishaw, original designer of REXX

Cover of a 1990 edition of the Rexx user guide written by Cowlishaw.

(The three languages — EXEC, EXEC 2, Rexx — are still maintained to work with modern IBM systems. Corporate mainframe code can have legacy code dating back to the 70s in active use; this is why COBOL programmers are still in demand.)

All this is relevant today because not only is today’s game ZENO written in Rexx (back when the language was still internal to IBM), ZENO is a “programming game”; you are at a central computer controlling robots with programming. Regarding programming games in general, I briefly touched upon the game OMEGA in my writeup of Pillage Village; I also recommend Data-Driven Gamer’s series on the classic (and extremely difficult) Robot Odyssey. We’ve never had any that are also adventure games. (There’s some linkage to Suspended, but ZENO ends up being very different.) I’ll give the details on how ZENO works in a moment, but let me jump back to the 60s again and follow our author, hopping geographically over the Atlantic.

Dave Mitchell first went academically down a very different path than he ended up in; he got a BA in Theoretical Physics at Oxford in 1963 before doing postgraduate work in Psychology. He joined IBM in 1968, only two years after EXEC started development, although his original work was in the language PL/I. (See my writeup on Ferret for more on the PL/I language.) He spent the 1970s mostly working on “programmer training”.

Like many mainframe programmers in the 1970s, he came across Zork, becoming very interested in how “tools” were used in the game; also note that original mainframe Zork includes a section where you give commands to a robot.

Via ion_bond on Reddit.

As a programming teacher, he decided to riff off Zork but use it to create a programming language for robots. You are in a central base and your job is to protect it; while you can’t leave the base, you can interact with the outside world with a variety of robots.

This game generally speaking hasn’t been available for ages; it was designed to work on an IBM mainframe which was only running a short time, and it only re-appeared on the internet 5 years ago when the author (Mitchell) got the game up and running with Hercules (an emulator for running old IBM virtual machines). The part of his website that held the download is now defunct but it was rescued by Robert Robichaud (Rob in our comments); getting it running was also a Herculean feat but Gunther Schmidl managed to create a package you can download here. (As a word of warning, your virus detector may not like the setup as it runs an open port; I had to turn it off to play the game.)

Before moving on, I should emphasize that ZENO and Suspended landed on roughly the same concept from roughly the same source. Infocom’s ideas around commendable NPCs first appeared in the Zork robot, and they advanced their system with Deadline that was then re-used for Suspended. Mitchell was working independently, landing on a more esoteric outcome in being a full programming game.

ZENO is an experimental REX exec (currently in version 1, the initial prototype). It was written (in the author’s own time) in 1983:

(i) to provide an interactive environment to stimulate the learning of problem-solving skills (debugging etc)
(ii) to demonstrate the expressive power of REX (though the prototype should NOT be taken as illustrating good programming style)
(iii) to show that an interpreted language CAN provide adequate performance, even for a large complex application
(iv) to prototype a number of “Personal Computer” characteristics (e.g. a VDU scroller, command language, full-screen editor etc)
(v) to experiment with the computer control of a variety of complex devices (lifts, robots etc)
(vi) for entertainment (outside business hours)

The language being used in the game is not a “real” language but one made for the game he calls SIMPL/E (as a parody of PL/I).

While the game technically accepts parser commands, it does so with a major simplification: it really cares about single objects, like a textual version of a point-and-click game. That is, while you can start the game with “go lift”, you really just need to type “lift” to enter it. (Or “computer” to use the computer, or “book” to use the book.)

The button in the lift is broken (pressing it causes nothing to happen). Typing “notebook” will automatically pick it up and use it (your avatar will subsequently keep it on hand for taking notes). Because of the parser simplification, typing “drop notebook” will just open it again; there’s no way to drop the notebook once you have it.

Early on messages start like “the air here is a bit stuffy”. Like Suspended (and Starcross) there are environmental problems going on, and the first thing to do is to start the air pump (this is mentioned explicitly in the directions).

My first time through I struggled for a while to figure out the air pump as the “book” that’s in-world is rather long and esoteric, but I’m pretty sure you’re intended to use the guide the game comes with for starter commands; it’s hard to figure out how to even get going with the robots otherwise. The relevant page from the book, for reference:

The lift needs to be turned on with the computer just like the air pump; once on, the button inside works to take you to an observatory.

If you try to go to the computer and type a command, you get pulled out as

You are distracted from the keyboard because:
The robot enters the lift

The book on this floor, ominously, has many pages ripped out, but keeps information on how to handle errors from source code:

This gets extremely complicated fast, so I’ll explain the various computer features and what can be done with robots next time. In the meantime, here’s the result of typing “window”:

After you touched the window it shattered, and you are sucked into the vacuum of empty space.

My So Called Interactive Fiction Life: Walk Through Testing in Sharpee

2026-02-15T10:42:50+00:00

I started porting Mainframe Zork to burn through the Sharpee platforms issues. This has been an excellent choice since Dungeon is a masterpiece of crazy puzzle illusions.

In order to run testing, I implemented GDT (Game Debugging Tool) which was a part of the original Dungeon PDP-10/11 implementation. It allows the Imps and other developers to debug issues with "god mode". This helped in some ways, but walkthroughs require logic because the game has random reactions to actions. In Dungeon, treasures may have been picked up by the Thief, the Round Room exits randomly until you solve the Tea Room puzzle, and combat uses a melee logic system with odds-based health and hit points.

So we invented a way to write walkthroughs with assertions and logic blocks. Here is the first section of testing in Dungeon (spoilers!):

title: Get Torch Early (Save Lantern Battery)
story: dungeo
description: Priority path - get the torch ASAP to minimize lantern usage. Torch is unlimited, lantern has 330 turns.
---

# ============================================================================
# GOAL: Get torch as quickly as possible
# Critical path: Attic (rope) -> Living Room (lantern, sword) -> Underground -> Dome Room -> Torch Room
# ============================================================================

[GOAL: Collect essential items from house]
[ENSURES: inventory contains "rope"]
[ENSURES: inventory contains "lantern"]
[ENSURES: inventory contains "sword"]

# Start at West of House
> look
[OK: contains "West of House"]

# Enter house via back window
> north
[OK: contains "North"]

> east
[OK: contains "Behind House"]

> open window
[OK: contains "open"]

> west
[OK: contains "Kitchen"]

> west
[OK: contains "Living Room"]

> take lantern
[OK: contains "Taken"]

> take sword
[OK: contains "Taken"]

> turn on lantern
[OK: contains "on"]

> east
[OK: contains "Kitchen"]

> up
[OK: contains "Attic"]

> take rope
[OK: contains "Taken"]

[END GOAL]

# ============================================================================
# GOAL: Enter underground and kill troll
# ============================================================================

[GOAL: Enter cellar and defeat troll]
[REQUIRES: inventory contains "lantern"]
[REQUIRES: inventory contains "sword"]

> down
[OK: contains "Kitchen"]

> west
[OK: contains "Living Room"]

> move rug
[OK: contains "trap door"]

> open trapdoor
[OK: contains "open"]

> down
[OK: contains "Cellar"]

> east
[OK: contains "Troll Room"]

# Kill troll - melee combat with DO/UNTIL loop
# Loops attack until troll dies or player dies (retry handles player death)
[RETRY: max=5]
[DO]
> attack troll with sword
[UNTIL "slumps to the floor dead" OR "removes his head" OR "He dies" OR "You are dead"]
[ENSURES: not entity "troll" alive]
[END RETRY]

[END GOAL]

# ============================================================================
# GOAL: Navigate to Dome Room and use rope puzzle
# ============================================================================

[GOAL: Get to Dome Room]

> north
[OK: contains "East-West Passage"]

> north
[OK: contains "Deep Ravine"]

> west
[OK: contains "Rocky Crawl"]

> east
[OK: contains "Dome Room"]

[END GOAL]

# ============================================================================
# GOAL: Tie rope and descend to Torch Room
# ============================================================================

[GOAL: Get the torch]
[REQUIRES: inventory contains "rope"]
[ENSURES: inventory contains "torch"]

> tie rope to railing
[OK: contains "rope"]

> down
[OK: contains "Torch Room"]

> take torch
[OK: contains "Taken"]

[END GOAL]

# ============================================================================
# GOAL: Switch to torch, save lantern battery
# ============================================================================

[GOAL: Switch light sources]

# Torch is always lit (perpetual flame) - no need to switch on
> turn on torch

> turn off lantern
[OK: contains "off"]

# Verify we still have light
> look
[OK: contains "Torch Room"]

# Down to underground
> down
[OK: contains "North/South Crawlway"]

# South and Northwest to Gallery
> south
[OK: contains "Studio"]

> northwest
[OK: contains "Gallery"]

# We'll get the painting on the way out of the bank

[END GOAL]

# Save checkpoint for next walkthrough
$save wt-01

And here is the second:

title: Bank of Zork Walkthrough
story: dungeo
description: Get portrait and zorkmid bills from Bank. Restores from wt-01 (starts at Gallery).
---

# Restore state from wt-01 (player at Gallery with torch, lantern, sword, rope)
$restore wt-01

# Start at Gallery (from torch transcript)
# Path to Bank: Gallery → W → Bank Entrance

# Navigate to Bank Entrance
> west
[OK: contains "Bank Entrance"]

# First get portrait from Chairman's Office
> northeast
[OK: contains "East Teller"]

> south
[OK: contains "Chairman"]

> take portrait
[OK: contains "Taken"]

# Now navigate to Safety Depository for the wall-walk puzzle
> north
[OK: contains "East Teller"]

> west
[OK: contains "West Teller"]

> west
[OK: contains "Safety Depository"]

# Wall-walk puzzle sequence:
# 1. Curtain → Small Room
# 2. South wall → Safety Depository (unlocks curtain to Viewing Room)
# 3. North wall → Vault (get zorkmid bills)
# 4. North wall → Safety Depository
# 5. Curtain → Viewing Room (escape)

> walk through curtain
[OK: contains "disoriented"]
[OK: contains "Small Room"]

> walk through south wall
[OK: contains "disoriented"]
[OK: contains "Safety Depository"]

> walk through north wall
[OK: contains "disoriented"]
[OK: contains "Vault"]

> take zorkmid bills
[OK: contains "Taken"]

> walk through north wall
[OK: contains "disoriented"]
[OK: contains "Safety Depository"]

# Curtain now leads to Viewing Room (set by south wall walk earlier)
> walk through curtain
[OK: contains "disoriented"]
[OK: contains "Viewing Room"]

# Exit via Bank Entrance
> south
[OK: contains "Bank Entrance"]

# Return to Gallery
> east
[OK: contains "Gallery"]

# Verify we have both treasures
> inventory
[OK: contains "portrait"]
[OK: contains "zorkmid"]
[OK: contains "torch"]

# Save checkpoint for next walkthrough
$save wt-02

I'm going to skip to the sixth test because it has round room complex logic gates:

title: Exorcism (Bell/Book/Candle Ritual)
story: dungeo
description: Perform exorcism ritual at Entry to Hades. Restores from wt-05.
---

# Restore state from wt-05 (player at Living Room with torch + lantern)
$restore wt-05

# ============================================================================
# GOAL: Verify starting state
# ============================================================================

[GOAL: Verify starting state]

> look
[OK: contains "Living Room"]

> inventory
[OK: contains "torch"]
[OK: contains "lantern"]

[END GOAL]

# ============================================================================
# GOAL: Navigate to Round Room
# Living Room -> Cellar -> Troll Room -> EW Passage -> Round Room
# ============================================================================

[GOAL: Navigate to Round Room]

> down
[OK: contains "Cellar"]

> east
[OK: contains "Troll Room"]

> north
[OK: contains "East-West Passage"]

> east
[OK: contains "Round Room"]

[END GOAL]

# ============================================================================
# GOAL: Traverse Round Room carousel to Grail Room
# Carousel is spinning (isFixed=false) - exits are randomized.
# Any direction you pick, you land at a random exit EXCEPT where you tried to go.
# Use DO-UNTIL: go south (not east, since east=Grail Room would be excluded),
# handle each possible landing, navigate back to Round Room, repeat.
# ============================================================================

[GOAL: Get to Grail Room via carousel]

[WHILE: not location = "Grail Room"]
  > south
  [IF: location = "East-West Passage"]
    > east
  [END IF]
  [IF: location = "Deep Canyon"]
    > southeast
  [END IF]
  [IF: location = "North/South Passage"]
    > southwest
  [END IF]
  [IF: location = "Winding Passage"]
    > northwest
  [END IF]
  [IF: location = "Engravings Cave"]
    > north
  [END IF]
  [IF: location = "Maze"]
    > northeast
  [END IF]
[END WHILE]

[END GOAL]

# ============================================================================
# GOAL: Navigate to Altar and collect exorcism items
# Grail Room -> UP -> Temple -> E -> Altar
# ============================================================================

[GOAL: Get exorcism items]
[ENSURES: inventory contains "bell"]
[ENSURES: inventory contains "book"]
[ENSURES: inventory contains "candles"]

> up
[OK: contains "Temple"]

> east
[OK: contains "Altar"]

> take bell
[OK: contains "Taken"]

> take book
[OK: contains "Taken"]

> take candles
[OK: contains "Taken"]

[END GOAL]

# ============================================================================
# GOAL: Navigate to Entrance to Hades
# Altar -> W -> Temple -> D -> Grail Room -> E -> Narrow Crawlway
# -> SW -> Mirror Room -> E -> Cave -> D -> Entrance to Hades
# ============================================================================

[GOAL: Get to Entrance to Hades]

> west
[OK: contains "Temple"]

> down
[OK: contains "Grail Room"]

> east
[OK: contains "Narrow Crawlway"]

> southwest
[OK: contains "Mirror Room"]

> east
[OK: contains "Cave"]

> down
[OK: contains "Entrance to Hades"]

[END GOAL]

# ============================================================================
# GOAL: Perform exorcism ritual
# Ring bell, read book, light candles (order doesn't matter)
# Daemon checks completion each turn - wait after all three steps
# ============================================================================

[GOAL: Perform exorcism]

# Step 1: Ring the bell
> ring bell
[OK: contains "resonant"]

# Step 2: Read the black book
> read book
[OK: contains "exorcism"]

# Step 3: Light the candles
> turn on candles
[OK: contains "on"]

# Wait a turn for the exorcism daemon to complete the ritual
> wait
[OK: contains "Time passes"]

[END GOAL]

# ============================================================================
# GOAL: Verify exorcism success - passage east should be open
# ============================================================================

[GOAL: Verify exorcism success]

> east
[OK: contains "Land of the Dead"]

[END GOAL]

# ============================================================================
# GOAL: Return to Living Room
# Land of Dead -> W -> Hades -> UP -> Cave -> W -> Mirror Room
# -> NE -> Narrow Crawlway -> W -> Grail Room -> W -> Round Room
# -> carousel WHILE -> Maze -> W -> Troll Room -> W -> Cellar
# -> UP -> Living Room
# ============================================================================

[GOAL: Return to Living Room]

# Back through Hades to Cave
> west
[OK: contains "Entrance to Hades"]

> up
[OK: contains "Cave"]

# Cave -> Mirror Room -> Narrow Crawlway -> Grail Room
> west
[OK: contains "Mirror Room"]

> northeast
[OK: contains "Narrow Crawlway"]

> west
[OK: contains "Grail Room"]

# Enter Round Room (carousel is still spinning)
> west
[OK: contains "Round Room"]

# Traverse carousel to reach Maze (Maze-01 has WEST -> Troll Room)
[WHILE: not location = "Maze"]
  > south
  [IF: location = "East-West Passage"]
    > east
  [END IF]
  [IF: location = "Deep Canyon"]
    > southeast
  [END IF]
  [IF: location = "North/South Passage"]
    > southwest
  [END IF]
  [IF: location = "Winding Passage"]
    > northwest
  [END IF]
  [IF: location = "Engravings Cave"]
    > north
  [END IF]
  [IF: location = "Grail Room"]
    > west
  [END IF]
[END WHILE]

# Maze-01 -> Troll Room -> Cellar -> Living Room
> west
[OK: contains "Troll Room"]

> west
[OK: contains "Cellar"]

> up
[OK: contains "Living Room"]

[END GOAL]

# ============================================================================
# GOAL: Verify final state for next segment
# ============================================================================

[GOAL: Verify inventory for next segment]

> inventory
[OK: contains "torch"]
[OK: contains "lantern"]

> look
[OK: contains "Living Room"]

[END GOAL]

# Save checkpoint for next walkthrough
$save wt-06

# SUCCESS! Exorcism complete
# Spirits banished, passage to Land of Dead now open
# Player in Living Room with torch + lantern + bell + book + candles
# Ready for next segment

We now have 13 working walkthroughs and over 500 points with only a few more puzzles to solve, then the end game. I wildly underestimated the complexity of Dungeon when I started this port and was wildly over-confident in the level of completion Sharpee had reached. I'd still say the foundation of Sharpee has held up. Fewer and fewer platform changes occur as the port of Dungeon nears completion and most of those are very small bugs, not systemic issues.

Zarf Updates: Visible Zorker: status report

2026-02-15T02:53:17+00:00

Three weeks ago I announced the Visible Zorker Patreon. At that time I said:

If we reach the $500/month goal by Feb 14th, I will start cranking on Zork 3. The aim will be to have a playable version ready for Patreon supporters on March 1st.

As you can see, we have not reached $500/month. The Patreon saw an initial wave of interest, but it leveled off after a few days at about $200.

But, you know what, I chose this project because it was fun! I want it to work. So we are officially in go-mode. Zork 3 is now in progress. I have a working build right now. Bare-bones, minimal, but working.

Contributor-level donors will get access to the Zork 3 page later tonight. Participant-level donors will get access on March 1st, by which time it will be feature-complete.

(Well, probably mostly complete. The map always takes longest.)

I'll be touting the project at GDC in March. I imagine that will bring in some more supporters. How many? No clue.

Regardless, I am now committing to finish Zork 3, Deadline, and Starcross by the end of May. June is NarraScope month, so I'll take a break to concentrate on the event. After that we'll take stock and see what the prospects are.

Sound good? Great.

See you around the Discord.

Renga in Blue: The Picture You Probably Saw of the “First Videogame” Is Wrong

2026-02-14T03:07:31+00:00

This is about as niche as a post of mine can get. What happened is I’ve been deep at work on my next game, which requires some history going back to the 1950s, and more specifically, Christopher Strachey makes a cameo appearance.

Strachey at the piano, date unknown. From Christopher Strachey, 1916-1975: A Biographical Note. Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 7, Number 1, January 1985.

For gaming history he is particularly known for a draughts (checkers) program that sometimes gets designated as the “first videogame”. There’s a lot of conditionals to that, including if a program called Bouncing Ball counts once a hole is added (and when that happened), but I’ll defer to the discussion here for details. I instead want to discuss what the game looks like. This it the picture most commonly seen (including on Wikipedia):

I wanted to mention Strachey’s videogame-pioneer status as aside before I went into his totally different part to play in my upcoming story, and as my way of compressing this information, I wanted to drop the image above with a descriptive caption and be done with it. However, I had the nagging feeling something was wrong.

After some expert consultation (specifically with Quarter Past and Ethan Johnson) I realized what the problem was. Quarter Past pointed to A Biography of the Pixel by Alvy Ray Smith as having good coverage.

Strachey was working on the Pilot Ace at Teddington, one of the first computers built in the UK (based on a more complex design of Turing’s). He wrote a letter to Turing about how he got a draughts (checkers) program to work, then found out that the Ferranti Mark I computer at Manchester had not only more memory but visible memory. He managed to re-do his program for the system, and used Turing’s “incomprehensible” manual to get it working. This led to an actual checkboard display on an arbitrary video system (hence “video”game). A figure from Smith’s book gives pictures:

These photos were found in Oxford’s archive of Strachey’s work, and Smith specifically mentions a folder number, C30, as containing photographs from Strachey. He gave a presentation with lantern slides of an actual game being played by the computer (at a conference in Toronto, where a new Mark I had just been installed) and these seem to have been part of that.

So, what’s wrong? If you don’t see it yet, let me zoom into one of the photos, and then give the one from Wikipedia (and elsewhere, including Ahoy’s video with 2.5 million+ views).

The Wikipedia board is left-right flipped! There should be a checker in the lower left corner. Wikipedia has a second error because it states it is a “A modern reproduction of Checkers, as it would have appeared on a Ferranti Mark 1” which isn’t true at all; it’s more like a scrubbed version of the photo from the real Mark I, reversed the wrong way. (ADD: I’m buying Aula’s argument in the comments there had to be cutting-pasting involved, so “modern reproduction” still works.) We’re not just talking Wikipedia; an academic paper here from 2012 also has the wrong view.

The figures in Strachey’s own paper (“Logical or non-mathematical programmes” from 1952) confirms he intended for checkers to be in the lower left corner.

However, I’m not quite done yet, as there’s still the question: is the picture rotated upside down?

This is from the biography article I mentioned at the top (with the picture of Strachey playing the piano). You’ll notice this time O is on bottom and X is on top. The book on pixels has this flipped over. Which one is right?

Strachey puts White at the bottom, and generally speaking Black is X and White is O. So it looks like all the book photos might need a 180 degree flip:

I haven’t been able to confirm this, but I figured I needed to share all this with you. (Also, the next post is going to be complicated, so likely it won’t be up until at least Monday.)

Zarf Updates: GDC plans, 2026

2026-02-14T02:39:30+00:00

Once again I will show my face in San Francisco for GDC. (My masked face, if you see me inside the convention center. That's how I roll now.) I'll be wearing the Green Hyperspace Jacket as usual.

I've attended GDC on and off since 2012. This year is a first, though: I'll be helping represent IFTF! We'll have a table in the new "GDC Commons" space, promoting the tools and art of interactive fiction. Come visit us during show-floor hours: 10-6 Wednesday, 10-6 Thursday, 10-3 Friday.

The Common will also host a bunch of other regional and interest-based game-dev nonprofits. Including the Global Game Jam, Black in Gaming, Latinx in Gaming, and groups from SF, Seattle, and my own homies from Boston Game Dev. Who I would totally be helping out if I weren't booked with the IFTF crew. And others.

I won't spoil our booth surprises... well, maybe a little. My Visible Zorker project is a great example of an open-source resource for game history education, so it'll be up and running somewhere. Assuming we get all the laptops set up the way we want.

No, I am not hijacking an IFTF event to promote my own Patreon. That would be tacky. But I should have Visible Zork 3 up and running as a special GDC sneak peek...

I won't be in the IFTF space every minute, but I'm signed up for a bunch of table hours on Wed/Thu/Fri. The rest of the week -- you know, the usual GDC cycle. Go to a talk, decide that talks are silly, hang out in Yerba Buena Park with all the other game-dev nerds. (Spoiler: the park doesn't require a conference badge. Drop by whether you're registered or not! It's always a crowd, unless it's raining, and even then.)

Oh, and I'll also be at the IFTF table at the Opening Night Event down at Oracle Park. Monday night, 6:30 until... actually I don't know how late it runs. We will find out!

And now, let's take that headline from top. What are GDC's plans for 2026? What's going on with this event? Why has it rebranded as the "Festival of Gaming"? What does that mean?

Everyone knows GDC started in 1988 as the "Computer Game Developers Conference" -- a couple dozen people in Chris Crawford's living room. Apparently it was 300 people by 1989. By the time I visited, GDC was the 30000-person monstrosity we know and resent today.

Then, splat. Pandemic, argh, skip a couple years, everybody comes back (not everybody)... just in time for three years of unprecedented industry consolidations, layoffs, and closures. Followed by the chilling of international tourism and business travel under, you know, the current way of things.

Not great for your theoretically industry-leading and in practice incredibly-expensive event.

As I understand it, the event's tentpole financial donors (Epic, Unity, Amazon, etc) have now drastically cut their support. Don't quote me on this, it's just what I hear on the street. But the giant reset of GDC's name, its branding, and its price matrix is a clear signal that The Old Plan Ain't Working.

Will the new plan work? 2025 had plenty of butts on-site, despite the industry malaise. Perhaps because of the industry malaise. But you can't run a show this size by shaking down the unemployed.

The "community and networking" theme seems to be aiming for a sort of social-time-with-your-30000-best-friends vibe. With an implicit promise that even though all of your friends just got laid off, their friends are all well-heeled publishers who can hook you right up. I mean, that is GDC in a nutshell, and has been for the past two decades. It's just that the social circle, the thousand overlapping social circles, have been cultivated on the coat-tails of gigantic economic battleships that hung in the sky in exactly the way that bricks don't. Can they really turn that into a self-supporting can't-miss community event? Or does everybody fly centrifugally off to fan-run meetups that cost a twentieth as much?

Don't look to me for predictions. I have an bug's-eye view of all this. Indeed, I'm one of the performing fleas they're bringing in to liven up the circus. IFTF gets free space on the show-floor! I'm happy to take my complimentary exhibitor pass and strut our stuff for a week.

But the sense that I'm getting from everybody is... provisional. "We'll try this new GDC and see if it works." Attendees are saying it and, well, GDC must be saying it too. Renting out the ballpark, good grief. They're just throwing a whole bunch of stuff in the pot and waiting to see if it explodes. With popcorn! Literal ballpark popcorn!

Somewhere behind the curtain is a spreadsheet, and a month from now, the cell in the bottom right will be red or black. I think that very shortly after that, we'll know whether 2026 turns out to be the last GDC.

If so, I am for sure not going to miss the party.

Not Dead Hugo: Less-cited Hugo File Limits

2025-03-12T00:47:00+00:00

When it comes to limits in Hugo, authors are most familiar with the static limits that can be viewed or modifiable ones that can be set at compilation time. If a game needs more arrays or routines than the system default, great, we change a value and we're good to go.

There are other limits in Hugo to be aware of, though, as discovered by Robb Sherwin. More than a year ago, he noticed that some rooms defined late in the code in his WIP were not accessible. I had a chance to use the Hugo Debugger on it and could see how, for no discernible reason, the code execution would just go off the rails once it reached the applicable object. Changing the order of file inclusion made this object accessible while presumably breaking something else.

We figured at the time that some limit (besides the ones already mentioned) was being overwritten, resulting in a pocket of a corrupted code. We couldn't deduce which limit we were running into, though. It was time to consult either Kent Tessman himself or someone else well-versed with the Hugo file format. We try to not bother Kent too much, though, as creating Hugo shouldn't be a CURSE OF ENDLESS QUESTIONS. He has more important, family-providing things to attend to (buy Fade In Professional Screenwriting Software today!). Similarly, we didn't want to bother others who have already done so much for Hugo, so the issue just kind of sat for a while.

Recently, it came up again and we tried to look at the problem with fresh eyes. I pointed Robb to Juhana Leinonen's Hugo .hex file inspector page, which verified that objects were redirecting to other things.

He also brought the issue up to Kent around this time, and Kent suggested that either the dictionary or properties table was the culprit. Robb took out some words and things, and voila, everything works now.

So, the problem was solved, but I still wanted to find out what tools Hugo authors have to check for this. The issues comes down to the design of the Hugo .hex file, which allocates 64K to the dictionary, special words, array space, events, properties, and objects each. Hugo was designed to make games playable on 16-bit devices and these limits reflect that. In Robb's case, he was surpassing that 64K dictionary limit.

One of the quirky things about Hugo is that it has a lot of great features that the documentation doesn't fully explain- either their usage or the situations in which something is especially useful. Despite the fact that the compiler didn't complain about a too-big dictionary table, I figured that there must be something in there since, in my opinion, Kent really did a great job in planning for a lot of scenarios.

So before I wrote this post, I thought I'd look over the compiler switch options again (since there are several that most Hugo authors rarely use), and indeed, there is a -u switch that shows the memory usage of a compiled game.

Here is an example of a memory usage readout:

(Top: $013F44)
+-----------------+---------------+
| Text bank | $001054 bytes |
+-----------------+---------------+
| Dictionary | $0B60 bytes |
+-----------------+---------------+
| Special words | $0080 bytes |
+-----------------+---------------+
| Array space | $0CE0 bytes |
+-----------------+---------------+
| Event table | $0010 bytes |
+-----------------+---------------+
| Property table | $0680 bytes |
+-----------------+---------------+
| Object table | $0700 bytes |
+-----------------+---------------+
| Executable code | $00FB60 bytes |
+-----------------+---------------+
| Grammar table | $0D00 bytes |
+-----------------+---------------+
| Header | $0040 bytes |
+-----------------+---------------+
(Bottom: $000000)

So, the values are in hex so authors have the extra step of converting them to decimal, but hey, it can give us a general idea if we're approaching any of those table size limits.

At some point, I will probably take a look at the compiler source and see if it's within my simple capabilities to check for these limits. In the meantime, I'll probably add a page to Hugo By Example drawing attention to this. Of course, this whole issue only happens in a game with a lot of stuff so it's possible that Robb will be the only one to ever run into it!

Renga in Blue: Epic Hero #1, Ocean Hunt: Welcome to Winsville

2026-02-13T03:03:27+00:00

(Continued from my previous posts.)

I’ve finished the game, and as predicted, there was not much left to go.

I was left before with a crystal rod and a related curious hint.

I have no idea what this hint means. What I instead was eyeballing was the “hole in wall” in the description. I was mentally equating that with the DOWN exit; there have been many games where a listed “background item” simply corresponds to a direction, but given I was horribly stuck, it was worth checking if that was really the case.

Anyone with an idea what the deal with the message was? I also was thinking in a structural-solving sense, insofar as the harpoon and rope make for one of the more elaborate puzzles in the game, yet the end result seemed to just be a relatively weak hint (like how the bottle from the ocean also just had a hint, one I didn’t even need because I had already solved the relevant puzzle!

Going inside the new passage, there is a vault, and now is when that number on the island gets applied:

(Of course, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever a sunken ship would have its combination clued by numbers written on a nearby island.. This is one of those adventure-things that gets handwaved off generally, but it really is so much more absurd than “the color on the windowsill matches the combination five rooms away” here; the game is clearly detached from reality in a “gonzo” sense where anything can happen.)

Sorry, not much update even with the analysis there! That’s the risk with adventure game blogging; you sometimes end up stopping right at the end. I do have one historical update, though:

From a Molimerx ad for the Epic Hero series, Computing Today January 1983.

I found the ad above in a January 1983 magazine (which was on newsstands, so it really was up in December ’82); that means I can drop the 1982/1983 business and stick this and the other two Epic Hero games in the Year 1982.

This game did not seem much like we were being heroic or epic, though? I could see calling a series that and diverging later into less epic material, but with this as the first in the series, it’s a curious naming convention. Perhaps Epic Hero games 2 and 3 will live up to the picture.

But for now, coming up: a wildly unusual mainframe game recently rescued and unlike anything featured on this blog before.

Choice of Games LLC: Out now! “Hearts in Hades: Divine Passion”—Choose romance as the goddess of nightmares!

2026-02-12T13:59:38+00:00

We’re proud to announce that Hearts in Hades: Divine Passion, the latest in our “Heart’s Choice” line of multiple-choice interactive romance novels, is now available for iOS and Android in the “Heart’s Choice” app. You can also download it on Steam, or enjoy it on our website.

It’s 40% off until February 19th!

Seduce the man of your dreams as the goddess of nightmares! Will you honor the gods of Olympus or consolidate power and rule the Underworld?

Hearts in Hades: Divine Passion is an interactive fantasy romance novel by Lidia Molina Whyte. It’s entirely text-based, 160,000 words, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

As the daughter of Hades and Persephone, you dwell in the Underworld as the goddess of nightmares, haunting mortals’ sleep and maintaining the tenuous alliance between your realm and Olympus. The Fates have woven you a path to the Messengers’ Council, where you work with Morpheus, god of dreams, and Hermes, leader of the Council.

Now, as rumors of an uprising by Giants begin to stir, and these ancient enemies attack, both Olympus and the Underworld will descend into brutal warfare.

Your parents are keen to strengthen the alliance between the realms by marrying you to Ares, Olympian god of war. Such a unified show of power might stop the slaughter before it starts. But is that what you want? And is that truly what is best for the gods?

Then again, perhaps this political match might be a love match after all. You and Ares were friends as children, and now he is a bronze-haired broad-shouldered vision of strength, rippling with muscles and encased in armor. Yet his warm hazel eyes and adorable dimples are the same, betraying his inner sweetness. How can the god of war give such tender kisses?

Or perhaps you wish to defy your parents’ will? What about your counterpart Morpheus, god of dreams? Smug, silver-haired, infuriatingly handsome, he flits in and out of your life on iridescent wings, leaving honey-scented poppies and satisfied lovers quivering in his wake. He’d be delighted to dominate you in bed, but perhaps you’d prefer to take charge, deciding exactly when, how, and where he’s allowed to come.

Or you could leave the gods and their games behind. There is one mortal who does not fear you, despite the nightmares that you have sent him: Theron, lord of Leukas. He has dark curls, sad eyes, a bittersweet smile; the clever rugged hands of an artisan and the easy power of a true ruler. Can you find true love under the mortal sun?

Play as a goddess romancing male gods and mortal men.
Romance the surprisingly sweet god of war, the smugly seductive god of dreams, or the charming mortal lord who doesn’t fear you.
Control a horde of shadow daemons, and choose their animal form.
Match wits with Hermes, supporting him as leader of the Messengers’ Council, or overthrowing him.
Beat Medea at an Ancient Greek game of strategy.
Pet Cerberus, the bone-chilling three-headed hound guarding the merciless gates to the Underworld.
Inspire a clutch of dragon eggs to hatch, and then pet those baby dragons.

We hope you enjoy playing Hearts in Hades: Divine Passion. 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.

Renga in Blue: Epic Hero #1, Ocean Hunt: Welcome to Killedsville

2026-02-12T03:22:39+00:00

(Continued from my previous post.)

First off, some corrections to statements in my last post: two of the Colour Genie games (from the “Colour Quest” series published by Gumboot) are by Dave Doohan, not Leduc. Leduc is listed on game 4 (Camelot) as a co-author (I’m guessing as authoring the “engine”), and while I don’t have a copy of game 5 (Shipwreck) to test and check credits, I now know what the box art of a republished version looks like, and I’m using the word “republished” very loosely.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History. I know this is also Colour Quest 5 from the August 1984 issue of the Colour Genie Auckland District User Groups newsletter.

Game 6 (Fishing Quest) goes back to Leduc but seems to be a remake of Ocean Hunt. So in total he has 6 games, not counting one remake and at least one (probably two) co-authorship credits.

West goes to the garden and north goes to the shop.

I otherwise haven’t seen any differences up to the point where the boat ends up in the ocean.

As promised last time, I whipped out the verb list and tested everything out. Fortunately, the game was pretty good about giving feedback if a word is not in its vocabulary (it explicitly says ‘”WORD” is not in my vocabulary’).

It’s a four letter parser, so the difference between SCREW and SCREAM was unclear, but otherwise the list was unambiguous. I found with TALK on the merchant that he says to drop all treasures at the shop (there’s only two we’re looking for, remember). While noodling around with START I realized it worked on the boat while holding the keys (even if you’re not standing on the boat! I guess there’s a remote keyfob, from, er, 1982).

It turns out you don’t have to worry about the boat floating away, you just need to specify you want to move it somewhere. Unfortunately, that always seems to be hell in adventure games, and here is no different. I finally checked the walkthrough to realize that HEAD DIRECTION works, and later got (what I think is a more reasonable) STEER DIRECTION. The thing that makes this even more bizarre is that it does NOT work in the directions north or south.

“I am not quite sure what you mean” is the same message it gives for a complete whiff of a command that is not understood, but all that’s really going on is you can’t steer north or south! The general layout is:

island – ocean – wharf

So if you want to buy the reel after the boat floats away (since getting the money causes the event to happen), just start the boat and steer east. You can then BUY REEL without getting killed by the shopkeeper, and take it back out to the ocean to THROW REEL.

The MESSAGE has “a drawing of a man entering blue flames”, and I only found it after I got through the relevant section of the game, so buying the reel is technically optional! (I think. I’m not quite done yet with the game.)

Regarding jumping in the ocean with the sharks, and drowning if I tried to SWIM DOWN: I had missed an item on the boat. Back inside where there’s a bed, I had found I could GO BED and find items on shelves, but confusingly, you can LOOK BED twice to find two more items (that you don’t see actually going on the bed, because early 80s adventure logic).

The purple pill makes you feel GASSY and allows you to swim underwater (the pill does eventually run out, but it takes a while). The flashlight is the standard LIGHT/UNLIGHT kind and I’m guessing it also eventually runs out (but again, pretty generous on the timing).

from here you can swim along some “ocean floor” rooms and it took me a while to understand I was in a maze; I’m used to underwater ocean rooms being more of a grid like The Palms, although to be fair that game had some confusing exits as well). You can map it with the standard “drop items” technique that dates all the way back to Crowther Adventure.

Just like The Palms, there’s a crashed boat, but in this case something about it doesn’t make sense (and I had to use the walkthrough again).

The inside has a harpoon gun and a telescope. LOOK TELESCOPE just says you see your eye; I tried taking the gun over to the sharks and shooting them but the game didn’t understand what I wanted.

Trying to GO STAIRS kills you in a hilarious and confusing way.

What I was not understanding is that the inside of the liner is not underwater. You can’t swim to the hole, you have to actually tie the rope to the harpoon, and then fire it in the hole and climb the rope. I simply followed the walkthrough steps in bafflement, and then had to stare at what happened for a while before I realized what the game was meaning. (I haven’t needed the walkthrough on anything else, but I also haven’t finished the game yet.) I suppose the weird stairs message might have been a clue but generally this game is styled around a tenuous grasp of reality anyway (which is fine story-genre-wise, but it makes puzzles harder to solve!)

We will get back to “crystal does’nt cause explosions” later.

The fact there is only a message suggests the harpoon thing might have been optional anyway; I don’t know. But let’s move on to the island! STEER WEST while out in the ocean:

Note the 4737 you can see with the telescope. I think this use was being hinted at by the note at the shopkeeper, when it referred to looking at an island closely. I have not applied the 4737 clue yet.

Everyone loves the self-insert. If you LOOK LEDUC:

He’s writing the next Epic just for you!

The woman is a little more trouble. She blocks the way in the cave, and “looks hungry”.

There are two food options. One — the more obvious one — I’m fairly sure is wrong. You can GIVE SALT and she’ll say “Fish and Chips!” and disappear.

Alternatively, you can give the candy bar. She “turns green and dies in agony.”

Considering you could eat the same bar and it was delicious, I assume she’s meant to be some sort of demon. Except maybe a British demon because of the Fish and Chips reference? This feels like some sort of inside-Nottingham joke I’m missing (remember all three Epic games were made in 1982 before being published in 1983, so likely were treated more like a “private” games by the author, just like with Campbell’s Fairytale).

I think the candy bar is right because you need the salt shaker later.

Going inside the cave, there is a “mouth”, which looks like it ought to be just a geographic feature…

…but is just an actual mouth. I don’t know if this is simply a gag like the quid/squid or something that gets used later.

Going north instead, there’s a room with a green, red, and blue stone; the stones can’t be taken. There’s an arch, and if you go in the arch, the room “feels wrong” although you can take the metal rod there seemingly without hurting anything.

TOUCHing the stones is the answer (thank you verb list!) as they’ll glow either green or red as you touch them, suggesting a combination lock. I eventually got into a “sacrifice and altar room”.

The next bit is hard to find, but the two solutions with the woman suggested (in a structural-solving sense) either the chocolate bar or the salt were still important. The salt turns out to be needed:

You can then GO FLAME; hinted at by the bottle in the ocean, although I want to re-emphasize I did this prior to getting the hint. The “sacrifice” thing seemed suggestive to me!

The diamonds are a regular treasure that you can deposit at the store right away; the crystal rod is not. I have no idea what to do with it. The message underground said something about it not being explosive but I haven’t been able to translate that into action.

Just to recap my items: fishing reel, shark repellent, crystal rod, telescope, metal rod (from the “bad” arch exit), keys, flowers, blanket, harpoon gun, squid, and some various messages. I suspect I just need to do the right thing with the crystal rod but I haven’t chanced upon it yet. We may get a win in a single puzzle, or it might still be a couple. Either way, I don’t think there’s too much farther to go.

One of the more amusing tape covers from Gumboot. That’s “Jet Set Billy”, not “Jet Set Willy”. Legally distinct! From the Centre for Computing History.

Zarf Updates: When is a bug not a bug?

2026-02-11T03:05:58+00:00

In my last post, I asserted that it was not a bug that the cyclops did not fight. (Not according to the combat rules that govern the troll and the thief, anyway.) There was some Patreon and Discord discussion about that; I'm pulling it out into a new post.

(Is my blog going to just be a stream of Infocom trivia for the next two years? Maybe! I'm winging it here.)

Why doesn't the cyclops fight? Well, it's these lines of code:

  <SET CNT 0>
  <REPEAT ()
      <SET CNT <+ .CNT 1>>
      <COND (<EQUAL? .CNT .LEN>
         <SET RES T>
         <RETURN T>)>
      <SET OO <GET ,VILLAINS .CNT>>

Translating to more familiar pseudocode:

  CNT = 0
  repeat {
    CNT++
    if (CNT == LEN) return
    OO = VILLAINS[CNT]
    // this monster attacks
  }

The VILLAINS table is an LTABLE, meaning it starts with a length field (3). Then entry 1 is the troll, entry 2 is the thief, entry 3 is the cyclops. The loop exits as soon as CNT is 3, so the cyclops never attacks. Simple.

The interesting comparison is Mini-Zork. This was a cut-down Zork, meant either as a demo, a more approachable game, or a version that would run on a cassette-based C64 -- I'm not sure of the precise story.

(Mini-Zork was the first ZIL code to circulate publicly, earlier than the big Infocom source release of 2019. So it got a lot of scrutiny.)

The point is, Mini-Zork has essentially the same logic, except the cyclops has been removed from the VILLAINS table. (His combat responses have been removed as well.) So the table LEN is 2, and the thief never attacks. That is clearly a bug. And the buggy line is <EQUAL? .CNT .LEN>.

(<==? .CNT .LEN>, because this version of ZIL let you abbreviate the operator. Means the same thing though.)

So am I really saying that the same line of code is a bug in Mini-Zork but not a bug in Zork? Sure! A bug is when the code doesn't do what you want. Infocom manifestly wanted the thief to fight but not the cyclops.

What's happened here is that a developer (probably Lebling or Blank, but who knows) made what should have been a simple change: removing one entry from a table. The table length wasn't hard-wired; everything that relies on VILLAINS checks its length. So the change should have been safe, but whoops, it wasn't. It resulted in a bug in Mini-Zork.

That wasn't a bug in the original game. It's what we call "an accident waiting to happen", or a "booby-trap", or a rake or a footgun, or, you know, bad code. Different situation entirely.

(Not a criticism. All IF games are made of bad code. It's just the nature of the beast.)

Let's compare a different bug (non-bug?) which also popped up in Discord discussion.

The strange machine in the depths of the coal mine is defined this way:

<OBJECT MACHINE
  (IN MACHINE-ROOM)
  (SYNONYM MACHINE PDP10 DRYER LID)
  (DESC "machine")
  (FLAGS CONTBIT NDESCBIT TRYTAKEBIT)
  (ACTION MACHINE-F)
  (CAPACITY 50)>

You can refer to it as a MACHINE, or a DRYER (the description says it's "reminiscent of a clothes dryer"), or a LID (so that OPEN LID is a synonym for OPEN MACHINE). Or you can call it a PDP10. A PDP-10 doesn't look anything like a dryer (fridge, sure) but any Zork insider would be familiar with the thing. Both MIT Zork and Infocom's version were developed on PDP-10 hardware.

So, great in-joke. Except it doesn't work:

>examine dryer You can't see any dryer here!

>examine pdp10 I don't know the word "pdp10".

(Infocom's parser reports unknown words whether you've found the item in question or not. So you don't have to journey to the Machine Room to test this.)

Here's a how-de-do! What happened?

To answer this, we must dig into the ZIL dictionary format. These words (MACHINE, DRYER, etc) aren't stored in plain ASCII. They're compressed using the Z-machine's text compression scheme.

In short: a Z-machine character is five bits. A dict entry is exactly four bytes -- two 16-bit words -- with three characters packed into each 16-bit word. So that's a maximum of six characters. The last word has a "stop bit" (the sixteenth bit) indicating that it's the end of the string.

(Then there's three flag bytes at the end of the entry, but those aren't relevant here.)

The six-character limit is well-known. You can type EXAMIN LANTER and the game will accept it. What's not so obvious is that some symbols are more expensive. Five bits isn't enough to distinguish every typable character, after all. So digits and punctuation are actually multi-character sequences: a "shift" code followed by a shifted value.

So the word PDP10 gets encoded as the sequence P D P shift 1 shift 0, or:

10101 01001 10101 00101 01001 00101
  P     D     P   shift   1   shift

The final 0 gets cut off, because it's the seventh Z-character.

Like I said, lots of game words get truncated. What's different about this one? It's truncated in the middle of a multi-character sequence. Apparently Infocom's ZIL compiler gets confused by this and omits the stop bit! (Remember the stop bit?) And that confuses the parser, so the word can never be matched.

I looked through the game dictionary and found another example of a missing stop bit. (I wasn't the first to do this.)

<OBJECT DAM
  (IN DAM-ROOM)
  (SYNONYM DAM GATE GATES FCD\#3)
  (DESC "dam")
  (FLAGS NDESCBIT TRYTAKEBIT)
  (ACTION DAM-FUNCTION)>

The backslash is just a source-code escape. This synonym word is supposed to be FCD#3 (Flood Control Dam #3), but again, the word is not recognized.

So the inevitable question: is this a bug? If so, where?

It could be an interpreter bug. After all, the text encoding spec I mentioned isn't an Infocom document. It came out of the IF community of the mid-90s, a time when we didn't have any Infocom documentation. Maybe the game is correct and my interpreter is wrong!

Well, we can check that. Fire up Zork 1 on the Apple 2!

Zork 1 running on an Apple //e emulator, courtesy of the Internet Archive.

Scratch that idea. My interpreter is behaving correctly, or "the same as Infocom's interpreter", anyhow.

At this point, I'd be happy to call this a bug -- an inferred bug in Infocom's compiler! But in fact we can observe a bit more evidence. Take a look at this object definition:

<OBJECT TREE
  (IN LOCAL-GLOBALS)
  (SYNONYM TREE BRANCH)
  (ADJECTIVE LARGE STORM ;"-TOSSED")
  (DESC "tree")
  (FLAGS NDESCBIT CLIMBBIT)>

This is a scenery object found all over the outdoors. A couple of locations say "Storm-tossed trees block your way", so they threw in STORM as a synonym. But the -TOSSED part is commented out.

Why? We don't have source code from earlier Zork 1 releases. But we do have compiled game files, and several of them have the word STORM -- with a missing stop bit.

Clearly, this was compiled from the word STORM-TOSSED, and ran into the same compiler bug. But this time, the developers noticed. They figured out what was wrong, and commented out part of the word to avoid the problem. But they missed the parallel situations of PDP10 and FCD#3.

We can also compare Zork 1 release 119, a late development version (never released). This has all the stop bits where they should be. All the funny words work. So by 1988, Infocom had fixed the compiler bug.

Whew. I've either completely narcotized you or opened your eyes to the many dimensions of Infocom game file analysis. Tune in next time when I count every individual one of the 69105 leaves!

(This entry is cross-posted to the Patreon site.)

The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction: February meeting (online)

2026-02-10T13:43:22+00:00

The Boston IF meetup for February will be Monday, February 16, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will post the Google Meet link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.

Renga in Blue: Epic Hero #1, Ocean Hunt (1982)

2026-02-10T03:31:32+00:00

In the April 1984 edition of Imagine magazine, intended mostly for tabletop gaming, Mike Costello (editor of Wargame News and Warmachine) started a column devoted to home computer gaming.

Many readers will already be familiar with the Adventure games that have been available on nearly all micros from the dawn of microcomputer history (about 1976). These sub-divide into a number of different types. The text-only Adventure is the most widespread, not because it is simpler than the others but because it is easier to rewrite a program of this kind for a variety of machines. The Scott Adams Adventures are the best known, but a number of authors have tried their hand at this type of game. In the UK, the machine-code Adventures by Marc Leduc and Brian Howarth have become well known to TRS-80 users, and the Brian Howarth Adventures are now being rewritten for a number of other machines.

Brian Howarth we’ve now seen quite a few times now (with games like The Arrow of Death and Circus); he’s given enough direct interviews that his history is mostly well-understood. (The exact story behind him switching to using the Scott Adams database format for his games is still messy, but at least we know enough about him for there to be a historical riddle in the first place.) Marc Leduc, mentioned in the same sentence, has not yet had any coverage here at all, and he’s had very little attention from modern writers.

The TRS-80/Genie Users Group of Nottingham was founded in 1980, meetings twice a month at the Wilford Moderns Rugby Club House. They had a club magazine, LPRINT, edited by Geoffrey Hillier.

2015 photo of the location. Source.

Marc Leduc was the chairman; what is unusual is he was also the chair of a second group, the National Colour Genie User’s Group. They had their own distinct magazine, Chewing Gum.

THROUGHOUT THIS MONTH’S MAGAZINE, YOU WILL FIND LOTS OF PROGRAMS TO TYPE IN. WE HOPE YOU ENJOY THEM ALL, AND WOULD LIKE TO TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO THANK ALL THE AUTHORS FOR THEIR TIME AND EFFORT.

I’ve gone through before how the Video Genie was a clone from EACA of the TRS-80; in Germany, the Video Genie name established itself well enough that EACA produced a color version. This was made without reference to the Tandy Color Computer. That is, even though the company started with a clone, they used that as a basis to make their own machine. Tandy’s CoCo is a hardware reset of sorts; the Colour Genie is instead more along the lines of “let’s just take a TRS-80 and add color to it”.

It is ultra-rare and mostly only known in Germany (where the Genie name held more stock than Tandy’s for historical reasons I’ve gone into detail about before). However, it did make it over to the UK, where it flopped in sales. Notice how Leduc is chair of a local TRS-80 group but a national Colour Genie group. The Colour Genie group even ended up making their own publishing label, Gumboot.

Leduc’s first Color Genie Game, via the Centre for Computing History. We’ll get back to this game in the future.

There’s a recollection from 2021 of the user group via Bernard Telemoid, who might have been the artist? Except there was a second cover from Gumboot used on their games generally, so I’m not sure which is his. Note Telemoid is not positive about Leduc’s games but I’m going to decide about that on my own (…weird to call adventure games in general “Scott Adams rip offs”…).

i used to go to the TRS-80 users group (later became the TRS-80/Video Genie user group, mainly cos my dad had started selling VG’s and he lobbied for the change) with my dad in the early/mid 80’s, held in a rugby club in wilford weekly, loads of great characters and discussions about EEPROM writing, machine language, programming the Z80 and the sublime beauty of the RS-232 interface (still a standard in many high level computing connections) of course i went for the crisps and fizzy drinks and of course the other children of electronics engineers, medical physicists and mathematicians.

It was through this i got my first paid work in the arts, designing awful cassette covers for Marc Leduc’s awful Scott Adams Adventure rip offs like ‘Find The Diamond Of Balmorlan’, i think it was he who showed me that if you press ‘break’ you could view the guts of the program and edit your own narritive into it, so i remixed a shit maze chase game into ‘Death Droid’ and gave it to people at school.

The Nottingham group was so prominent in the English-language Colour Genie space (essentially victory by default) that when EACA wrote a BASIC manual for the Colour Genie, it came with a free tape containing programs from the group.

Leduc wrote three games for TRS-80/Genie and then six for Colour Genie. The three for TRS-80 eventually ended up published by Molimerx (prior background here), and Harding’s spiel about the game is in his usual style of “honesty with no attempt at marketing spin whatsoever”.

“Although Brian Howarth’s series, Mysterious Adventures, essentially monopolizes the TRS-80/Genie (and now many other machines) adventure market, other English authors are still writing adventures from their own particular discrete viewpoint.” In other words: I know who my best-selling author is, but have you considered buying an adventure game from a different author?

A December 1982 catalog does not contain the game so it appears to not have been officially published until sometime in 1983, but awkwardly, not only did Leduc finish all three Epic Hero games with a copyright of 1982, he started his new Colour Genie series in 1982 as well. Especially given the role clubs played during this era in distribution (with “libraries” of games for sharing), I think it likely Epic Hero made it out at least to the local Nottingham area before being published; adding on the fact the Colour Genie games ended up more-or-less self-published, is a date of 1982 or 1983 more appropriate? (CASA uses 1983.) I’m listing both in the title but sorting in 1983 for now, but it’s possible some issue of LPRINT will emerge that throws this for a loop (I haven’t been able to find any copies). ADD: This lands in 1982; see the last post in this series.

I don’t have anything detailed yet about Leduc himself, other than based on his dedications to his wife and kids in various games I think it is safe to say he was not one of our 15-year-old prodigies.

Our goal is to go to the ocean, retrieve two treasures, and come back.

The Charlau I was puzzling over for a while as it is just described as a “beaut” but it is actually the name of a houseboat. Let’s stick with land first, by going east:

There are flowers hiding keys (your keys, I presume, since they go to the boat you end up heading to the ocean on). You can also climb the tree to find a rotten hole with a salt shaker.

From the wharf, picking up the quid and instead going south:

That’s not a quid, that’s a squid. Hilarious. (It likely borrowed this moment from Mystery Fun House with the “five dollar bill” but without the existential confusion of now carrying what I assume is a large squid.)

The leaflet just hints “Look closely at Kikimawa Island” which I haven’t gotten to yet; you can try to just take the reel but the merchant just shoots you. (Similar to The Golden Voyage, if we’re staying with the Scott Adams references.)

Hopping onto the boat, there’s a rope and a bar of chocolate (you can eat the chocolate, and the game says it is delicious, but with no further effect; I don’t know if this is a red herring style game yet or if everything is important). The door unlocks with the keys from the flowers.

Inside you can climb up to a bed and find shelves with some shark repellent and some money (as long as you LOOK SHELVES more than once, but that’s pretty standard for this era).

After going inside (and only after going inside, this is essentially an event-based trigger rather than a time-based one) you find that the boat has now moved and you’re in the open ocean.

I would assume the rope could be used to tie the boat to the wharf, but I’ve tried TIE ROPE / WITH NOUN on every feasible noun both on the boat and on the wharf. I’m not sure what’s going on. The money presumably should be used to buy the reel before we take off for the ocean.

Even with the path being “wrong” we can still do a little preview of what it is like jumping into the ocean. It’s fine as long as you are holding the “shark repellent”, and I’m not sure what to visualize that as.

The only way (seemingly) to go is down, or more specifically SWIM DOWN, but that just causes drowning.

I think I need pull out the bigger guns on this parser to make any progress. If all else fails, there is a walkthrough, but this is the only Leduc game out of his nine that has one, so it’s better for me to try to figure out his mindset as much as possible now while I still have a fallback. Everything is in machine code so I can’t just expect to prod at BASIC source code on his later games.

Choice of Games LLC: Coming Thursday! New Heart’s Choice Game “Hearts in Hades: Divine Passion”—Demo and Author Interview Out Now

2026-02-09T16:00:22+00:00

Seduce the man of your dreams as the goddess of nightmares! Will you honor the gods of Olympus or consolidate power and rule the Underworld?

Hearts in Hades: Divine Passion is an interactive fantasy romance novel by Lidia Molina Whyte. It’s entirely text-based, 160,000 words, and a 4/5 peppers on the Heart’s Choice spice level rating! I sat down with Lidia to talk about her upcoming game and how a journalist and fiction writer moves to interactive romance.

Hearts in Hades: Divine Passion releases this Thursday, February 12th. You can play the demo today and wishlist it on Steam—even if you intend to buy on a different platform, it really helps.

This is your first time writing interactive fiction but you have a broad background as a writer in general. Tell our readers about yourself!

I have been writing professionally for about 12 years. I started out as an editorial assistant for a local food and culture magazine while I was still at university. I went on to complete a master’s degree in creative writing (though I firmly believe formal education isn’t necessary to be a writer) and have since worked across a variety of mediums including comics, short stories, film, and even an interactive walking adventure. Hearts in Hades is the longest project I’ve finished to date, but I’m currently working on my second long-form project, a fantasy novel inspired by Die Hard. I’m also an editor and regularly help writers get their manuscripts in good shape before they go on sub or are published. I’m not at the stage where I can survive off my creative writing and editing income alone just yet, so I also work as a copywriter and a media, film and TV journalist. There’s a lot going on, but it keeps things interesting!

This game started out with very little spicy content, but as you found your feet, it felt like a natural fit for the story being told. What drew you to the Greek gods for this setting and that kind of content?

I have always been a huge Greco-Roman mythology nerd. Before I pitched to Heart’s Choice, I had been toying with the idea of writing something inspired by the Orphic Hymn to Melinoe, but I wasn’t sure what shape it might take yet. At the time, I was going through a Hesiod phase, had just finished Madeline Miller’s Circe, and was enjoying Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, so I was very much in the mood for a setting involving gods, mortals and fate. I’m also a big fan of fantasy with strong and complex romance subplots, so it felt like a natural fit; Greek mythology is full of epic love stories (although most of them are extremely dysfunctional by modern standards).

Still, after the pitch was accepted, I was a little hesitant to go all out on the spicy content, even though the source material I was drawing from had no shortage of references to it. I was already stepping out of my comfort zone by tackling interactive fiction. The prospect of learning to code and getting comfortable with a whole new approach to characterisation was daunting enough. Did I also want to add writing fully explicit scenes for the first time to the mix? Once I got to writing, though, I realized I didn’t want to hold myself back like that. I’m so glad I did, because even though they were super challenging to get right, those scenes ended up being some of the most interesting to write. And fun, too!

The romances in this game are intense. If you had to choose, do you know which romance option you’d prefer?

That’s a tough question! I challenged myself to write each romantic option as compellingly as possible. Basically, I wanted to make it really hard for players to choose. I think I might’ve succeeded because I’m struggling to pick myself. I’m a huge enemies-to-lovers fan so I would probably be drawn to Morpheus in a first playthrough. There’s something irresistible about two characters being their worst, pettiest selves with one another and working backwards from there into falling in love. Though I would find it difficult not to romance Ares as soon as he gave me cake, or Theron following that first encounter on his balcony. So it truly would be anyone’s game, I think.

What did you find most surprising about the writing process or the stories you ended up telling in Hearts in Hades?

So many things on both fronts! The most challenging part for me was learning the code. I’m not a very technically-minded person, and I’m atrocious at maths. But once I got to grips with it, I was very surprised at how this style of writing shifted my perspective on storytelling as a whole. I had to do a lot of internal rewiring, but it’s been so worth it. I ended up finding a lot of satisfaction in attacking the same problem in a variety of different ways, and loved not being confined to a single narrative. A specific element I didn’t anticipate would be so rewarding was writing failure scenes. I often found myself trying to make them as narratively enticing as the successes, despite potentially leading to negative consequences or outcomes.

What games do you enjoy playing yourself?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’m a big Hades and Hades II fan, and though I beat both games a while ago, I keep going back time and time again. Still also playing Baldur’s Gate 3 regularly (I don’t think I’ll be able to stop until I’ve romanced all the characters). One of my all-time favourite games and the one that inspired me to try out interactive fiction is 80 Days, which I usually replay once a year. On the tabletop side of things, I love playing D&D and very occasionally dabble in DM-ing. My husband and I also enjoy starting weekend days with a board game over breakfast. Our current favourite is, perhaps also unsurprisingly, Iliad, but Wyrmspan and Small World are close seconds.

Renga in Blue: Cosmo Cross: The Thing’s Hollow—It Goes on Forever—

2026-02-09T03:48:37+00:00

(Continued from my previous posts.)

I was missing one reasonably simple (but still hard to find) action in order to escape with the Bluestone; I did try the next part of the game but it didn’t go well.

Just as a reminder, I had found a key, the bluestone, a gun, and a memo, and I was now looking for a way out of the base on the planet of Ariosferia. I received the verbs USE, TAKE, SHOOT, and PUSH from pressing the HELP key.

Kazuma Satou informed me in the comments that I had missed a feature; if you are being prompted for a noun, you can hit HELP in order to get them listed by the game. Hence you don’t have the guess that the GUN is a GUN (assuming you’ve understood this aspect from the instructions).

I went around every surface of the game trying to apply USE, SHOOT, and PUSH in order to see if I could get some kind of reaction. It turns out the end-hallway figures are very different.

This is the end of the hallway on the left.

This is the similar-looking end of the hallway to the right.

If I tried USE on the right side (and only the right side) the game was asking me for a noun. I went through my held items and found that using the KEY then went back to asking me for a verb again, and I was very confused since it didn’t seem like anything happened, and in fact the game is prompting you for your next turn a specific action, and if you don’t that it resets the variable (that is, you go back to needing to USE KEY again). If you type OPEN right after using the key you reveal hidden switches.

This is an entirely random choice, and there’s no save feature to the game, so after struggling through the combat and going through the sluggish adventure session you now have a one-third chance of just dying. Good luck!

(For me the correct switch was SWITCHA.)

(Immediately after this scene, the game does a LOAD”CAS:” to open the next part of the game. You can theoretically LOAD”CAS:” twice from the start to jump to part 2; only not knowing the password is stopping you.)

We’ve been teleported back to the ship and are ready to go onto the next phase. Unfortunately, the ships are just as irritating and deadly as before. (At least not invisible; the comment in the Oh! MZ guide said something about this but it meant that their movement is invisible; that is, you don’t see sprites smoothly changing places but rather “jumping” between points like an old LCD handheld game.)

Reader, I tried. I tried for far longer than I really ought to have. I tried using Antimicro to map my gamepad to the right keys; while this made playing a little more comfortable, but it didn’t change the fact that the laser movement is outrageously slow compared to how quickly you get destroyed, and this level has the downside of it not being as obvious which planet you’re aiming at (you’re going for something red … I think).

Mid-warp.

Attacked. This enemy is in a good spot, but that’s no guarantee for the next five enemies.

It was time to resort again to hacking.

This is me typing in a replacement line. Compare it with the original two lines up.

After the game had a moment of confusion it brought me INTO ORBIT, closed the spaceship window, and opened it again on a red environment with a dot in the background. I could use warp to get closer and aim but without any enemies around.

The dot was constantly moving to the right so I kept having to adjust my center aiming every few steps of warp.

The controller for the planet launcher is supposed to be a black rectangle.

Once I reached the screen above (and pressed F5, although I am unclear if I needed to do that), a very very long cutscene started. It is long in that it is being drawn on a PC-88 and I found in the end weirdly magnificent and impressive. I would probably not find it so impressive if I died in the scene after and had to redo the entire thing.

I’m showing far more screenshots than usual. Keep in mind each frame lasts about two seconds, and I’ve still cut many of the in-between frames.

And then…

…a sea of monoliths. You now can control movement, using up/down/left/right, with it being agonizingly slow as a bar fills at each step.

Midway filling a “charge” that will turn us a step to the left.

Pressing F1 will show either an arrow left, arrow right, or double-arrow (which I think indicates “you’re pointed the right way”). The problem is you need to navigate the monoliths without hitting things.

My spaceship being destroyed because it collided with one of the monoliths.

I found this section terribly confusing as it doesn’t appear like the things you hit are the monoliths? Or at least you can sometimes steer towards what appears to be an empty path, move forward, and crash.

Moving forward here crashes into apparently nothing.

The goal, according to the manual, is to find a series of six rectangles that you shoot with the Revival Ray (powered by the Bluestone) and you’ll be able to escape. Oddly enough, it appears to be impossible to crash moving backwards, so the way to position yourself is to slide far to the right (past whatever hitboxes the game thinks are there, visible and invisible) and slide forward the right amount, then slide back into place. At least I think this is the strategy, as I haven’t found a single one of the rectangles, and this is with occasionally hitting the “speedup” key to keep the sluggish movement from being so sluggish.

I’m far past adventure territory so I can consider this one done. The cinematic ambition is impressive and I found the imagination of both “act 2” sections I experienced to be exciting, just janky and undercooked for BASIC source code on an ancient system. The “ship docking” section with giant monoliths made me think the author was trying to make cinema more than a game. Not only thinking of 2001 here, but the long special effect sections of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

On my timeline of early Japanese adventure games, this technically lands somewhere in November of 1982, as the earliest ad that Rob found was in December of 1982.

Given the by-hand local distribution early in Osaka, I’m inclined to think that month might bump back a little, after Mystery House II but before Diamond Adventure. However, other games (like Diamond Adventure) may have ended up in displays in local computer stores early as well, so for consistency I’ll place in November against the ones we’ve played:

Xtal will return with more adventures, so if nothing else, this gives a preview of what their kind of thinking might lead to. There’s even a sequel to Cosmo Cross by the name of Grand Cross, sorted as “ADV/RPG” although I’ll worry about what sort of genre it really falls into once I get past 1983.

Zarf Updates: To fight a troll

2026-02-08T17:56:49+00:00

Everybody knows that you KILL TROLL WITH SWORD until he vanishes in a greasy black fog. If he kills you first, big deal; RESTORE and try again. It's too random to be a real obstacle. But do you know the math behind the randomness?

I didn't! But some folks got to talking about it on the Discord, and I realized there was room to add some visualization. So Visible Zork 1 now has a "Combat" tab. You can try it now, or just read it right here.

(The Visible version is dynamic. It shows how enemy strength decreases as you fight them. Also exciting details like the "enemy wakes up" timer.)

The villain table describes the three enemies you can fight. (Although the cyclops does not follow regular combat rules, so his entries are never used.)

The table shows what weapon the monster is weak again, the weakness penalty, the awakening probability (if it is unconscious), and the table of melee outcome messages. Also STRENGTH, which is really a property rather than a table entry, but I’m including it here anyway.

The combat table is used for all attacks, player and monster. Select a row based on the defender’s combat strength and the attacker’s advantage over the defender. That is, if the defender has strength 2 and the attacker has strength 3, use line “2/D+1”.

(For the computation of combat strength, see FIGHT-STRENGTH and VILLAIN-STRENGTH.)

Then roll a nine-sided die. Outcomes (for the defender) are: miss, staggered, light wound, serious wound, unconscious, killed.

If you are staggered, you have a 25% chance of being disarmed. If you are knocked out, your opponent gets 1-3 free shots at you, and most of the results are “killed”. (The dungeon is unkind to the unconscious.)

A few observations and questions:

Why a nine-sided die? Who knows. Maybe they didn't trust the low bit of the primitive RNGs of the day. (Even the "modern" IF interpreters of the 1990s had that sort of problem.)

The troll, who starts with strength 2, can be killed in one blow. The thief can't; you have to wear him down a bit.

Note that the cyclops is fully set up for combat, even though you can't hurt him (strength 10000!) and he won't fight you. He can kill you; if you annoy him, it starts a timer that ends with your ignominious death. But that's not handled through the combat system -- no die rolls.

In early versions of MIT Zork, you could fight the cyclops, but that was disabled in favor of sneaky solutions. The real question is, why did they leave the cyclops combat responses in the game? That's about 500 bytes they could have saved. Usually Infocom treated every byte as precious -- particularly for these early titles which had to run on the Atari 400, etc.

Finally, a combat bug -- newly discovered on our Discord, as far as I know.

Let me summarize the HERO-BLOW routine, which handles your attacks:

Set ATT to FIGHT-STRENGTH (your adjusted combat strength);
Set DEF to VILLAIN-STRENGTH (the opponent's adjusted combat strength);
If the opponent is disarmed or unconscious, you kill them automatically;
Otherwise roll on the combat table;
Decrease DEF if you rolled a hit;
Call VILLAIN-RESULT, which stores DEF as the opponent's STRENGTH and kills them if that's zero.

What do we mean by "adjusted combat strength"? Well, the VILLAIN-STRENGTH routine checks whether PRSI (the parsed indirect object) matches the villain's weakness. This is a crude way of checking whether you typed KILL TROLL WITH SWORD or KILL THIEF WITH KNIFE, as distinct from any other weapon. If the weapon matches, VILLAIN-STRENGTH returns a value decreased by one (but not to zero).

(I think this decrease would also happen if you typed PUT LAMP IN SWORD on the same turn that the troll attacks you. Possible additional bug! But not the one I'm talking about.)

Notice that the weapon penalty makes its way from VILLAIN-STRENGTH to the DEF variable to the opponent's STRENGTH -- regardless of your roll! So if you attack the troll with the sword and miss, the troll's strength goes down by one anyway. (Unless it's already at one.) A light wound does two damage, and a serious wound does three.

The same goes for attacking the thief with the knife, of course. A miss will cause damage.

(To be clear, this only happens when you attack. The converse VILLAIN-BLOW routine does call VILLAIN-STRENGTH, but it doesn't call VILLAIN-RESULT. The decreased enemy strength value is discarded and doesn't affect future turns.)

Is this a bug? It sure doesn't look intentional. You wouldn't expect that a miss would cause damage. On the other hand, every commercial version of Zork behaved this way (as far as I know). If you "fixed the bug", combat would get significantly harder -- particularly the thief fight, which necessarily goes several rounds. Would anybody want that?

If the combat was playtested at all -- and Infocom was assiduous about user testing, both before and after release -- it was tested with these odds. The mechanics may be illogical, but we have to assume that the outcome is what Infocom wanted. Or at least, they were satisfied with it.

(This entry is cross-posted to the Patreon site.)

Renga in Blue: Cosmo Cross: Don’t Look Behind You

2026-02-07T22:45:16+00:00

(Continued from my previous post.)

I’ve made progress on but haven’t yet finished the ADV part of Cosmo Cross; while I suspect the section is short, I made it through enough content to report in.

To continue from last time, I had found some difficulty beating the space combat portion that starts Cosmo Cross, so used the raw power of editing the BASIC code to jump to the part most relevant to this blog, the adventure. Once reaching orbit you activate a signal device and get a text message about getting teleported to Ariosferia.

Soon you will see the surface of the planet, and arrive at the entrance to the base at its center.

The instructions also warn “you must never look behind you.” You’ll see what’s going on with that shortly.

The parser is the kind (like original Mystery House) that asks verb and noun to be typed on separate lines; confusingly, sometimes a modifier is also requested. Here, you need TO OPEN / DOOR / LEFT or OPEN / DOOR / RIGHT. This will cause an animation showing one side or the other opening, and then GO / FRONT (not FORWARD or the like) will advance inside.

The left and right side consist of a series of four doors, and a series of four … windows? decorations? On the shot above when facing one of the windows I haven’t been able to do anything. After TURN / LEFT:

The game gives a full list of verbs if you press the HELP button on the keyboard. Other than OPEN, GO, and TURN which we’ve already used, there’s USE, TAKE, SHOOT, and PUSH. Helpfully, if you type one of these verbs and it doesn’t apply, the game will just prompt you for a verb again; at the “window” or whatever that is, I tried all four, indicating either some other condition needs to hold or they really are just decoration.

Opposite the symbols are doors leading to single rooms. Some are empty, some have items. The big issue has been identifying what the items are. While this one is clearly a KEY…

…what about this item?

After some squinting and thinking about the word SHOOT on the verb list, I decided (correctly) it was a GUN.

It was a bit harder for me to realize with the screen above I was dealing with the STONE (that is, the Bluestone we’ve been trying to find).

Here is the complete map of the two sections (at least in my playthrough – I’m fairly sure everything seen can shift around):

The “monster” is the one oddity; a creature moves around when you walk in, and it took a lot of noun-hunting before I decided to SHOOT / MONSTER. There doesn’t seem to be any positive effect. I may be in a situation like the squid in The Palms where the encounter is “optional”.

One room has a rectangle where the only reason I could come up with MEMO was the suspicion the author had played Mystery House 2. Taking the memo reads it automatically.

The memo indicates the Bluestone and the teleport switch to return to the spaceship are both hidden, and that there are three switches, including a “self-destruct” switch.

Two more details: the end of each hall has a figure which may or may not be passable. Via testing verbs I found the game was wanting USE, yet none of my items — and I apparently had all of them available — did anything useful.

Finally, there’s the ominous “don’t turn around” message. If you turn to face “south” on my map you will outright die. This might have been a dodge to get out of drawing the opening room, but it’s a wonderfully atmospheric way to do it. I always felt a small bit of pressure while walking around even though this isn’t an intense/time based area like the first section of the game was.

Sent to another dimension!

My guess is at least one of the “windows” or whatever those are have some extra secrets, so I need to laboriously test each one; the game tries to animate movement as much as it can so every step is sluggish. I still expect an escape with the Bluestone next time, and I’ll at least try the later sections; no promises I’ll get that far, though.

Zarf Updates: The Beacon is lit

2026-02-07T15:09:49+00:00

Here's the back wall of my home office -- a.k.a. my videochat background. It used to be boring. Now it's colorful!

Pattern: slowflies. The lights are bright enough to saturate my phone camera; that's why the blue looks weirdly dark.

That's a programmable LED strip running a pattern that I designed. In a pattern language that I came up with. The source code for that pattern is here: slowflies.pbb.

As you can see, it's a declarative syntax which describes waves. Roughly, this code says "Generate some sine-wave pulses that move slowly back and forth; add them; draw them in green ($0F0) with a blue ($02C) fade-down."

Here's another one, in pinks and oranges:

Pattern: fireblobs. I turned off the room lights to bring out the colors.

And some video:

Pattern: wanderedges.

It's nicely flexible. That green-fireflies video is a sum-of-waves like all the others, but with a gradient that only shows the midpoint of the summed curves. This gives a sort of cheapass edge-detection over time, which is visually interesting.

This project has taken several detours. I originally wanted to run an LED strip around the bay window of my second-floor apartment. Thus the "Beacon" -- it would shine out over my neighborhood. Or at least amuse the neighbors.

I may yet do that, but weather-proofing and outdoor wiring is a lot. I figured it would be easier to start with an indoor installation. The neighbors would miss out, but it would amuse my compatriots at morning stand-up.

The pattern language is a syntax that I came up with a couple of years ago. My first implementation was in Rust. (I wanted some Rust practice.) That was intended to run on a Raspberry Pi. And it did! I bought a Pi and an LED strip. I managed to get the software installed, and it ran great.

However, connecting the Pi to the LED strip was, well, a soldering project. I've soldered wires, but my skill level is "blob it on and hope it works" and I just didn't feel comfortable anywhere near circuitboard pins. So that got shelved for a while.

But a few months ago, someone mentioned the word "Pixelblaze". The Pixelblaze is a user-friendly microcontroller for LED strips. It has a built-in web interface. You can get it with the connector already soldered on! Plug in, fire up a web page on your local network, select a pattern, and you're off. There's a pattern editor, too. Exactly what I wanted.

A Pixelblaze controller plugged into its connectors. It's illuminated in green because where do you think the light is coming from?

Only one problem: it doesn't run my pattern language. It uses a Javascript-like language. Nothing wrong with that -- but I had this extremely cool (I thought) declarative syntax all worked out, and I wanted to use it.

Sadly, while the Pixelblaze hardware (and its software) are intended for tinkerers, they are not open-source. So I couldn't just replace their language with mine.

Instead, I had to write a translator tool. Behold: pbbeacon!

(Yes, the "Pixelblaze Beacon". I wasn't feeling groovy for names.)

pbbeacon is a translator which reads one of my pattern files (a .pbb file) and writes out a Pixelblaze language file. You can see examples of both in the scripts directory. The slowflies.pbb script up top gets translated into slowflies.pat. You shove that onto the Pixelblaze and it runs.

(The top of the .pat file is the original .pbb source, included as a comment. Provenance is all.)

More to be done

This project is, as they say, very much in progress.

The pbbeacon language is missing a few features compared to the Rust original. In particular, I need to implement the noise operator. The PB language has a noise() function; I just need to get it hooked up right. [EDIT: Done as of Feb 13th.]
My system has a global clock. It needs to fire waves at known intervals, so time-tracking is critical. But the underlying Pixelblaze language uses fixed-point 16.16 math for everything. (Really 15.16, because it's signed numbers.) That means that my clock will overflow after 32767 seconds -- nine hours. Probably the whole pattern will freeze up, or go blank, or something. So it's no good for all-day operation. I should write some code to time-shift down after eight hours.
You're supposed to be able to control the Pixelblaze by sending messages over a websocket connection. I have not yet gotten this to work. (I could have it flash red when someone messages me on Slack! Or when someone files a bug on one of my Github repos! Wait, no, that's a terrible idea.) [EDIT: Done as of Feb 13th.]
I did a fair amount of code optimization, but my patterns are inherently slow. Adding up several sine waves is just a lot of math. The Pixelblaze chugs a bit under the load. Some of my patterns run at 30 fps, which is slower than I prefer. If I try to get any more complex, it would get unacceptably blinky. Or if I got a longer strip, or a denser one (more dots-per-inch).

Pattern gallery

Here's all the patterns I've come up with so far. I'm sure I'll add some more as time goes on. Fiddling with pattern code is fun!

(I've uploaded most of these to the Pixelblaze pattern repository as well.)

These are animations rendered by the Pixelblaze editor. (Or, really, 2D images scrolling through a narrow rectangle. Slit-scan trippiness!)

Techy details

I bought a Pixelblaze V3 Standard, the "pre-soldered" version, along with the slim case. Actually I bought two, one pre-soldered and one not.

What it looks like with the case open. This is the non-pre-soldered Pixelblaze.

Then (or rather, two years earlier) I got an Adafruit DotStar LED strip, 4 meters at 60 LEDs per meter. Also a chunky 5V power supply.

You can power the Pixelblaze through a USB-mini interface, but it can't draw much power that way. So there's a limit to how many LEDs you can run off USB. I followed the recommended setup, which is to power the LED strip directly from the power supply. Then the Pixelblaze doesn't need its own power connection; it just runs off the power coming from the LED strip. It's clever.

I ran into one hitch. If you look at the Pixelblaze store page, you'll see it comes with a tiny little ribbon cable that connects the controller to the LED strip. (Also visible in the green closeup above.) The DotStar strip I bought has a four-pin connector on each end (they can daisy-chain) so it all just worked.

...eeexcept it didn't work. Upon careful inspection, the PB ribbon cable wanted to connect to the wrong end of the DotStar strip. (They daisy-chain, but one end is "input" and the other is "output".)

But I was smart this time. I asked my partner, who has been soldering LEDs for decades. She threw together a 4-pin gender-changer from parts lying around, and then it all just worked.

Yes, I will get her to deal with the Raspberry Pi as well. My original plan still awaits. The Pi will run much faster -- which means fancier patterns on longer strips. The Beacon will rise! Forth EorlinGaAs!

Key & Compass Blog: Responser project update

2026-02-07T13:22:24+00:00

IF Responses page: https://plover.net/~davidw/responses/index.html

Hey, it’s been a while since I updated this project, and it’s not up to date by any means, but I have added several new entries to my XYZZY, PLUGH, PLOVER, etc. pages, and I have added Flexbox so the sorting options actually work now. Yay progress.

IFTF Blog: Board Transition Update

2026-02-06T19:49:44+00:00

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

IFTF Blog: The IFTF Microgrant program is back!

2024-10-05T14:02:17+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you’re interested in applying or learning more about the process, please check out our grant guidelines. Applications will be open until October 31, 2024, and we except to announce accepted projects by January 31, 2025.

If you have any questions, please reach out to grants@iftechfoundation.org. We can’t wait to see the ideas the community comes up with!

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

2024-12-13T06:34:54+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2025-02-07T05:23:28+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IFTF Blog: Announcing the 2025 IFTF Grant Recipients

2025-02-10T21:08:23+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Atrament, an Ink-based IF engine - Serhii Serhii is working on an IF engine that combines Ink scripting with Javascript as an alternative to Inky, creating a more full-featured release platform for Ink stories comparable to the mature web deployments for languages like Twine and ChoiceScript. The core of the engine is already complete: Serhii will receive $1000 to fund dev time writing documentation, testing and debugging the engine, and adding improvements focused on easier development and deployment workflows for authors.

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

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

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

IFTF Blog: IFTF Officer Transition

2025-02-27T15:40:42+00:00

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

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

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

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

IFTF Blog: New IFTF Committee: Institutional Relations

2025-02-28T05:40:18+00:00

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

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

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

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

IFTF Blog: IFTF 2024 Transparency report now available

2025-05-14T02:06:44+00:00

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

IFTF Blog: Announcing the IFTF Patreon

2025-06-02T14:03:43+00:00

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

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

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

https://www.patreon.com/IFTF

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

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

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

IFTF Patreon Q & A

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IFTF Blog: 2026 IFTF Microgrant Applications Now Open!

2025-10-12T02:16:46+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Renga in Blue: Cosmo Cross (1982)

2026-02-06T18:56:55+00:00

The company for today’s game, confusingly, goes by X’TAL SOFT, XTAL SOFT, or CRYSTAL SOFT depending on what document you are looking at. At least the title of the game is straightforward:

Except for the “Part-I”, thing, but that’s not part of the title; the game was sold as one whole but the three different parts are accessible with different passwords. Part-I is reached with XTAL.

The founding president, Yoshiyuki Morita, was a music fan in high school (along with Takeshi Kono, who he discussed rock and guitars with) and after graduating from university he founded the music studio “SKY SOUND” in Osaka. I found a 1982 recording from the studio, if you want to hear what sort of work they did:

In 1980, he saw a PC-8001 in Nipponbashi (aka “Den Den Town”, the second big electronics haven in Japan after Akihabara), and bought a MZ-80B for his studio “under the guise” of customer management.

Den Den Town in the 1980s. Via @carllin117464 on Twitter.

He found the management software terrible and learned programming by modifying it to be usable. This experience gave him enough of a taste of software development he wanted to work on his own. Because of the tape-based nature of computers at this time, it was not that unusual to switch from music to games; he founded Xtal Soft in April 1982 and the company’s first product (Cosmo Cross) was written by his old acquaintance Takeshi Kono, who left his job to join. Initial copies were made manually for the local Osaka area, one by one.

Source.

Cosmo Cross eventually sold a solid 10,000 tapes and was enough to kickstart the company to life, although where they really established their credibility was the RPG Mugen no Shinzou (translated either as “Heart of Fantasy” or “Heart of Illusion”). Quoting the composer Chihiro Fujioka (who had joined the company in 1983), the game was “a bit hard to explain” and they were “anxious about whether it would actually sell” but “the game decided the fate of Crystal Soft.”

It’s similar to Ultima but with giant character pictures on encounters. Images from Hardcore Gaming 101.

While they have multiple early adventures, they became mostly known for their RPGs; both Lizard and Crimson are available to play on Switch (Japanese language only, they never sold in English). Noteworthy is that the music for Crimson includes Sky Sound in the credits so they were still operating the same time as the software company.

For the purposes of today’s game specifically, I want to jump ahead a bit to 1990: Xtal Soft does a merger with T&E Soft, the latter most famous for the seminal RPG Hydlide. Takeshi Kono is still around as a game director. Mitsuto Nagashima is hired right before the merger as a programmer; his first project is the Japan-only (and technically impressive) vertical shooter Chikyuu Kaihou Gun ZAS…

…which he follows up with a game for Virtual Boy, one of the most famous for the system: Red Alarm. While Mitsuto Nagashima wore quite a few hats, according to an interview…

I was in charge of the game’s content, balance, enemy positions, and even parts of the story.

…the director of the game was Takeshi Kono, the author of Cosmo Cross.

ASIDE: Of the two top videos on Youtube, one calls it one of the very best Virtual Boy games and one calls it the worst. The reactions seem dependent on how people are able to handle the wireframe graphics, and this may be a case where the 3D looks different to different brains. Gunpei Yokoi, designer of the Virtual Boy, is quoted as saying, “when playing, you completely forget it’s all just lines” but that clearly wasn’t true for everyone. Digging into the Youtube comments: “in the actual game, it [the wireframe design] can actually make it difficult to focus your eyes because there is no surface to focus to.”

Cosmo Cross is part space shooter, part adventure game. It was originally for PC-88 (the version I’m playing) and later got a Sharp X1 port. It isn’t quite like Probe One: The Transmitter with both running simultaneously forcing the player to leap between joystick and keyboard rapidly; a better comparison is The Desecration, which switches between “arcade segment” and “adventure segment”. The Desecration’s arrangement is:

adventure – action – adventure – action – adventure – action

while Cosmo Cross instead goes:

action (in space) – adventure – action (in space) – action – action (in space) – action

(I’m basing this off both the manual which describes Act 2 of Part I as “kind of an adventure”, but also the guide from a 1984 issue of Oh! MZ. “Action” is more like “simulation” but I’m being handwavy here.)

There’s hence only a little adventure going on, but it’s unusual and early enough in Japanese adventure history to be worth a play even if I skip by the other parts. The problem is getting to it! I spent a long time deciphering what was going on with Part I Act 1.

The game came with “instruction cards” showing each of the scenes. This is a scene from the “adventure” part of the game.

Plot: in the year 259 on the Octam calendar, humanity was expanding their space colonies, and started to have constant battles with the Zagros. While most humans had moved from Earth, they still regarded it with fondness, and so the Zagros came up with an evil plan: tamper with a device installed by ancient aliens — intended to keep planets stable — to instead fling a planet into Earth and destroy it.

Humanity pooled their resources to build a single spaceship, the Saint Cosmo, piloted by… you! Your mission is to

a.) fly to the “clear blue” planet of Ariosferia (アリオスフェリア) to retrieve a Bluestone (ブルーストーンを); note that “the Zagros have anticipated this and have set many traps on Ariosferia.”

b.) use that Bluestone to power a “Revival Ray” and fix the sabotaged planetary-stability unit.

There’s a lot of keys going on; there’s a summary here and the more full manual text here. The big issue is that there are three kinds of steering:

◆ The number pad is used to generally change which direction your ship is pointing at.

◆ While floating in space with no enemies, you can press up plus a number (1 through 4) to activate Warp at different speeds. You can backwards-Warp by pressing down and a number.

◆ You can press F1 to activate a laser (F2 to turn it off); then holding down arrow keys will move a “crosshair” around. You cannot do any other kind of movement with the laser on.

I often was befuddled trying to rapidly switch from one to another, and since any kind of stalling can result in being attacked by ships, the result of pressing F2 a little too slow for the umpteenth time can be deadly.

Facing a Zagros ship, with the laser active.

There’s also a “barrier” that the player can activate with F3 (and turn off with F4) which will absorb some enemy shots; there’s a lot of details and rules about what you can do with particular amounts of enemy damage (like reduced warp) but the important points are that killing an enemy gains you 30% energy, and in general if you start to get serious damage (past about 50%) it is almost inevitable that you are going to die.

Suffering major damage. Notice that the laser crosshairs no longer show on the right and left side; this is one of the results of the damage.

The numbers in the bottom left corner end up being important.

VU and HL refer to how far off you are from an enemy vertically and horizontally. If you get these numbers down to 0 you are dead center and your shot will automatically kill. (You can still cause damage and eventually kill if you aren’t direct on center.) These become super important later (in a section I haven’t reached yet, and will probably decline to play) when there are invisible enemy ships to contend with.

The PARSEC display indicates shows how close you are to the destination planets. There’s a whole set of planets off in the distance you can try to get closer and closer to, and you point to the right one with your number pad movement; if you aren’t pointing at any planet, the display saying 0 PARSEC will be black space. You need to be pointing directly at a planet to see it at 0, and the goal of each of the space sections is to fly to the correct planet.

Ariosferia (the initial goal) is the clear blue one as the instructions say; later sections apparently can have the colors change when up closer.

Closer to the planets, close enough that if you try warp speed 4 you’ll overshoot and the game will automatically switch to rear camera and you’ll need to use warp backwards. The blue one is in the lower right. It’s not true 3D space and you’re essentially on a “track” like the one in Red Alarm or Star Fox, just the way you point your ship matters when you get up to the <2000 parsec range.

I found this section extremely frustrating to play. You start almost like a game of Lunar Lander where you’re just watching a number (the PARSEC count) in the corner, first holding up and Warp speed 4 and watching the counter tick down, then switching at the right moment to warp 3, 2, and 1 as you get closer and closer. Somewhere along the line you need to stop and steer, and that’s when an enemy will almost definitely appear (they can catch you at low warp, but it’s less likely).

The big problem is that often ships will appear in a position like this…

…and the laser is very slow at moving. (You can’t do number-pad steering in combat.) You can take many hits just from moving to shooting position. Here’s a battle (with the barrier shields off) that went relatively lucky; often the ships aren’t as well behaved and you need to adjust multiple times:

I constantly found myself in a situation where I would sustain rapid-fire from an enemy ship and even with my attempt at moving the laser over as “fast” as possible eventually I just would die.

I finally threw in the towel, as this is All the Adventures, not All the Space Simulators. I have here a video of the game played on Sharp X1 cued to start right at “0 PARSECS” with the planet in view. Once pointed the right direction, your ship will enter orbit and you press F5 to activate the next section of the game.

The video above keeps going into the adventure part but does not finish it. Things get a bit complicated so I’m going to wait on delving into there next time. (The game is in BASIC, and I have a setup from gschmidl that will skip straight to the adventure.) I will try a few more jabs at the space combat, but unless I’m missing something I’ll say finding the Bluestone will stay as my ultimate goal, because I really don’t want to deal with shooting down invisible enemies in space.

Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian: Ultima IX

2026-02-06T17:09:05+00:00

This article tells part of the story of the Ultima series.

Years ago, [Origin Systems] released Strike Commander, a high-concept flight sim that, while very entertaining from a purely theoretical point of view, was so resource-demanding that no one in the country actually owned a machine that could play it. Later, in Ultima VIII, the company decided to try to increase their sales numbers by adding action sequences straight out of a platform game to their ultra-deep RPG. The results managed to piss just about everyone off. With Ultima IX: Ascension, the company has made both mistakes again, but this time on a scale that is likely to make everyone finally forget about the company’s past mistakes and concentrate their efforts on making fun of this one.

— Trent C. Ward, writing for IGN

Appalling voice-acting. Clunky dialog-tree system. Over-simplistic, poorly implemented combat system. Disjointed story line… A huge slap in the face for all longtime Ultima fans… Insulting and contemptuous.

— Julian Schoffel, writing from the Department of “Other Than That, It Was Great” at Growling Dog Gaming

The late 1990s introduced a new phenomenon to the culture of gaming: the truly epic failure, the game that failed to live up to expectations so comprehensively that it became a sort of anti-heroic legend, destined to be better remembered than almost all of its vastly more playable competition. It’s not as if the bad game was a new species; people had been making bad games — far more of them than really good ones, if we’re being honest — for as long as they had been making games at all. But it took the industry’s meteoric expansion over the course of the 1990s, from a niche hobby for kids and nerds (and usually both) to a media ecosystem with realistic mainstream aspirations, to give rise to the combination of hype, hubris, excess, and ineptitude which could yield a Battlecruiser 3000AD or a Daikatana. Such games became cringe humor on a worldwide scale, whether they involved Derek Smart telling us his game was better than sex or John Romero saying he wanted to make us his bitch.

Another dubiously proud member of the 1990s rogue’s gallery of suckitude — just to use some period-correct diction, you understand — was Ultima IX: Ascension, the broken, slapdash, bed-shitting end to one of the most iconic franchises in all of gaming history. I’ve loved a handful of the older Ultimas and viewed some of the others with more of a jaundiced eye in the course of writing these histories, but there can be no denying that these games were seminal building blocks of the CRPG genre as we know it today. Surely the series deserved a better send-off than this.

As it is, though, Ultima IX has long since become a meme, a shorthand for ludic disaster. More people than have ever actually played it have watched Noah Antwiler’s rage-drenched two-hour takedown of the game from 2012, in a video which has itself become oddly iconic as one of the founding texts (videos?) of long-form YouTube game commentary. Meanwhile Richard Garriott, the motivating force behind Ultima from first to last, has done his level best to write the aforementioned last out of history entirely. Ultima IX is literally never mentioned at all in his autobiography.

But, much though I may be tempted to, I can’t similarly sweep under the rug the eminently unsatisfactory denouement to the Ultima series. I have to tell you how this unfortunate last gasp fits into the broader picture of the series’s life and times, and do what I can to explain to you how it turned out so darn awful.

Al Remmers, the man who unleashed Lord British and Ultima upon the world, is pictured here with his wife.

The great unsung hero of Ultima is a hard-disk salesman, software entrepreneur, and alleged drug addict named Al Remmers, who in 1980 agreed to distribute under the auspices of his company California Pacific a simple Apple II game called Akalabeth, written by a first-year student at the University of Texas named Richard Garriott. It was Remmers who suggested crediting the game to “Lord British,” a backhanded nickname Garriott had picked up from his Dungeons & Dragons buddies to commemorate his having been born in Britain (albeit to American parents), his lack of a Texas drawl, and, one suspects, a certain lordly manner he had begun to display even as an otherwise ordinary suburban teenager. Thus this name that had been coined in a spirit of mildly deprecating irony became the official nom de plume of Garriott, a young man whose personality evinced little appetite for self-deprecation or irony. A year after Akalabeth, when Garriott delivered to Remmers a second, more fully realized implementation of “Dungeons & Dragons on a computer” — also the first game into which he inserted himself/Lord British as the king of the realm of Britannia — Remmers came up with the name of Ultima as a catchier alternative to Garriott’s proposed Ultimatum. Having performed these enormous semiotic services for our young hero, Al Remmers then disappeared from the stage forever. By the time he did so, he had, according to Garriott, snorted all of his own and all of the young game developer’s money straight up his nose.

The Ultima series, however, was off to the races. After a brief, similarly unhappy dalliance with Sierra On-Line, Garriott started the company Origin Systems in 1983 to publish Ultima III. For the balance of the decade, Origin was every inch The House That Ultima Built. It did release other games — quite a number of them, in fact — and sometimes these games even did fairly well, but the anchor of the company’s identity and its balance sheets were the new Ultima iterations that appeared in 1985, 1988, and 1990, each one more technically and narratively ambitious than the last. Origin was Lord British; Origin was Ultima; Lord British was Ultima. Any and all were inconceivable without the others.

But that changed just a few months after Ultima VI, when Origin released a game called Wing Commander, designed by an enthusiastic kid named Chris Roberts who also had a British connection: he had come to Austin, Texas, by way of Manchester, England. Wing Commander wasn’t revolutionary in terms of its core gameplay; it was a “space sim” that sought to replicate the dogfighting seen in Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, part of a sub-genre that dated back to 1984’s Elite. What made it revolutionary was the stuff around the sim, a story that gave each mission you flew meaning and resonance. Gamers fell head over heels for Wing Commander, enough so to let it do the unthinkable: it outsold the latest Ultima. Just like that, Origin became the house of Wing Commander and Ultima — and in that order in the minds of many. Now Chris Roberts’s pudgy chipmunk smile was as much the face of the company as the familiar bearded mien of Lord British.

The next few years were the best in Origin’s history, in a business sense and arguably in a creative one as well, but the impressive growth in revenues was almost entirely down to the new Wing Commander franchise, which spawned a bewildering array of sequels, spin-offs, and add-ons that together constituted the most successful product line in computer gaming during the last few years before DOOM came along to upend everything. Ultima produced more mixed results. A rather delightful spinoff line called The Worlds of Ultima, moving the formula away from high fantasy and into pulp adventure of the Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells stripe, sold poorly and fizzled out after just two installments. The next mainline Ultima, 1992’s Ultima VII: The Black Gate, is widely regarded today as the series’s absolute peak, but it was accorded a surprisingly muted reception at the time; Charles Ardai wrote in Computer Gaming World how “weary gamers [are] sure that they have played enough Ultima to last them a lifetime,” how “computer gaming needs another visit to good old Britannia like the movies need another visit from Freddy Krueger.” That year the first-person-perspective, more action-oriented spinoff Ultima Underworld, the first project of the legendary Boston-based studio Looking Glass, actually sold better than the latest mainline entry in the series, another event that had seemed unthinkable until it came to pass.

Men with small egos don’t tend to dress themselves up as kings and unironically bless their fans during trade shows and conventions, as Richard Garriott had long made a habit of doing. It had to rankle him that the franchise invented by Chris Roberts, no shrinking violet himself, was by now generating the lion’s share of Origin’s profits. And yet there could be no denying that when Electronic Arts bought the company Garriott had founded on September 25, 1992, it was primarily Wing Commander that it wanted to get its hands on.

So, taking a hint from the success of not only Wing Commander but also Ultima Underworld, Garriott decided that the mainline games in his signature series as well had to become more streamlined and action-oriented. He decided to embrace, of all possible gameplay archetypes, the Prince of Persia-style platformer. The result was 1994’s Ultima VIII: Pagan, a game that seems like something less than a complete and total disaster today only by comparison with Ultima IX. Its action elements were executed far too ineptly to attract new players. And as for the Ultima old guard, they would have heaped scorn upon it even if it had been a good example of what it was trying to be; their favorite nickname for it was Super Ultima Bros. It stank up the joint so badly that Origin chose toward the end of the year not to even bother putting out an expansion pack that its development team had ready to go, right down to the box art.

The story of Ultima IX proper begins already at this fraught juncture, more than five years before that game’s eventual release. The team that had made Ultima VIII was split in two, with the majority going to work on Crusader: No Remorse, a rare 1990s Origin game that bore the name of neither Ultima nor Wing Commander. (It was a science-fiction exercise that wound up using the Ultima VIII engine to better effect, most critics and gamers would judge, than Ultima VIII itself had.) Just a few people were assigned to Ultima IX. An issue of Origin’s internal newsletter dating from February of 1995 describes them as “finishing [the] script stage, evaluating technology, and assembling a crack development team.” Origin programmer Mike McShaffry:

Right after the release [of Ultima VIII], Origin’s customer-service department compiled a list of customer complaints. It weighed about ten pounds! The Ultima IX core team went over this with a fine-toothed comb, and we decided along with Richard that we should get back to the original Ultima design formula. Ultima IX was going to be a game inspired by Ultimas IV and VII and nothing else. When I think of that game design I get chills; it was going to be awesome.

As McShaffry says, it was hoped that Ultima IX could rejuvenate the franchise by righting the wrongs of Ultima VIII. It would be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, placing a modernized gloss on what fans had loved about the games that came before: a deep world simulation, a whole party of adventurers to command, lots and lots of dialog in a richly realized setting. The isometric engine of Ultima VII was re-imagined as a 3D space, with a camera that the player could pan and zoom around the world. “For the first time ever, you could see what was on the south and east side of walls,” laughs McShaffry. “When you walked in a house, the roof would pop off and you could see inside.” Ultima IX was also to be the first entry in the series to be fully voice-acted. Origin hired one Bob White, an old friend with whom Richard Garriott had played Dungeons & Dragons as a teenager, to turn Garriott’s vague story ideas into a proper script for the voice actors to perform.

Garriott himself had been slowly sidling back from day-to-day involvement with Ultima development since roughly 1986, when he was cajoled into accepting that the demands of designing, writing, coding, and even drawing each game all by himself had become unsustainable. By the time that Ultima VII and VIII rolled around, he was content to provide a set of design goals and some high-level direction for the story only, while he busied himself with goings-on in the executive suite and playing Lord British for the fans. This trend would do little to reverse itself over the next five years, notwithstanding the occasional pledge from Garriott to “discard the mantle of authority within even my own group so I can stay at the designer level.” (Yes, he really talked like that.) This chronic reluctance on the part of Ultima IX’s most prominent booster to get his hands dirty would be a persistent issue for the project as the corporate politics surrounding it waxed and waned.

For now, the team did what they could with the high-level guidance he provided. Garriott had come to see Ultima IX as the culmination of a “trilogy of trilogies.” Long before it became clear to him that the game would probably mark the end of the series for purely business reasons, he intended it to mark the end of an Ultima era at the very least. He told Bob White that he wanted him to blow up Britannia at the conclusion of the game in much the same way that Douglas Adams had blown up every possible version of the Earth in his novel Mostly Harmless, and for the same reason: in order to ensure that he would have his work cut out for him if he decided to go back on his promise to himself and try to make yet another sequel set in Britannia. By September of 1996, White’s script was far enough along to record an initial round of voice-acting sessions, in the same Hollywood studio used by The Simpsons.

But just as momentum seemed to be coalescing around Ultima IX, two other events at Origin Systems conspired to derail it. The first was the release of Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom in April of 1996. Widely trumpeted as the most expensive computer game yet made, the first with a budget that ran to eight digits, it marked the apex of Chris Roberts’s fixation on making “interactive movies,” starring Mark Hamill of Star Wars fame and a supporting cast of Hollywood regulars acting on a real Hollywood sound stage. But it resoundingly failed to live up to Origin’s sky-high commercial expectations for it; at three times the cost of Wing Commander III (which had also featured Hamill), it generated one-third as many sales. This failure threw all of Origin Systems into an existential tizzy. Roberts and few of his colleagues left after being informed that the current direction of the Wing Commander series was financially untenable, and everyone who remained behind wondered how they were going to keep the lights on now that both of Origin’s flagship franchises had fallen on hard times. The studio went through several rounds of layoffs, which deeply scarred the communal psyche of the survivors; Origin would never fully recover from the rupture, never regain its old confident swagger.

Partially in response to this crisis, another project that bore the name of Ultima saw its profile elevated. Ultima Online was to be the fruition of a dream of a persistent multiplayer fantasy world that Richard Garriott had been nursing since the 1980s. In 1995, when rapidly spreading Internet connectivity combined with the latest computer hardware were beginning to make the dream realistically conceivable, he had hired Raph and Kristen Koster, a pair of Alabama graduate students who were stars of the textual-MUD scene, to come to Austin and build a multiplayer Britannia. Ultima Online had at first been regarded more as a blue-sky research project than a serious effort to create a money-making game; it had seemed the longest of long shots, and was barely tolerated on that basis by the rest of Origin and EA’s management.

But the collapse of the industry’s “Siliwood” interactive-movie movement, as evinced by the failure of Wing Commander IV, had come in the midst of a major commercial downturn for single-player CRPGs like the traditional Ultimas as well. Both of Origin’s core competencies looked like they might not be applicable to the direction that gaming writ large was going. In this terrifying situation, Ultima Online began to look much more appealing. Online gaming was growing apace alongside the young World Wide Web, even as the appeal of Ultima Online’s new revenue model, whereby customers could be expected to pay once to buy the game in a box and then keep paying every single month to maintain access to the online multiplayer Britannia, hardly requires further clarification. Ultima Online, it seemed, might be the necessary future for Origin Systems, if it was to have a future at all. These incipient ideas were given a new impetus over the last four months of 1996, when two other massively-multiplayer-online-role-playing games — a term coined by Richard Garriott — were launched to a cautiously positive reception. This relative success came even though neither 3DO’s Meridian 59 nor Sierra’s The Realm was anywhere near as technically and socially sophisticated as the Kosters intended Ultima Online to be.

By the beginning of 1997, the Ultima Online developers were closing in on a wide-scale beta test, the last step before their game went live for paying customers. Rather cheekily, they asked the fans who had been following their progress closely on the Internet to pony up $5 each months in advance for the privilege of becoming their guinea pigs; cheeky or not, tens of thousands of fans did so. This evidence of pent-up demand convinced the still-tiny team’s managers to go all-in on their game. In March of 1997, the nine Ultima Online people were moved into the office space currently occupied by the 23 people who were making Ultima IX. The latter were ordered to set aside what they were working on and help their new colleagues get their MMORPG into shape for the beta test. In the space of a year, Ultima Online had gone from an afterthought to a major priority, while Ultima IX had done precisely the opposite. Although both games were risky projects, it looked like Ultima Online might be the better match for where gaming was going.

The conjoined team got Ultima Online to beta that summer and into boxes in stores that September, albeit not without a certain degree of backbiting and infighting. (The Ultima Online people regarded the Ultima IX people as last-minute jumpers on their bandwagon; the Ultima IX people were equally resentful, suspecting — and not without some justification — that their own project would never be restarted, especially if the MMORPG took off as Origin hoped it would.) Although dogged throughout its early years by technical issues and teething problems of design, the inevitable niggles of a pioneer, Ultima Online was soon able to attract a fairly stable base of some 90,000 players, each of whom paid Origin $10 per month to roam the highways and byways of Britannia with others.

It became a vital revenue stream for a studio that otherwise didn’t have much of anything going for it. The same year as Ultima Online’s launch, Wing Commander: Prophecy, an attempt to reboot the series for this post-Chris Roberts, post-interactive-movie era, was released to sales even worse than those of Wing Commander IV, marking the anticlimactic end of the franchise that had been the biggest in computer gaming just a few years earlier. Any petty triumph Richard Garriott might have been tempted to feel at having seen his Ultima outlive Wing Commander was undermined by the harsh reality of Origin’s plight. The only single-player games now left in development at the incredible shrinking studio were the Jane’s Longbow hardcore helicopter simulations, entries in yet another genre that was falling on hard commercial times.

Electronic Arts was taking a more and more hands-on role as Origin’s fortunes declined. A pair of executives named Neil Young and Chris Yates had been parachuted in from the Silicon Valley mother ship to become Origin’s new General Manager and Chief Technical Officer respectively. Much to the old team’s surprise, they opted to restart Ultima IX in late 1997. They read the massive success of the CRPG-lite Diablo as a sign that the genre might not be as dead to gamers as everyone had thought, especially if it was given an audiovisual facelift and, following the example of Diablo, had its gameplay greatly simplified. A producer named Edward Alexander Del Castillo was hired away from Westwood Studios, where he had been in charge of the mega-selling Command & Conquer series of real-time-strategy games. If anyone could figure out how to make the latest single-player Ultima seem relevant to fans of more recent gameplay paradigms, it ought to be him.

What with the ongoing layoffs and other forms of attrition, fewer than half of the 23 people who had been working on Ultima IX prior to the Ultima Online interregnum returned to the project. Those who did sifted through the leavings of their earlier efforts, trying to salvage whatever they could to suit Del Castillo’s new plans for the project. He re-imagined the game into something that looked more like the misbegotten Ultima VIII than the hallowed Ultima VII. The additional party members were done away with, as was the roving camera, and the visuals and interface came to mimic third-person action games like the hugely popular Tomb Raider. Del Castillo convinced Richard Garriott to come up with a new story outline in which Britannia didn’t get destroyed, an event which might now read as confusing, given that people would presumably still be logging into Ultima Online to adventure there after this single-player game’s release. In the new script, as fleshed out once again by Bob White, the player’s goal would be to become one with the villainous Guardian, who would turn out to be the other half of himself, and rise as one being with him to a higher plane of existence; thus the “ascension” of the eventual subtitle. It felt like the older games in the way it flirted with spirituality, for all that it did so a bit clumsily. (Garriott stated in a contemporaneous interview that “I’m enamored with Buddhism right now,” as if it was a catchy tune he’d heard on the radio; this isn’t the way spirituality is supposed to work.)

In May of 1998, Origin brought the work in progress to the E3 trade show. It did not go well. The old-school fans were appalled by the teaser video the team brought with them, featuring lots of blood-splattered carnage choreographed to a thrash-metal soundtrack, more DOOM than Ultima. Del Castillo got defensive and derisive when confronted with their criticisms, making a bad situation worse: “Ultimas are not about stick men and baking bread. Ultimas are about using the computer as a tool to enhance the fantasy experience. To take away the clumsy dice, slow charts and paper and give you wonderful gameplay instead. They were never meant to mimic paper RPGs; they were meant to exceed them.” In addition to being a straw-man argument, this was also an ahistorical one: like all of the first CRPGs, Richard Garriott’s first Ultima games had been literal, explicit attempts to put the tabletop Dungeons & Dragons game he loved on a computer. Internet forums and Usenet message boards burned with indignation in the weeks and months after the show.

Those who could abandoned the increasingly dysfunctional ship. Bob White bailed for John Romero’s new company Ion Storm, where he became a designer on Deus Ex. Then Del Castillo was fired, thanks to “philosophical differences” with Richard Garriott. Lead programmer Bill Randolph recalls the last words Del Castillo said to him on the day he left: “They don’t care about the game. They’re just going to shove it out the door unfinished.”

Garriott announced, not for the first time, that he intended to step in and take a more hands-on role at this juncture, but that never amounted to much beyond an unearned “Director” credit. “You know, he had a lot of other obligations, and he had a lot going on, and a lot of other interests that he was pursuing too,” says Randolph by way of apologizing for his boss. Be that as it may, Garriott’s presence on the org chart but non-presence in the office resulted in a classic power vacuum; everyone could see that the game was shaping up to be hot garbage, but no one felt empowered to take the steps that were needed to fix it. Turnover continued to be a problem as Origin continued to take on water. Few of the people left on the team had any experience with or emotional connection to the previous single-player Ultima games.

Del Castillo’s ominous prophecy came true on November 26, 1999, after a frantic race to the bottom, during which the exhausted, demoralized team tried to hammer together a bunch of ill-fitting fragments into some semblance of a playable game in time for EA’s final deadline. They met the deadline — what other choice did they have? — but the playable game eluded them.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time here excoriating Ultima IX in detail, the way I did Omikron: The Nomad Soul in my very last article. I nominated Omikron for Worst Game of 1999, but Ultima IX has run away with that prize. Although I found Omikron to be deliriously lousy, it was at least lousy in a somewhat interesting way, the product of a distinctive if badly misguided vision. Ultima IX, alas, doesn’t have even that much going for it. Whatever original creative vision it might once have evinced has been so thoroughly ground away by outside pressures and corporate interference that it’s not even fun to make fun of. As far as kind words go, all I can come up with is that the box looks pretty good — a right proper Ultima box, that is — and some of the landscape vistas are impressive, as long as you don’t spoil the experience by trying to do anything as you’re looking at them. Everything else is pants.

Imagine the worst possible implementation of every single thing Ultima IX tries to do and be, and you’ll have a reasonably good picture of what this game is like. Even 26 years later, it remains a technical disaster: crashing constantly, full of memory leaks that gradually degrade performance as you play. Characters and monsters have an unnerving habit of floating in the air, their feet at the height of your eyes; corpses — and not undead ones — sometimes inexplicably keep on fighting instead of staying put on the ground (or in mid-air, as the case may be). These things ought to be funny in a “so bad it’s good” kind of way, but somehow they aren’t. Absolutely nothing about this game is entertaining — not the cutscenes that were earmarked for an earlier incarnation of the script only to be shoehorned into this one, not the countless other parts of the story that just don’t make any sense. Nothing feels right; the physics of the world are subtly off even when everything is ostensibly working correctly. The fixed camera always seems to be pointing precisely where you don’t want it to, and combat is just bashing away on the mouse button, an action which feels peculiarly disconnected from what you see your character doing onscreen.

Of course, one can make the argument that Ultima wasn’t really about combat even in its best years; Ultima VII’s combat system is almost as bad as this one, and that hasn’t prevented that game from becoming the consensus choice for the peak of the entire series. What well and truly pissed off the series’s hardcore fan base back in the day was how badly this game fails as an Ultima. A game that was once supposed to correct the ill-advised misstep that had been Ultima VIII and mark a return to the franchise’s core values managed in the end to feel like even more of a betrayal than its predecessor. This final installment of a series famous for the freedom it affords its player is a rigidly linear slog through underwhelming plot point after underwhelming plot point. Go to the next city; perform the same set of rote tasks as in the last one; rinse and repeat. If you try too hard to do something other than that which has been foreordained for you, you just end up breaking the game and having to start over.

And yet it’s not as if Ultima IX doesn’t try to exploit its heritage. In fact, no Ultima that came before was as relentlessly self-referential as this one. You create your character by answering questions from a gypsy fortuneteller, like in the iconic opening of Ultima IV. The plot hinges on yet another corruption of the Virtues, like in the fourth, fifth, and sixth games. You visit Lord British in his castle, like in every Ultima ever. There you find a newly constructed museum celebrating your exploits, from your defeat of the evil wizard Mondain in Ultima I to your recent difficulties with the Guardian, the overarching villain of this third trilogy of trilogies. The foregrounded self-referentiality quickly becomes much, much too much; it gives the game a past-its-time, sclerotic feel that must have thoroughly nonplussed any of the new generation CRPG players, weaned on Baldur’s Gate and Might and Magic VI and VII, who might have been unwise enough to pick this game up instead of Planescape: Torment, its primary competition that Christmas season of 1999. Ultima IX is like that boring old man who can’t seem to shut up about all the cool stuff he used to get up to.

But at the same time, and almost paradoxically, Ultima IX is utterly clueless about its heritage, all too obviously the product — and I use that word advisedly — of people who knew Ultima only as a collection of tropes. I don’t really mean all the little details that it gets wrong, which the fans have, predictably enough, cataloged at exhaustive length. When it comes to questions of continuity, I’m actually prepared to extend quite a lot of slack to a series that went from games written by a teenager all by himself in his bedroom to multi-million-dollar productions like this one over the course of almost twenty years of tempestuous technical and cultural evolution in the field of gaming. Rather than the nitpicky details, it’s the huge, fundamental things that this game and its protagonist seem not to know that flummox me. (Remember, the official line is that the Avatar is the same guy through all nine mainline Ultima games and all of the spinoffs to boot.) At one point in this game, the Avatar encounters the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom, the object around which revolved the plot of Ultima IV, probably the best-remembered and most critically lauded entry in the series except for Ultima VII. “The Codex of Ultimate Wisdom?” he repeats in a confused tone of voice, as if he’s sounding out the words as he goes. As Noah Antwiler said in my favorite quip from his video series, this is like the pope asking someone if she happens to know what this Bible thing is that the priests around him keep banging on about.

The most famous meme that came out of Antwiler’s videos is another example of the Avatar’s slack-jawed cluelessness. “What’s a paladin?” he asks the first person he meets in Trinsic, the town of Honor which he has visited many times in the course of his questing. You have to hear him say it, in the voice of a bored television announcer, to fully appreciate it. (Like everything else in this game, the voice-acting, which had to be redone at the last minute to fit the new script, is uniformly atrocious, the output of people who all too clearly have no idea what they’re saying or why they’re saying it. Lord British sounds like a doddering old fool, inadvertently mirroring the state of the series by this point.)

You can make excuses for the existence of some of this stuff, if not the piss-poor execution. Origin obviously felt a need to make Ultima IX comprehensible and accessible to new players, coming as it did fully five and a half years after its predecessor. Lots of people had joined the gaming hobby over those years, and some of the old-timers had left it. But such excuses didn’t keep the people who were most invested in the series from seeing it as a slap to the face. “What’s a paladin?” indeed. They felt as if a treasured artifact of their childhood had been stolen and desecrated by a bunch of philistines who didn’t know an ankh from a hole in the ground. Origin ended up with the worst of all worlds: a game that felt too wrapped up in its lore to live and breathe for newcomers, even as it felt insultingly dumbed-down to the faithful who had been awaiting it with bated breath since 1994.

Any lessons we might hope to draw from this fiasco are, much like the game itself, almost too banal to be worth discussing. But, for the record:

No game can be all things to all people.
Development teams need a clear leader with a clear vision.
Checking off a list of bullet points sent down from marketing does not a good game make.
When the design goals do change radically, it’s often better to throw everything out and start over from scratch than to keep retro-fitting bits and pieces onto the Frankenstein’s monster.
It’s better to release a good game late than a bad game on time.

Beginning with Ultima VIII, the series had begun to chase trends rather than to blaze its own trails. This game, despite all the good intentions with which it was begun, doubled down on that trend in the end. Even if the execution had been better, it would still have felt like a pale shadow of the earlier Ultima games, the ones that had the courage of their convictions. It’s not just a bad game; it’s a dull, soulless one too. If the Ultima series had to go out on a sour note, it would have been infinitely nicer to see it blow itself up in some sort of spectacular failure rather than ending in this flaccid fashion. Origin’s Neil Young could have learned a lesson from his musical namesake: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

You start out in your house on Earth, even though this directly contradicts the ending of Ultima VIII.

The gypsy fortuneteller makes a return to help you choose a class and send you on your way to Britannia.

Lord British has… lost a step.

Yes, that is a euphemism for sex. (Why are so many games from this era so horny?)

“What? Where? By the way, what’s a paladin?”

The Gargoyles still speak only in infinitives. (Hey, Yoda’s speech patterns were already taken.)

Good for you, buddy.

Stanley Kubrick called. He wants his monolith back.

As you have probably surmised, Ultima IX did not do well in the marketplace. There was never any serious discussion of continuing the single-player series after it was greeted with bad reviews and worse sales. In fact, it managed not only to kill the series to which it belonged but for all intents and purposes the studio that had always been so closely identified with it as well. It was the last single-player game ever to be completed at Origin Systems.

Officially speaking, Origin continued to exist for another four years after it, but only as an MMORPG house. Right about the same time that Ultima IX was reaching stores, Ultima Online was actually ceding its crown as the biggest MMORPG of all to EverQuest. Nevertheless, in a bull market for shared worlds like these in general amidst the first wave of widespread broadband-Internet adoption, Ultima Online’s raw numbers still increased, reaching as many as 250,000 subscribers in early 2003. But the numbers started to go the other way thereafter as the MMORPG field became ever more crowded with younger, slicker entrants. Inevitably, there came a day in February of 2004 when it no longer made sense to EA to keep an office open in Austin just to support a single aged and declining online game. And so the story of Origin Systems came to its belated, scarcely noticed end, a decade after its best years were over.

By then, Richard Garriott was long gone; he had left Origin in March of 2000. His subsequent career did little to prove that his dilettantish approach to the later Ultima games had been a fluke. He dabbled in gaming only in fits and starts, most notably by lending his name to several more MMORPGs. As also happened with his old Origin sparring partner Chris Roberts, an unfortunate whiff of grift came to attach itself to him; I tend to think that it’s born more of carelessness in his choice of projects and associates than guile in his case, but that doesn’t make it any more pleasant to witness. Shroud of the Avatar, his Kickstarter-funded would-be second coming of Ultima Online, produced more than its fair share of broken promises and ethical questions about its pay-to-win focus during the 2010s. More recently, he has talked up an MMORPG based on blockchain technology (Lord help us!) that now appears unlikely to turn into anything at all. It seems abundantly plain that his heart hasn’t really been in making games for many years now. One hopes he will finally be content just to retire from an industry that has long since passed him by.

There’s something a little sad about watching Richard Garriott play the hits in his Lord British get-up as he closes in on retirement age.

However cheerless of a conclusion it might be, this very last article about Richard Garriott and Ultima marks a milestone for these histories. I’ve genuinely loved some of the Ultima games I’ve played these past fifteen years: Ultima I for its irrepressible teenage-Dungeonmaster enthusiasm, Ultima VII for its literary and thematic audacity, Ultima Underworld for its bold spirit of innovation. Most of all, I found myself loving the rollicking Worlds of Ultima games, two of the least played, least remembered entries in the series. (By all means, go check them out if you haven’t tried them!) As for the rest — at least the ones that came before Ultima VIII — I can see their place in history and see why others love or once loved them, even if I do also see them more as artifacts of their time than timeless.

But such carping is almost irrelevant to the cultural significance of Ultima. Richard Garriott had a huge impact on thousands upon thousands of people through Ultima IV in particular, a game which caused many of its young players to think seriously about the nature of morality and their place in the world for the very first time. Coming from a fellow not much older than they were, raised on the same sci-fi flicks and fantasy fiction that they were consuming, moral philosophy felt more real and relevant than it did when it was taught to them in school. Small wonder that so many of them still adore him for what his work meant to them all those years ago, still rush to defend him whenever a curmudgeon like myself points out his feet of clay. And that’s fine; we need to be clear-eyed about things sometimes, but at other times we just need our heroes.

So, let us bid a fond farewell to Richard Garriott — or, if you insist, Lord British, the virtuous king of Britannia. His legacy as one of gaming’s greatest visionaries is secure.

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Sources: The books Explore/Create: My Life in Pursuit of New Frontiers, Hidden Worlds, and the Creative Spark by Richard Garriott with David Fisher; Through the Moongate: The Story of Richard Garriott, Origin Systems Inc. and Ultima, in two parts by Andrea Contato; Ultima IX: Prima’s Official Strategy Guide; Online Game Pioneers at Work by Morgan Ramsay. Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of December 6 1991, February 10 1995, and September 20 1996; Next Generation of March 1998; Computer Gaming World of September 1992 and February 2000.

Online sources include “Ultima IX Nitpicks on the Tapestry of the Ages” on Hacki’s Ultima Page; Noah Anwiler’s video lacerations of Ultima IX; the Ultima Codex’s “Development History of Ultima IX“; Ultima Codex interviews with Mike McShaffry and Bill Randolph; an old GameSpot interview with McShaffry; Julian Schoffel’s Ultima IX retrospective for Growling Dog Games; a December 1999 group chat with some of the Ultima IX team; Desslock’s October 1998 interview with Richard Garriott for GameSpot; Trent C. Ward’s review of Ultima IX for IGN; KiraTV’s documentary about Shroud of the Avatar (but do be aware that the first part of this video uncritically regurgitates the legend rather than the reality of Richard Garriott’s pre-millennial career).

Where to Get It: Ultima IX: Ascension is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com.