Planet Interactive Fiction

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

2026-06-06T22:32:00+00:00

The Boston IF meetup for June will be Monday, June 22, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will post the Google Meet link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.

We are considering an in-person meetup at MIT later this summer. Check out the mailing list for information on that.

Renga in Blue: The Coveted Mirror: Paint the Leaves Grey & the Sky-Clouds Red

2026-06-06T18:09:43+00:00

(Continued from my previous posts.)

Before getting into the puzzle solving, let’s tour the last part of the map, where “there’s less hustle & bustle”.

This is just past the main town, to the south. Just west of the room above are the stockade (with the scene I discussed last time) and the jousting.

Just like with town, the various rooms have random encounters. It isn’t nearly as bad as it could be, and I’m guessing they’re programmed in a way that forces a rotation rather than hoping the random number generator doesn’t make it so you might have to test each location 10 times. In the location just past town, you might see nobody, or you might meet a Bolshevik.

TALK here gives SOFT–AND CARRY A BIG STICK. Some of the characters give random hints (like talking to random town members in a JRPG) although it is also possible to try to GIVE items, so I don’t know if any of them represent puzzles. This isn’t the only encounter you can have here!

I met her on my fourth-pass through, rather than having to go back and forth ten times. I’ve most recently written about the perils of character appearance RNG with Ringen.

TALK gives a more active clue, about an NPC I had gotten lucky with and met on my first visit to the room in question.

Let’s just hop all the way over there — it’s on the far east, marked Near Forest of No Return on my map.

This man’s appearance is less frequent than other characters, which I suspect is why the hint is there. He’s also hinted at by the bard, he mentions MUNIJSTAN & HIS SILENT FRIEND and how you need to WAIT WITH THE RING AT THE DARK FOREST’S END.

Trying to TALK gets the response HE GESTURES IN SIGNS YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND; we’ve also had the sign language reference given by Alice at the hovel, but I don’t know how to learn the sign language yet. My suspicion, based on Alice’s hint about sign language at the tavern, is that someone hanging out in the tavern (where the pickpocketing happens) knows, but that’s one avenue I’m still dead-ended at (talking isn’t useful, nor waiting around, nor coming back and forth a bunch of times).

Let’s zip back to Outside Town and take a path by a graveyard next.

The graveyard sometimes has a ghost. The ghost makes a reference to digging.

Last time I had found a solving path (release person in stockade helps get the candlestick, candlestick gets bellows from the alchemist, bellows go to the blacksmith who gives you a shovel) that gets a shovel, so I tried it out and got some bones. Unfortunately, I don’t know what to do with the bones yet. (Giving them to the dog, the dog says — yes, it talks — that it prefers steak.)

Heading north, there’s another multi-character room, a crossroads. Encounters include a talking horse that lets you know again about the ring-forest connection.

If you try to ride the horse, the game lets you know it is a FREE SPIRIT.

There’s also someone who gives out elixirs for health that can sometimes appear and I think he may be there purely for color.

This shows the result of me trying to GET ELIXIR.

With that done, let’s swerve east which turns out to go into a house, the residence of Lady Vainly. (Some games, architecturally, will always put “boundary” rooms to set up transitions between outdoors and indoors; here this game is being a little more freeform.)

The dialogue above is the result of using TALK, and it is meant to hint that if you go east…

…you can GET GRAIN. Nobody says a peep about stealing or the like, the game just says OK and it lands in your inventory. We’ll be using the grain somewhere else shortly. First, a visit to a fairy.

Heading north from the grain is a well, with a bird in a nest. Again, I think the nest may be just “for color” — I’m still unclear how much content in this game is meant for pure atmosphere — and going down leads to a fairy.

The fairy asks you to find her glasses. I’m not sure where to even begin to look so this is one of those puzzles that will eventually solve itself.

Swerving back to the intersection with the talking horse, and going north, there’s a door in a hillside (locked) adjacent to a jug (which I have yet to use anywhere, and trying to take it to the tavern just gets it stolen). Going north from here is where the fishing is, which I will talk about (along with the jousting) in more detail later.

Neither mini-game is a proper “room”; the game just prompts if you want to start the game when you go a particular direction.

Finally there’s an inn. There’s a hint elsewhere (given by a woman randomly in the town) that the innkeeper likes to receive grain.

I guess he’s so keen on grain he gets kicked out if tries to go for Lady Vainly’s fields so can’t just walk over and grab it himself.

The reason he wants the grain is to feed his beloved bull; you can enter the door and see the bull assuming you’ve handed over the grain. There’s a rope in the room you can then take.

I originally thought that was a whip.

I did finish the mini-games but with a lot of save-state abuse. Starting with the joust, you have a series of clashes where you control your lance with A and Z (high/low) your shield with semicolon and period (high/low) and press SPACE to charge.

We’re controlling the person on the right.

There are two issues, one likely with the emulator. The first is that the game simply moves too fast at default settings, and I had to change the computer to be half speed. (Nothing else in the game, including the fishing, has this issue.) The other issue is that I don’t understand when you win or lose. The scene above looks to me like the right-side lance hit the opposing knight and the shield is placed correctly to block, but the scene shows a LOSS. I never could figure out a pattern and just kept reloading a save state and hitting buttons randomly until I won a match. Four wins means you are through and done with the game.

I assume the ATHLETIC PROWESS works to defeat another puzzle I haven’t seen yet.

The fishing is at least comprehensible, although still finicky enough that I resorted to save states again.

A and Z move the hook up and down, and the fish swim left to right, and you try to hit SPACE when the hook and fish match places. Your goal is to catch 14 fish before running out of time; time is not “real time” in a normal sense, but rather, the hourglass counts down by 1 if either a fish is caught or a fish is missed. You’ll notice I was cutting things tight above (goal of 14, 17 hourglass ticks) but I already knew from previous tests I was going to do save state abuse, and I was trying to fit both the jousting and fishing in one trip (without using up a bribe in order to increase time).

(Speaking of bribes: the only treasure I’ve found is still that necklace from the start. Given how long certain sequences take, I’m paranoid if I use the bribe early, I might get some later section that I won’t have the time to do on one jaunt before getting yanked back to the dungeon with the mirror shards.)

The main issue is the hitbox on correct presses of SPACE; there were many times it looked like a fish was properly being caught but it got away. I think there’s a slight offset (the fish maybe should optimally be a little below the hook?) but I never could figure out a pattern that worked consistently, so save state abuse ahoy.

After winning at fishing, the game informs you that you’ve obtained enough patience / quietude in order to stealthily read the Abbott’s book without getting caught. It’s nice when a puzzle solve is so direct! The book also quite directly tells you that one of the pieces of the Coveted Mirror is in the church at the castle.

This is definitely a case where you need to see the information before the mirror gets registered (so it isn’t like we did the mini-game for nothing). I know this because there’s a similar situation involving another mirror piece that I did find, which you’ve been seeing on some of the screenshots, one in the shape of a rectangle. To find it, bring the horseshoe to the jester (who wanted luck) and he’ll give a poem explaining there’s a mirror shard right in the dungeon at the start.

Once you know that, going back to the Dungeon is enough to trigger the mirror piece showing in “inventory”. (You can’t even refer to it in the room! It just has the picture appear.)

I unfortunately have yet to make it to the castle’s chapel so I can’t get the third piece marked down yet.

I managed to eke out one more puzzle solve, by taking the fish from the kitchen (only available via trapdoor, and you have to get caught right after, but you can retrieve the fish from the treasure room in the maze). I took the fish over to the sewing shop. I knew the woman there wanted a fish because I tried GET COAT and she’d indicated she would trade.

Some characters will say what they want if you just TALK, some will only say what they want if you try to take a particular item. The baker, for instance, doesn’t let you know about the chocolate moose ingredient until you’ve tried to GET COOKIE.

I do not know where the coat goes. I can’t USE COAT so I assume I give it to a person. There’s no obvious candidates. At least, there are custom messages when you give it to the wrong person, which is a very nice touch that makes the whole situation less frustrating.

It’d be hilarious if we then need to make a fake designer label, but this isn’t that kind of game.

To recap my issues, some which carry over from last time:

a.) two locked doors, one in the tower at the castle and one outside town at the hill

b.) I still need invisibility

c.) the people at the tavern (and the cryptic mention of sign language); relatedly, learning sign language for understanding the man at the forest

d.) the astrologer who pines after the fortune teller

e.) the “moose” ingredient

f.) the glasses for the fairy

g.) does Lady Vainly need anything or was that whole scene just for the grain?

h.) what to do with: bones, ax, coat, broom, and rope.

The game is keen on USE X so I may just need to start grinding (check every room for use of bones, ax, coat, broom, and rope).

Choice of Games LLC: Keeper’s Vigil–Will you become a monster to save the world?

2026-06-04T14:01:57+00:00

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They call you Harbinger.

You are a Keeper, a sworn protector of the Realm, mutated by necromancy to keep the monsters that plague the land in check. But you are no ordinary Keeper. You are the most powerful Keeper of your generation. A genetic anomaly: the only living Keeper to survive the mutation with a positive blood type. You possess the physical might of a mutant and the forbidden spell-casting of a mage.

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Now, a new terror has risen. An experiment to resurrect the extinct Elves has failed, unleashing a horde of “Abominations.” They are twisted and infectious creatures that are overrunning the Middle Realm.

Keeper’s Vigil is a 193,000-word interactive dark fantasy novel by Lota Labs. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

As the Abominations claw at the gates of the Inner Realm, you must uncover the conspiracy within your own Order. Traitors seek to bring back the ancient Elves to fight an even greater threat: the Anunnaki. But the price of resurrection may be the death of humanity.

Will you rely on your steel, your wits, or your forbidden magic? Every time you use your necromancy, your mutation advances. If you embrace your power too fully, you may lose your humanity forever and become the very monster from which you were sworn to protect the Realm.

Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, or bisexual.

Romance a rival: Woo the compassionate Royal Heir, the fiery Rebel Leader, or your former best friend, whom you believed to be dead years ago.

Master the Mutation: Utilize your corrupted blood to unleash devastating and supreme magic, or seek a cure to restore your humanity before you transform into a beast.

Choose your Faction: Align with the strict Order, the freedom-fighting Rebels, or enter the Lusus Naturae tournament to earn the loyalty of the Beast Clan.

Define your Legacy: Will you block out the sun to intimidate the Regent, sacrifice a limb to survive, or ascend to godhood to stop an interdimensional invasion?

Investigate the Outbreak: Use your perception and necromancy to track the source of the Abominations before the Inner Realm falls.

The Anunnaki are gaining entry. The portal is opening. Will you be the Realm’s savior—or its end?

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

Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online: Three Newly Uncovered Apple II Eamons

2026-06-04T05:35:22+00:00

It has been a pretty long time since there was a post here but some incredible work by Huw Williams has promoted me to dust off the old email account and share the following. Huw relates the following:

Recently an old box of assorted floppy disks auctioned off at eBay revealed a hidden treasure: three previously unknown Eamon adventures that had eluded the clubs and the official catalog for nearly 45 years! The unearthed adventures are titled Castle Danger, The Jester's Court, and The Trapster's Maze.

Castle Danger was written around 1982 by Pat Hartman, a member of the Apple Corps of San , and has some interesting custom features, most notably several pieces of colorful computer art by Hartman that show locations in the story. The Jester's Court and The Trapster's Maze are even older, created around 1981 when Eamon was still radiating out through the nation's Apple II user groups. What makes these two especially remarkable is that they were written by none other than the young Raymond E. Feist, who would later go on to become a best-selling fantasy novelist and creator of the popular Riftwar Cycle. Reached for comment, Feist remembered the adventures, recalling that he made them "for grins and giggles" back before he had any expectations of being a writer or game designer. Writes Feist, "It's good to know they're still floating around out there somewhere and a few folks may still get a giggle out of them."

All three adventures are simple outings with straightforward layouts, representative of the earliest Eamons. In "The Jester's Court", the adventurer's friend Felinah has taken a wrong turn on her way to Krondor and instead winds up in the clutches of the nefarious Jester, so the adventurer sets out to free her. In "The Trapster's Maze", the Guild sends the adventurer and a handful of companions on a quest to locate and return the legendary Chalice of Ubarzee. "Castle Danger" has no explicit quest and is simply an exploration of a forbidding stone castle.

These three rarities have been converted to DSK, mapped, and are now available as adventures 281, 282, and 283 in the Eamon catalog.

Renga in Blue: The Coveted Mirror: Vile Upstart

2026-06-04T03:22:16+00:00

(Continued from my previous post.)

I’ve got most of the map laid out, and things are open enough that I’m not really “stuck” but I wanted to report in anyway.

Story from the later version of The Coveted Mirror, via the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History.

To clear one thing up right away, regarding the mirror pieces: you don’t pick up the ones you find. You instead just see them and remember their shape, and trying to pick one up mentions a “protection spell” (I’ve only found one of them so far, but it clearly is consistent across the game). This at least partly explains the setup: Voar doesn’t need to be near the mirror shards to use them, isn’t worried about sabotage, and probably doesn’t even know seeing what they look like would be necessary information to find the fifth missing shard (given he hasn’t been able to locate it).

I also think the original wizard is still alive, despite the original manual indicating he wasn’t. There’s also reference to a Queen so maybe that’s who Voar pushed out?

No invisibility spell yet. That would be lovely to find.

The player starts “locked” in the first floor of the castle in the Dungeon (not really that well locked), can travel to a second floor, can leave to go into a town, and a little past. There is a timer on each trip out of the starting room. After the timer runs out, you get teleported back to the start, and lose any items you are carrying to a holding room on the second floor.

You can bribe the guard that checks the room for extra time. This required first having the bribe — there’s a necklace you can find early that works — and then typing WAIT while hanging in the Dungeon. Then you hand the item over and the guard gives you extra time.

I’m honestly not fully sure on the formula here, but I think the more valuable an object you give, the more extra time you have. It may be possible to not bother at all with this mechanic but since getting deep into (and past) the town does take a decent chunk of clock, it may instead be impossible to win without resorting to at least a little bribery.

Red spaces are spots you get caught. Yellow spaces are places you land from trapdoors (more on that shortly).

I incidentally say (GUARD) for all the red rooms but some of them are courtiers or other hangers-on of the evil Voar as opposed to proper guards. Any run-in will send you to Voar then back to the Dungeon (and one of your 25 times you can get into trouble gets used up).

From the Dungeon you can just move a bed to sneak your way out (through a dark room that I later managed to light up). Going south leads to a staircase, going up then leads to a mysterious locked door (and that necklace that helps with bribery).

One element to highlight (as touched upon in my last post) is that text is extraordinarily sparse and sometimes doesn’t try to describe the room at all (as in the above scene). The game is dependent on you looking at the picture and figuring out not just what to interact with but what nouns to use. Here “door” and “necklace” aren’t that hard to come up with, but later there are multiple items in a scene where I had to guess if the game would let me pick up something in particular.

I incidentally have no idea yet how to unlock the door. You can ignore it for now and go south or east, which leads to a maze which takes up the second floor of the castle.

The “twisty maze” aspect isn’t done in a classical Crowther/Woods sense, but rather in having trap doors which will shoot you back to the first floor.

These trap doors correspond exactly with the yellow rooms from the earlier map. This can be helpful as a way of jumping past the rooms you can get caught in. Before trying that, I should also point out:

a.) Going E-S-E-E-N-N-W-W from the necklace drops you in Voar’s treasure room; if you get scooped up back to the Dungeon while holding items, this is where they go. Unfortunately, that’s a lot of steps to start a run, so that already runs a fair amount of the hourglass out; I think the game intends you to time things out, storing items safely so you don’t have to deal with this.

You can hit ENTER on its own like a Sierra game to switch to text mode; if there’s items here they’ll be listed before the short description.

b.) One of the pieces of the Coveted Mirror is in the maze.

This is the first mention of the Peak of Shards. Metacommentary is an odd place to be introducing lore.

Dropping into trapdoors, you can make it into a kitchen…

Despite lots of visuals going on, the only thing I could find to do was GET FISH.

…and also a Great Hall.

This seems like a good moment to remind you that many of the scenes are animated; in this case the dog’s tail moves. I haven’t been able to interact with it but I assume some kind of food or bone would be appreciated.

The Great Hall is connected up with Voar’s throne room if you feel like getting yourself caught directly, and two rooms which have a random chance of encounters. This mechanic shows up much more in the town, but I’ll mention now there are a fair number of rooms where you may or may not meet a character.

South of the dog is the jester.

TALK gets this response. I think I know what the jester wants, just I haven’t managed the logistics yet of shuttling the item over here. It wasn’t clear to me right away that this was even an item request, I thought for a while maybe OFFER HELP or the like would work, but conversation seems limited to TALK in each location it can happen.

East of the dog is a bard (which, again, shows up at random — the hall may be empty).

Doing TALK here gets the response:

SO MUNJISTAN & HIS SILENT FRIEND FARED LONG AGO TO THE MOUNTAIN BEND. IF YE ASPIRE TO ASCEND, WAIT WITH THE RING AT THE DARK FOREST’S END.

I don’t think any further puzzle is here (although if a music sheet shows up it would be worth taking to the bard). North is where Voar is hanging, and to the east is a room with nice art and not much description.

Just a general fact about the keep, rather than trying to describe the room (and making clear the broom is takeable).

Time for an escape! Fortunately back at the staircase you can just go south, and there’s a window you can open.

The random mention of the Queen. I hope I’ve made clear why the confusing lore like this can be frustrating in an adventure game; is there a Queen that’s alive we are trying to find? If so, that means some artifact that seems like it belongs to the Queen might be an aid in finding her. Maybe she’s in the tower past the locked door?

To the east of the “main entrance” you pass by is a “good place to hide loot”; I haven’t experimented with if there really is a problem dropping objects in random places and you have to be strategic to avoid things being yoinked.

You see this as walking away from the castle and towards the town.

Here’s my map of the town:

There’s a lot of content, and I’ll mostly take it north to south. At the far north there is a tree where going UP lets you climb and find an AX.

It’s not clear these are climbable trees. Fortunately I was obsessively trying N/S/E/W/U/D in every room.

If you try to take the AXE the game suggests you use AX instead. I find it fascinating when the game clearly understands your meaning but tries to force your typing in a particular way instead rather than just recognizing the alternate spelling method.

The next east-west row has a tavern on the far west, where you get something stolen when you enter. I haven’t noodled here at all nor worked out if the game is softlocked once an item is stolen.

There’s a gate where “Starina” (optional encounter) tells you IN THEE LIES THE HOPE OF ALL STARBURY. GREAT HOPE MAKES THEE GREAT! and I’m again wondering what the biographical context of our main character is, and if it matters for any puzzles.

Past Starina to the east is an astrologer, who is pining after a fortune-teller, and the fortune-teller right next to him.

We’ll be back here later with the crystal ball she wants.

Going back to Starina and heading south, there’s a blacksmith (who needs something to help with his fire) and a hovel.

South even further is a “town square” with multiple possible encounters, including “Granny Garbled-Marbles” who lets you know a candlestick of hers was stolen by an Abbott.

To the east is a church, with Brother James (and the aforementioned candlestick) and the Abbott’s room.

If you try to read the book, the Abbott appears and throws you out.

To the west is a glassblower place, where you can find a crystal ball. This is the ball you need to take to the fortune teller (mind you, the fortune teller seemed to indicate she had lost her ball and you’re finding it … this seems like you’re getting a new ball?) When trying to GET BALL the glass-blower first quizzes you on what a picture is, showing it piece by piece; you need type MERMAID and you can go ahead.

Just to jump ahead a bit, if you take the crystal ball back to the fortune-teller, you get told about a magical vase:

Was the scene necessary to win, or will you find the vase anyway even if you don’t hear about it first?

Resuming our north-south walk, on one side is an alchemist.

He needs the candlestick. I’ll do that whole sequence in a moment.

Across from the alchemist is a bakery, where the person inside needs an ingredient for chocolate “moose”.

Reaching the outskirts of town, there’s a path passing by a pig, chicken, and goose (at various moments, their appearance is random); there’s also a horseshoe lying around which I believe is the lucky item the jester wants.

Further on is a shop where you can “appraise” items. It will determine which items are considered valuable as bribes (this is quite directly given in the text — something is listed as valuable or not “TO GUARDS”).

Also, there’s someone sewing with a cat.

There’s still more map south past the town, but I’m just going to highlight a couple things. First of all, you can find a joust minigame. You are informed you need to win four times in a row. You can move a shield and a lance independently, and it is possible to win, lose, or tie at any clash. I don’t know what you get if you win.

(The game also keeps track of your hourglass time and you will get booted back to the Dungeon once time is up.)

Similarly, you can also find a fishing minigame nearby. Again, I’m not sure what the reward is, although I found this easier than the jousting. Again, hourglass time will pass as you fish, so it is possible to lose by getting booted back to the Dungeon.

This and the other minigame show our avatar!

Finally, there’s a stockade just outside of town. If you talk with the criminal within, they let you know they have a lockpick out next to the tavern. You’ve actually seen the lockpick!

That little dot and line in the bottom right is the lockpick! (This, plus the minigames, plus the emphasis on parsing the world visually rather than reading text, plus the people appearing at random, make me think of later Sierra games.) You can just GET LOCKPICK, even if you hadn’t heard about it previously from the criminal.

With the man free, head over to the church, and he’ll cause the Father to chase him so you can grab the candlestick. You can then take the candlestick over to the alchemist who will take some of the metal for alchemy (not the whole thing) and he’ll give you his bellows. You can then take the bellows over to the blacksmith who will trade you his shovel for the bellows. I have yet to be able to dig anything up with the shovel.

That’s mostly it for this update, but one more thing: I was captured with all the aforementioned items, retrieved them, dropped down the trapdoor to the magician room, and then lit the candle using the fire at the flask. I could then open the cupboard and go in where it was dark, finding an item.

Just to recap the obstacles remaining, I need to deal with

a.) the jester (just need to get the horseshoe over, most likely)

b.) the locked door

c.) the various people in the halls (likely need the invisibility spell, likely meaning I need to find a witch)

d.) the people at the tavern (and the cryptic mention of sign language)

e.) the astrologer who pines after the fortune teller

This might just be for color, but maybe you give a flower or something along those lines.

f.) the Abbott and the book

g.) the “moose” ingredient

h.) something at the sewing shop (nothing seems to be requested?)

i.) winning the joust

j.) winning the fishing

k.) some exploration past the town which I’ll save for a different post

l.) probably at least one thing I’m missing because of the random appearance of characters and also the fact exits aren’t mentioned, so I have to test N/S/E/W/U/D in every room and I likely missed one by accident

I haven’t had a game split in this many directions in a while. The time-limit part is interesting in keeping each expedition “directed” (for example, jousting and fishing take enough time that they likely each need their own individual journey, without any extra stops). I certainly don’t need any hints or suggestions yet, so please save those for if I later get stuck.

Zarf Updates: Effinger replies to me

2026-06-04T00:38:41+00:00

I posted a couple of weeks ago about Infocom tie-in novels, with a bit of a digression on the work of George Alec Effinger. It turns out that I have a response from Effinger to relay!

Not a response to my 2026 post, obviously. Effinger passed away in 2002. But his books were mentioned on Usenet in 1997. It was a thread about the "Groundhog Day" trope, which brought up Effinger's books The Nick of Time and The Bird of Time. (The first Effinger that I read, as it happens.)

Anyhow, someone made a rather dismissive comment to the effect of "...before Mr. Effinger ran out of ideas and was reduced to writing things like 'The Zork Chronicles'." And guess who showed up to riposte?

Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction Subject: Re: Groundhog Day as Interactive Fiction Date: Tue, 13 May 1997 14:41:42 -0600 From: g.effinger2@genie.com

I've read with a lack of amusement the opinion that I wrote THE ZORK CHRONICLES because I ran out of ideas. Generally, I don't respond to negative opinions of my work--I really don't expect everyone to like everything I write. I don't like everything I write. I'm interested to hear why some of my stories or novels don't work for particular readers; however, "Mr. Effinger ran out of ideas" doesn't convey any useful information to me. [...]

I regret to say that I had also posted to that thread -- agreeing with the original poster. Although, in my defense, I added that I was a Glorian of the Knowledge fan. Still, embarrassing. And not just because I totally forgot that this exchange happened! Thirty years ago. Yikes.

You can read Effinger's entire post here. If Google Search goes ass-up, as it keeps threatening to, you can also find the post archived in this Usenet thread collection (unzip, search the text file raif970828).

However, I need to quote more of Effinger's post. It gives valuable context for those days of 1989 or so. And, well, it trashes a lot of the assumptions I made in my earlier tie-in post. Further embarrassment! At least I tried to label all my assumptions as assumptions.

I wrote that Effinger might have written The Zork Chronicles "as an on-ramp to the videogame industry". Turns out I had it backwards:

I wanted to write the novel and this was an opportunity to do it. Also, I had worked with Infocom when I wrote a game for them, "Circuit's Edge," based on characters and locations in WHEN GRAVITY FAILS, and I liked the Infocom people. They asked if I'd be interested in doing a novelization for them, and they offered me what they called "the big one"--the Zork games. I'd played all the games enthusiastically when I got my first computer, years before, and I was glad they thought of me for the book.

(Effinger, ibid.)

That bit shows up another of my mistakes. I asserted that Effinger was not a gamer or a computer nerd. I was going off this interview, recorded in 2020. There, Mike Legg says that Effinger "...didn’t have a PC, he didn’t have a word processor; at least I don’t think he had." Oops on both of us.

Jumping back, and relevant to the topic of my original post, Byron Preiss:

First, although I've faced large medical debts for a considerable time, I didn't write ZORK for money. I was paid $5,000 for it, a flat fee from the packager, with no royalties--something I tell my writing class not to do (work-for-hire it's called). I did it, knowing I'd never see another penny and knowing that the $5,000 was probably not enough to cover my living expenses during the time it took to write the book, because it was a book I'd always wanted to write. Not THE ZORK CHRONICLES, but the third book about the character of Glorian; he was in WHAT ENTROPY MEANS TO ME and HEROICS, and this was to be his apotheosis. I was discouraged in writing such a book because my Budayeen series looked more promising, and because my earlier humorous books never did well in a commercial sense (BIRD, NICK, and HEROICS have never even been in paperback).

(Effinger, ibid.)

Preiss was referred to as a "book packager" in this 2019 article. It's good to see the use of the term validated.

I do get to correct Mr. Effinger in turn on one trivial point: The Nick of Time and The Bird of Time were published in paperback editions -- in the UK. I only know this because I picked up a second-hand copy. (Possibly at the Toronto Worldcon of 2003.)

Effinger goes on to defend the practice of writing licensed works, and to deny that they're inherently crap. He is polite but clearly annoyed that he has to do this. I won't quote because we've hopefully grown out of making such attacks.

On to more interesting details:

I am currently engaged in helping to develop a game entitled "Aeon" with White Wolf, and I'll be doing more work-for-hire books for them. A legal situation has prevented me from delivering any new books under my name using previous characters or series--especially finishing the last two books in the WHEN GRAVITY FAILS series. I may never be allowed to publish them, so I've had to turn entirely to work-for-hire until the final judgment is made later this year.

(Effinger, ibid.)

The legal situation is mentioned in Effinger's Wikipedia entry: a medical bankruptcy which could have stripped him of his ownership of his own work. Happily, that didn't happen. He went on to publish those two sequels, A Fire in the Sun (1989) and The Exile Kiss (1991), to acclaim.

But what about that game "Aeon"?

However, although I'm making the same money now that I made for the Zork book (i.e., not very much although White Wolf will pay me royalties), I'm eager about the project. Andrew Bates, the game's developer, has some wonderful SF ideas, and he's been enthusiastic about my thoughts and suggestions. I was approached originally about doing only an 8,000 word short story for the game's original book, but the novels happened only after I decided I liked the intelligence and possibilities of the setting and theme. The novels' story and most of the characters are mine, not White Wolf's, and will be incorporated in the game itself.

(Effinger, ibid.)

A bold choice of cover design.

ÆON, an ambitious sci-fi RPG, was released by White Wolf Publishing in late 1997. They promptly got slapped with a lawsuit from MTV's animated show Æon Flux. One hasty press release later, the game was retitled Trinity.

RPGs aren't my field, so I won't try to summarize the history of Trinity or Effinger's connection to it. It seems to still be in print (now from Onyx Path). Hopefully Effinger got his promised royalties.

One can peek at the original Æon/Trinity rulebook. (A true monument to the '90s trend of hyper-greeblied page layouts!) The book opens with the promised Effinger short story. It's titled "The Honored Dead"; it's literally the first twenty pages of the rulebook, before the table of contents.

...I just sat down and read it. It's a decent bit of sci-fi thriller. Tough Guy and Mysterious Lady smuggle some valuable biotech across the Alps. Which cup is the ~~Maltese Falcon~~ cryovial under? It's got character backstory and an intro to some big-shots of the Æon setting. (As promised, their names appear in the background material of the rest of the sourcebook.) What it doesn't do is give a sense of the setting as a whole. There's supposed to be aliens, space colonies, a world reshaped by psi-wars. What we see is a few miles of Switzerland. Fine for a story, questionable for an RPG intro.

Also, as I said, I prefer the whimsical Effinger. White Wolf hired the gritty one.

But what about those novels? Sadly, they never appeared. Wikis mention the titles as Æon 1: Dawn and Æon 2: Meridian -- both cancelled in 1998. Effinger says they "happened", which sounds like manuscripts got written. If so, they presumably got stuffed in a drawer and remained there until his death.

Of course, I've gotten myself into trouble with assumptions before...

I should note that the Onyx Path Æon page lists stories titled Dawn and Meridian. However, if you click through, they're shown as novellas (not novels), written in 2021 by Lauren Roy and Chris Allen respectively. Written from scratch from the original 1997 outlines? Or just borrowing the titles? I have no idea.

Well, that's all I've got on this particular path. My very belated thanks to Mr. Effinger for dropping in on our discussion, and my very belated apologies for my mostly-dismissive attitude back then.

Although... Huh. One of the designers of Trinity, after Andrew Bates, is a guy named Richard Dansky.... who's giving a talk at NarraScope in less than two weeks. Maybe I'll corner him and ask him about Effinger.

Gold Machine: Postcards from the Hedge

2026-06-02T12:52:51+00:00

The text of Infocom’s Hollywood Hijinx

Paratext and Worldbuilding

The pack-ins for Hollywood Hijinx include an issue of Tinsel World magazine, a leter from the protagonist’s Aunt Hildegard, and a postcard from Uncle Buddy. It’s a likable assortment. The copy protection doesn’t disrupt the reading experience, and the documents effectively evoke the mood of a b-movie about b-movies.

The pleasantly ludicrous magazine features black and white photographs and parodic advertisements. In one passage, it advises readers that “Dill pickles can add years to your life!” Elsewhere, in an article titled “Gerbil Terrorizes Gramps,” we read that “the crazed rodent sprang out and began racing wildly around the house, clawing and biting at curtains and furniture and severely maiming Mr. Veldran’s pet lizard.”

“Dill pickles can add years to your life!”

These are garnishes to the practical purpose of the magazine, as the current issue observes the recent passing of Aunt Hildegard and remembers her collaborator Buddy Burbank. Her passing is the inciting incident of Hollywood Hijinx. Her will (and Buddy’s before her) states that her entire and substantial estate will go to their favorite niece or nephew (the game never assigns a gender to the protagonist) if they can complete a treasure hunt in twelve hours. Other nieces and nephews will get their own chances, should the protagonist fail.

The magazine fills in details of the world and contextualizes Hollywood Hijinx‘s protagonist. It reviews—humorously—Buddy’s career as a studio owner and b-movie auteur. His body of work includes films like The Seven Dwarves Do Dallas and Buck Palace, the Fighting Mailman. We learn about the marriage between Buddy and “Hildy,” as well as their close relationships with their nieces and nephews.

Hollywood Hijinx is the very rare Infocom game that makes a substantial investment in the backstory of its protagonist. Many Infocom characters have undeveloped backgrounds, as this series demonstrates. Moonmist‘s detective is a “famous” sleuth, for example, but we are arguably meant to fill in the blanks with whatever we know about Nancy Drew. The precocious inventor of Seastalker doesn’t have a story so much as they do a resume. Only Infidel makes this kind of commitment to background and character, and, as we will see, the playable game itself performs even more of this work.

Hollywood Hijinx is the very rare Infocom game that makes a substantial investment in the backstory of its protagonist.

Both the postcard and letter illuminate the relationships between the main character, Hildy, and Buddy. Both are addressed to the protagonist, and their authors obviously care for our avatar. The postcard consists of a rather ridiculous series of heroic couplets exhorting the player to learn from the examples set by characters in Buddy’s films. It additionally serves as copy protection, and those clues blend in well with the poem it contains.

The letter from Hildegard provides the main dramatic question of Hollywood Hijinx. It establishes the stakes, that of a treasure hunt in which the rewards are all-or-nothing. The letter further details the goal and rules of the hunt. Hildy’s voice is distinct and gives insight into who she was and how she feels about the protagonist.

Considering the thing in total, it is clear that the paratext of Hollywood Hijinx is excellent because every element extends our understanding of the game’s world both in terms of history and geography. I have always said that the best feelies are essential to the text of their games, though few cases truly achieve this ideal. While I always suggest that players read all Infocom pack-ins, I do so here with extra emphasis.

The Treasure Hunt

Despite—or because of—the frontloaded vividness of its setting, Hollywood Hijinx sometimes feels like a loose bag of puzzles. That isn’t necessarily a problem. The wacky nature of the house and its former inhabitants mandate a certain level of incoherence. Critiques of mimetic infidelity neither can nor should apply here. If we find ourselves moving from computer punch cards to fireproof matches to an automaton “atomic chihuahua,” so be it!

The wacky nature of the house and its former inhabitants mandate a certain level of incoherence.

My critique of the puzzles is that they don’t all lean into the zaniness enough. While the casual relationships between puzzle elements feel fitting, as a player I would have enjoyed more puzzles embracing the wacky nature of Buddy’s career. That’s what makes the atomic chihuahua puzzle stand out as the game’s best: we are, for a moment, inhabiting a world of Buddy’s imagining.

>east
The Atomic Chihuahua, in its best prehistoric prance, moves further east, then comes to a stop.

The Atomic Chihuahua continues to take hits from the tiny tanks. The planes, only a block away, begin firing as they move within range. As bullets pierce the dazed dog's scales he pauses momentarily, remembering his younger days with Xavier Cugat.

>push black
The Atomic Chihuahua lifts its hind leg and, just as you thought this game was going to become even more base, stomps its clawed foot down on one of the tiny tanks, crushing it.

The Atomic Chihuahua continues to take hits from the tiny tank. The planes, spewing bullet-shaped death, reach the radioactive reptile and begin circling around it. The Atomic Chihuahua takes two rounds in the throat and gasps. (Two rounds to you and me, but that's 14 rounds to little scale-face!)

The scene, we realize, is a riff on old Godzilla films.

Compare this to a more generic widget puzzle that could easily appear in any game.

>south
Closet
You're in a small closet. Mounted at an angle on the back wall of the closet are three coat pegs. To the left of the first peg there is a hole the size of a peg. To the right of the third peg there is a peg which has been sawed-off, flush with the wall. The door to the north is open.

>push first peg
You pull the peg down to a horizontal position.

As you release the peg, it pops back into its original 45-degree position. The closet begins to shake and rattle a bit as the door swings shut. You feel your stomach rising to your throat as the closet moves down, then stops.

Elsewhere, a genuinely unpleasant hedge maze puzzle, which could easily be dropped via helicopter into countless other games, will likely frustrate and annoy many. Procrastinators will be rewarded by a map that can only be constructed later in the game.

Such puzzles are never bad as puzzles in isolation, and many players will like them quite well, but in many cases we find an out-of-place dryness that falls short of the highs of game and feelies alike.

The most notable feature of the game’s text is a recurring emphasis on the protagonist’s history with the house, Buddy, and Hildy. A later essay will discuss this element in depth, but for now I call attention to Hollywood Hijinx‘s remarkable commitment to worldbuilding and character development. The practice dovetails incredibly well with the feelies themselves. Some—myself included—might overlook this practice because of the unsubtle silliness of the work, but Hollywood Hijinx makes novel moves in terms of craft and narrative.

While it will likely retain its reputation as a lesser work, we see here a game that does what other Infocom games have not yet done, and in this, its detractors must concede, Hollywood Hijinx excels.

The Gold Machine treatment of Hollywood Hijinx concludes with a(n) (a)typical treatment of themes, context, and reception. Don’t miss it!

Renga in Blue: The Coveted Mirror (1983)

2026-06-01T22:38:23+00:00

We’ve featured companies here before (like Adventure International and Sierra On-Line) that started their main development in games, with a few extra utilities being sold on the side. When Mark Pelczarski formed Penguin Software, their initial core product was (rather than a game) their Graphics Magician, which held them steady through their early years. However, they eventually became prominent for their adventure games: Transylvania, Crimson Crown, The Coveted Mirror, The Quest, and their re-published version of Oo-Topos (originally without graphics at all). Considered across multiple platforms, the adventure games are what sold the best for Penguin, but it took The Graphics Magician existing in the first place for those games to appear.

Back of the Graphics Magician box, via eBay.

Their first adventure game, Transylvania, came to them essentially by accident and didn’t originally have graphics. They got the author (Antonio Antiochia) an early copy of Graphics Magician to make it a flagship product alongside The Graphics Magician.

After The Graphics Magician was published, they got a call from a programmer named Eagle Berns at Stanford. Burns had been there as a programmer since 1959 (and their IBM 650), overlapping with the early computer science great Donald Knuth. Close to when he started his Apple II journey (1980) he worked some on LaTeX (one of Knuth’s projects) as well as Foreign language processing at Stanford.

Importantly for us, he decided to pivot to personal computers and specifically the Apple II, and using The Graphics Magician he had written a game using the tool with Michael Kosaka. (Michael Kosaka only has a small part to play in today’s game, but as an aside: of the people I mention today, he had the deepest involvement with later games, working on Skate or Die, Madden NFL ’94, and an unreleased Sonic game for 32X which would require a several-thousand word essay to adequately explain.) Quoting Pelczarski on Burns:

A great, creative person, he went on to make his mark at Apple Computer (on the Macintosh team), Micro Focus, and Oracle. But first and foremost he turned into a good friend who also happened to write, with Michael Kosaka, the first game with Graphics Magician: Pie Man. The game was loosely based on an I Love Lucy skit, with pies coming rapidly off a conveyor belt while you try to put whipped cream and a cherry on top and put the pie in a rack, while avoiding grease spots and obstacles. (Remember that these were the days when state of the art was Break-Out, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man.) A non-violent game with a bit of personality was very unique and new.

The non-violent part is worth highlighting; Scott Scram started writing games for Penguin with Crime Wave, and wanted to follow up with something “completely non-violent”; Mark Pelczarski suggested porting Pie Man to Atari.

People who play violent games excessively may do so for psychological reasons. Perhaps they seek a jolt of self-medicating adrenaline, or they need to feel powerful in the game world as opposed to feeling powerless in their real lives … I enjoyed porting the game, and it turned out well with the use of some Atari additions such as a 4 part musical soundtrack.

Unfortunately, the world was not ready to give up the really cool violent games that were coming out at about that time, and the game did not sell well. But, the popularity of Tetris, solitaire and others prove that there is a market for non-violent games and puzzles.

A video of some of the Atari version below:

Eagle Berns followed up Pie Man with an adventure game, The Coveted Mirror, working with his friend Holly Thomason (and a small contribution from Michael Kosaka, which I’ll highlight when I eventually reach that part of the game).

From the back of the later printing of the game using an updated engine, although supposedly it loses some minigames.

The story is set in the “Faraway Land of Starbury” where “people were happy and life was good”. However, there was a “villian” named Voar with a “heart of black poison” who sought to rule the kingdom as his own; however, he was stopped by the Wizard Munjistan who had a magical Mirror who could see all “troublemakers” who would cause destruction to the land. One night, Voar entered the realm of the wizard in a forest and tried to steal the mirror, but it broke into five pieces, and he was only able to steal away with four (how it got to the mirror in the first place without being spotted is unclear).

Thus it befell that with most of the pieces, Voar’s power waxed and overshadowed that of Munjistan’s. However, without all the shards of the Mirror, Voar’s power was yet incomplete. Munjistan knew he had very little time to secure the last piece against Voar’s craving, so he desperately searched his magic books for a spell to save Starbury. Alas, to no avail! The best he could find was one which required he hide the piece and wait for a champion born beneath future stars. If the champion is pure of heart and bests Voar in the race for the piece, the evil one’s power will be shattered.

Voar in the meantime learned to wield the other four pieces in order to spy on citizens and send people to the dungeons, but he could not find the fifth piece. The wizard managed to disguise himself as a court magician to stay close to Voar but has since passed away. This is where you come in. You (no biographical background) have been captured by Voar, and the action starts in the throne room.

The title screen animates the mirror shattering.

The essential gimmick of the game is that you’re a prisoner and get started by being sent into a dungeon, but it isn’t hard to escape; however, Voar “can generally find you easily with his mirror pieces” meaning you aren’t really free. A “prison guard” will “check on you regularly but you may find a way to cope with that.” Additionally there’s a time limit (given by the sands) where the guard will return to check on you.

Whilst you are doing all this, your job is to find various mirror pieces and assemble them into a rectangle.

This is all summarized directly from the manual and I admit I haven’t been this baffled by the premise of a game in a while.

a.) If the mirror let the wizard watch for trouble, how did Voar get close enough to steal it?

b.) Who was ruling over the kingdom before Voar? The Wizard? Maybe it was some sort of collective and the wizard was just keeping the peace? Is the wizard’s disguise going to be an important detail later, even though the wizard is now dead?

c.) If we’re aiming to find the fifth mirror piece, but Voar can always just watch what we’re doing, couldn’t he watch us going for the fifth mirror piece and stopping it?

d.) But if Voar has the mirror pieces, how are we able to find them around the castle? How are we able to keep them given the whole process of getting tossed into the dungeon?

e.) If we’re under surveillance, why is there a regular guard appearing with a timer? Why doesn’t the guard immediately know when we’ve escaped?

I ended up checking the later (1986) version of the game which has its own story book, and at least one of the holes gets filled up: Voar starts a crime wave in order to distract the Wizard, which is why he’s able to sneak to the location of the mirror. One other slight change: the wizard shares the secret of the fifth shard’s hiding place with “one other soul”.

This still doesn’t address how we are picking up mirror pieces despite Voar tracking us, or the setup behind the guard regularly appearing. With most media I am pretty tolerant of “plot holes” as simply things a story hasn’t bothered to explain but likely has some explanation; unfortunately with an adventure the interpretation of the plot can be important in puzzle-solving so I find the confusion more of a problem.

The king’s face is incidentally animated. Many scenes are, and it adds a feeling of polish to the game that makes it seem more like later-Apple-II graphics rather than depths-of-early-Sierra. (You can also contrast with The Hobbit. That game was made by four computer scientists with interests in systems and languages; this game was made by two people — with minor help from a third — that were more graphics-oriented.)

No matter what action you do (at least any action I could find) there’s the response…

I’LL HAVE THEE BEATEN FOR THY INSOLENCE
OFF TO THE TOWER!
(THAT’S 01 I’LL ONLY ALLOW IT 25 TIMES.)

…and then you appear in the dungeon. (The first immediate issue with the plot being sketchy rises up right here: are we supposed to do something at the king? Or was getting thrown into the dungeon just a “cutscene” so to speak?)

There is no more text than what you see (“YOU ARE IN THE DANK, DESOLATE, PRISONER TOWER.”) The game expects you to see items and refer to them by name from the picture, not from the text. It took me a while to realize the item to the right is a PITCHER (not a JUG) and even when I realized it the game told me that it’s just scenery when I tried to pick it up.

You can move the bed to find a hole, then GO HOLE into darkness.

Going west from here leads to the magician’s room with “mysterious odds & ends”, except all that’s visible is a flask which is too hot to touch and some books.

You can’t take the books (“THEY’RE NOT YOURS TO TAKE”) but you can READ BOOK, find a diary of the magician, and read multiple pages which give hints.

IF THAT OLD WITCH DOESN’T GIVE ME HER INVISIBILITY SPELL SOON, I’LL CHANGE HER INTO A STARBURY STRAWBERRY.

I thought the wizard was supposed to be the good guy?

I WONDER IF VOAR KNOWS BORIS LETS THE PRISONERS ROAM IF THEY OFFER HIM THE RIGHT THINGS!

I’m wondering if this means you leave a present in the room that the guard finds while you’re out. Otherwise there isn’t a reason for a gift (if you’re physically there, nothing bad happens).

BORIS KEEPS CLOSE WATCH ON THAT HOURGLASS, BUT SOMETIMES HE FALLS ASLEEP & PRISONERS GET EXTRA TIME.

IF BORIS WAKES TO FIND THEIR TIME IS UP BUT THEY’RE NOT BACK IN PRISON, HE REPORTS THEM TO VOAR.

SO VOAR USES THE MAGIC MIRROR TO WHISK THEM BACK & GLADLY PUTS THEIR BOOTY IN HIS TREASURE ROOM.

I’m guessing this is the sort of game where you can simply avoid this happening, but we have had some games where you have to hit the fail-state at least once (including how you need to have the pirate steal your treasure in Crowther/Woods before the pirate chest shows up).

BUT EVEN VOAR CANNOT SEE BEYOND THE IMPENETRABLE MIST.

Is this another way to hide from getting teleported away, or just a hint where the fifth mirror piece is?

I’m still trying to get a hang of the game’s norms (which seem to vary quite a bit from what we’ve had here before) so I’ll try to get a fair chunk of the map made before reporting in next time.

Choice of Games LLC: Author Interview: Natalia Theodoridou, Choice of Games author

2026-06-01T20:44:39+00:00

Happy Pride! Choice of Games is proud to be gender-inclusive and LGBTQ+-affirming all year round, but during the month of June, we’re featuring writers whose work connects especially closely with those themes.

Today we’re sitting down with Nebula award winner Natalia Theodoridou, author of Rent-A-Vice, An Odyssey: Echoes of War, Vampire: the Masquerade–Sins of the Sires, and Restore, Reflect, Retry.

First, congratulations on being a Nebula finalist again! This time it’s for your debut novel Sour Cherry, which takes on the Bluebeard legend: a story with toxic masculinity, gendered power dynamics, and abusive relationships running through it. There’s also a fascinating theme of silence and namelessness in your adaptation. Can you tell us more about how you wove those themes in with the gender dynamics?

Thank you so much! It’s always so weird to be upbeat about the reception of this dark, dark book, but I’m really touched and humbled that it seems to be resonating with readers. Much of the violence in Sour Cherry is male violence, but my hope was to capture some of the complexity of gender dynamics beyond a clear-cut “men have power and are bad, women have no power and are silent victims.” The patriarchy hurts us all; having the range of the stories your mouth can speak and your mind can conceive reduced down to this single story is a kind of silencing. It is a kind of violence.

Losing one’s name is a kind of silencing, too. People caught in webs of oppression can lose their names in so many ways: by not having their true names accepted; by having names palatable to authority or cultural lines imposed on them; by having their names struck from the record of history; by becoming known not by the individuality of a name but by a function—a Cook, a Shopkeeper, a Nurse. At the same time, there can be power found in that flattening; names can be shackles, too, and sometimes, when people shed them, they are finally free to sit in the power of their voice (think Anonymous, who was, as Virginia Woolf would have it, a woman). Namelessness can also birth a kind of solidarity: we can become one in our namelessness and so, like the chorus of ghosts in Sour Cherry, negate silence.

Turning to last year’s Nebula win, A Death in Hyperspace: you were one of a large team of authors on that. How did you find working in a large group? What distinctive elements did a team effort bring to this project?

It was delightful. I’m constantly amazed by how differently people can come at the same creative question, and I think the project was so much fun because of the diversity of voices and approaches that were woven through it. This is also what made the characters feel and sound so authentically different. I particularly loved (and this is where Stewart C Baker’s genius clearly shone through, because he was the one who made the project cohere) the way the creative process of putting the project together as a puzzle—each of us writing for one character and slotting clues into someone else’s piece—mirrored the playing of the game-puzzle for the reader. In a sense, writing the game and playing the game are the same process, except in reverse.

Of all your many short stories, the one I just have to ask about is “Cursed Moon Queers”, which first posits a queer colony on the moon and then asks “What if those TikTok witches who cursed the moon actually had an effect?” What was it about that pop culture moment that sparked your imagination?

(I mean, are we sure they didn’t? Look at the state of things.)

It’s hard for me to pinpoint exactly what it was that did it because there are always so many disparate elements that come together for me to make a story; it’s never just one thing. But I guess it was something about the anxiety and pain behind an idea like cursing the moon. To me, it speaks to the desperation of the most powerless. A struggle to claim some agency, impossibly, when everything feels out of control. Except it’s usually other marginalised folks who feel the consequences of grand-scale things first. So the story was in a sense saying, okay guys, you’ve done it; now what? What exactly did you hope to accomplish? As if we weren’t all cursed enough already.

We’re asking all of our authors this: How has your representation of LGBTQ+ themes in your writing evolved over the course of your career?

I used to be very anxious about representing LGBTQ+ themes and characters because I worried I would inadvertently cause offence, say the wrong thing, fail to include absolutely every queer point of view, and end up hurting my community. Now, more than a decade later, I know this is not only an impossible task, but the wrong task altogether. LGBTQ+ people are not a monolith, and we do not agree on everything (maybe even most things). Nor should we want to. I have no intention of flattening us all into an inert, non-threatening, smooth mass. I think it’s healthy to disagree, and it’s desirable to have loudly different opinions on things, including on what constitutes harm. Writing defensively to avoid what I imagine might cause someone discomfort simply results in writing inauthentically and not saying much. Now I aim to write truthfully and courageously about things that matter to me. Of course not everything will land with everyone, and their response will be their response, just as my thinking is my thinking. I cannot claim to represent anyone but myself, my context, and my own understanding of things. Or actually, my current understanding of things. I hope that my understanding has and will keep evolving; I hope to keep changing my mind, or to keep being able to. Of course I have made mistakes, and I will make more. Failing and failing again is the only way to grow. Mistakes are how we learn. All I hope is that, when I make my next one, it will be in a space and time where we can afford to listen to each other. Listening when you’re in pain is the hardest thing. But we can work at it. Like Kai Cheng Thom said, I hope we choose love, you know? And that we keep choosing it.

Finally: how are you celebrating Pride this year?

By surviving in the face of blatant, widespread, normalised transphobia.

Choice of Games LLC: Choice of Games Pride 2026 Sale: Week 1

2026-06-01T20:44:34+00:00

Pride isn’t just for a month! All year, we work to bring you games that offer a diverse and expansive view of love, family, and identity. But we’ll take any excuse to celebrate, and so we’re putting games on sale every week of June that showcase and explore that diversity, and we’re featuring interviews with the authors of those games.

These four Choice of Games titles by Natalia Theodoridou are up to 40% off until June 8th!

Vampire: The Masquerade—Sins of the Sires — In this elegy of blood, Athens is burning!
An Odyssey: Echoes of War — Fight Poseidon’s wrath to reclaim the throne!
Rent-A-Vice — What doesn’t kill you…kills someone else.
Restore, Reflect, Retry — This haunted game remembers you. Play again?

top expert: adjectival advantages

2026-06-01T17:25:27+00:00

Creating or specifying custom adjectives.

using adjectives to describe the worlds of our games

adjectives in general.

In everyday spoken English, we use adjectives to describe and specify nouns. We might refer to a tall building or a lovely song. A bird might be blue or black. Adjectives are frequently discussed in Inform’s Standard rules, and why wouldn’t they? If we are programming with natural language, it only makes sense that we will sometimes need to characterize the things populating the worlds we make.

The use of the word “adjective” in the Inform documentation is not always technical. Here is its first use, which reasonably assumes that we know what the English word “adjective”means:

WI §3.6 Either/or properties

Some containers, like bottles, can be opened: others, like buckets, cannot. If they can be opened, then sometimes they will be open, and sometimes closed. These are examples of properties, which can change during play. The following source sets some properties:

```
The cardboard box is a closed container. The glass bottle is a transparent open container. The box is fixed in place and openable.
```

There are only four different properties referred to here. Closed means not open, and vice versa, so these two adjectives both refer to the same property. (As might be expected, when a container is open, one can see inside and place things within, or take them out.) The glass bottle and the box being containers is a matter of their kinds, which is something fundamental and immutable, so "container" does not count as a property.

This is not a technical usage of the term “adjective.” Rather, we see here that properties (a technical term) can be used as adjectives within our phrases and sentences. For instance, a box with the open property can be identified as such:

if the box [a thing] is open
...
if there is an open box [a kind] in the location
...
repeat with B running through open boxes [a kind]

The designation an open box (used as a kind) is what Inform calls a “description of values.” While this terminology might seem confusing at first, it is straightforward enough.

“description” = described by an adjective
“values” = while we might initially think of values as abstractions, kinds of things (in this case, boxes) are values, too.

defining new adjectives

Creating a property is one way to make adjectives that we can use in our code.

a thing can be red or blue.
...
a thing can be red.

In both cases, Inform will assign all things a default property. This will always be the second value (if no second value is stated, the assumed second is, for instance, “not red” or the absence of red).

after examining the box:
	now the box is red;

In other words, creating a property has implications for all things of the world, and that property can be assigned (or not) by default or else by specific code.

Sometimes, it will be desirable—perhaps very desirable—to let inform decide whether or not an adjective applies to something. Things that are carried by the player—not stowed in a bag, mind you, but carried “bare-handed,” so to speak, can be referred to with the adjective carried. Under the hood, the adjective carried is not assigned in the way that red (above) is. Instead, it is derived from a relation.

From the Standard Rules:

The verb to carry means the carrying relation.

We don’t need to be experts in relations to take advantage of this. We can make sentences straight away. For instance:

lab is a room.

the player carries the wallet.

instead of jumping:
	if the player carries the wallet, say "The player carries the wallet!";
	if the player is carrying the wallet, say "The player is carrying the wallet!";
	if the wallet is carried by the player, say "The wallet is carried by the player!";

This yields

>jump
The player carries the wallet!
The player is carrying the wallet!
The wallet is carried by the player!

That’s all quite handy, and, once we’re used to working with relations, we can write such sentences with ease. However, Inform offers ways for us to write other phrases and conditions based on these relationships. Using “definitions,” we can craft adjectives to use in our phrases and sentences. Again, from the Standard Rules:

Definition: a thing is carried if the player is carrying it.

Initially, the significance might not be clear, as there doesn’t seem to be meaningful difference between phrases like these:

if the player carries the frob
...
if the frob is a carried thing

In fact, the one with the adjective seems to be the more awkward of the two. Let’s try again.

repeat with T running through things:
	if the player carries T:
...
repeat with T running through carried things:

In that case, the second one requires less typing and is more readable, too.

after stumbling:
	try dropping a random carried thing;

We need not limit ourselves to relations, though. We can devise custom adjectives based on any number of considerations.

a diving board has a number called height.

definition: a diving board is high if the height of it is greater than 10;

Definitions always begin with “definition:” What immediately follows is our adjective (“high”). Next comes a condition. Note that we can use “it” freely here; Inform knows that we refer to the thing defined.

We can use it straight away. Perhaps our protagonist is afraid of heights:

does the player mean climbing a high diving board:
	it is very unlikely;

before climbing a high diving board:
	say "Gathering your courage, you make your way up the tall, narrow laddder.""

Sometimes, we might incorporate both an affirmative and negative adjective in our definition.

definition: a diving board is high rather low than if the height of it is greater than 10;

Using the “rather than” construction allows us to name a second, opposing adjective.

At least, sometimes we can. Some definitions are too complex to allow a negative counterpart in-line. Consider this familiar-looking construction:

definition: a person is frightened if:
	if it is on a high diving board, decide yes;
  decide no;

In such cases, we might want to define the negative ourselves using the definition we just made.

definition: a person is sanguine if:
	if a person is frightened, decide no;
decide yes;

If you read last week’s post, then you’ve likely noticed how similar this practice looks to a phrase defining a new condition. Both push toward a yes or no question: the conditions have been met, or they haven’t. The board is high, or it isn’t. The main difference comes down to application: defined conditions can be used broadly to talk about just about anything. The condition is whatever we name it. Defining an adjective, on the other hand, modifies something more specific. “definition: a frob is…” can only compile if there is someplace within our code a frob to describe.

Perhaps we need a list of things the player left in the opening section of the game.

lab is a room.
	
starting area is a region.
the point of origin is in starting area.

the widget is in the point of origin.
the frob is in the point of origin.

definition: a thing is left behind if it is in the starting area and the player is not in the starting area.

after jumping:
	say "You have left behind the [the list of left behind things].";

In this case, a left behind thing is anything that is in the starting area when the player is not. However, we may have been a little too loose with our definition. Let’s make sure we aren’t talking about scenery, since players can’t bring that with them:

definition: a thing is left behind if it is not scenery and it is in the starting area and the player is not in the starting area.

alernately:

definition: a thing is left behind:
	if it is scenery, decide no;
	if the player is in the starting area, decide no;
	decide yes;

There! Applying the scenery adjective gives us the specificity we need. If we wished to only include things the player has carried, we could specify “handled” instead.

These most recent examples are computed. This is an important distinction! We never need to tell Inform that the frob is left behind, because it can work that out based on the definition we have provided. This differs from the adjectives we’ve discussed in the past: those are assigned via either defaults or else more specific code.

In both cases, though, we are using adjectives to designate something in the world of our game, and, like phrases defining new conditions, adjectives can empower us to write more effective and readable code.

Zarf Updates: Visible Deadline is now available to all

2026-06-01T04:29:01+00:00

Welcome to June. The latest from the Visible Zorker project: Visible Deadline!

"A locked door. A dead man. And 12 hours to solve the murder."

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license.

Deadline was Infocom's first non-Zork game, and they pulled out all the stops to make it feel like a new and different thing. Which made my job a lot more interesting!

For a start, Deadline's "feelies" were absolutely integral. When I bought Zork 2 and Zork 3, back in the day, I was basically able to throw the manual aside and jump straight into the game. (I'd already learned how the parser worked, and what else was there?) But Deadline came with a full police dossier introducing the murder scene: the coroner's report, interviews with the suspects, a little envelope containing a "sample" of the pills that did for Mr. Robner.

Visible Deadline wouldn't make sense without these documents. So I've included images in the "Feelies" tab. These are scanned directly from the copy of Deadline that I played as a kid! Except that my pills have crumbled to moldy crud over the decades.

I've posted the original, high-resolution images from this scan session on the Internet Archive. I'm not the first person to do this, of course; here's a set of scans from the Atari Deadline package. However, that's missing the interviews, and also I was able to do full 600dpi scans. So now you have both.

On the technical side, Deadline made an enormous leap: all of the game's NPCs were autonomous agents. Over the game's twelve-hour timeline, each character moved around the mansion on their own schedule. They could also react to your investigation. Certain questions or revelations would send characters running off to confer, conspire, destroy evidence, or (in the worst case) commit another murder. (When will these people learn that crime never pays?)

All of this required a pile of brand-new NPC navigation code. I've exhibited this in two ways:

The "Schedule" tab shows each character's current movement goal, as well as the daily schedule for the whole crew. It's a pretty complicated system. I've included a full explanation as I understand it.
The "Map" tab shows NPC routing paths and sightlines. The blue paths are internal tables which allow a character to move to a desired destination. The pink lines allow you to see a character in adjacent rooms down the hall.

(The routing logic is referred to as the "T system" in the source code, after the transit system that serves Boston and Cambridge. Infocom will always have its home-town in-jokes.)

Other than that stuff, this game runs pretty much like the previous Visible Infocom titles. Objects, functions, global variables, verb grammar. Enjoy browsing!

I guess I should also note that Deadline has not been licensed as open source by Microsoft. So I am somewhat jumping the gun by taking the Visible Zorker to this milestone. But it's where I started, and it's what I said I would do. So we're doing it. I don't really expect problems; we're all fans here.

Zarf Updates: Some games that happen to be all about music

2026-05-31T23:35:21+00:00

A musical city, a record store, and a 90s soundtrack album! Okay, and a Lovecraftian adventure game.

Phonopolis
Wax Heads
Mixtape
Call of the Elder Gods

Now that I think about it, the Lovecraftian adventure has a puzzle where you control alien technology through musical resonance. See. It all fits.

Phonopolis

by Amanita Design -- game site

An adorable animated puzzle-adventure game about a city ruled by sound.

I almost said "tiny adventure game", because of course Amanita games are tiny. It's part of their charm, right? But in fact Phonopolis is pretty substantial. I mean, it's not gigantic, but it's comparable to Keeper or Mind Diver (to name two games which I played recently and didn't call "small").

I'd say Phonopolis leans more towards the "puzzlebox" side of the genre than to puzzle games per se. The aesthetic is machinery that you don't know how it works. You play with the controls until you've done the right thing. Very often that's "make the machine explode messily and satisfyingly all over the place." Then you encounter a new weird machine.

I'm not saying it's not puzzly. You definitely have to pay attention to the game's reactions, think about where you're going, and put together consequences in the right order. And there are some mechanical puzzles that would be entirely at home in Riven. It's a mix.

What I'm saying is that (a) if you feel stuck, it's because you haven't played around enough to see everything the machine can do. And (b) fairly often, when you discover the new thing it can do, it will complete the puzzle right there and leave you saying "Hey, what did I just do? Why did that ~~explode~~ succeed?"

Usually that's a bad reaction! You always want to understand the puzzle after you solve it. But in Phonopolis it didn't bother me. The fun is exploring all the weird little animations and reactions. If a scene wraps up unexpectedly, so what -- you get new toys to play with. Win!

The toys are all modeled and hand-painted before being animated. It's a different style than Harold Halibut -- krunkier, in a word -- but watching everything move is a joy. And everything moves. The main menu rattles as you move the mouse and collapses in a heap when you quit. It's all like that. Wonderful.

Wax Heads

by Patattie Games -- game site

An adorable deduction-ish cartoon game about working in an indie record shop somewhere in Middle England. A customer comes into the shop and tells you what they're looking for, and then you flip through the stock and give them what they want. Or what they need -- not always the same thing.

This isn't a iron-brained deduction game like Golden Idol. Really, it's lighter than Strange Antiquities was, and that wasn't particularly heavy. But it's not simplistic either. You'll find you need to think all over the record shop: sleeve art, reviewer comments, social media, the indie zine shelf. You wind up absorbing the backstory of several local bands, and then that turns out to matter.

(The riffs on band and performer archetypes were all dead-on. They weren't send-ups of specific names like in Birch Tree Theater, but they're still recognizable. I laughed.)

In the end, it wasn't even about the puzzles. I was there for the character stories. Wax Heads is staffed by a coterie of queer nerds and alt-music-heads. They are all beautiful and I love them. The owner is an (equally great) cranky old lady, a refugee from a burned-out-not-faded-away 80s rock band. That turns out to matter too.

I could have done without the Spotify subplot (on-the-nose but too easy a target). But the big finale show brought an unwonted tear to my eye. A bit of Stray Gods-style dynamic musicologue, even, just to cement the game's place in my heart.

Mixtape

by Beethoven & Dinosaur -- game site

A reprise of 1990s high-school life as perceived through Stacey Rockford's headphones.

Just like Bloom and Rage, and for that matter The Artful Escape, this is set in an era that I never visited, with a musical idiom that I don't know a thing about. I have never inhabited a world where "Wanna go sit under the power lines and get blackout drunk?" was a question that people asked. But now I have some idea what it was like.

Our protagonists are a tide-locked trio of extremely different teens: the music devotee, the rebellious coddled kid, the stoner artiste. Not that they're limited to those cliches. The joy of the game is seeing their future selves flicker through the self-centered adolescent burn.

Rockford, as she tells the camera up front, is on a beeline to New York to transform her musical hyper-consciousness into a career as a hotshot music producer. Her friends are not entirely keen on being thus ditched. But they are entirely united on the need to find some alcohol to bring to Camille Cole's illicit summer beach party. Can't roll up without booze, man.

The game is -- yes -- a mix: a series of vignettes, each with its mood, mechanics, and (of course) soundtrack. (Rockford introduces each track to the viewer with the elan of a born radio-host-to-be.) Just like in Artful Escape, the music underpins your acrobatics and puts you in the groove. But where Artful Escape had a single move -- the high-flying guitar riff -- Mixtape gives you everything from nighttime sneaking to a lazy day skipping stones to a furious rampage. You're never doing the same thing twice.

Really, Mixtape is the same plan as What Remains of Edith Finch. (Did I really never review that one?) Except instead of recounting generations of Finches, the scenes recount a single (triple) high-school existence, disordered, in flashback. Even the "present" scenes are rendered in the exaggerated colors of memory; surely this is Rockford's adult reflection how How It Was. Kids on skateboards, outrunning cops and their onrushing future.

The art is stylized and generally great. (Photorealism has been ruined, it just means slop now.) I admit that I'm getting tired of the low-frame-rate stop-motion effect. "Animation on twos" made me look smart the first time I mentioned it, but I can't keep doing that, can I? Anyhow I think this one is on threes. Just jerky. However, the portrayal of the glow in a Sharper Image plasma sphere was dead on, and I have to admit that's what counts.

Usually when people refer to a game as "cinematic", they mean that the game knows the camera can move around during cut-scenes. Mixtape is cinematic in that it's keenly interested in what the camera is showing you. And how, and what the soundtrack (of course) does alongside. I can't remember the last time a game made me laugh at a camera cut and Mixtape does it twice. Okay, now it's Virginia, except instead of Twin Peaks it's doing a 90s music-nerd Sixteen Candles.

(Non-romantic candles. Crushes lurk, unvoiced as deep-sea magma, but this is not a kissing game.) (When you get to the kissing scene you'll see what I mean.)

Anyway: I laughed, I cheered, I gasped. I pushed the buttons and did all the things. I made a horrified noise when Rockford said Brazil was the best movie of the 80s and her friends hadn't seen it. That much was true to my life. As for the rest, it's still palpably awesome. Go play it.

I don't think anybody names a year beyond "the 90s". Since this is my schtick, I choose to believe that it's 1995, and the planned summer road trip (of course there's a road trip) will pick up two teenage hitchhikers in Northern California. And then, you know, whatever happened to Kat.

Call of the Elder Gods

by Out of the Blue Games -- game site

A followup to Call of the Sea, a Lovecraftian puzzle adventure that I quite enjoyed. Sea wasn't the deepest-rooted exploration of cosmic-horror-minus-the-horror, but it landed the vibe. I enjoyed Elder Gods too. It introduces two new viewpoint characters, both connected to the previous story, and sends them off to explore a mysterious jungle island, overwrought cultic basements, an alien city lost to the depths of time. And more!

Early on, Game 2 lets you choose which of Game 1's major endings you got... or prefer. The story proceeds from either starting point. It's ballsy way to avoid the classic Soul Reaver fumble. Norah, the protagonist of Sea, is absent either way (for different reasons). But she is still palpably present, both as backstory and as the offscreen narrator.

Mind you, she narrates the game with an ironic tone which I found a bit distracting. I kept expecting her to refer to the current protagonist as "Stanley". Maybe that's just me.

As with the previous game, the puzzles are numerous but consistently light-weight. They're meant to pace the story, not deadlock you. On the other hand, a lot of the story they're pacing is that you explore a place in search of the clues you need to solve the puzzle. (And absorb story background along with the clues.) So, a collectathon, when it comes down to the foundation.

This lands a bit off-key sometimes. In several scenes, you reach a "Leave or continue exploring?" choice. This sort of winking fourth-wall break usually indicates a story's finale. I don't expect to see it at the end of a scene. Here it doesn't mean "Finish your side quests", because this game has no side quests. It's a bare admission that they couldn't work all the background info into the story progression. They've just scattered it around the room. If you don't read it all before you leave, tough.

(The Invincible did something like this. But that had multiple story threads, past and present, so it felt okay to focus on some of them and not bother journal-scraping for the others. Elder Gods isn't as successful; you really do want to read everything.)

And the story? Not as satisfying as Sea. Pretty good though.

I think Harry and Evie were less palpably connected to cosmic strangeness. They had both been touched by weird stuff, but their real involvement was second-hand. (Harry's wife, Evie's father.) Their stories didn't have the element of cosmic self-discovery that gave Norah's story in Sea its kick.

Still, there's plenty of weird stuff, rooted in Lovecraft's mythos but building in interesting directions. And plenty of ambivalence in the ending. In Sea I was committed to one interpretation of Norah's story; the ending choice was an easy one. Elder Gods, in contrast, gave me pause. And then, once I chose, it didn't try very hard to reassure me that I'd chosen correctly. A happy ending, to be sure, but just that little bit too pat.

Maybe a trace of cosmic horror after all. But only if you want to see it.

Content warning: literal Nazis. I am not 100% off games where you take down Nazis. (Obviously!) But I don't need a lot more Nazi imagery in my life. Times being what they are. ("...Indifferent.")

Renga in Blue: Epic Hero #3, Venus Must Live: object scanned is / sentient

2026-05-31T12:05:09+00:00

I’ve finished the game, and you’ll need to have read my previous three posts to understand this one.

Rendition of Sapas Mons on Venus, a volcano 400 km across and 1.5 km high, using coloration from Venera missions. Via NASA.

Last time I was thinking about the bug I had run across with the rod becoming two rods when entering the pool.

Despite the glitch here, some further mucking about confirmed the rod is the only item that this happens with, and the special coding indicates that it is meant as a puzzle to get the rod into the cave. (This type of logic I’ve called “structural solving”, although there’s two kinds. One is where there are restrictions based on the structure of the game that force certain things to be true, like an exit closing off meaning a puzzle behind the exit has to be solved first. The other is the “author suggestive” kind where they put work to incorporate some element to the map or plot sequence which doesn’t make sense unless it gets used in a certain way. The first type of solving is almost ironclad, the second relies on the author not leaving any loose pieces. Here, Leduc wouldn’t special-code the rod getting foiled by the dense pool unless the rod needed to get by.)

I realized I hadn’t tried xenoshifting and putting the rod into the hole at the ledge both in the same saved game, so I went ahead and tried it: start with the regular space suit and the boots, wear them both, take the rod to the ledge, PUT ROD / IN HOLE, go back in the ship, dump the boots and suit (you don’t need them any more the rest of the game), xenoshift, then go past the pool into the cave.

Oho! So I was in the same situation as before (nitrogen stream, cube) except with the rod. Given it could extend for very long I tried various ways of dropping it and applying CROSS ROD. Unfortunately, the parser hard-code interprets that as CROSS STREAM without the player attempting to use the rod as a plank. (The game never describes if the rod is thick or thin, so I don’t know how reasonable an ask this was anyway.)

The extreme restriction here — for structural solving reasons, the obstacle has to be the stream, and the rod has to be important somehow — led me to tread through the entire verb list but still no luck. However, that doesn’t mean every verb is accounted for! (Especially in a game with REPROGRAM.)

Fiddling with the 11 foot pole, I suddenly recalled a very different game, Terminal City. The developer Powerhoof (who recently published The Drifter, one of the best adventure games I’ve played in the last few years) made as a gamejam project an endless runner that’s also a Sierra-style adventure game, and it’s as harebrained as that sounds.

As part of Terminal City, I remembered a particular moment where you need to take a long pole and type VAULT. Well, it is a particularly long pole in Epic Hero 3:

This is a rare verb. We had it in Earthquake San Francisco 1906, but I can’t come up with any other games in the Project that have used the actual verb VAULT. I found out after the fact both CROSS and JUMP work, but you have to be holding the long pole (and the game makes you have some intentionality since you have to TWIST RIGHT three times to get it at the correct size).

The creature attack is the worst part of the design. It merely happens at random: it’s just like the vampire which can follow you all the way to the sunlight in Epic Hero 2 and not be affected. My first two times through it attacked right away, so I thought I was supposed to be solving some sort of puzzle, but no: you’re just supposed to do things quickly and ignore it.

You are in a subterranean cavern.
Objects you can see are: Narrow crevice ■ Large reptilian creature ■ Wide Stream ■

Regarding the narrow crevice, the idea is to widen the crevice so you can pass through (the creature won’t stop you). I didn’t know that at the time so I first was thinking about fighting the creature off. I didn’t have anything that suggested violence other than the bomb, so I dropped it, vaulted back, and used THINK to set it off. (The only catch is, as I pointed out last time, the rod needs to be set to 12 inches to be used as a relay. So you need to TWIST LEFT twice to restore the rod to a short size, do the explosion, then TWIST RIGHT twice to get back to vaulting size.)

Fortunately, this accidentally wanders into the solution of expanding the crevice to a “wide crevice” you can enter, and the creature doesn’t stop you if you saunter on by.

Past the room is the last room of the game, a silvery mist room with an alien. Remember earlier the alien had said they wanted to ask a question.

You are in a greyish coloured nest.
Objects you can see are: Alien
Possible exits: EAST⠤

Alien says “ZRVZYWQ AVZTRXHG”

Unfortunately, the alien speaks alienese, and if you don’t respond correctly here, you will get blasted.

Alien raises its hand and
fires a strange weapon at you !!

This final(-ish) puzzle required a lateral mental leap. Remember the rod has multiple functions: in its smallest size, it can fit into the small hole, in its largest size, it can be used as a pole vault, and at 12 inches specifically, it works as a “relay” for the bomb. I realized it might help communicate with the alien, so I tried all the sizes before hitting a result.

The egg from the previous room, the red furry cube, and the triangle all appear to be alive (when applying EXAMINE). But which one is sentient? Hiking everything back to the lab and turning back to human, I did SCAN on all three of the items.

It took a little parser struggle after to work out what the game intended with storing the triangle in life support. Dropping or placing gets special parser treatment here to be interpreted as the item being put into the right place, and PUT doesn’t work.

There was one last catch: I somehow messed up getting the Identi-Comp set correctly on my transformation back to human, and the pad wasn’t recognizing my touch. This made me wonder if possibly I could do a City of Alzan style ending.

I dropped everything, switched back to alien in the medi-unit, held my breath, and made a beeline for the main control room. Then I pressed the red button to take off, whilst HOLD BREATH was still in effect.

I had a save state and it would have only taken two minutes to fix the computer, but I wanted to see if this would work. City of Alzan let you leave the city with a deadly disease still in effect but win anyway.

This game unfortunately did follow the pattern of increased difficulty pushing against the technical capabilities of the author, specifically here the capabilities of the parser (especially the weirdness of PUT being inconsistent, and the two part PUT ROD / IN HOLE applying itself to the rod even if you try to PUT some other item). However, the game still handled the various conditions far more skillfully than your average text adventure author of this time; Leduc deserves to be known at least as much as Brian Howarth.

The reason for obscurity, other than the first three games being trapped on TRS-80, is that his remaining games ended up on the ultra-obscure Colour Genie. Leduc’s Colour Genie club was nearly the only reason for activity in the UK at all on the system, so the games he wrote were restricted to a very small crowd. Which is exciting, in that we may have some gems coming up that hardly anyone knows about! However, we’re going to take a breather from Leduc for a while, as we have coming up: The Coveted Mirror, for the Apple II.

And since I have an excuse to drop this here, a screenshot from The Drifter, which I highly recommend. It includes a puzzle late in the game where you have to put all the pieces together into one action and the entire meaning of what’s been going on shifts.

Renga in Blue: Epic Hero #3, Venus Must Live: Xenoshifting

2026-05-29T16:59:34+00:00

(Continued from my previous posts on the game.)

I was trying to push to the end, but I still must be missing something fundamental. At the least, I can say (checking the list of rooms in the machine code) that there isn’t much more for me to explore; this is intended to be a “tight” game like Savage Island Part 2, and the way the alien-transformation works makes me think the author even had Savage Island Part 2 specifically in mind.

True color picture of Venus, from Reddit.

Progress hinged on two relatively obscure parser actions (one is from Savage Island and I really should have thought of it, I needed spoilers from Alastair). First off, the Identi-Comp.

What will you do now? EXAMINE COMPUTER
Notice on Identi-Comp: “Speak Clearly”

You
see numbers 1 and 2
A switch is set to
1
What will you do now? TO TWO
Okay

What I was missing (sleuthed out by Rob) is the verb REPROGRAM works on the system.

What will you do now? REPROGRAM COMPUTER
Identi-Comp: “Reprogramming commences after
second medical
usage”

The one-or-two part is setting whether the “reprogramming” happens after one or two medical uses (I’ll explain what that means shortly). I’m still not sure what “speak clearly” is all about; that may be the fundamental thing that’s keeping me from winning the game.

It’s a bit of an exhausting moment not only because this is the first time the verb has shown up anywhere, but it’s unclear what action the player is even doing. There was a moment in Seiko’s Adventure where you needed to “close hatch” while looking at a lot of buttons, essentially jumping over the first-layer interaction (which buttons are getting pushed, exactly) straight to the second-layer interaction (the hatch gets closed). Most classic text adventures stick with first-layer interaction and will come up with interfaces with five buttons that all happen to coincidentally be different colors to facilitate this; in Epic Hero 3, to launch the spaceship back off the planet you merely press a red button, as opposed to typing LAUNCH SHIP and letting the avatar in the world figure it out.

Just a reminder the Identi-Comp is in the central hub room on the ship, a fact that will be important later.

So what, exactly, is the avatar doing when the player types REPROGRAM COMPUTER? How do we even know (from the minimal description we get) that it’s got enough available parts to do that? I admit I visualized it smaller-scale with just the one-two switch, and was instead focused on potentially breaking the system open to fiddle with some wires. (For all I know, maybe that really is what the player-avatar is doing! Or maybe the “reprogram” action is actually a command spoken out loud?)

The second obscure command — the one from Savage Island — is HOLD BREATH. Back at the medical unit, you can transform yourself into an alien (made clear by the fact your space suit no longer fits based on your shape). Unfortunately, this means you breathe Venus-atmosphere but not ship-atmosphere, so opening the unit kills you.

With HOLD BREATH, you can safely hit the button.

There’s no apparent way to unhold, just after enough time your face will start to “turn red” and after “Gasp!” you’ll start breathing again. In alien form, you should be on the planet when this happens.

One last catch before going there! If you haven’t gone through the Identi-Comp reprogramming, specifically with the setting on TWO, then you will no longer be able to operate the door in alien form.

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

What will you do now? PUSH BROWN
Okay
Nothing happens

I think pressing the orange button and closing the unit counts as one medical operation, and pressing the black button to convert counts as the second; once we are xenoshifted, the ship changes the controls to allow us to use them in our new (non-described) form.

Non-described protagonists are nearly 100% the norm for this era, but it’s absolutely fascinating to have this then extend to where we clearly aren’t “ourselves”. Do we have tentacles? Multiple eyes? A large hump on our back used for breathing? This is not purely theoretical since it extends to our body’s capabilities in the world (for example, it wouldn’t immediately occur to me that we still have the kind of body where holding our breath makes sense). Neither the suit nor the boots fit anymore, although the headband does still fit and work.

One small … step? … tentacle glide? … for xenokind.

This shows holding breath from opening the medical unit, all the way to getting on the planet and walking to the pool/statue, where “Gasp!” shows when we need to take a breath.

No running out of suit air at least! We can still go over to the alien statue and SHAKE HAND to get a message, although we need to be wearing the headband to do so (this is true in either human or xeno form).

“Enter my domain. I have a question for you.”

We are now dense enough to go in the pool, HOLD BREATH, and DIVE DOWN (my problem before was not putting DOWN there, this is not nearly as smooth a parser experience as Epic Hero 2).

The purple plants glow and you need them in your inventory before going into the hole, leading to a small new area.

It took me a few beats to realize that the hole beneath the pool liquid does not lead to more liquid, but rather is an “open air” (in terms of alien atmosphere) room. There are circumstances where the tunnel winds in a way that this makes sense, but I was visualizing something entirely different at first.

That is, it’s fine if we run out of breath here and “gasp”. HOLD BREATH needs to happen again before going west (which leads back to the pool).

To the north is a stream which is smoky (it turns out to be liquid nitrogen) and a furry red block, which “contains something alive”.

You can break the block, resulting in just “red bits”. It doesn’t count as sentient though; if you take it back to the lab, and SCAN BLOCK (another new thing I discovered) the game informs you of this, meaning it isn’t our ultimate goal. I would expect that given this particular path hasn’t used either the explosive or the weird ledge found by jumping with boots.

I’ve tried taking the thought bomb into the hole and placing it either at the stalagtites or the nitrogen stream, but in both cases there’s a “crater” and no other result. The funny side result is I had the 12-inch rod with me, and when trying to dive it “floated up” and turned into a 9 inch rod and a 12 inch rod.

It turns out the thought bomb only blows up if you are wearing the band and holding the rod while in 12 inch form. (Without the rod, the game indicates a “relay” is missing.) The rod only goes in the ledge-hole if you have it in 9 inch form. This weird duplication bug means you can both have the rod deposited in the hole at the ledge and blow something up after, but clearly the intent was to have the rod be inaccessible (meaning the blowing up should happen first). I have not tested every single room but I have tested most rooms, and I’m worried there’s some special way to put the bomb in place that I’m missing (but is special coded for a particular room).

Any suggestions from this point (even guesses) please put in ROT13; I’m still going to try pushing to the end on my own.

Key & Compass Blog: New walkthroughs for May 2026

2026-05-29T13:11:02+00:00

On Friday, May 29, 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.

The White Bull (2012) by Jim Aikin

In this mythological game, you play as a young man named Matt. You, your archaeologist girlfriend Julia, her fey-like best friend Fawn, and Fawn’s dirtbag boyfriend Leo came to this remote Mediterranean hunk of bleached rock because Julia hopes to find King Minos’s palace, later called the Labyrinth, here. You just plan to poke about and have a great summer vacation.

This game was an entry in Spring Thing 2012 where it took 2nd place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Adventures of Helpfulman (1999-2000) by Philip Dearmore

In this large but flawed superhero game, you play as Helpfulman, one of Porthaven’s newest heroes. Your girlfriend, Aquagirl, just ditched you at the graduation dinner, and soon, your professor urges you to leap into action. Which heroic deeds will you perform to earn your cape, win back your girl, and save all of Porthaven?

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

The Thief of Woven Woods (2011) by Arielle Shander

In this game, you play as a masked thief waking up in the quiet hours of the morning in your damp wooden crate. You need to get going and steal eight food items, eat them, then nurse your growing children. Soon they will have to learn to be as excellent a thief as you.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

The Time Machine v2.0 (2021-2024) by Bill Maya

In this fantasy inspired by H.G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine, it’s 1895. You play as Wells’ friend and attorney, and watch helplessly as Wells is forced into the horse-drawn ambulance on Dr. Humboldt’s orders. Unless you can find evidence that Wells’ fantastic story about time travel is true, he’s doomed to be committed into an insane asylum.

An earlier version of the game was entered in ParserComp 2021 where it took 6th place. This new version was enhanced in various ways and entered into Spring Thing 2024’s Back Garden.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Ransack! (2026) by Charles Moore, Jr.

In this adventure game for beginners, you play as a back-alley amateur archeologist. You even got a fedora like that guy in that movie. Your plan is to find (steal) an emerald skull from a maybe-haunted maybe-booby-trapped maybe-Mayan pyramid, smuggle it out of this stupid country, sell it, and never work again.

This game was written in Dialog and was an entry in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam of 2026.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Loadstone (2025) by rosetinted

In this short fantasy, you play as a diplomat visiting the Crystal Valleys, the first of your people to do so. After days of meetings, you’re finally free to explore with both Learis, a guardian of the city, and a very illegal loadstone you acquired. You must get rid of the stone as soon as possible, but it’s cursed: you can’t drop it or put it anywhere or even talk about it.

This game was an entry in SeedComp 2025.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

The Missing City Council (2026) by Solarius

In this first-time effort, a severely-underimplemented slice-of-life mystery, you play as someone visiting Loimijoki City Hall, at night, in Finland. Although never stated in the game itself, you’re here to attend a council meeting about zoning. But apart from two taciturn British guards in the basement, the building seems empty. Where is everyone?

This game was entered in Spring Thing’s Main Festival.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

A Potion Labeled ‘Time’ (2020) by Finn Fabish

In this short game, you wake up in an ugly room with no memory how you got there. You have a potion labeled ‘time’ and a watch. The room itself has an ugly door, an ugly key, and an ugly mailbox. Escape this series of meaningless puzzle rooms until you reach the end, then quit.

This game was written in ZIL and was a participant in the unrated Infocom Tribute Jam.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Window Washer (2025) by Galvan

In this short, strange, and disturbing game, you play as a man who wakes up in the middle of the night. Your wife, Melinda, and your daughter, Jess, still sleep, but little details about your high-rise apartment seem off or wrong, somehow. And why is there a window washer on a platform at this time of night?

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

top expert: conditional love

2026-05-26T18:41:57+00:00

ifs, ands, and otherwises

reintroductions.

Hi all! It’s been a while. At some point, it will probably make sense to work through specific chapters in the documentation. Starting at the beginning would be the most logical approach, so let’s not do that. I’ve been thinking about what Inform calls “phrases” a lot, specifically ones used to create new conditions and adjectives.

using conditions to assess the state of the world.

What are conditions? They are used to form conditional statements. Chances are, we use them all the time. For instance:

if the secret number is five:
...
if the location is the winding staircase:
...
if the player carries the frying pan:
...
if the second noun is scenery:
...
if the turn count is less than 20:

…and so forth. A condition follows the magic words “if,” “when,” “while,” or “unless.” We can specify what code will run based on whether a condition is met or not. Consider the following preamble (the opening line of an Inform rule):

every turn when nothing is on the oaken bench:

We could “tree” things out, so to speak, using a shorter preamble:

every turn:
	if nothing is on the oaken bench:

Another option would be to formulate a negative case:

every turn:
	unless something is on the oaken bench:

What’s the difference? Since performance problems are rare (though we might talk about some common cases someday), it probably won’t matter whether a rule is processed as applicable on every turn (“every turn” preamble) or processed only when conditions are met (“every turn when nothing is on the oaken bench”).

It might matter, though, that Inform processes more specific rules first (the one with the “when” clause) and less specific ones later. By adding conditions to our preambles, we assign rules priority over the ones that don’t.

too many “ands” for my taste.

Wherever we put our conditions, though, we will want to make sure they are readable and applied consistently. Here’s a barely functional project that contains a lot of properties and values.

lab is a room.
closet is a room.

a cat is a kind of animal.

coat is a kind of value.
the coats are orange and black.
a cat has a coat.

a cat can be hungry.
a cat is usually not hungry.

food is a kind of edible thing.

the hat is in lab.
the ball is in lab.
the kibble is food in lab.

the evening jacket is a wearable thing in lab.

Marbles is a female cat in lab.
Carrot is a male cat in lab.
the butler is a male person.

feeding timer is a number that varies.
feeding timer is 20.

every turn when feeding timer is greater than zero:
	decrement feeding timer

With this imagined example, we could write out some pretty complex conditions. Consider:

every turn when food is in the location and the butler wears the evening jacket and feeding timer is less than ten and the player holds the ball and an orange cat is in the location:

under one condition.

This isn’t terribly easy to read, is it? What if we needed to use these same conditions elsewhere? Given the complexity, we might forget an ingredient or get it wrong while retyping it. That makes for two concerns: readability and consistency. To make things easier for ourselves, let’s use a “to decide” phrase to create a single, more readable condition that we could use again and again.

to decide if the very specific conditions are met:
	if food is in the location and the butler wears the evening jacket and feeding timer is less than ten and the player holds the ball and an orange cat is in the location:
		decide yes;

With this custom condition, we can write a much tidier preamble. These two are functionally the same now:

every turn when food is in the location and the butler wears the evening jacket and feeding timer is less than ten and the player holds the ball and an orange cat is in this location:
...
every turn when the very specific conditions are met:

Much better! We could use a different organizational strategy we find it more readable. Choose what works best for you.

to decide if the very specific conditions are met:
	unless food is in the location, decide no;
	unless the butler wears the evening jacket, decide no;
	unless feeding timer is less than ten, decide no;
	unless the player holds the ball, decide no;
	unless an orange cat is in the location, decide no;
	decide yes;

This tactic is referred to in the documentation as defining a new condition by using a “to decide” phrase. Such phrases don’t just apply to things in the world. We can make custom criteria based on numerical calculations, table values, or anything else we can check in code. I’ve talked about this practice before because I use it all the time and I am still discovering new uses for it.

CF https://zedlopez.github.io/i7doc/WI_11.html#section_16

next.

Let’s discuss definitions next, which we can use to create new adjectives.

IFTF Blog: IFTF 2025 Transparency Report Now Available

2026-05-25T20:41:14+00:00

IFTF’s 2025 transparency report is online, summarizing the organization’s activity over the previous calendar year, including its financial income and outflow.

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: 2025 Grant Report: “Critical Essays On Interactive Fiction” (Grace Benfell)

2026-04-03T19:55:59+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

IFTF Blog: 2025 Grant Report: “Interactive Fiction Workshop for Theatre Practitioners” (Katy Naylor)

2026-04-03T19:55:59+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you so much Katy!

IFTF Blog: IFTF at GDC 2026 Recap

2026-04-04T18:08:00+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IFTF Blog: 2025 Grant Report: “Atrament, Ink-based IF engine” (Serhii)

2026-04-05T06:17:53+00:00

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

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

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

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

IFTF Blog: 2025 Grant Report: “Moving Literature, a no-code IF platform for web using Ink” (Mark Davis)

2026-04-05T06:17:53+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

IFTF Blog: Announcing the 2026 IFTF Grant Recipients

2026-04-08T14:20:09+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IFTF Blog: Twine Version 2.12.0 Released

2026-04-12T00:44:21+00:00

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

Full Notes

New Features Added

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

Bugs Fixed

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

Story Format Updates

Chapbook has been updated to version 2.3.1.

For full details, please refer to the Twinery Reference Guide

IFTF Blog: IFTF Seeking New Board Members

2026-05-21T16:39:25+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

Renga in Blue: Epic Hero #3, Venus Must Live: Experiments in Life

2026-05-24T20:28:28+00:00

(Continued from my previous post.)

I haven’t made real progress in terms of events happening, but I did manage to get more objects to do something, so it seems worth an update. Exploration across the inventory space rather than the locational space, so to speak.

Actual pictures of Venus from the Ventura 14 probe, front and back cameras. Via The Planetary Society and Ted Stryk.

First, most straightforwardly, I figured out how to operate the boots: you need to JUMP UP (as opposed to just JUMP) while wearing them. This will allow you to scale the cliff up to a ledge.

Another Leduc cameo. I don’t know if he keeps this going through all his games. If you wait long enough he plugs his game Epic Hero 4, Camelot. This was written, but for the Colour Genie adventure series instead of the TRS-80 one.

Unfortunately, this only reveals the one new single room above. The small hole is not the kind you can enter, but the kind you can put things in.

I know this because PUT ITEM then prompts “IN WHAT?” while the command simply fails elsewhere (IN FOG for instance gets “I am not quite sure what you mean”) it has a different message with the hole.

You have in your possession:
Thought Bomb ■ 12 Inch Rod ■ Head Band ■ Space Suit ■ Which you’re wearing ■ Lift Boots ■ Which you’re wearing ■ Dial ■
What will you do now? PUT ROD
In what?
What will you do now? IN HOLE
Won’t fit

Regarding the rod, it is described as having “a DISK at one end” and I admit I was unsure for a while if they meant the kind you put in a computer. Playing around with my verb list, I ended up finding TWIST DISK worked, the game prompting for either TWIST LEFT or TWIST RIGHT. It starts at 12 inches, and twisting left makes it 9 inches, and twisting again causes the rod to explode.

What will you do now? TWIST LEFT
****** Kaboooooooooom !! ******

9 inches will fit in the hole. TWIST RIGHT will result in 5 feet, then 11 feet, then exploding. So to recap, the possible sizes are: 9 inches, 12, inches, 5 feet, 11 feet. The only one that fits in the hole is 9 inches.

Also, due to the two-part aspect of the parser (PUT ROD / IN HOLE) it doesn’t understand putting other things in the hole. I tried PUT BOMB / IN HOLE and (with the rod the right size) it put the rod in instead. I have no idea how to get the rod to do anything after it is in the hole; it seems to be lost.

Speaking of the bomb, let’s get to that next. I found that THINK UP is not necessary, any command with THINK as the verb will work to blow up the thought bomb while the player has the headband on. You do not have to be nearby to set off the bomb; I tried putting it down at the ledge here, setting it off, and coming back shows a “crater” and a completely intact Marc Leduc (alas!) Also, this implies that any thinking whatsoever sets off the bomb, which is pretty awkward if you, er, think about it.

You are on a mountain ledge.
Objects you can see are: Thick Fog ■ Small Hole ■ Marc J. Leduc writing another Epic ■ Small crater ■

The small crater will also show up inside the pool (the one with the poison liquid), even though it doesn’t quite make sense. The same thing happens in the surgical unit of the ship.

The unit (with the white, black, and orange buttons) ends up being the most fascinating object of the game so far, so let’s save that for last and go back outside to the pool/statue area.

I rammed through the verb list on the statue and found that SHAKE STATUE repeats the message about it having its hand out; SHAKE HAND specifically gets a different response. (Rob theorized about this one in the comments, but it took me a while to realize the second noun was being introduced.)

What will you do now? SHAKE STATUE
It
has it’s hand out !
What will you do now? SHAKE HAND
Okay
You
grasp the hand and a voice in your mind says :

“Enter my domain. I have a question for you.”
What will you do now?

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to enter the domain as suggested! I would have thought the pool might be it, and ENTER POOL is still possible, but no command I’ve tried after (like DIVE) has seen anything productive.

One last outside-thing: the spacesuit itself that I’ve been wearing. A “dial” is mentioned in inventory and I used mindless verb-testing again to realize READ works: “Enough air for 65 moves”. This means that there’s a time limit to all this, so probably I’ll have to put together a “real run” at some point after stumbling my way to the right answers.

Back to the surgical unit! Remember orange closes the pod, black does some kind of procedure, and white (it turns out) undoes the procedure. What’s most interesting is if you try to leave the unit after pressing black but before pressing white.

What will you do now? PUSH ORANGE
Okay
The lid
opens
Atmosphere
is poisonous
You are DEAD!!

If you’re wearing or even holding a spacesuit, the unit will announce “Patient not ready.” If you drop your suit, go through the black procedure, and then try to put the suit back on, you’ll find that your body shape has changed and the suit can’t be worn!

Won’t fit
over
Strange shaped body

The boots also don’t fit; the thought head-band does (so you can set off the bomb while converted). You can kill yourself with the bomb while converted. If you try to put the bomb on the outside of the surgical unit and set it off, you get the message “Relay not present.”

So it seems the unit is literally turning us into an alien form unable to breathe oxygen; given the context, we likely could survive on the surface of Venus while converted, but I don’t know how to get down there and be in alternate-form at the same time.

Comments and suggestions still appreciated! I’ll even take hacking at machine code, although if someone goes that far, please use ROT13.

What will you do now? HELP

Use your imagination. Remember, I’ve got a weird outlook on
things and you must try to THINK the way I do.
Is it possible? – Signed Marc

Zarf Updates: A brief digression into Infocom tie-in novels

2026-05-23T02:21:44+00:00

Last week someone passed around a link to a post: "Classic Zork Novels, Now in E-book Format!"

That's right, it's another instalment of "Somehow, obscure Zork media returned"!

This time we're stepping out of the digital realm and into the world of official Zork (and Zork adjacent) prose. Presented here are four novels:

The Lost City of Zork by Robin W Bailey

The Zork Chronicles by George Alec Effinger

Enchanter by Robin W Bailey

Wishbringer by Craig Shaw Gardner

Thanks to the work of dedicated fans, these books have been available as scanned pages for many years in places like The Internet Archive. But with advances in OCR tools, it was now possible for me to convert these pages back into editable text with no compromise to accuracy.

-- PaulloDEC, May 13th

See the post for download links. PaulloDEC has now followed up with downloads of the four Zork-themed gamebooks.

So, this is convenient. These aren't rare books. As the post says, you can easily find scans of them (e.g. here). The used paperbacks are also not too hard to track down. I have Wishbringer and The Zork Chronicles on my shelves. But .epub files are easier to tote around.

The post got me looking at the books again, though. They're rather puzzling artifacts.

The gamebooks aren't that surprising. They were written in 1983, a time when Infocom games were really popular, and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-TM books were really popular, so why not do some knock-offs and see if they sell? (I have no idea if they sold.) They were written in-house by Steve Meretzky and published by Tor Books.

Digression from the digression: Tor was a young company (the same age as Infocom!), but it had launched with star power in both its editorial staff and its initial author lineup. Just to name a couple, they had Gene Wolfe, Orson Scott Card, and a promising newcomer who went by Robert Jordan. It seems they were happy to take on some smaller fry as well.

Again, I don't know what the sales figures looked like, but Infocom didn't follow up with any more gamebooks after the four Zork titles. So it's a fair guess that sales were tepid.

The books themselves are, let's say, workmanlike. Or maybe the later ones are really good! No, probably not. I confess that I've barely flipped through them.

Even more disgression: The first gamebook mentions the "Three Palantirs of Zork". (The three crystal spheres in Zork 2 are referred to as "palantirs" in the source code, but the game never says the word out loud.) This mostly indicates that the books weren't notable enough for the Tolkien estate to sue over.

The novels, on the other hand, are way more interesting.

Timing, for a start. Here's the full list:

Planetfall, Arthur Byron Cover, 1988
Wishbringer, Craig Shaw Gardner, 1988
Enchanter, Robin Wayne Bailey, 1989 (no scan online)
Stationfall, Arthur Byron Cover, 1989
The Zork Chronicles, George Alec Effinger, 1990
The Lost City of Zork, Robin Wayne Bailey, 1991

As you see, the two Zork tie-in books shipped after Infocom had dissolved entirely -- and well before Activision brought the brand back with Return to Zork. Curious!

The novelization project must have kicked off in 1986 or 1987. At that point, Infocom was in financial straits and had been acquired by Activision. It seems certain that the books were a flailing attempt to find more revenue somewhere. But unlike with the gamebooks, the original Infocom crew doesn't seem to have been involved at all. Other than a 1988 press release in the Status Line newsletter, I can't find any discussion of the novels in Infocom memos or internal discussion. (If you find something in the Cabinet that I missed, let me know!)

My assumption is that Activision set up a deal for six books in three years (or two a year with options to continue), and that's how long it ran. The shutdown of the Infocom office wouldn't have factored in.

As to the authors... the Status Line article says "new novels by leading authors", which is a stretch. Craig Shaw Gardner and Robin Wayne Bailey were newcomers with a couple of readable but not groundbreaking fantasy novels each. Arthur Byron Cover had a few more years of publication history but was definitely not a big name. On the other hand, all three had done tie-in or shared-world work; they were clearly happy to crank out words to spec in somebody else's playground.

Oh, but then there was George Alec Effinger, the genuine star of the list. His debut novel What Entropy Means to Me (1972) had earned a Nebula nomination out of the gate. The following years had produced a string of offbeat, absurdist stories in a deadpan style which drew critical if not mainstream attention. I discovered Effinger in high school with Heroics, in which a senior citizen is assigned a professional supernatural guide and dragged across post-civilizational America to complete her collection of twentieth-century Depression glass. The Great Plains have been Teflon-coated. ("So that nothing would stick to them.") Shoulda been as famous as Hitchhiker's, as far as I was concerned.

Effinger had just landed his mainstream breakout with When Gravity Fails (1987), a thriller about a brain-hacked gumshoe named Marîd Audran. It was cyberpunk with a North-African, Arab-Futurist tilt; it made a splash. Effinger was busy turning that hit into a trilogy. Why would he step off the escalator of success to do a videogame tie-in?

As an on-ramp to the videogame industry, perhaps. The Zork Chronicles is dedicated (in part):

To Rob Sears of Infocom, and Brett Sperry, Mike Legg, and the rest of the gang at Westwood Associates, who have made my own Infocom game, Circuit’s Edge, a reality.

Again, a bit of a stretch. "Infocom" by that point was a brand name in Activision's portfolio. Circuit's Edge wasn't a text adventure at all. It was a graphical RPG, set in the same Marîd Audran continuity as the cyberpunk trilogy. This interview notes that Effinger was deeply involved in the design and writing, despite not being a gamer or a computer nerd (at least not at that point).

I'm afraid I never played Circuit's Edge. I preferred Effinger's older stuff to the brutal and cynical Audran books, and the idea of a combat-heavy RPG didn't really appeal. Nonetheless, I was glad to see that the game existed and the author was making some money off of it.

But back to The Zork Chronicles. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Effinger took on the project for the sheer fun of it. It was an opportunity to go back to his absurdist roots. Mirakles of the Elastic Tendon (the Adventurer's most barbarian-esque iteration) meets up with Glorian of the Knowledge, the shape-changing supernatural guide from Heroics and What Entropy Means to Me. In fact the whole project is less a Zork novel than a few Zork characters and familiar scenery transplanted into Effinger's peculiar and whimsical world.

Also there's a great quantity of very bad computer puns. (The Dipped Switch, the Scroll Lock, and alas more.) If Effinger came up with those, it's because he read a lot of microcomputer manuals in a hurry and then decided to share the pain.

After all that, what really confused me was the title page.

The title page of The Zork Chronicles.

I set off on this road trip with one question: who owns the rights to these books? (I hope you're not disappointed at finding such a pedantic issue at the end of all these circuitous, or circuits'-edge-ous, digressions!) But that page doesn't really clear anything up, does it? This Effinger book is an Infocom book and a Byron Preiss book and it's from Avon Books.

Better check the copyright page:

The copyright page of The Zork Chronicles, and also my thumb.

That's straightforward: the novel's copyright is owned by Byron Preiss Visual Publications.

Why, though? For a tie-in novel, you'd generally expect the rights to be owned by the company that licensed the work. Those Zork gamebooks from 1984 all say "Copyright Infocom, Inc." Star Trek novels of the era say "Copyright Paramount Pictures". The X-COM novel I've got (don't laugh, it's Diane Duane) says "Copyright MicroProse". And so on. It's work for hire, and the company does the hiring. Only not in this case.

At first glance, I thought Byron Preiss Visual Publications was the publisher. But that's clearly wrong. The publisher is Avon Books, an old-school publisher of genre paperbacks. Mostly romance (that's where the money was and still is) but back then Avon had a well-established sideline in sci-fi and fantasy. They were clearly in charge of the book's layout; they reserved the back flyleaf as an ad for Avon's then-big series launch, Roger Zelazny's Second Amber Chronicles.

(To be sure, the back flyleaf of the Wishbringer novel is an ad for Planetfall.)

So if Byron Preiss was not the author, licensor, or publisher, what was his role? The best explanation I've found is from an article "The Strange Case of Byron Preiss Visual Publications" (PG Williams, Journal of American Studies, 2019). (The magic citation thingie says "2021", I don't know why.)

The article is primarily about Preiss's adventures in the comics industry in the late 1970s. It doesn't mention Infocom or gaming at all. However, it begins:

Between 1976 and 1979 Byron Preiss operated as a book packager specializing in graphic novels, bringing comics creators together on original stories and licensed properties and delivering the finished product to publishing houses.

Further explanation from the article:

These agents, known as “book packagers,” would generate ideas for authors and bring writers, studios, and fashionable subjects into conversation. Packagers could have a book’s licensing rights finalized before the first draft was finished – in some cases, before writing had begun.

[...] BPVP brought comics creators together to deliver books to publishing houses as finished packages. Preiss sometimes wrote these books himself, or he paired up writers and artists, or he bought the rights to creative properties that other creators developed under his editorial control. Preiss operated as a book packager and not a self-publisher on the basis that if you only published a few books at a time, the resources invested were not likely to recoup adequate profit; he pursued multiple projects simultaneously...

In other words, Preiss ran a sort of middleman empire, setting up a whirlwind of deals -- and somehow having all the rights land in his pocket. It seems sketchy to me, but hey, I wasn't in the business. And he did get a lot of books published.

The article focuses on Preiss's ambition to legitimize "graphic novels", and the reaction of comics fandom to this new and opinionated player. Preiss apparently annoyed a lot of people.

It's also worth noting that the Infocom deal wasn't Preiss's first contact with the game industry. Under the label Byron Preiss Video Productions, he worked with Trillium/Telarium and Windham Classics to produce adventure-game adaptions of four books.

To digress even further (hey, this is the fun stuff): Preiss had attempted to get in on the Masquerade treasure-hunt craze. The Secret (1982) presented itself as an illustrated encyclopedia of modern Faerie. (The artists included then-newcomer John Jude Palencar, now a big-name SF illustrator.) The book was supposed to clue the location of twelve treasure-boxes around the US. Apparently only three have been found -- one as recently as 2019.

Whew! Okay, back to the question.

So where are they now?

George Alec Effinger suffered life-long health problems. He died in 2002 in his beloved home town of New Orleans. (The Budayeen, Marîd Audran's home turf, apparently draws as much from the French Quarter as from the Middle East.)

The other three authors of the Infocom novels are still around, as far as I know. So is Steve Meretzky. Apparently Meretzky was even at GDC 2026, although I didn't catch him there.

Byron Preiss was killed in a car accident in Long Island in 2005. His multifarious publication businesses were all apparently a one-man show; they did not survive his death. His widow announced in 2006 that BPVP was filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The company assets would be sold to pay off creditors.

So who got them? I expected this to require a tedious legal trawl, but in fact the answer turned up on the first web search. (The open web: not yet entirely destroyed!)

J. Boylston, Publishers, announces the acquisition of the companies owned by the late Byron Preiss. Ibooks, the trade publishing house known for its extensive backlist titles in science fiction, fantasy, history, popular culture, and military nonfiction will continue its publishing program of bringing new and solid titles to the marketplace. Readers of notable authors as Isaac Asimov, Roger Zelazny, Stan Lee, John Betancourt, and Chris Beakey will enjoy new and familiar favorites as the company develops its rich backlist while presenting a new generation of writers to booksellers.

-- Press release, December 2006, via ComicsBeat

The ComicsBeat article notes that the sale price was $125,000, which "seems low given the number of contracts Preiss had – numbering in the thousands." Here's another article saying the same. However, it's likely that most of those contracts had expired or reverted.

I should explain that the typical book contract has a reversion clause. If the publisher allows the book to go out of print, they lose the publication rights. The author (or copyright holder) is then free to seek out another publisher or self-publish the book.

Preiss must have had some good sellers, on the sheer numbers. But I can't imagine that the Infocom titles were high on the list. They must have gone out of print (with Avon) almost immediately. And then they sat in Preiss's closet, unused. I don't know if Preiss's deals with the authors were still in force, but it's a moot point if the books weren't being sold.

J. Boylston & Co still exists. They've got a web site up as ibooksinc.com. ("IBooks", with varying capitalization, was another brand that Boylston picked up from the Preiss estate.) The site even still lists Byron Preiss Visual Publications as an imprint. The titles number in the hundreds, though, not thousands. And the Preiss portfolio is rather scattered, with only a few listed directly under "BPVP".

Alfred Bester, Roger Zelazny, Isaac Asimov, and Tanith Lee are proudly featured on the site. As is The Secret, the treasure-hunt extravaganza. Arthur Byron Cover, Craig Shaw Gardner, Robin Wayne Bailey, and George Alec Effinger are not to be found.

No, wait, a Bailey fantasy trilogy called "Dragonkin" is listed. Go him.

So that's where we stand. A brief experiment in IF novelization, abandoned and left to evaporate in the sun. Feel free to download the books off the links above; nobody's watching.

I doubt anybody is all that excited to read them. I plowed through Wishbringer this week. Skimmed through it, I should say, with grim tenacity. The writing wasn't bad, but it was, well, cutesy. The game characters and scenery were, honestly, well done. Gardner clearly thought about them and came up with his own takes, neither slavish nor unrecognizable. Still, a slog.

Even The Zork Chronicles -- for all my admiring comments about Effinger's writing -- defeats me. I've read it in bits but never all the way through. Effinger can do cutesy and make me like it. But he can't make the Topiary Garden (Zork 2) or the Scenic Vista (Zork 3) more interesting than they were the first time. And the puns, yeesh.

"Above The Powers That Be is the Autoexec," explained Glorian. "Above the Autoexec is the Control Character. No one I ever know has ever seen the Control Character. A lot of us Association members even think he's a myth. I mean, a non-existent myth, not like the real myths the rest of us are."

See? Simultaneously adorable and grating. And that's if you're into Effinger's stuff. He's at his best when he can spin off into unexpected tangent after unexpected tangent. The prescriptive rote of Zork IP just weighs him down.

Still, it's a part of Infocom history.

Hey, the ibooks site lists a contact address for "Media rights inquiries". Should I... hmmm... maybe I will.

More news if I get a reply.

Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian: Planescape: Torment, Part 1: From the Tabletop…

2026-05-22T16:27:41+00:00

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

This article tells part of the general story of Dungeons & Dragons on the tabletop and on computers, which includes the more specific one of the Infinity Engine games.

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

— Chris Avellone

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

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

Clearly we have much to unpack…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lady of Pain.

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

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

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

Chris Avellone.

TSR had begun dangling the prospect of a Planescape computer game in front of publishers even before the boxed set shipped; such a thing was regarded as a potentially vital part to the product line that had become the latest Great White Hope for reversing the company’s accelerating downward spiral. Interplay rose to the bait, signing the contract before 1994 was out. In fact, it went so far as to hire Zeb Cook himself, who had concluded that “it didn’t seem like there was going to be a long-term future” for him on the tabletop. But the initial rush of enthusiasm petered out; Cook soon departed again, leaving the digital future of Planescape in limbo. And yet the idea of a Planescape computer game never completely went away. Late in 1995, when an inexperienced youngster named Chris Avellone came to Interplay for a job interview, he was asked how he would design such a game. He brainstormed in the spur of the moment the genesis of the eventual Planescape: Torment: “I would start it after the death screen. What happens after the main character dies?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

We can’t wait to see what ideas you’ve got brewing this year. If you have any questions about the IFTF Microgrants or the application process, please reach out to 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!

Choice of Games LLC: Samurai of Hyuga: Book 6—Class is now in session for our favorite ronin!

2026-05-21T14:53:02+00:00

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

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

And don’t get me started on the extracurriculars.

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

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

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

Infiltrate a shugenja academy held captive by a sinister demon!

Balance duty and deception while juggling a chaotic social life!

Join club activities ranging from kendo duels to tea ceremonies!

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

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

Choice of Games LLC: It’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day!

2026-05-21T13:55:44+00:00

Today is the 15th annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day!

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

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

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

Renga in Blue: Epic Hero #3, Venus Must Live (1982)

2026-05-20T19:00:54+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comms Link: “This is a recorded message.”

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

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

The ship blasts off!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Auto-Surg Unit: “Surgery Complete”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To summarize:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zarf Updates: Titanium Court

2026-05-20T01:29:06+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is it baseball? It might be baseball.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Renga in Blue: Deed of the York (1983)

2026-05-19T01:05:15+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My attempt to OPEN GREEN DOOR at one room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choice of Games LLC: Coming Thursday: Samurai of Hyuga Book 6—demo out now!

2026-05-18T15:32:10+00:00

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

And don’t get me started on the extracurriculars.

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

Choice of Games LLC: “Wizard Confidential”—Sling spells and crack the case in 1920s Seattle!

2026-05-14T13:22:50+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2026-05-14T03:08:28+00:00

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

Choice of Games LLC: Coming Thursday: “Wizard Confidential”—New author interview and demo out now!

2026-05-11T16:49:17+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are you working on next?

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

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

My So Called Interactive Fiction Life: Sharpee Goes Through Changes

2026-05-10T21:25:51+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The opening turn in Dungeon shows its channel manifest:

And the channel output...

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

Zarf Updates: That firefighting game I played in Toronto

2026-05-10T01:57:06+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- maurymarkowitz, reddit thread, 3 Feb 2023

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

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

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

maurymarkowitz continues:

Found my notes, such as they are:

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

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

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

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

-- maurymarkowitz, reddit thread, 4 Feb 2023

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

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

-- planettom, toronto.livejournal.com

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

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

So why am I posting this?

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

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

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

We understand this building holds many memories.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zarf Updates: Those ZIL grammar flags

2026-05-08T00:02:22+00:00

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

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

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

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

(This post is also available on my Patreon.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's a set of definitions from Zork 1:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, let's get to the mysterious tokens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's go back to that original manual example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But look at this one:

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

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

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

Similarly:

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

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

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

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

> I You are carrying: A painting A brass lantern (providing light) A sword A brown sack The brown sack contains: A jewel-encrusted egg A clove of garlic

> PUT ON TREASURE You can't wear the jewel-encrusted egg.

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

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

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

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

In conclusion...

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

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

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

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

Future goals? Maybe.

Zarf Updates: Spring games of the id

2026-05-06T23:53:39+00:00

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

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

Puzzle Spy International

by Travel-Friendly Cake -- game site

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

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

Murder at the Birch Tree Theater

by Crucible Juice -- game site

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

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

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

Gecko Gods

by Inresin -- game site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!

by ArtRising -- game site

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legacy of Kain: Defiance: Remastered

by Crystal Dynamics -- game site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Renga in Blue: PRISM: The T100 Version

2026-05-04T20:24:24+00:00

The story so far:

PRISM was a storydisk/game released by a business software company, International Software Marketing, in 1982. Inside are clues that lead to real life buried treasure: three golden keys. Back in January of this year, I wrote a series about the game and the commenters of this blog took a swing at solving the puzzles.

My original posts used the Apple II version (which still seems to be the original intended platform), but an Atari version surfaced as well (thanks to Atarimania). By comparing the two versions it became clear there was nothing special hidden in the layout of the text-only pages.

Via the January 1983 issue of Creative Computing. This is the first mention I’ve seen of a “surprise climax” that will be revealed when “all three keys are cleverly recovered.”

I wasn’t expecting to do any updates this week, but: back in February, velvetfistironglove had pointed out a mention of an IBM PC port in PC Mag, and linked to a CP/M version which might be related. (I had filed this away but I was burnt out on PRISM enough I figured I’d return to it later.) A few days ago, LocalH picked up the baton, and found that the CP/M file was for the Toshiba Pasopia computer, or more specifically, their T100 computer which launched in the United States. The only catch is the file did not want to run.

After some more work (from Rob, gschmidl, and the crew of folks who worked on rescuing Mystery House II including bsittler and eientei) it became clear the issue was the embedded copy protection, and after ripping that out, the storydisk/game became playable. (Download here.)

At least one of the puzzles is made harder, but a certain important aspect may have been made easier. (I have to hedge since we don’t actually know any answers for certain!) I will go through the new content just like I did with Atari, but I first want to explore how the program ended up on the ultra-obscure Toshiba T100 to begin with.

The early 80s were a graveyard for Japanese companies trying to import their computers into the United States, computers like the Fujitsu Micro 16s, the NEC TREK, the Panasonic JR-200, and the Sanyon MBC-550, which was allegedly IBM PC compatible but failed to run a great deal of IBM software. Epson did well selling printers but failed outside of Japan with their portable HX-20.

Toshiba had a long history with computers by this point, with work dating back to the 1950s with the TAC developed at the University of Tokyo and the TOSBAC series of mainframes developed in the 1960s.

From a 1954 Toshiba Corporation journal.

However, a long history does not indicate commercial success for personal computers; while they did well with the Pasopia and Pasopia-7 computers in Japan, they never broke the top sales echelon over the heavy hitters (NEC PC-88, Fujitsu FM-7, Sharp X1, MSX). Like all the other companies, they wanted to give their shot in the United States; to do this, they hired Sorel Reisman, who had recently moved to the United States. Reisman was hired from IBM Canada to work with Discovision in California; it quickly became clear it wasn’t going to work commercially so he started shopping for another job, finding one when he met the Vice President of Toshiba.

Toshiba had just gone into the computer business here, and they had just started a division called the Computer Systems Division. The guy who was heading that up, I met him. They had essentially two groups; they had the printer group and they had the computer group. This was in 1981 Toshiba was trying to get into the computer business here, they wanted to compete with the IBM PC, which had just been launched — this was in 1981 — they wanted to bring their wonderfully better-manufactured personal computers over here (to the US) and compete against the IBM PC.

The T100, a Pasopia with some tweaks for the American market. From an old eBay auction. There’s a blank key on the top row (next to “LABEL”) because that was the kanji key in the Japanese version.

He was hired to head the computer division starting in 1982, but ran into an issue nearly all the Japanese companies were slamming into: software. The system used CP/M which is technically cross-compatible with certain software, but this still wasn’t the same thing as IBM compatible. As Reisman points out, clients were wanting to run Lotus 1-2-3 (the big spreadsheet software after VisiCalc) but couldn’t, so they weren’t interested.

Instead of Lotus, the computer came with Magic Worksheet, software barely anyone cared about. From a 1983 Multitech catalog.

In July of 1983 they tried “re-introducing” the computer to the market as “portable” by adding a LCD display, although coverage had a tone of skepticism (“the T100 runs solely on 110 AC cord power, rather than on AA batteries, thus limiting its usefulness in long distance travel.”)

InfoWorld Jul 18, 1983.

To take a stab at the software gap Toshiba introduced products scrounged from supportive developers, which is why they ended up hooking up with International Marketing Systems, and getting their Mathemagic, Graph Magic, and Prism software as part of the $1600 package. (Rob pointed out the connection a long while back.) Toshiba discontinued the T100 only a year later, in 1984, so this all represents a fast-moving blip in computing history. (They took another stab with the portable T1000 in 1987; learning their lesson from last time, they made it actually IBM compatible.)

While (as I already indicated) we don’t have the DOS version of PRISM, the T100 version is likely close, although modifications to the graphics would still be needed. The source code turns out to be pure BASIC. (Link here. A few characters are off.) The copy protection involves checking for an (intentional) error on the disk, and if that error is present, allowing the program to go forward; once this check was removed the game could run. The fact the porting isn’t 1-1 and that the CP/M port came after the other three versions is important: it means that this is essentially a “version 2” of the software. As LocalH points out, two typos are fixed.

I notice that “Hubert’s” and “ecstasy” are correct in this version (surrounding the “TRET” screen, on pages 20 and 22) but “gazing redly” is still written exactly that way on page 20.

(I never thought “gazing redly” was a typo, given the story’s theming.)

An easier-to-read font compared to Apple and Atari.

You can see a very curious difference from the first graphic, and the part that I alluded to earlier that makes for a harder puzzle. Apple and Atari first:

Now, the T100 version of the same:

Everything is much more chunky. Positions have been slightly altered (and assuming they didn’t mess anything up, it means some positional elements to the images have to be unimportant). The I Ching reference is much muddier now:

Without the rows-of-lines element, I would not have the symbol identified as from the I Ching at all! Additionally, in the “broken tree” picture, as you’ll see later, the symbol is moved from a spot next to the tree to the corner. This suggests two things: a.) that the symbols really are important, important enough they spent the time to render it here despite the difficulty and b.) the exact position of a symbol is not important, but rather that it marks a particular page.

Enough preface; here’s the rest of the images. If you want to download them as a pack (including the text) I have them all zipped together here.

Besides the positional shifting, the other big change of note is the colors. The highlighted letters are now only either red or blue! I’m not sure if that really means the exact coloring is unimportant; it may be the developer simply lost control given hardware restraints (just like the Atari had some odd colors based on what row of the screen it was drawing). At the very least, any solution needs to be at least somewhat compatible with this variation (keeping in mind, like the I Ching puzzle, it’s possible some clue or clues were lost).

Renga in Blue: Horror House (1983)

2026-05-03T15:17:45+00:00

So far, out of the Falsoft contest adventures, I’ve played Polynesian Adventure, Search for the Ruby Chalice, and Escape from Sparta. I pointed out last time that these tend to be the only games published by the particular authors, although in the case of today’s author (Robert Mangum II) this isn’t true. He published two games, one that won in the first Falsoft contest and one that won in the second.

Robert Mangum, a 15-year-old sophomore at Astronaut High School in Titusville, Fla., purchased his TRS-80 Color Computer when he was an eighth grader. His hobbies include reading, playing the stock market, and writing Color Computer games. He aspires to pursue the latter hobby as a career.

As the “Astronaut” in the school name implies, Titusville is east of Orlando, close to Cape Canaveral and one of the US’s space launch sites.

I’m unclear if the introductions to the various games given in the book are written by the author(s) themselves or by the magazine editors, although I suspect the latter for reasons I’ll get into. Horror House’s book-intro has a very Encyclopedia Brown feel to the writing, and even though the lore doesn’t affect the game at all I felt like reading this one out loud. No overdramatic Dungeon Master this time, I went with something a little more like Goosebumps.

In summary, in order to get into a local club, we have to prove we aren’t a “chicken” by going into the local Horror House and defeating the various “ghouls and goblins”. (!!) Not even pretending there aren’t any and you’ll be safe, nope, you actually gotta commit homicide, kid. Hope being popular is worth it!

The game starts with an animated visual effect where the initials of the author draw themselves into the distance, then disappear.

I love it when cinematic ambition gets applied to the start of a regular type-in text game.

This is a game fairly similar to the last one we played (Escape from Sparta) in which there’s an overall “health” stat; Sparta called it Energy, but this game just calls it Health Points, similar to but not exactly like Dungeons & Dragons (which used “hit points”).

The game is up-front this is going to be combat focused, but with rules that are somewhat unusual for an adventure game: you regenerate health, and the monsters reincarnate. Specifically, you get 1 HP back every 10 turns, and one monster reincarnates every 50 turns. (If you see a loophole in this already, I’ll get back to you later.) You can “REST” only once but it will cause a total reset of your HP, at the cost of resurrecting all dead enemies.

The game also gives the complete (restricted) verb list.

MOVE, PULL, OR PUSH
PUT, LEAVE, OR DROP
PUNCH / HIT
N, S, E, OR W
INVENTORY
INSERT
LOOK
REST
GET OR TAKE

The game announces AS YOU ENTER THE HOUSE THE DOOR LOCKS but gives no room description. There essentially isn’t one. After LOOK:

You are informed of any objects or enemies in a particular room, and if the room doesn’t have any, it just is described as having NOTHING.

You can MOVE STATUE which reveals a blue coin, but it also turns the statue into a living statue (one of the enemies).

A more typical room, just north of the start.

I started with a traditional adventure map but quickly realized I would be better off breaking out Dungeon Scrawl and doing a Wizardry-style map instead.

The enemies (where PUNCH and HIT must be applied) move around so I don’t know on a particular game if they’ll always be where I placed them, but at the very least this is a deterministic setup; there is no random rearrangement at turn one. My first battle was a giant crab at a vending machine where I punched it in the face (?).

No real time element here: just slowly exchanging blows while health points go down on both sides. Not all enemies have the same starting health (there’s a rat early that starts lower, for instance).

You are allowed to run away; enemies may chase you, and you can easily find a situation with multiple creatures clustering in the same room.

In the crab and snake vs. protagonist battle above, this is actually crab version 2, after resurrecting. Remember that enemies resurrect after 50 turns. Given that a fight can take up to ten, and walking from one side of the map to the other can take as much as fifteen (assuming you know where you’re going to hunt down an enemy) trying to get all the enemies to stay dead at the same time is a bit of a dilemma.

There are two puzzles (besides the blue coin); one is a bed that simply be moved to reveal an exit.

The other is a computer (“IT IS A 64K COLOR COMPUTER”); there’s a tape cassette elsewhere (guarded at least at the start by a rat) and INSERT TAPE will open a second secret door.

A sword is out in the open (past the first secret door) and it does seem to help a little so I found the best strategy was to make a beeline there first. (PUNCH explicitly is “attack with no weapon” while HIT explicitly means “attack with the sword”, and you can’t hit things without the sword. This gets at the “game-meaning of verbs doesn’t match dictionary-meaning” problem I had with The Phantom Ship.)

I tried just naively hitting everything but the tendency of monsters to cluster meant I was succumbing to too much damage, and REST seemed to reset everything so that didn’t help, until I realized the loophole I alluded to earlier: while you can personally restore health, and enemies can resurrect, the enemies cannot restore health.

This means the best strategy is to hit each enemy down to low health, but not kill them. It’s a little like catching Pokemon.

Once I had enough enemies whittled down to single digits, I picked a starting place just outside an enemy (the MINOTAUR which I knew I had at 1), did REST, and started a slaying spree. The goal is to kill faster than they resurrect, and my strategy worked such that I only had to deal with one resurrection, the minotaur I started with.

Enemies can run away as well. The movement of enemies keeps the combat from being ultra-dull like adventure-game-combat often is, but just regular dull. You need more options (like Eamon) for it to feel like more than just a sequence of dice rolls.

Once you’ve killed all the monsters, if you go back to the computer you’ll find it has fallen into a pile of rubble. LOOK PILE reveals a red coin; you can combine that with the blue coin from under the statue and a gold coin just lying out in the open and take them back to the vending machine.

The key then can be inserted at the door at the start, letting you escape.

I should highlight that the opening text from the book (which I recorded) had falsehoods. Not only are there no ghouls (and just one goblin), but the text claims the house will explode when the computer does. I was genuinely worried by that last part but there’s no timer: the computer simply falls apart, and you are in complete safety once all the monsters are dead. Also notice that the screenshot-intro said nothing about us doing a dare and wanting to join a club. I think the opening was so abrupt that the book editors (Lawrence Falk, James Reed, Susan Remini) decided they needed to add some context; not only did the context not make sense, but it was actively deceptive and changed my behavior at the end of the game (until I realized no explosion was forthcoming).

I haven’t found any letters complaining about embellishment, so the authors must have just let it go.

Before signing out, I should add that JIMMY ADVENTURE 5 strikes again: the was a misprint in the original book that made the source code for this game entirely broken.

Coming up: I’m finishing something else (it’s related to the blog, but not another game) so the next post will be delayed by about a week.

Zarf Updates: Visible Zork 3 is now available to all

2026-05-01T04:01:34+00:00

Three months ago, I launched the Visible Zorker Patreon with a promise: fund me and I will create a new Visible Infocom game every month.

You did! And now the tree bears fruit.

I decided to put the games on a two-month delay, so that Patreon supporters would have a leg up. I worked on Visible Zork 3 in February; I made it available on the Patreon page on March 1st.

Two months have passed. (Happy Workers' Day!) And thus Visible Zork 3 is now live on the project page. The source code repository is also live, licensed under the open-source MIT license.

Enjoy the lonely, shadow-lit, eerily silent world of Zork 3... It's a bit of a tonal shift from the first two games, isn't it? The cartoonish treasure-hunts have been replaced with a somewhat philosophical meditation on virtue. (One might compare the route Ultima 4 took a few years later.)

To be sure, there are still some brightly-colored puzzles left over from the original MIT Zork. The blend isn't entirely smooth. But it's the wrap-up we have for the world of Zork... well, until Enchanter crashes back in. That will be another episode.

EDIT-ADD: I meant to add some bits of trivia from the Zork 3 source, but I forgot when I was writing up this post last night. Let me just drop one in:

The Royal Puzzle ("CHINESE PUZZLE" in the 1979 MIT Zork source) is credited to "WILL WENG". Who the heck is Will Weng? A quick search reveals that one Will Weng was the crossword puzzle editor for the New York Times from 1969-1977! Surely the same person?

Weng was succeeded as NYT crossword editor by Eugene T. Maleska, who was succeeded in 1993 by Will Shortz. The latter names are very familiar to me from Games Magazine in the 1980s, but I did not remember Will Weng at all. How he came to contribute a puzzle to an MIT computer game is sadly not recorded.

Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian: The Mystery of Rennes-le-Château, Part 5: The Man Behind the Curtain

2026-05-01T15:46:03+00:00

Pierre Plantard in 1942, at age 22.

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

It is possible to trace the Plantard family tree a fair ways back without relying on the Lobineau dossier, but not as far back as the time when the Merovingian kings ruled over the nascent nation of France. The real genealogical record shows that the Plantards were not a line of kings or demigods; they were rather ordinary laborers. The first trace we can find of them comes in the form of one Jean Plantard, who arrived from parts unknown to the town of Sémelay, about 300 kilometers southeast of Paris, during the first half of the seventeenth century. His descendants continued living in this region of France.

A Pierre Plantard was born in the village of Magny-Cours on October 11, 1877. Following a stint as a coal miner and a term of service in the French Army, he moved to Paris early in the new century to become a valet and butler, probably to one of the officers under whom he had served. (Such arrangements were common at the time.) He was called up again in that fateful month of August 1914, and spent the entire First World War fighting on the Western Front with his artillery regiment. He then returned to Paris to take up his domestic duties once again, working now for a wealthy Russian family who had fled the Bolshevik revolution in their country. He died in 1922 from a fall out of a second-floor¹ window he had been attempting to clean, a sadly ironic fate for a man who had managed to survive four and a half years of brutal war.

The older Pierre Plantard died from a fall out of one of these windows. One wonders whether his son might turned out differently if he had grown up with both of his parents.

But before he left this world, Pierre Plantard fathered a son with his wife Amélie, a fellow domestic servant. Born on March 18, 1920, the son was given the same name as the father he would never know.

This new edition of Pierre Plantard grew up coddled by his mother. By working day and night, she was able to supplement the small pension she had been awarded after the death of her husband enough to provide him with a reasonably good primary-school education. She and her son were mutually convinced that young Pierre was destined for greater things than his father, or, indeed, any of his other less-than-august ancestors.

Still, it wasn’t clear just how he was to rise to the level of his just desserts from such a humble point of origin. After he finished his standard schooling in 1937, his mother found that university was far beyond her means, no matter how many hours she worked or how she scrimped and saved. Being still in full agreement with his mother that he was above manual labor, Pierre spent almost all of his time in their apartment, expressing his political views in pamphlets which he gave away for free. He was of a type with a certain species of young man that can be found in the less savory corners of the Internet today (and occasionally showing up in this site’s usually friendly and thoughtful comment section to sound a discordant note). Intelligent in some ways but socially awkward, they channel the grievance born of their social isolation into reactionary cultural and political views. In the context of 1930s Europe, the endpoint of that journey was almost always fascism and its even uglier handmaiden of antisemitism.

Alas, Pierre Plantard was no exception. He advocated for the “purification and renewal of France,” a euphemism which, I trust, requires no elaboration. As an admirer of Adolf Hitler, he was traumatized when his country declared war against Germany in response to the latter’s invasion of Poland in September of 1939. He immediately dashed off a letter to Prime Minister Édouard Daladier to demand that he “put a stop to a war started by the Jews which we cannot win.”

In the decades to come, Plantard would claim that he joined the Resistance after a Nazi army marched into Paris in June of 1940. But in the early stages of the occupation at least, nothing could be farther from the truth. He was in fact an admirer and booster of the Vichy puppet regime that was installed to govern part of France under Marshal Philippe Pétain, an 84-year-old hero of the First World War who, to paraphrase the later words of Charles de Gaulle, went from glorious to deplorable in the view of French history in the space of an instant. A letter which Plantard wrote to Pétain on December 16, 1940, shows his delusions of grandeur already in fine fettle at age twenty. Claiming that he has knowledge of an assassination plot against Pétain, Plantard pushes the doddering old man to get a move-on implementing the Holocaust before it is too late.

Please forgive me for taking the liberty of writing to you this evening. Despite my various commitments, my lectures and my magazine, I am perhaps still unknown to you…

I know that, in the depths of your soldier’s heart, you are suffering from the knowledge that the people of France are questioning your sincerity and your patriotism, and are suffering more perhaps from that than from the effects of our recent disaster. But I know also of your great love for our country, and I am certain that you will do everything possible to save it once more…

You must act! Immediately upon receiving this letter you must issue strict but totally confidential orders. You must put an immediate stop to this terrible Masonic and Jewish conspiracy in order to save both France and the world as a whole from terrible carnage.

At present I have about 100 reliable men under me who are devoted to our cause. They are ready to fight to the bitter end in response to your orders. But what is 100 men when faced with the might of our enemies? Whatever the case may be, they will fight alongside me for our cause.

This letter would be laughable if the undertone wasn’t so dark. Plantard’s magazine was an amateurish pamphlet he passed out for free on the street; his lectures were nonexistent, as was the crack squad of 100 soldiers at his beck and call. He was just a skinny kid writing screeds in his mother’s apartment in lieu of facing the real world outside. Yet he would prove bizarrely adept at inhabiting an imaginary world throughout his life, never allowing reality to get too close to him.

In 1941, Plantard claimed to be the head of a youth group called La Rénovation Nationale Française (“The French National Renewal”). Under its auspices, he petitioned the Parisian police to let him seize the home of M. Shapiro, “an English Jew who is presently fighting alongside his fellows in the British armed forces,” to use as the group’s headquarters; he said he had already gotten permission to do so from the occupying Nazi authorities. In response, the police launched an investigation of his affairs. The verdict was as dismissive as it was scathing. From our standpoint, the most shocking aspect of the report is how fully-formed Plantard’s modus operandi was at such an early juncture.

M. Plantard describes himself as a journalist; in fact he lives entirely off his mother, who holds a pension granted to her following the accidental death of her husband…

Plantard, who boasts of having links with numerous politicians, seems to be one of those dotty, pretentious young men who run more or less fictitious groups in an effort to look important and who are taking advantage of the present trend toward a greater interest in young people in order to attract the government’s attention…

La Rénovation Nationale Française seems to be a “phantom” group whose existence is purely a figment of the imagination of M. Plantard. Plantard claims 3245 members, whereas this organization currently only has four members…

To date no meetings have been held…

It would seem that this organization is doomed to failure.

The report concludes that Plantard should not be allowed to steal M. Shapiro’s house, even if the latter is a Jew.

But Plantard soldiered on undaunted. By January of 1943, La Rénovation Nationale Française had morphed into a magazine called Vaincre (“Conquer”). Its mission was “to restore to the Fatherland the strength to live through an ideal based on chivalry and self-denial.” In what some might consider an abnegation of its stated ideal, Plantard still hadn’t found a paying job or moved out of his mother’s apartment.

His lifestyle was about to be dramatically disrupted, however. At some point during 1943 or 1944, Plantard was sent by the Nazi occupying authorities to Fresnes Prison, the primary holding place for Resistance agitators among others, for a four-month stint. This event is documented only by the French police, who were unsure of the reason for the sentence; the report author’s suspicion is that it was handed down primarily out of annoyance and exasperation, because Plantard had been badgering the German authorities with requests related to his various associations and publications as persistently as he had been the French ones. All of the relevant German documents seem to have been lost. Regardless of the reason for the prison stint, those four months, unpleasant though they doubtless were, would show themselves to have been a blessing in disguise after France was liberated, in that they prevented Plantard from being tarred with the broad brush of a full-on Nazi collaborator.

Indeed, he was quick to change his tune after an Allied army marched into Paris in August of 1944. The following month, he founded his latest organization, Alpha Galates (“Alpha Galatians”). Its object was “the creation, maintenance, and development of one or more welfare centers for young people who have suffered from German oppression (forced labor, deportation, imprisonment).” The one bar to membership was “to have been a member of any German or pro-German organization,” a standard which Plantard himself arguably didn’t meet. Another report in the archives of the French police, this one dated February 13, 1945, concludes that “this association has not engaged in any activity. It has had about 50 members, who resigned one after the other as soon as they sussed out the president of the association and worked out that it was not a serious enterprise. Plantard seems to be an odd young man who has gone off the rails, as he seems to believe that he and he alone is capable of providing French youth with proper leadership.” At the time of this report, he was back to living with his mother and still unemployed.

But not for too much longer. In December of 1945, the perpetual adolescent dipped a toe into the adult world. He got married to a woman named Anne-Léa Hisler and left the nest at long last. His activities over the next ten years are murky. He, his wife, and the daughter that would soon result from their union appear to have lived for a good part of that time in the town of Saint-Julien-en-Genevois, close to the border with Switzerland. He appears to have served two short prison sentences there, one in 1953 and the other in 1956; his wife left him around the time of this second prison stint, although the couple would not be formally divorced until 1970. The details of the convictions remain vague, thanks to French privacy laws, but mention has been made of “breach of trust,” “bad checks,” “fraud,” and, most alarmingly, “abuse of a minor,” which may refer to sexual relations with an underage girl. It isn’t clear how Plantard earned a living during these years; his attempts at playing a confidence man seem not to have been terribly lucrative. He himself would later mention working as an architect’s draftsman, but this may have been cover for other, humbler forms of employment.

It was also in 1956 that the series of events which would lead to the likes of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code began in earnest. You may remember that it was in January of this year that Albert Salamon wrote the first French newspaper accounts of François-Bérenger Saunière’s possible hidden treasure. Later this same pivotal year, either just before or just after going to prison, or possibly from his prison cell, Pierre Plantard registered an organization called the Priory of Sion with the French government.

It is tempting to read more than coincidence into the dating of these events. But we must avoid falling into the same trap that poor Henry Lincoln tumbled into again and again. There is no concrete reason to believe that Plantard read Salamon’s newspaper articles at the time they first appeared. Anathema though the notion is to conspiracy theorists, sometimes coincidence is just coincidence.

At this stage, the Priory of Sion was very much of a piece with what had come before, one more shell organization occupying a liminal space between a scam and a delusion, whose claimed membership count was at extreme odds with the reality of Plantard himself and a few others whom he had persuaded or cajoled into signing on as his “board.” As a subtitle, the Priory bore the acronym C.I.R.C.U.I.T.: Chevalerie d’Institution et Règle Catholique et d’Union Indépendante Traditionaliste (“Knighthood of Catholic Institution and Rule, and of Independent Traditionalist Union”). Its founding statutes make it sound like an amalgamation of two of Plantard’s previous organizations, La Rénovation Nationale Française and Alpha Galates. It borrows from the former an interest in chivalry and Medieval life in general, from the latter an expressed interest in doing good deeds for the community. On the whole, it comes off like a French version of the Society for Creative Anachronism, albeit with a reactionary edge lurking in the corners. As a concession to the changing times, the overt fascism and antisemitism have been excised, but one can still feel their undertow beneath the surface: “The aim of the association is to found a Catholic order, with the intention of recreating in modern form, while preserving its traditional character, an ancient knighthood, which by its actions promoted a highly moralizing ideal and was a factor for steady improvement in the rule of life of the human personality.”

A C.I.R.C.U.I.T. newsletter from the fall of 1956 — the acronym was actually more prominent than the name the Priory of Sion early on — promises to institute a bus service for the local neighborhood, “to take your children to school and then bring them home again.” The fee is just 360 francs per month for one child, or 500 francs for two or more: “We would kindly ask you to enter details of your children on the attached form and deposit it in the letterbox of M. Plantard, Hill B, before Sunday evening, 21 October 1956.” There is no reason to believe that these buses ever ran. For that matter, it seems doubtful that this first incarnation of the Priory of Sion existed in even nominal form by the time 1956 was over.

Plantard returned to Paris in 1958, just as France was being plunged into its most serious political crisis of the postwar era. A revolt in the colony of Algeria had exposed the ineffectuality of the current system of parliamentary democracy, which was known as the Fourth Republic. In response, Charles de Gaulle, the hero of the Second World War, led a sort of soft coup that resulted in a system of government with more resemblance to the American approach than that of most European countries, complete with a strong president. De Gaulle himself became the first of these presidents.

While the outcome of his efforts was still in doubt, de Gaulle’s supporters all over France created organizations that bore the vaguely ominous name “committees of public safety” to forward his cause. These were catnip for Pierre Plantard. Forgetting that he had once preferred Marshal Pétain to General de Gaulle, he began to present himself to the press as one of the leaders of these committees. He was quoted in this guise several times by France’s national newspaper of record, Le Monde; this was rising higher than his fantasies had ever taken him before.

Once the Fifth Republic was firmly established and the committees dissolved, Plantard discovered a new vehicle for his schemes, one that would prove immensely important to the later history of the Priory of Sion and Rennes-le-Château. He found out that, through some colossal administrative oversight, anyone could deposit unvetted documents into the Bibliothèque Nationale. After this was done, they would be assigned a catalog number and be made available to researchers just like any other item in the library’s vast holdings. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, The Da Vinci Code, and all the rest of the lore and lucre of Rennes-le-Château could never have come to pass without this bureaucratic tribute to our natural instinct to trust one another. For trust was a quality just waiting to be weaponized by a man like Pierre Plantard.

His first application of the technique was to deposit documents which seemed to show that he had worked as de Gaulle’s right-hand man among the citizenry while the Fifth Republic was hanging in the balance. The clincher was a personal letter from the general — a forged one, naturally. (One problem with all of Plantard’s efforts at forgery is that he couldn’t shift himself from a stilted and fussy prose style that becomes readily recognizable, even when translated into English, as soon as you’ve seen it two or three times.)

My dear Plantard,

In my letter of 29 July 1958 I told you how much I appreciated the part that the committees of public safety had played in the restoration work that I have undertaken. Now that new institutions are being proposed that will enable our country to once again assume its place in the world, I think that the committees of public safety should be released from the obligations that have been imposed upon them to date and that they can be demolished.

This letter would later entice Henry Lincoln and his co-authors to make the ludicrous assertion that de Gaulle had “turned specifically to M. Plantard for aid” in realizing the Fifth Republic. (This after Plantard had engaged in “laudable activity” during the Second World War, including “editing the Resistance journal Vaincre,” and had then been imprisoned “more than a year” by “the Gestapo.” In between these two heroic periods of his life, he had resided near Lake Geneva, Switzerland, by explicit invitation of that country’s government, to be “one of the éminences grises from whom the great of this world seek counsel.” It certainly sounded better than languishing in a provincial prison cell for petty crimes.)

Plantard had been putting on aristocratic airs all his life, part and parcel of his longstanding fixation on the vanished life of the Middle Ages. By the time he returned to Paris, he had likely invented the idea that he himself was a long-lost scion of noble blood, may even have already linked himself to the Merovingian dynasty of almost a millennium and a half ago. But his self-aggrandizing fictions would never have reached as many people as they eventually did if he hadn’t met Philippe de Chérisey.

De Chérisey was exactly what Plantard most devoutly wished to be: a real nobleman, a count to be specific, with a pedigree stretching well back into Plantard’s beloved Middle Ages. But whereas Plantard had spent his life running toward a noble title that could become his only through deception, de Chérisey had spent his running away from the expectations of his family. Born in Paris three years after Plantard, he had enrolled in acting school as soon as the end of the Second World War made it possible. Adopting the stage name of Amédée as a sop to his family’s sensibilities, he appeared on radio and in a few reasonably successful films during the 1950s, until his other habits began to interfere with his career.

Philippe de Chérisey drinks up in the 1956 film Gervaise.

For de Chérisey was an unrepentant drunk, womanizer, and all-around bon vivant who wore his dissipation like a badge of pride, as if he had stepped straight out of the pages of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. He was also a card-carrying Surrealist, whose watchwords were anarchy and absurdity, born out of the belief that nothing in life — absolutely nothing — was worth taking all that seriously. The best reason to do something was because it was fun; the best reason not to do something was because it was not fun. Surrealist moral philosophy extended no farther than that.

De Chérisey collected rogues and misfits whom he found amusing in the way that some other people collect stray cats and dogs. We don’t know exactly how he came into contact with Pierre Plantard, but it is clear that he found that man, who approached his con artistry with all the gloomy intensity of a knight about to ride into bloody battle in the name of his lord and savior, incredibly amusing. Plantard didn’t so much willfully lie as attempt to reconfigure the order of things to the way it ought to be, with himself in the place of prominence that he deserved. De Chérisey, who already had that which Plantard most desired and affected not to care a whit about it, found it hilarious that such an unprepossessing man as this one could have such delusions of grandeur. He began paying Plantard’s bills in Paris so that the bizarre fellow could have free rein to do his bizarre thing.

De Chérisey happened to have another amusing friend, a fellow traveler in Surrealist circles named Gérard de Sède, who was working on a book about the Knights Templar that was to be, shall we say, not an overly rigorous history of the Medieval chivalric order. De Chérisey put the “hermeticist” Plantard in touch with de Sède. De Sède went on to quote Plantard prominently in his book.

The real conspirators of Rennes-le-Château: Pierre Plantard, Philippe de Chérisey and Gérard de Sède.

It cannot be emphasized enough how essential de Sède and de Chérisey were to everything that followed. Plantard was as dull and pedantic by nature as he was dishonest; de Sède once described him as “a big nocturnal bird, very gloomy, very tall, very skinny. He’s not cultured; in fact, he’s quite ignorant.” De Sède and especially de Chérisey, on the other hand, were possessed of all the joie de vivre which Plantard lacked. They were able to give his ponderous genealogies a spark of wit and whimsy, able to turn the fraud into a game that could prove almost as enticing to those who didn’t believe in it as those who did. (Witness: the fact that this series of mine has now extended to five articles…) There is a reason that Plantard didn’t become a successful con man until he met de Chérisey and de Sède, the same reason that he was plunged into relative obscurity again almost as soon as the relationship ended.

Just as the exact time and circumstances of Plantard and de Chérisey’s first meeting are unknown, it isn’t clear when Rennes-le-Château first crossed their radar either. In the late 1970s, Plantard would spin a tale of a youthful visit.

I went to Rennes-le-Château in August 1938 to recover some letters which the priest Saunière had received from my grandfather. It was during the holidays and I was not yet twenty years old. ‘Marinette’ [Dénaraud], as they called her in the village, received me very hospitably at the Villa Bethania; I stayed there for three days. We celebrated the 70th anniversary of the old lady…

This upper-crust vision of tea in the garden of Saunière’s villa is a complete fabrication, like most of what Plantard said during his life.

In the category of more reliable witnesses, the Carcassonne librarian René Descadeillas believed Plantard made his first appearance in the area already in the late 1950s. This may be correct, but it seems at least as likely that this is a rare instance of Descadeillas being mistaken. For a documented reference to Rennes-le-Château from the pen of Plantard can’t be found until January 18, 1964. He may very well first have learned about Saunière and his alleged treasure the same way that so many of his countrymen did, through the documentary that aired on French television in early 1961. However it happened, he became one of the collection of misfits, cranks, and dreamers who took to hanging about the place, standing out only for being a bit more extreme in all three of those descriptions than most of the others. Calling him “strange,” Descadeillas wrote that

this man lived in Paris. He had no connections and no known relatives in the area. He was a difficult fellow to place, drab, secretive, cunning, with the gift of the gab, but people who spoke to him said it was hard to follow what he said. He was not having a course of medical treatment [the nearby town of Rennes-les-Bains, once the home of the French Lewis Carroll Henri Boudet, was known for its medicinal springs]. People asked about the reasons for his regular appearances, because he turned up unexpectedly, even in winter. They also speculated about his interest in archaeological and natural sights, because he was not an intellectual. They were intrigued by the strangeness of his behavior: he used to go around surveying the area and inquiring about the origin of properties. He would set his heart on scrubland or abandoned ground which did not interest anyone.

Philippe de Chérisey reportedly accompanied Plantard on some of these trips, and presumably funded all of them. Together, the two of them began to concoct the narrative that would soon spread through France and then the rest of the world, through the mediums of Gérard de Sède and Henry Lincoln respectively. Plantard may already have been working on the fake genealogies that were meant to suggest that he was a long-lost scion of the Merovingian dynasty for quite some time by this point. The earliest of those documents states that it stems from 1956 (again, that pivotal year!), but it’s impossible to say if this date is accurate. But his masterstroke — or perhaps de Chérisey’s — was to link these fantasies with the ones surrounding the treasure of Rennes-le-Château, thereby lending them the verisimilitude of being centered on a very specific place, one that anyone could go and see for themselves. Stumbling upon the tomb of a once-wealthy American heiress and her mother, constructed only 40 years before, Plantard thought it looked like the one seen in Nicolas Poussin’s The Shepherds of Arcady and worked that into the story. And of course the Priory of Sion was added to the plot, no longer as a Medieval-revivalist social club but as a shadowy cabal that had been associated with the hidden Merovingian bloodline since before the Crusades.

The reasons for the inclusion in the lore of the painting by David Teniers the Younger and the anonymous portrait of Pope Celestine V were and have remained far less obvious, such that they have been confusing treasure hunters ever since. Ditto Le Serpent Rouge, the nonsensical poem that also made its way into the growing dossier. De Chérisey, the unapologetic Surrealist prankster, must have relished blending the soluble conundrums with insoluble ones such as these, all in the service of turning the inept failed con artist Pierre Plantard into a king. What could be more absurd and hilarious?

Between 1963 and 1967, Plantard and/or de Chérisey deposited into the Bibliothèque Nationale the tranche of documents that Dan Brown would grandiosely call Les Dossiers Secrets in the opening pages of one of the best-selling novels in history. The holy texts of what would become practically a new religion to some are to be found right here. Among them are the genealogies of the Merovingians (and the Plantards), the list of Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion, and François-Bérenger Saunière’s connection to the mystery, including his fabled trip to Paris to have some “parchments” decoded and to buy three particular paintings. In short, the Lobineau dossier is the new religion’s version of the Bible or Koran. In time, much would be added to the theology that didn’t appear there, but it was the foundation of all that was to come.

It was de Chérisey who created the textual puzzle boxes we have been referring to as Altar Documents 1 and 2. He forged Gravestone 1, depositing it into the Bibliothèque Nationale with the names of Eugène Stübeln and a recently deceased local priest named Joseph Courtauly attached, and repurposed Gravestone 2 from an old journal put out by a Languedoc society of gentlemen scholars. We know all of this because he later told the French author Jean Markale exactly how he went about “inventing a story that the mayor [of Rennes-le-Château] had had a tracing made of the parchments discovered by the priest. Then I started to devise a coded copy based on passages from the gospels, and then I decoded myself what I had encoded.” The actual messages hidden in the documents were de Chérisey’s usual mixture of the sensical and the nonsensical. The results were superficially clever, but positively riddled with tells that they were far from aged, from the modern typesetting to the use of a far too recent edition of the Vulgate Bible. Nevertheless, they would, as de Chérisey put it, “work beyond my wildest dreams.”

For many years, it was assumed that Gérard de Sède was more or less a useful idiot in all of this, nothing more than Plantard and de Chérisey’s dupe for getting their invented mythology out into the world. But the indefatigable Rennes-le-Château skeptic Paul Smith, who has been fighting the good fight on his website since three years before Dan Brown’s novel hit, believes that de Sède, being a card-carrying Surrealist in his own right, was in on the joke all along. Smith’s theory of the case is that “originally, Plantard wrote a manuscript on the Rennes-le-Château story and during an eighteen-month period approached countless publishers to buy it. Nobody was interested. De Sède then rewrote the book, made it more comprehensible and less cluttered with detail. The result was the book L’Or de Rennes which was published in 1967 by Julliard.”

By way of bolstering his case, Paul Smith has placed the original publication contract for L’Or de Rennes on his website. Signed on January 13, 1967, it considers de Sède and Plantard to be full-fledged co-authors, and unequal ones at that: de Sède is to be awarded just one-third of the book’s royalties, Plantard the remaining two-thirds. The contract concludes that “in accordance with Mr. Pierre Plantard’s wishes, his name will not appear in any way either in the text or in any publicity relating to it.”

So, no one associated with the book was innocent; it was a knowing scam from top to bottom. The crowning masterstroke, which reeks of de Chérisey’s devious mind, was the decision to leave one fairly easily decipherable secret message undecoded, as a sort of exercise for the reader. That pulled Henry Lincoln into an intellectual black hole that he would never escape, providing the trio with a dupe par excellence.

Pierre Plantard during the heyday of the conspiracy.

We don’t need to dwell unduly on what happened during the 1970s, on how the myth-makers fed Lincoln a steady drip of fresh information, until he reached the point of making up his own lore, thus making the conspiracy theories self-sustaining. It seems unlikely that anyone had thought about secret geometries in the paintings and landscapes before Lincoln. And the ultimate piece of plot inflation, the transformation of Pierre Plantard from merely a long-lost king to a demigod on Earth with the sacred blood of Jesus Christ coursing through his veins, definitely caught the trio by surprise. It first occurred to Lincoln as a potential answer to a thoroughly commonsense question: why did it really matter to anyone, other than perhaps some scholars of genealogy and Medieval history, even if Plantard really was a long-lost Merovingian? On the other hand, everybody could understand why it mattered if he was Jesus’s direct descendant.

Ironically, the French themselves realized the truth about the conspiracy theories they had sprung on the world far earlier than everybody else. Already in 1974, when Henry Lincoln had barely gotten started, René Descadeillas returned to the subject out of sheer exasperation with the misinformation he saw flying all around him from his perch in the library of Carcassonne. This time, he wrote and published a proper book, Mythologie du Trésor de Rennes (“Mythology of the Treasure of Rennes”), thoroughly debunking the notion that Saunière had been anything but a corrupt priest with a taste for simony alongside the one that the various documents being passed around by de Sède could be anything more than an elaborate, eminently Gallic practical joke. Several other French authors wrote similarly detailed exposés in the decades that followed, but none of them were translated into other languages to directly challenge the gospels of Henry Lincoln and Dan Brown in the wider world.

The real, three-man conspiracy that stood behind it all started to fall apart already by the end of the 1970s. De Sède was the first to break ranks, angry at Plantard for communicating directly to Lincoln instead of using him as his exclusive intermediary. He was already gone when Lincoln filmed his fateful interview with the would-be Merovingian scion in March of 1979. Switching sides with the fecklessness of a conspiracist spurned, in 1988 he would publish the book Rennes-le-Château: Le Dossier, les Impostures, les Phantasmes, les Hypothèses (“The Dossier, the Deceptions, the Fantasies, the Hypotheses”). It would explain almost everything, except the extent to which de Sède himself had been in on the scam all along.

Plantard’s break with de Chérisey came a few years after the one with de Sède, after Lincoln and his co-authors trumpeted the theory that Plantard was a direct descendant of Jesus Christ in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. He took extreme exception to this assertion, for reasons that aren’t really clear. One would think that this man of all men would love to be known as a demigod walking the Earth, but such was not the case. It may have been that, underneath all of the lies and deceptions, the Catholic faith he professed was in some sense genuine, and couldn’t abide a blasphemy such as this. Or it may have been simply that Lincoln and his cronies got rich by building on his cherished myth, while he did not.

De Chérisey, by contrast, loved this ultimate theory of the case, clearly seeing it as the perfect final punchline of the joke he had unleashed upon the world fifteen years earlier. He wrote articles and letters telling people so, which led Plantard to cut ties with him, as he already had with Henry Lincoln. De Chérisey died relatively young in 1985, a victim of way too much aristocratic decadence. Plantard refused to attend the funeral.

In the aftermath of the rupture, Plantard attempted to reboot a fraudulent legacy that, he must have felt, had gotten too far out of his control. He went back to his usual playbook, re-inaugurating the Priory of Sion as a social organization with a philosophy and a magazine but a dubious roll call of actual members. According to the latest mythology, the Priory dated not from before the Crusades or even from after the Second World War, but rather from September 19, 1738. I could try to explain the new secret history, which retained some elements of the old one and discarded others, but what would be the point? Suffice to say that Plantard was still up to his old tricks. Unfortunately for him, the loss of his co-conspirators meant that his efforts were subject once again to the weaknesses that had undermined his earlier attempts at fraud: his tendency toward pedantry, his tangled prose, his lack of personal charisma, and his utter inability to tell a straightforward story without getting himself and his reader irretrievably lost in the weeds.

Pierre Plantard with author Jean-Luc Chaumeil during the 1980s.

One technique which Plantard had long used to good effect was that of attaching his tales to those of famous dead people, who, being dead, were unable to contradict him. “He was first and foremost a past master at putting words into the mouths of the dead”, says Jean-Luc Chaumeil, the author of several books about the mythology of Rennes-le-Château. “Once someone had died he produced all sorts of documents, letters, and so on, all forgeries of course.” This longstanding practice — as demonstrated most famously in his list of Grand Masters for the Priory of Sion, without which Dan Brown’s novel would have been left without a title — remained one of his go-to moves as he entered his septuagenarian years. This time around, however, it would wind up hoisting Plantard with his own petard, in a way delightfully surreal enough to cause Philippe de Chérisey to giggle in his grave.

Roger-Patrice Pelat, at far left, in Rennes-le-Château in early 1981. His friend François Mitterand stands just to his right, wearing a hat.

Once upon a time in France, there was a prominent financier named Roger-Patrice Pelat, whose grievous life story would come to parallel that of his British counterpart Robert Maxwell. Pelat was very close to François Mitterrand, France’s president from 1981 to 1995, whom he had known since the two were prisoners of the Nazis together. They visited Rennes-le-Château during Mitterrand’s first presidential campaign, resulting in a well-traveled photograph of them standing inside Bérenger Saunière’s cluttered, rather tacky church. (The line between sinister trappings of the occult and mere bad taste is often thin.) Several years later, Pelat found himself at the center of a scandal when all sorts of improprieties in his dealings began to come to light. Mitterand distanced himself hurriedly, as politicians invariably do in such situations, and Pelat died alone and unlamented in March of 1989 of a literal broken heart.

Pierre Plantard moved to appropriate Pelat’s legacy for his purposes almost before the body was cold. In his telling, Pelat had become Grand Master of the Priory of Sion after he himself had stepped down from that post in 1984. But the Americans — these had become Plantard’s new bogeymen, a replacement for the Jews who had filled that role in his youth — had gotten to Pelat in some undefined way and brought him down.

For a long time, the American dream has been to dominate our country for financial and economic motives. The Priory, very many of whose members are themselves major financiers, politicians, directors of major insurance companies, magistrates, and so on, is the ideal CIRCUIT for various courses of action. That’s how Patrice Pelat was ensnared, and — I can say it here — I retain for him the most profound affection in spite of everything that has happened.

All would have been fine if Plantard had contented himself with spinning such fables exclusively for the all but nonexistent members of his largely imaginary organization. But on September 28, 1993, someone who called himself René-Roger Dagobert — yes, really — sent a number of documents to the court of law that was still investigating the dealings of the deceased Pelat. One of these, on the letterhead of the Priory of Sion, referred to Pelat as “our former Grand Master, who was always very much a man in the background, perfectly honest and just, who fell beneath the blows of various American initiates.”

In response, Judge Thierry Jean-Pierre ordered the police to search Plantard’s house and ordered the man himself to appear before his court, possibly because he suspected that the Priory of Sion may have been helping Pelat to launder money. This was a laughable notion on the face of it; Plantard’s operation was nowhere near that sophisticated, as must have been made all too clear by the documents that were seized. Nevertheless, Judge Jean-Pierre soon had Plantard under oath in his courtroom, and seems to have enjoyed making him squirm. There are conflicting reports about exactly how far he pushed him; transcripts of the proceedings remain sealed. Some reports have it that Plantard admitted only that he had lied about Roger-Patrice Pelat having been affiliated with the Priory of Sion, while others say that he confessed to all of the fraud, stretching back at least to 1956. Either way, Judge Jean-Pierre clearly put the fear of God into Pierre Plantard. For Plantard disappeared completely from public life after he went home from court for the last time on November 23, 1993; I might write now that he finally shuttered the Priory of Sion for good, if only there had actually existed much of anything to shutter. He died on February 3, 2000, just short of his 80th birthday.

The symmetry of the young and the old Pierre Plantard seems better suited to a novel than to real life. From first to last, he was founding grandiosely titled organizations in that aforementioned liminal space between wish-fulfillment and fraud, imagining thousands of members who didn’t exist, preaching his reactionary, nationalist politics in whatever form was deemed most acceptable at the time. He got his comeuppance at the hands of the Nazi occupiers of France during the 1940s and a French court of the 1990s for the same reason: for annoying them by spouting an endless stream of stupid, petty, self-aggrandizing lies instead of doing something better with his time.

Pierre Plantard was the embodiment of hyperreality, living his entire life in a virtual world of his own making. And he was the embodiment of another quality that hardcore hyperrealists often manifest: a complete inability to evolve. He was, whatever else he might have been, a perpetual adolescent. How strange to think that the mystery and the industry of Rennes-le-Château — the novels and the games and the movies and the tours and the earnest students of the lore who are poring over their sacred geometries even as I write these words — all came to exist because one emotionally stunted man decided to make himself the king he wanted to be as a replacement for a reality he refused to accept. In its way, his story is even more improbable than the mythology he spawned.

Farewell, Rennes-le-Château. It was an interesting place to visit, but I don’t want to live there.

There is much, much more that I could write about Rennes-le-Château, a sticky topic that can ensnare the skeptic almost as easily as it can the true believer. Every answer just leads you to five more questions if you let it.

But we shouldn’t let it. Once we cut through all of the tangential connections and secret codes and other nonsense, we find that the underlying truth is disarmingly straightforward. At the turn of the twentieth century, a corrupt French priest remade his church and his village into a lavish if tacky monument to his own eccentric tastes. In the 1950s, a hotelier harnessed the local legend of hidden treasure which the priest had left behind to drive business his way. Then a few other bored Frenchmen embellished the story for aggrandizement and amusement. Then Henry Lincoln heard the tale they were spouting and added some extravagant touches of his own to the story, because he wanted it to make sense so very badly. And then Dan Brown came along to mash it down and make it suitable for mass consumption, turning a chicken into a chicken nugget.

The peak of the Da Vinci Code mania is well past now, but the fantasies of Plantard, Lincoln, and their friends still echo through popular culture — not least the culture of gaming, which has long since become as mainstream as any other form of entertainment. Gabriel Knight 3, the game which started us on this journey, is just the tip of the iceberg. We will surely be encountering this mythology again as we proceed on this larger journey of ours through the history of gaming.

But at the same time that it has been an influence on games, the mystery of Rennes-le-Château is itself a sort of game — an “infinite game” in the words of Mariano Tomatis, one whose playing board is the whole world. Anyone who claims to have solved the mystery and thus won the game is immediately perceived as a threat by a community of players who have made it their hobby, their social outlet, in some cases even their identity: “The game of Rennes-le-Château continues to provide amusement only if there is an underlying mystery, an unsolved puzzle to be explored. Any contribution academically sound is immediately rejected by the large community of players, because every demystifying statement closes at least one of the possible extensions of the game, thus threatening the very purpose of the infinite game, which is to continue indefinitely.”

Every gamer knows the feeling of wanting to keep a good game going. But the wise ones also maintain the barrier between the game and real life. For to do otherwise is to risk madness, as the lives of Plantard, Lincoln et al. so painfully demonstrate.

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 and The Messianic Legacy 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; Le Trésor Maudit de Rennes-le-Château by Gérard de Sède; The Holy Place: Saunière and the Decoding of the Mystery of Rennes-le-Château by Henry Lincoln; Key to the Sacred Pattern: The Untold Story of Rennes-le-Château by Henry Lincoln; Les Templiers sont parmi nous, ou, L’Enigme de Gisors by Gérard de Sède; Les Mérovingiens à Rennes-le-Château. Mythes ou Réalités. Réponse à Messieurs: Plantard, Lincoln, Vazart & Cie by Richard Bordes; Lives of the Popes: The Pontiffs from St. Peter to Benedict XVI by Richard P. McBrien; Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco; The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown; Are We Idiots?: The Simulacra of Jean Baudrillard by Boris Kriger; Simulations by Jean Baudrillard; Mythologie du Trésor de Rennes by René Descadeillas; Rennes-le-Château: Autopsie d’un Mythe by Jean-Jacques Bedu; Bérenger Saunière Curé à Rennes-le-Château by Abbé Bruno de Monts; Rennes-le-Château: Le Dossier, les Impostures, les Phantasmes, les Hypothèses by Gérard de Sède.

Skeptical Inquirer of November/December 2004; Politica Hermetica 10.

As should be made clear by the links sprinkled through the article, I owe a special debt to the material collected by Paul Smith on his website Priory of Sion.

Renga in Blue: Escape From Sparta (1983)

2026-05-01T15:08:31+00:00

This returns to the Tandy CoCo adventure contest from Rainbow magazine, culminating in thirteen games printed in The Rainbow Book of Adventures; I’ve played Polynesian Adventure and Search for the Ruby Chalice so far. I wanted to get a few more of the set taken care of. Even though I’m not following strict chronology by month, the book was released in January and I’d feel awkward being near the end of my 1983 sequence and still pulling games to play from the book.

Just as a reminder, this contest was run before both Scott Adams and Infocom were available on Tandy CoCo; there wasn’t many adventures to pick from at all. The authors of the contest tended to be enthusiasts rather than gaming professionals and most of the entries seem to be the only published game from each particular author or authors.

Today’s selection involves a pair of authors, just like Polynesian Adventure, although Rainbow magazine made a mistake and just credited Rick Townsend, leading to a correction letter.

I was very pleased to learn when I arrived home from vacation that my program Escape From Sparta was selected as a winner in your First Annual Adventure Contest. The following day I bought a copy of January’s issue and was excited to see that it had won Best Science Fiction Trophy. I was, however, extremely disappointed to see that the name of Thomas Hollerback, co-writer of this adventure did not appear with my own. Without his help I could not have written Escape From Sparta. Escape From Sparta was a joint effort and intended to be a joint entry. Apparently, I may have misled you when I enclosed a separate letter in reference to the game signed only by myself. Tom’s name appears along with my own in the program heading. Please give Tom the credit which he also deserves.

Rick Townsend
Bettendorf, IA

The book has things printed properly and biographical notes for both authors.

Rick Townsend is a self-taught computer enthusiast who works as a computer operator for United Totalisator International. Thomas Hollerback, co-author, is a 1983 graduate of Central Michigan University and a perspective CPA. Both men enjoy video and Adventure games.

Thomas Hollerback did indeed become a CPA and became quite successful in the profession, serving as chairman for various boards of directors and becoming named president & CEO of Yeo & Yeo in 2013.

Rick Townsend I’ve been getting too many nameclashes to be sure on, but United Totalisator is a curious company indeed to be located at the far east of Iowa (on the Mississippi River) in 1982/1983. Totalisator equipment is intended for handling betting (horse racing, dog racing, etc.) and while Bettendorf did become a center of gambling, it only happened after 1989 when Iowa legalized riverboat gambling. (Iowa was the first state to do so; I’ve written more about that here.) However, it was still possible to bet directly at horse tracks at this time, so it isn’t absurd as placement for a gambling company; Arlington track in particular was not far away in Illinois and had just recently had the first million dollar horse race.

The important point here is that programmers were spread out all across the country, not just hovering around Silicon Valley/California and MIT, and in a contest meant to encourage amateurs it’d drag some of the less-commonly-associated-with-game-development places out of the woodwork.

As the book’s plot intro indicates, we are part of a “superior race of robots” and our creator is a “highly regarded” person who is an “epitome of virtue.” (I guess the polar opposite of Davros from Dr. Who.)

You are a Combutron X robot, one of the most advanced and most loyal of his races, and your assignment is to defend the good side of the universe. Recently, the warlord, master of the evil alliance, has developed a secret plan to control all the planets. To succeed, he must capture and kill your creator. Then, the robot race will not be properly maintained, and the robots will expire — eliminating any resistance to the warlord’s evil clutches.

Our goal is to rescue ~~Light Davros~~ our creator.

The game starts with an “instructions file” with a title screen (see above) and a bit more information about what’s going on.

YOUR MISSION: FIND THE CREATOR ABOARD THE SPACE STATION SPARTA AND ESCAPE.
PLEASE STANDBY TO BE BEAMED ABOARD SPARTA. GOOD LUCK!

ENTER ‘POKE 25,6:POKE 26,1:NEW’ BEFORE LOADING WITH CLOAD

The instructions given here with the POKEs and the NEW command clear out the BASIC memory for maximum space. (This includes the program that just ran, which is why the player needs to type it in after the starting program is done.)

The game then puts you right in the action, and there’s a semi real-time component. If you are being attacked by a HUMAN or ROBOT (as you are at the landing spot here) you’ll get a rotation of the human/robot attacking over and over if you don’t press any keys. You need to press ENTER, which will then let you type a response (SHOOT ROBOT). The game does not require the actual typing to be done in real time (unlike Keys of the Wizard, which was willing to interrupt your typing mid-line).

It’s also possible to miss many times in a row. I discovered later after the first SHOOT ROBOT/HUMAN it was possible to just type SHOOT, but you have to be more specific the first time around.

Once combat is done, you can search the corpse/rubble, and find either a GREENCHIP (from a human) or a REDCHIP (from a robot).

Other than that, the only thing to pay attention to is consoles. For example, if you go up from the starting room, you arrive at a console.

For the security clearance, you need to insert a chip. Redchips are the lowest level clearance, followed by greenchips, followed by a single silverchip (held by the captain). As far as I could tell there is nothing special about silverchips vs. greenchips, but for escape pods (which you need to use at the end) you have to have a greenchip rather than a redchip.

After inserting the chosen chip, you can start the console with $ and then enter commands to it. In the room above, the door to the east is locked, so if you UNLOCK DOOR it will take care of the problem.

Here’s the rest of the upper-section map, although I believe there is some randomization in robot/human placement (there definitely is in finding the Creator):

There are some environmental aspects, and when I first started playing I was dutifully mapping them, and even trying to interact with them, but for the most part only the enemies and the consoles are important (with one exception).

Hence, this ends up being a little more like a strategy game (akin to the Apex Trading Haunted House with the odd bonus attribute that I didn’t know I was until I had finished the game. You certainly can’t visit everywhere, because your robot has a certain amount of energy and will eventually run out; not just from fights…

…but from the fact that walking around also drains energy.

Hence, it’s better to skip certain fights if you know you don’t need the chips you get out of them. You need at least one red or green chip for opening doors, and at least one green or silver chip for taking an escape pod away.

For my game, the best approach was to a.) shoot the robot at the start b.) use the red chip to go down to the “bottom access chamber” and unlock the door c.) head west and fight the human in the kitchen, taking the greenchip and d.) going north to the lab and fighting the robot.

You don’t need the robot’s chip.

You can then take the creator…

…and blast out the exit, using a greenchip to activate the pod.

The last command here is being typed in the “console” rather than being given to the robot.

There’s one more entirely optional thing you can do, and it’s interesting that the game doesn’t mention it as a “bad ending” if you skip doing the thing: you can blow up the space ship. At the nuclear reactor (see NE corner of the bottom part of the map) there is a lever you can pull.

The four minutes here pass in real time. If you haven’t won by then, you blow up with the spaceship. Winning with the explosion coming doesn’t give a different winning message.

I ran past some robots rather than fight them, meaning my energy was lower than my other win.

While the random attacking is the same mundane thing seen in many of our games, the fact you can utterly bypass the enemies — yet also get a useful (and predictable) resource from killing them — makes this have a slight bit of interest as a strategy game. The game is too short and simple in the end to hold up historically, but it does suggest an maneuver that could be done in an adventure-roguelike format.

Thanks to gschmidl for technical assistance (the POKE/CLOAD setup seemingly doesn’t work when you load the game from menus in xRoar, I was only able to run the game using the command line).

Renga in Blue: St. Andrew’s Adventure (1983)

2026-04-29T20:23:52+00:00

This is the first visit of the All the Adventures project to Ireland. I can’t fully say “this is the first adventure game from Ireland” due to the possibility of something slipping through the cracks (and also the fact I haven’t finished 1983) but we can still assert 1983 as a general starting point; anything that came before that was too obscure to be noticed by the various modern archives. (We have an author upcoming from Northern Ireland with a game from before 1983, but it wasn’t written there, and of course in a political-border sense it’s a different country.)

From a 2021 video introduction to St. Andrews College Dublin, an international school for elementary through high school students.

1983 does seem somewhat late given how much adventures were booming in the UK just adjacent; this isn’t a situation like New Zealand with physical isolation from computer distributors. So it’s worth a rewind:

December 6, 1921 marked the start of Ireland as an independent country with the Anglo-Irish Treaty, giving independence to 26 counties in the south with six counties of the northeast (Northern Ireland) remaining with the United Kingdom. Ireland’s economy remained tied closely to the UK, however, with exports in 1924 at 98.1% and imports at 79.1%. Exports focused on food, while manufacturing in particular languished, with a small number of firms (mostly in Dublin). The biggest manufacturer, Ford, employed 7000 in 1930, but the Great Depression ended up causing the majority to get laid off. The next largest manufacturer, Guinness (who produces not just alcohol but also barrels), employed 3200. Besides those two companies, most doing manufacturing did no exports at all.

Signatures on the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

This situation led to a policy of import-substituting industrialization; in short, trying to reduce dependence by building locally. The economist Keynes gave a speech in Dublin fretting over “national self-sufficiency” and a “disastrous reduction in a standard of life”. Protectionism and tariffs arose in the 30s in an attempt to cause the transition, although this was interrupted by WWII, where Ireland remained neutral. (Or perhaps “neutral” in quotes; the Irish intelligence service G2 regularly shared information with the British, and Nazi attempts to introduce a wedge in relations were shot down.)

However, post-WW2 and leading through the 1950s, it was starting to be clear that protectionism was not the answer; Ireland’s economy was sluggish, and protectionism extended to the political arena as well with a knock-on effect. Tweaks in policy in the late 1950s started to lead to a boom, to the extent that Ireland being welcoming of foreign companies is a general policy which holds to this day.

TK Whitaker, Secretary of the Department of Finance in 1958, the one who introduced the First Programme for Economic Expansion. It was the centerpiece of Ireland’s new economic policy. Picture from a 1969 video interview via RTÉ.

Surrounding all this, for our purposes, is the rise of computing. IBM was the first to arrive, in 1956. One of the agriculture companies (Irish Sugar) was the first to get a computer, installing a system through British Tabulating Machine starting in 1957 in order to manage payments for farmers. Quoting Gordon Clarke, an Irish mathematician that was pulled to England for training before returning to Ireland:

I was assigned responsibility for a number of installations, but particularly for the ICT 1201 in the Sugar Company. We had to ensure that the computer could not be blamed for any delay in its payments to farmers. It was a valve-based machine and had no conventional memory. The program was stored on a drum whose capacity was 1024 words of 40 bits. Subroutine calls had to be preceded by appropriate placement of the return address. Each instruction included the address of the next instruction, and branching instructions included two such addresses. The programmer had to take account of the latency of the drum rotation and place the next instruction in the most efficient location to save time.

IBM and ICL were the big companies through the 1960s, with DEC setting up their manufacturing in Galway for the European market in 1971; they cited tax policy, an English speaking workforce, and the forthcoming entry of Ireland into the European Common Market (which indeed happened, two years later). Quoting John Eyres, who worked at DEC from 1974 to 1977:

I developed a model with the finance department to select high margin products which would take advantage of Digital’s 0% tax on profits from products manufactured in Ireland. This model significantly improved corporate profit after tax and helped overcome opposition from design managers based in the US (powerful people in the Digital world).

Despite these favorable winds for mainframes and microcomputers, with educational and personal computing, the environment didn’t change the fact that the basic GDP-per-capita was lower than the United States and the United Kingdom. Personal computing was expensive.

In current US$. World Bank, CC-BY-4.0. After 1980 both the UK and Ireland declined, setting the stage for games like Urban Upstart.

The most prominent early entrant to the arena was Apple, which had a three-day exhibition at the Burlington Hotel in Dublin which was the public’s first exposure to personal computers; they ended up selling almost all their product to schools. Apple decided to put their European manufacturing in Cork (see: the exact same conditions which swayed DEC). This ended up influencing the decision of John Boland (minister for education) in 1981 to make a bulk purchase of Apple IIs for schools (that is, the iconic education computer for Ireland was the Apple II, not the BBC Micro).

Commodore also tried to enter the market at this time; their PET was considered solely a business computer due to cost, but they started to have popular success with the lower cost of the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64 (with the downside that when Commodore tried to sell the C64 to schools, Apple had already been entrenched and the C64 was considered a “games machine”). The ZX series via Clive Sinclair of course also invaded, although due to timing it was more the ZX81 and especially the ZX Spectrum which struck big. One testimonial:

I always refer to that school trip from St Kieran’s College in Kilkenny to Dublin in late 1981 or early 1982 where one of my schoolmates brought me to the Grafton Arcade and into Tomorrow’s World, the main computer shop at the time. I can’t put into words how mind-blown I was. At this stage I think I’d only been near the Apple II in school. To be able to touch and play with real computers was the most exciting thing I’d ever encountered.

Then I saw the ZX81 and it was love at first sight. In comparison to all the clunky behemoths with their clear 1970s heritage, here was something that was tiny and modern. And “cheap”. I had to have one.

Still, because of economic hurdles, the entrance into the market was slower than that of mainland Britain, which is why Ireland’s first adventure game (probably, at least tied with other contenders) only was made in 1983, by Edward (aka Eddy) Carroll.

Eddy talks at length about his background in the interview above, and how he first was introduced to computers at school, but using Commodores rather than Apples:

I went to school in Booterstown in Dublin [St. Andrew’s College] and it was quite progressive at the time because the government had decided that every school was going to have its own Apple II … in this particular school the guy in charge of computers decided that wasn’t going to do it. So he got his own funding and fundraising and bought a couple Commodore PETs and continued to buy them and we ended up with probably about fifteen Commodore PETs, all networked together using a thing called Hydranet which was a very early local area network that ran over serial ports…

I only have been able to find record of Hydranet in relation to Amiga computers, but it’s plausible they started prior to Amiga and it hasn’t been documented yet. (It’s also plausible Carroll was mixing up memories. However, the person who made the Hydranet cards was Graham Heggie who also created the original dongle, an anti-piracy device that connects to a computer port, so he certainly was making hardware back then.)

From the Amiga Hardware Database.

…there was a computer club that ran in the afternoon and anyone who wanted to could go along. So when I was in first year after school I heard about this and I went one September and it was an absolutely tiny, tiny, room, so literally no room even to turn around, so you had people sitting at keyboards and then everyone else standing looking over their shoulder … I stood there one evening and I was looking over somebody’s shoulder and they typed in a simple BASIC program … I was like “wow I can see how that works, that’s unbelievable” and I was basically hooked so I started spending most of my time there.

St. Andrew’s College opened a new building in 1983 including a new computer room; Carroll is referring to the old one.

From the official school history. “Houseroom Area 5 opens in response to a need for a Computer Room, a Home Economics Unit, Cloakrooms and Changing Rooms.”

A few months later I managed to persuade my parents to get VIC-20 for Christmas which would have been Christmas 1981 … the VIC was followed a year later by Commodore 64 and then a couple years after Commodore 128 … a user’s group of Ireland was formed … I went with a few friends and we ended up on founding committee and that ran from, I think, maybe 1980 to 1983.

Carroll became very interested in the technical underpinnings of the computer (learning assembly from Nick Hampshire’s book VIC Unleashed); he wrote a 1983 article about how to get fast sprites on the Commodore 64, and he has a demoscene page including credits to an “Ultraload (Tape Turbo)” program and a demo that pretends the C64 is an Amiga. The reason he has a two-hour interview online in the first place is his development of a piece of software known as SnoopDOS (a “system monitoring tool” for Amiga that was/is very popular amongst Amiga hackers).

Listed amongst his programs is his one game St. Andrew’s Adventure. This is clearly a school-friends-and-family sort of game; it was written as a satire-simulation of the school the author went to. Out of various personal-location games we’ve seen (like Williamsburg Adventure and The Case at KAXL), it’s the densest in terms of in-jokes. In a normal circumstance (say, playing/reviewing a current IFComp game) this might make me grumpy, but as a window into history it’s fantastic.

Our goal is to find a missing statue of St. Andrew.

I have not seen any “statue of St. Andrew” lore specific to the school. In Dublin itself there is a heavily damaged statue at St. Andrews Church, and a local legend holds that in the late 1700s members of the Daly Club would use the statue for target practice.

Starting with a general meta-layout (meaning this is a simplification of the different areas):

The player starts near some “general” locations like a library and kitchen, and then can go into a long hall which branches into four curriculum regions, each which has its own hub. Most of the map is wide open to start, and for me a majority of the gameplay was simply mapping things out. Zooming in to the start:

The Senior Hall is where the chest the player is questing after is hiding, although finding it is not quite the end of the game.

It seems intended by the author for the player to wander in the library early, because there’s a book that explains what’s going on in more detail. There’s nothing stopping someone from finding this information much later in the game, though.

MANY YEARS AGO,BEFORE THIS SCHOOL WAS BUILT,AN OLD STATUE OF ST. ANDREW WAS HIDDEN IN A WOODEN CHEST.THIS CHEST WAS SO STRONGLY BUILT THAT IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO OPEN WITHOUT A KEY.THE STORY HAS BEEN FORGOTTEN BY MOST PEOPLE BUT IT IS SAID THAT THE KEYS AND THE CHEST ARE BOTH TO BE FOUND WITHIN THE ROOMS OF THIS SCHOOL.A CHEST WHICH WAS CAPABLE OF HOLDING THE STATUE WAS RECENTLY FOUND IN….

THE REST OF THE PAGE IS MISSING.

Unfortunately, this is the sort of game where it’s unclear if things held within the room description can be interacted with, or if all objects that can be used are displayed as separate text (like the book in the library). To the north of the start is a dimly lit passage which mentions a locked office (complete red herring, the parser doesn’t understand any attempt at interaction) and to the west of that are lockers with a similar reaction.

In some games, handling the lockers (even when not mentioned on their own) would be essential.

So you might think all objects are separated out from the description text, but this is not a consistent rule as you’ll see later.

The start area presents three different exits which are blocked off. First is the kitchen, where the smell of gruel is too much to handle.

Second is a set of stairs with a BOARDER on top. The shock causes us to fall down the stairs. (This repeats if you re-enter.) This has to be some kind of in-joke.

Third is an assembly hall with music that’s too loud to get by. This goes to the senior hall and close to the end of the game.

All three will be defeated by objects, so we need to start piling some objects, but first, two more obstacles, seen in the long passageway that leads to the various hubs:

The Lost Property room and the Prefect Room are both “fake-out” rooms in terms of world modeling; they don’t exist as actual rooms, but the game gives text and prompts as if you’ve entered one, but you get booted immediately after a scene happens. With Lost Property, by default, you are asked if you want some lost property, but get booted upon saying YES because you need 10p.

I AM IN THE LOST PROPERTY OFFICE. MR. O’MAONIGH IS HERE.HE ASKS ME: ‘DO YOU WANT SOME LOST PROPERTY?’

MY REPLY IS:

For the Prefect Room, again via YES/NO, you are asked if you want to join a poker match, but without money you are told you need some to enter the game.

Moving on to hubs:

There’s almost nothing in the Humanities or English areas; you can find some pencils in Language 4 (red herring), but that’s it. The point is generally the colorful descriptions (or intentionally mundane ones).

This crash happens over and over when you enter the room.

The southern hubs are science and math.

One room has a gas mask, another some thick gloves, and yet another (a physics lab) has a BOX SUITABLE FOR CARRYING HARMFUL SUBSTANCES.

The in-jokes and “isn’t this classroom making you bored by just standing here” type descriptions remain.

In a professional modern product this would be irritating, but in context here it’s a snapshot of student life in 1983.

One room will directly kill you.

One thing I haven’t highlighted yet is how the avatar has an antagonistic relationship with the player. Some games have played quite explicitly with the relationship but in a “friendly” way (like Cyborg); this is the first time I’ve seen straight out rebellion.

The gas mask is sufficient to enter the kitchen from earlier.

I AM IN THE SCHOOL KITCHENS.THERE IS A GIANT BOWL OF SOME SUBSTANCE IN THE CORNER AND ABOVE IT IS A SIGN WHICH SAYS ‘SCHOOL DINNER’.THIS HAS BEEN CROSSED OUT AND REPLACED WITH ‘GRUEL’

This is where I hinted not all objects were listed separately. You can take the gruel, as long as you have the box. Once you have the gruel, this is sufficient to gross out the boarder, and find an ACE OF SPADES.

Unfortunately the player still doesn’t have a method of getting past noise, nor no money for the lost items place or the poker game. However, the gruel is sufficient to kill off the monster. This is where the money is hiding.

Next is an order-of-operations problem: you need to go gambling with the money before going to Lost Property, because if you only have 10p, you can only use Lost Property once. By gambling, you double your money.

Visiting once the office with money gets you earmuffs, and a second time gets you keys. They just let you pay for lost items with cash? The earmuffs, at least, are sufficient to get by the booming organ.

Near here is a hammer; with the hammer you can GET NAILS, and it took me a while to find the right parser command (and the fact the panels are within the room description made me nervous I was taking things the wrong direction, despite the gruel from earlier).

This goes down a secret passage with a chest. The end goal! Using the keys you can open the chest, but that isn’t quite the end of the game.

REHOXER is given as a one-shot magic word. It needs to be used in the right room (“A PLACE WHERE THE AXEMAN GOES”) otherwise the ghost will kill you. I’ve shown off the correct place earlier so you may be able to solve this puzzle on your own before I reveal the answer.

This only took me about sixty seconds to work out, but I had fun; it reminded me of the brief moment of riddle solving in Uncle Harry’s Will with a large enough environment that the last part of the poem felt like a real scavenger hunt.

The drama room with the “CHOPPER WAS HERE” message is the right place to use the magic word. (I first thought in terms of a play with a person holding an axe, so I checked the room description and realized the match.)

Here ends a milestone in adventure history. It may not be important as a game-in-itself, but it did respect my time (I didn’t even need to consider using a walkthrough) and I did get a certain gleeful joy from the in-jokes on teachers who have no doubt retired and/or died long ago.

I AM IN LANGUAGE 5 AND I THINK I’M GETTING DEPRESSED.

Coming up: three games from the Tandy CoCo contest, followed by another British game, and then we’ll finally get to The Coveted Mirror.