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Renga in Blue - Dec 07

Adventure (Software Toolworks version, 1982)

(This continues from my previous post.) As mentioned in my last post, Don Woods started editing Crowther’s game in March 1977. He was not working entirely solo; he got ideas from when people at Stanford were trying things out (“oh yeah, I could put a message in for that”), and from his friends. Bob Paraiso, […] 3 hours ago

(This continues from my previous post.)

As mentioned in my last post, Don Woods started editing Crowther’s game in March 1977. He was not working entirely solo; he got ideas from when people at Stanford were trying things out (“oh yeah, I could put a message in for that”), and from his friends. Bob Paraiso, Don’s roommate for part of that period, had what Don calls a “twisted sense of humor” and came up with the clam/pearl and narrow passage puzzles.

It did not go straight to a finished product; it has an intermediate version I’ve been calling “Adventure 250”, based originally on this recollection:

I’m relying solely on memory which tends to be fallible (see above: the dwarf ‘vanishes’, not ‘disappears’) but my best recollection is that ADVENT.EXE first appeared on the PDP-10s at ADP (the old First Data in Waltham, Mass.) in 1977. It was an incomplete version which only had about 250 points worth of treasure. I seem to recall that there was nothing past the troll bridge but an ‘under construction’ sign or some such. I believe our copy came from WPI, but word at the time was it was developed at Stanford. Two or three months later we got the full 350 point game.
— John Everett

I was uncertain of this account until I encountered Dave Lebling’s map of Adventure, the one he made prior to starting Zork. It has the exact signature described by Everett of having “under construction” at where ought to be the troll bridge. There also is no notation for an end game.

The content is otherwise nearly identical.

By mid-1977, Woods had added the portion past the troll cave and the endgame, leading to the “canonical” version of Adventure at 350 points, finished by June 3rd, 1977. (Zork already started development by then, but remember they were looking at the 250-point version!) The first “altered” version, Adventure 366, was out by the 15th of July. It added a small area outdoors and a “palantir” which allows teleportation:

You are in the gazebo. The dust is deep here, indicating long disuse. Ancient elvish runes here describe this as a place where one may see many things. Another, more ancient inscription reads “PKIHMN”.
There is a palantir(orb) here.

Relevantly for today’s game, Don Woods had discussions early about the potential for commercializing the software. From Lester Earnest, manager of the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) he was at, in June 1977 (that is, the same month the game was “finished”):

One general rule that you should beware of is that Stanford facilities including this computer) may not be used in support of private business transactions. Under certain circumstances, is IS possible for Stanford to sell software, even if it was developed under a research contract. It is conceivable that a sale could be arranged in which contract you might share, but it sounds a bit hairy.

(There’s another fun message from Les being upset about someone managing to sneak on and play Adventure past the server capacity limit. These systems all were expensive to run and time was valuable! The messages all come from the SAIL message system and credit goes to Ethan Johnson for finding the material a few years ago.)

The general perception of software up to this point was often it was not something “intended for sale”, but the mid-70s this was starting to change, so it is a mistake to think at least Woods felt comfortable just having his work be “freeware”. However, the fact it was created on a massively expensive Stanford computer essentially precluded any direct commercialization. Certainly people treated it as public domain, and in an interview with Jason Scott, Don Woods alludes to the fact the people who got the source from him for the game were selling it; when he created a 430-point version which could be thought of as the “master quest” edition of the game (where only recently has anyone been able to manage to get a full 430 points!) he was much cagier about distributing it.

In the same interview, Don Woods discusses Software Toolworks, which came around in 1982; the company wanted them to endorse the game as the “official version”:

Don Woods mentions in the interview that he tested the program over out Will Crowther’s house; they found that there were additional treasures added, so they could not do the endorsement of saying it was exactly the original. Eventually, this was smoothed over, and you can read their “certification letter”.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

It was also possible to get a letter signed from them if you beat the game (similar to the certificate upon beating Wizardry 4), but none have surfaced. (We incidentally do know what the Wizardry 4 certificate looks like, thanks to Carl Muckenhoupt managing to beat the game when it was new.)

Today, I’m playing the CP/M version from February 1982, the one with the extra treasures that kept Crowther and Woods from saying it matched the original. I have some more detail here about Jim Gillogly and Will Bilofsky, whose names are on the port. Importantly, Walter Bilofsky (of Software Toolworks) was scrupulous about his first product, a C compiler, and tried to contact the original author so he could charge $80 and split with the author 50-50; the author was not interested due to having the early hacker ethic of just wanting to spread the Gospel of C, so Bilofsky just cut the price in half instead. It makes sense he would look for a way to eventually get some royalties over to Crowther and Woods for their game (unlike Microsoft or anyone else who was selling it).

A detail you might not know about classic Adventure:

Welcome to Adventure!! Would you like instructions?
NO

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.
SCORE

If you were to quit now, you would score 5 out of a possible 375.

Where did the 5 points come from? Well, you start the game with them. If you request instructions (that is, type YES at the start) your score goes down by 5.

For my playthrough, given this is now something like the 142nd time I’ve played Adventure, I just referred to a walkthrough early in order to snag all the standard game treasures, keeping an eye out for anything unusual. There was only one obvious difference. Y2 contained a dictionary:

Baggins’ New Dwarvish-English Dictionary
Publ. TA 3005, Imladris
Reformed Spellings

-%&-^~~& (v.t.): to excavate a new side
passage through soft rock
-%!”! (n., fem): small warm granite stone

… These words are hurting my throat. I quit!!

There’s a “magazine” that gets used for the “Last Lousy Point” of the game — it gets dropped at Witt’s End. Importantly, the magazine has always stated (when you attempt to read it) that it is written in Dwarvish. With the dictionary in hand, it comes off different:

Most of these have been damaged by water, but here’s one I can read:

Spelunker Today
Vol. 1 Number 3
We regret to announce that our associate editor was lost while taking two consultants on a tour of Colossal Cave. One consultant returned, his hair and eyebrows turned white from the ordeal, and was able to mumble only “The Dark-room … the Dark-room…”

One of our contributing correspondents reports the Troll to be in exceptional good humor; snickering sounds have been heard issuing from beneath the troll bridge.

(Advertisment)
CERTIFICATE OF WIZARDNESS
… serially numbered and suitable for framing, may be obtained absolutely free by writing to The Software Toolworks, 14478 Glorietta Drive, Sherman Oaks, CA 91423. Only available to Journeyman Wizards. You must include the Wizard Password which is revealed to a new Journeyman Wizard when he/she has earned the maximum number of points.

The rest of this magazine is too damaged to read.

I went through the entire map and found no new passages. Generally speaking modifications to Adventures have fallen into two categories:

a.) adding a random set of rooms “in the open”

b.) trying to secretly hide the new rooms and keep things otherwise consistent

This game goes with (b.); I checked through the entire map and found nothing new. Eventually I turned to the magazine which was the only different material to look at, and took a whack at the dark room in case of something new:

You’re in Dark-room.

A massive stone tablet imbedded in the wall reads: “Congratulations on bringing light into the Dark-room!”

This is the place where you have to say PLOVER to get in while also holding a lamp (a puzzle I wrote about when I first played 350-point adventure; it required a lateral leap of faith). Without much else to mess with, I tried PUSH TABLET, and hit new content:

The tablet silently swings open to reveal a small opening to the north.

N

You are in a large room with medieval furnishings. Two bleached skeletons are hanging on the wall in iron cuffs. The room is dominated by a huge white boulder near the west wall. A tunnel in the east wall turns quickly out of sight. A dark hole in the floor was apparently once covered by a grating or trap door.

A very rusty sword with a ruby-studded hilt is embedded in the boulder!

GET SKELETON

I’d really rather not desecrate the remains of these two intrepid adventurers.

DOWN

You are in a very tight foul-smelling hole with damp walls. There is a room above you.

It is not a large section; here the entirety of the map:

The sword in the boulder can be pulled quite easy; this isn’t the “Excalibur” scenario we’ve seen before. The catch is that pulling the sword causes the tablet to shut behind the player, locking the secret room.

You heave on the sword with all your might. Little by little it scrapes out, until finally it comes free.

There is a muffled crash in the distance.

Dropping the sword causes it to return to the boulder and the passage to re-open. Dropping the sword in the room below the Medieval Room will cause the sword to “bounce once” and then return to the boulder, again re-opening the passage. There doesn’t seem to be a way to keep the passage open while holding the sword, and I’ve tried dropping in substitutes and jamming the entrance with no luck.

There is a way out: while the cave-closing countdown will not start if the player has all the “standard treasures” from the original game, the sword is sufficient to put things over the top, and there will be standard closing message followed by a teleport after waiting enough turns:

The sepulchral voice intones, “The cave is now closed.” As the echoes fade, there is a blinding flash of light (and a small puff of orange smoke). . . . As your eyes refocus, you look around and find…

You are at the northeast end of an immense room, even larger than the Giant Room. It appears to be a repository for the “Adventure” program. Massive torches far overhead bathe the room with smoky yellow light. Scattered about you can be seen a pile of bottles (all of them empty), a nursery of young beanstalks murmuring quietly, a bed of oysters, a bundle of black rods with rusty stars on their ends, and a collection of brass lanterns. Off to one side a great many dwarves are sleeping on the floor, snoring loudly. A sign nearby reads: “DO NOT DISTURB THE DWARVES!” An immense mirror is hanging against one wall, and stretches to the other end of the room, where various other sundry objects can be glimpsed dimly in the distance.

However, the sword does not come with the player, and it doesn’t get registered back at the building as one! I can still report the gameplay to the end, though.

In the original, there are two endgame rooms; the second has some special rods, and if you drop one in the NE room, drop it, move to an adjacent room, and type BLAST, it will blow open an entrance to cheering elves. This time things go a little differently:

BLAST

There is a loud explosion, and a twenty-foot hole appears in the far wall, burying the dwarves in the debris.

You are at the SW end of the repository. Debris and broken pieces of mirror are strewn everywhere, burying everything that was stored here. At your feet, partly visible through the rubble, is a large steel grate, next to which is a corroded brass plaque, half obscured, reading “Treasure Vau… Keys in Mai…”

The grate is locked.

A whole has blown open to a “Main Office” which is a new room.

You are in the Main Office of the cave. A large jagged hole in the north wall opens into the Repository. Along a side wall is a large glass display case containing magic rods belonging to great wizards of the past. Another wall is covered with yellowed autographed glossy photos of well-known dragons and trolls. On a bulletin board are many charts and notices, marked “Dragon Duty Roster”, “NOTICE: Workdwarves’ Compensation Rules”, and the like. Through an archway in the south wall daylight can be seen.

Lying to one side is a ring with two large identical keys on it.

The keyring can go over to the treasure vault.

You are in a narrow vault with heavy walls constructed of large stone blocks. Dim yellow illumination glows through a square grate overhead.

A tall pointed wizard’s hat, made of solid gold, and inlaid with moons and stars carved from precious jewels, shimmers in midair!

Suspended a few feet off the ground is a wizard’s robe of blue velvet.

The grate is open.

The hat straightforwardly counts as a treasure, and the robe magically follows you around.

The robe rises gently, swirls about you, and settles around your shoulders. Evidently you have earned admission as a Probationary Apprentice in the Wizard’s Guild.

You can then head outside through the Main Office, walk over to the building, deposit the golden hat, and win.

As you release the hat, a cloud of sandalwood-scented smoke appears, out of which steps the Grandmaster of the Colossal Cave Lodge 437 of the Wizard’s Guild. He is wearing a long blue velvet robe, a long, pointed bejewelled hat made of solid platinum, and love beads. He carries a three foot long rod with a star on the end, all of solid gold. His eyes twinkle behind thick gold-rimmed spectacles, and he smiles benevolently as he says,

“Congratulations, young Adventurer. By your ordeals in the Cave you have proven yourself worthy of admission to the Wizard’s Guild in the rank of Apprentice Wizard. If you divine the remaining mysteries of the cave, you shall be rewarded with the rank of Journeyman Wizard.”

The Wizard waves his wand, and the cave bear and little bird appear in a puff of orange smoke, grunting and twittering their congratulations. You leap onto the bear’s back, and, with the bird fluttering in a circle overhead, you ride out of the building, through a crowd of cheering elves, and into the sunset.

You scored 345 out of a possible 375 using 448 turns.

Your score puts you in Master Adventurer Class A. To achieve the next higher rating, you need 1 more point.

Hence I’ve “won” but I’m still quite curious about the sword treasure and if there’s yet another hidden treasure somewhere. The only hint I can think of is about the reference to the troll being amused in the magazine, but prodding at both the troll and troll bridge have revealed no new actions I can find. It is possible the sword is really the only thing left to bring the score to maximum.

I’d normally try prodding at the source but there’s encryption going on (like the Dian Gerard games). I realize some of y’all are keen on that sort of thing, so I have files here to make the game easy to play. Run the RUN.BAT file, type B: to switch to the Adventure disk, and type ADVENT to run. I left my save files you can look at with DIR, and typing ADVENT SAVENAME will boot a saved game.

3 hours ago

Gold Machine - Dec 06

Now I Am Become Death

Another Pull at an Old Thread Recent discussions have attempted to bolster a few, key ideas. The first and most controversial, given the present critical landscape, is that while historical detail informs our understanding of humanity, it isn’t, in and of itself, a theme or interpretive “code wheel” that can unlock the meaning of Trinity. […]

The post Now I Am Beco a day ago

increment body count

Another Pull at an Old Thread

Recent discussions have attempted to bolster a few, key ideas. The first and most controversial, given the present critical landscape, is that while historical detail informs our understanding of humanity, it isn’t, in and of itself, a theme or interpretive “code wheel” that can unlock the meaning of Trinity. Instead, I think Trinity asserts that the details often do not matter. They might offer up an illusory sense of exhaustibility or reinforce ideas that equate mastery with knowledge. As the old song goes, “I shouted out ‘Who killed the Kennedys’ / but after all, it was you and me” (Jagger/Richards). Trinity isn’t a polemic against the United States government, or the state of New Mexico, or J. Robert Oppenheimer. In fact, individual action generally comes off as futile in the face of the cosmic inevitability of humanity’s tendency to overreach, to under-empathize, to mistake power for justification.

In order to get at the idea, Trinity features many encounters between the Wabewalker and non-human animals. Animals appear to us players as complexes of significance. They are doomed, as a matter of fact, with the possible exception of the roadrunner. The ducks and geese in Kensington Gardens are presumably vaporized. The many lemmings on the Siberian tundra–should the not make it to the cliff’s edge–die as well. Dolphin and rattlesnake alike: destroyed. The skink–today’s topic of discussion–is well on its way to a similar fate before we players intervene.

Let Them Have Dominion

Considering this fairly populous (by Infocom standards) menagerie of ill-fated creatures, what can we players deduce or discover about or in the text of Trinity? I believe that the animals have a synecdochical function. In plain terms, they are a part of the world that is meant to represent the whole. Humanity’s treatment of animals in Trinity reflects its disregard for the wider world including its inhabitants and ecological welfare.

Another key element of Trinity‘s presentation of devastation generally is an implication of blamelessness. It is crucial to note that the animals are blameless. They have no involvement in our conflicts or exercises in techno-destructive overreach. The same can be said of the young girl from Nagasaki (more on this next time). There are at least two implications to implied blamelessness in Trinity. The first is empathy.

In my series on Steve Meretzky’s A Mind Forever Voyaging, I claimed that one of its defining characteristics was empathy. It doesn’t just provoke empathic reactions in players. In fact, I argued that it was concerned with empathy as a crucial part of the human experience. Today, games with emotionally potent narratives are a familiar part of the gaming landscape, but it wasn’t something players were used to at the time. Trinity aims for–and lands–some punches of its own. Without declaring one better than the other–a hard thing to resist, apparently–I’m impressed with how both games approach empathy differently. In AMFV, empathy is resolved. It is an optimistic work, and better things are likely coming to those we empathize with. Empathy in Trinity is usually painful. This pain is often a consequence of hopelessness or inability to affect a situation. The protagonist may want to save the dolphin, for instance, but there is no hope of that.

The other outcome of perceived blamelessness is culpability. Whatever suffering we encounter in Trinity, you can be sure that humanity is its author. There are no earthquakes or tornadoes behind the white doors, only people and their gadgets. Sometimes, the culpability is not so general. We feed the terrified lemming to the snake, for instance. Some players will feel a pinch, there!

Hard Luck Lizard

The central mid-game puzzle of Trinity involves mixing spell ingredients in a cauldron. We discover both recipe and cauldron in the same shack where the book and map are located.

The magpie croaks, "Awk! Milk and honey, fresh whole lizard."
...
"Awk! Fresh whole lizard. Awk!" squawks the magpie.
...
"Awk! Killed in the light of a crescent moon," screeches the magpie.
...
"Awk! Crescent moon. Awk!"
...
The magpie says, "Awk! Mix 'em with a pinch o' garlic. Awk!"
...
"Awk! Then stand back! 'Cause it go BOOM. Awk!"

The lizard seems a rather extravagant request, particularly the bit about the crescent moon. There is a skink beyond the Pluto door, though it is–quite reasonably, as it turns out–afraid of the protagonist. It can be cornered with correctly placed lighting:

The skink scrambles out of the lighted crevice, slips between your legs and scurries away into the east tunnel. A moment later it reappears, blinking helplessly from the glow of the lantern.
With no place to hide, the flummoxed skink runs in circles at your feet.

Considering the entire Infocom catalog, we players are well on our way to shattering previous records for killing frightened animals. The skink’s story ends in what is, in my opinion, the most dramatic and visually striking scene of Trinity. Beyond the Mercury door lies the vacuum of space. The Wabewalker can survive–briefly–if they enter while encased in a soap bubble.

>enter door
You squeeze the soapy film through the white door.

Earth Orbit, in a soap bubble
You're five hundred miles above a sea of ice, hurtling in profound silence over the Arctic atmosphere. Layers of crimson and violet describe the curve of the horizon, blending imperceptibly into a black sky crowded with stars.

The soapy film around you freezes instantly, but remains intact.

The white door drops away behind you.

You watch helplessly as the white door dwindles to a distant speck, vanishing at last between the horns of the rising moon.

Provided the player plans correctly, the Wabewalker can kill the skink before getting back to the door. It will be unpleasant for what I hope will be most players: I personally cast about for alternatives, even though I knew that Trinity was not the sort of game where players can get out of killing small animals.

>kill skink
The tiny lizard writhes in your grasp and claws at your fingers, its pink mouth gasping for breath. You squeeze harder and harder until your fist trembles with the effort.

The skink stops squirming.

The episode further illustrates the adventure game ethos discussed in a previous post: take everything, use everything, go everywhere, win. It is a world in which nothing is more than its utility. Is humanity a kind of cosmic adventurer? In any case, the Wabewalker’s encounter with the skink engenders feelings of empathy, culpability, and also, yes, inevitability. The only alternative to killing the skink, after all, is quitting the game entirely.

All that remains is to throw the body in a pot resting–quite appropriately–near the map and book of hours. Casting a spell is, after all, a way in which Trinity participates in traditional adventure game design: this is a treasure hunt. The items in the shack speak to us–not the Wabewalker–as players familiar with adventure games. Whatever the moral or cosmic implications of the Wabewalker’s quest might be, we players know how to deal with a treasure hunt. In the end, Trinity‘s design fulfills, rather than abolishes, the cave game.

I think that must be the point.

By the Light of the Moon

A last detail bears mentioning. This outer space adventure takes place in a future. I say “a future” because in Trinity the so-called “Star Wars” antiballistic missile program was a success. The atomic relevance–each mushroom represents an atomic detonation–of this vignette is a confrontation between a satellite and a missile. Since Trinity is concerned with past explosions, it must take place in this hypothetical future.

Why is this important? Atomic warfare, in Trinity, cannot be stopped. In fact, in its future setting, it has already happened.

Next

Suffer the children.

The post Now I Am Become Death appeared first on Gold Machine.

a day ago

Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian - Dec 06

A Conversation with Andrew Plotkin

For some of you, Andrew Plotkin will need no introduction. The rest of you ought to know that he’s quite an amazing guy, easily one of the half-dozen most important figures in the history of post-Infocom interactive fiction. By my best reckoning, he’s written an even dozen fully realized, polished text adventures in all, from […] a day ago

For some of you, Andrew Plotkin will need no introduction. The rest of you ought to know that he’s quite an amazing guy, easily one of the half-dozen most important figures in the history of post-Infocom interactive fiction. By my best reckoning, he’s written an even dozen fully realized, polished text adventures in all, from 1995’s A Change in the Weather, the co-winner of the very first IF Competition, to his 2014 Kickstarter-funded epic Hadean Lands. While he was about it, he made vital technical contributions to interactive fiction as well; perhaps most notably, he invented a new virtual machine called Glulx, which finally allowed games written with the Inform programming language to burst beyond the boundaries of Infocom’s old Z-Machine, while the accompanying Glk input-output library allowed then to make use of graphics, sound, and modern typography. Over the last ten years or so, Andrew — or “Zarf,” as his friends who know him just a little bit better than I do generally call him — has moved into more of an organizing role in the interactive-fiction community, taking steps to place it on a firm footing so that its most important institutions can outlive old-timers like him and me.

Andrew was kind enough to sit down with me recently for a wide-ranging conversation that started with his formative years as an Infocom superfan in the 1980s, went on to encompass some of his seminal games and other contributions of the 1990s and beyond, and wound up in the here and now. I hope you’ll enjoy reading this transcript of our discussion as much as I enjoyed chatting with Andrew screen to screen. He’s refreshingly honest about the sweet and the bitter of being a digital creator working mostly in niche forms.

One final note before we get started: Andrew is currently available for contract or full-time employment. If you have need of an experienced programmer, systems architect, writer, and/or game designer whose body of work speaks for itself, you can contact him through his website.


The munchkin Zarf, 1971.

Perhaps we should start with some very general background. Have you lived in the Boston area your whole life?

No, not at all! I only moved to Boston in 2005.

I was born in 1970 in Syracuse, New York, a place that I don’t remember at all because my family moved to New Jersey when I was about three. We lived there for a couple of years, then my father got a job in the Washington, D.C., area. I went to primary school through high school there.

And when and where did you first encounter interactive fiction?

It must have been around 1979. My father’s company had a “bring your family to work” day. A teletype there was running Adventure. My father plunked me down in front of it and explained what was going on. I thought it was the best thing in the universe. I banged on it for a couple of hours while everybody else was running around the office, although I didn’t get very far.

For the next few months, Dad was playing it at work, illicitly — that was how everybody played it. He would bring home these giant sheets of fan-fold printer paper showing his latest progress. As I recall, I suggested the solution to the troll-bridge puzzle: giving the golden eggs to the troll. That was great, the first adventure-game puzzle I solved.

When did you first get a computer at home?

Around 1980, we got an Apple II Plus. We acquired the first three Scott Adams games and Zork, which was newly available, plus Microsoft’s port of Adventure to the Apple II.

Andrew’s bar mitzvah cake took the form of an Apple II.

That started my lifelong attachment to Infocom. I played all the games as they came out. I begged my folks to buy them for me. Later, I spent my own money on them.

You played all of the Infocom games upon their first release?

Pretty much, up until I went off to college. I remember that I did not play Plundered Hearts when it came out.

That one was a hard sell for a lot of young men — although it’s a brilliant game.

Yeah. I didn’t play it because I was a seventeen-year-old boy.

I also didn’t play Zork Zero or the [illustrated] games that came after it because I had gone off to college and didn’t have the Apple II anymore. But I did catch up with all of them a few years later.

You mention that you did get some adventure games from other companies when you first got the Apple II. Did that continue, or were you exclusively loyal to Infocom?

Well, I was haunting the download BBSes and snarfing any pirated game I could. I played Wizardry and Ultima. I didn’t play too many other text adventures. I knew they existed — I had seen ads for Mike Berlyn’s pre-Infocom stuff — but I didn’t really hunt them down because I knew that Infocom was actually better at it. I remember that we had The Wizard and the Princess, which was just clunky and weird and not actually solvable.

I know that you also wrote some of your own text adventures on the Apple II in BASIC, as a lot of people were doing at this time.

Yes. The first one I did was a parody of Enchanter. I called it Enchanter II. It was a joke game that I could upload to the BBSes: “Look, it’s the sequel!” It was very silly. It started out pretending to be an Infocom game, then started throwing in Doctor Who jokes. The closing line was, “You may have lost, but we have gained,” the ending from the Apple II Prisoner game. It was terrible.

But I did write it and release it. Unfortunately, as far as I know it’s lost. I’ve never seen it archived anywhere.

I did Inhumane after that. That was another parody game, but it was meant to have actual puzzles. It was inspired by the Grimtooth’s Traps role-playing books. I liked the idea of people dying in funny ways.

Inhumane is obviously juvenilia, but at the same time it shows some of what was to come in your games. There’s a subversive angle to it: here’s a game full of traps where the objective is to hit all the traps. That’s the way I play a lot of games, but inadvertently. Here that’s the point.

Were you heavily into tabletop RPGs?

No. Tabletop role-playing I was never into. I get performance anxiety when I’m asked to come up with stories on the fly. I just don’t enjoy sitting at a table and being in that position. It’s not my thing.

But I was interested in role-playing scenarios and source books. First, because of the long-term connection to [computer] adventure games, second because they had so much creative world-building and storytelling, just to read. So, yeah. I was interested in tabletop role-playing games but not in actually playing them.

A surprising number of people have told me the same: they never played tabletop RPGs much but they liked the source books. For some people, the imagination that goes into those is enough, it seems.

So, you go off to university. Why did you choose Carnegie Mellon University?

I got rejected by MIT! It was second on the list.

Were you aware that Infocom was connected so closely to MIT?

No. I knew that they were in Cambridge because I subscribed to the Status Line newsletter. There was a running theme of them mentioning stuff around Cambridge. And I’d played The Lurking Horror. But I didn’t have the full context of “these were MIT students who made Zork at MIT.”

I guess it would have made the rejection even more painful if you’d known.

At university, you’re exposed to Unix and the Mac for the first time.

Yes. And to the Internet. And I started learning “real” programming languages like C.

Did you also play games at university?

Yes. I ran into roguelikes for the first time.

Which ones did you play?

I played a fair bit of Advanced Rogue, but I never got good at it. There were people playing NetHack, but it was clear that that was a game where you had to put in a lot of time to make any serious progress. Rogue was a little bit lighter.

Yeah. I never was willing to put in the hours and hours that it takes to get good at those games. Now especially, when I write about so many games, I just don’t have the time to devote 200 hours to NetHack.

You’ve since re-implemented one of your own programming experiments from university, Praser 5.

That was not originally a parser-based text adventure. It was a puzzle stuck inside the CMU filesystem. Every “room” was a directory, connected by symlinks. You literally CDed into the directory and typed “ls,” and the description would pop up in the file listing. Then you would type, “cd up,” “cd left,” whatever, to follow symlinks to other directories. It was an experiment in using the tools of a shared computer system to make an embedded game. The riddles were a matter of running a small executable which was linked in each directory. I used file permissions to give people access to more things as they solved more puzzles.

Much later, after I had learned Inform 6, I did the parser version.

What did you do right after university?

I graduated in 1992, but I wanted to stick around the Pittsburgh area because a lot of my friends hadn’t graduated yet. I got a job in the CMU computer-science department and shacked up with a couple of classmates in a rundown apartment.

That was great. I bought my first Macintosh and started writing stuff on it. That’s when I started working on System’s Twilight. I figured it was time for me to get into my games career. I decided to write a game and release it as shareware to make actual money. So, I bought a tremendous number of Macintosh programming manuals, which I still have.

System’s Twilight has the fingerprints of Cliff Johnson of Fool’s Errand fame all over it.

Yes. It was an homage.

When did you first play his games? Was that at university?

Yeah. Those came out between 1988 and 1992, when I was there. I had a campus job, so I could afford a couple of games. I played them on the campus Macintoshes.

I remember very well being in one of the computer clusters at two in the morning, solving the final meta-puzzle of The Fool’s Errand. I had written down all of the clues the game had fed me on papers that were spread out all over the desk. Every time I used one of the clues, I’d grab the piece of paper, crumple it up, and throw it over my shoulder. When I finished, the desk was empty and I was surrounded by paper.

We had an amazing experience with The Fool’s Errand as well. My wife fell in love with it. It was our obsession for two weeks. When I talked to Cliff Johnson years ago, my wife told me to tell him that he was the only man other than me that she could see herself marrying. I wasn’t sure how to take that.

What were your expectations for System’s Twilight?

I intended to make some money. I didn’t know how much would show up or whether it would lead to more things. It was just something I could do that would be a lot more fun than the programming I was doing in my day job.

Now that you had your own Macintosh and a steady income, I guess you started buying more commercial games again? I know you have a huge love for Myst, which came out around this time.

I was actually a little bit late to Myst. I didn’t play it until 1994, when everybody was already talking about it.

But when you did, it was love at first sight?

Yeah. The combination of the environment and the soundscape was great and the puzzles were fun. It felt like someone was finally doing the graphical adventure right. I’d never gotten into the LucasArts and Sierra versions of graphical adventures because they were sort of parodic, and the environments weren’t actually attractive. They were very pixelated. They just weren’t trying to be immersive. But Myst was doing it right.

As long as we’re on the subject: I guess Riven absolutely blew your mind?

Yes, it did. It was vastly larger and more interesting and more cohesively thought-through than Myst had been. I played it obsessively and solved it and was very happy.

At what point did you get involved with the people who would wind up being the founders of a post-Infocom interactive-fiction community?

In 1993 or 1994, someone pointed me to an open-source Infocom interpreter. I hadn’t really been aware of the technology stack behind Infocom’s games. But now you could pull all of the games off of the Lost Treasures disks and run them on Unix machines. That was kind of interesting.

I don’t remember how I encountered the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup. But when I did, people were talking about reverse-engineering the Infocom technology. I wrote an interpreter of my own for [Unix] X Windows that had proportional fonts, command-line editing, command history, scroll bars — all the stuff we take for granted nowadays. I released that, then ported it to the Macintosh. That was my first major interaction with rec.arts.int-fiction.

It must have been around this time that Kevin Wilson made a very historically significant post on Usenet, announcing the very first IF Competition. You submitted A Change in the Weather and won the Inform category. Did you write that game specifically for the Comp?

Let me back up a little bit. In early 1995, I got an offer from a game company in Washington, D.C, called Magnet Interactive, to port games from 3DO to Macintosh. So, I moved to Washington — I was very sad to leave Pittsburgh behind — and rented a terrible little rundown apartment there. I was also making some money from System’s Twilight, and had started working on a sequel, which was to be called Moondials. It was a slog. I had some ideas for puzzles, but the story was just not coming together.

So, when Kevin Wilson said, “Hey, let’s do this thing,” I said, “I’m going to take a break from Moondials and write a text adventure very fast.” The process started with downloading Inform 5 and the manual and reading it. I think I blasted through the manual five times in a week.

The start of the Competition was a little weird because we didn’t yet have the idea of all of the games being made available at the same time. Kevin just said, “Upload your games to the IF Archive.” So, all of the games trickled in at different times. For the second Comp, we settled very firmly on the idea of all games being released at the same time because the 1995 experience was not very satisfactory.

I know that it’s always frustrating to be asked where ideas come from. But sometimes it’s unavoidable, so I’m going to ask it about A Change in the Weather.

I think I was drawing on the general sense of being an introvert and not making friends easily — being separated from people and feeling alienated from my social group. My college experience wasn’t solidly that. I was an introvert, but I was at a computer college, and there were a lot of introverts and introvert-centered social groups. I had friends, had housemates after college, as I said. But I still struggled somewhat with social activities. It was a failure mode I was always aware of, that I might end up on the edge not really talking to people. I drew on that experience in general in creating the scenario of A Change in the Weather.

That’s interesting. From my outsider perspective, I can see that much more in So Far, your next game. It really dwells on this theme of alienation and connection, or the lack thereof. That also strikes me as the game of yours that’s most overtly influenced by Myst. Just from the nature of the environment and the magical-mechanical puzzles. It’s not deserted like Myst, but you can’t interact in any meaningful way with the people who are there — which goes back to this theme of alienation.

I wasn’t thinking of Myst specifically there, but it was part of my background by that point. The direct emotional line in So Far was breaking up with my college girlfriend. That was a couple of years in the past by this point. That had been in Pittsburgh. A lot of the energy for working on System’s Twilight came from suddenly being stuck at home after that relationship ended. I channeled my frustrations into programming.

But then I tried to drop it into So Far as a theme of people being separated. None of the specifics of what had happened were relevant to the game — just the feeling.

By the time of So Far, you were as big as names get in modern interactive fiction. Your next game Lists and Lists was arguably not a game at all. What made you decide to write a LISP tutorial as interactive fiction? Do you have a special relationship with LISP?

Yes! I hate it! I had taken functional-programming courses in college and learned LISP. But I just did not jibe with it at all.

That’s ironic because Infocom’s programming language ZIL was heavily based on LISP.

Right. It was an MIT thing, but it was not my thing. Nevertheless, the concept of building it into the Z-Machine with a practical limit of 64 K of RAM — or really less than that — seemed doable. And I had written a LISP interpreter as a programming exercise during my first or second year in college. So, I was aware of the basics. Doing it in Inform wasn’t a gigantic challenge, just a certain amount of work.

Were you already starting to feel restless with the traditional paradigm of interactive fiction? Right after Lists and Lists, you released The Space Under the Window, which might almost work better if it was implemented in hypertext. It’s almost interactive poetry.

I wasn’t bored with traditional games, but I did want to try different things and see what could be done. And writing in Inform was simple enough that I could just whip out an idea and see whether it worked. That was inspiring the whole community at this point. That was the lesson of the first IF Comp: you can just sit down and try an idea, and a month later people will be talking about it. There was a very rapid fermentation cycle.

Yes. It led to much more formal experimentation. Before the Comp came along, everybody was trying to follow the Infocom model and make big games. But if you have an idea that’s more conceptual or avant garde, it’s often better suited to a smaller game. The Comp created a space for that. If you do something and submit it to the Comp, even if it’s highly experimental, it will get played and noticed and discussed.

Now we come to The Big One of your games in many people’s eyes. And I must admit that this applies to me as well. Spider and Web is such a brilliantly conceived game. I’m in awe of this game. So, thank you for that.

You’re welcome. It’s always tricky to have a game which is so purely built out of a single idea because then, when you try to write another game, you think you have to come up with another idea that’s as good, and it’s never possible.

Was this idea born out of any particular experience, perhaps with other media?

I don’t think it was. I was prying into what we would now call the triangle of identities — prying into the idea that what the game’s text is telling you is a point of view that might have biases behind it. There is a dialog between what the player thinks about the world and what the game thinks about the world, and there can be cracks in between. That led to the idea of using the storytelling of the game to tell a lie, and that there is a truth behind it which can be discerned.

I started with that kernel and started coming up with puzzle scenarios. Here is an outcome that is verifiable. But there’s two different versions of what happened that could have led to that outcome. I’m going to tell one, but the other is going to be the truth. I strung together a few different versions of that. Then I said, okay, if we’re lying, then the introduction of the game has to introduce the lie. So I folded that in from the start. I knew that I wanted a two-part structure: you learn what’s going on, then you make use of all of the information.

The moment of transition between the two is often referred to as simply The Puzzle. It’s been called the best single text-adventure puzzle ever created. Did you realize how special it was at the time?

No. I figured it would be a puzzle. I didn’t understand how much of an impact it would have. I knew that I wanted to surprise players by having a possibility suddenly become available. Here’s a thing that I can do, and I will do it. Any kind of good puzzle solution is a surprise when you think of it. Afterward it seems obvious. I knew I had a good combination of elements to make it work, but I wasn’t thinking about the way that it would reorient the entire history of the game in the player’s head in one fell swoop. I don’t know. Maybe I had an inkling.

What I love is that the game is called Spider and Web. Suddenly when you solve that puzzle, those two categories get reversed. Who is really the spider and who is caught in the web?

The reason I called it Spider and Web was actually the old idiom “What a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive.” The notion of deception was meant to be part of the title, and the spider was there just to go with the web. But yes, it’s multi-valent.

I know you’re a big reader of science fiction and fantasy. I wouldn’t picture you reading a James Bond novel. What made you decide to go in the direction of spy fiction here?

Honestly, I thought of it as science fiction. The spy fiction was merely because the story was about deception, and somebody had to be fooling somebody. But conceptually, I had it pinned as a science-fiction scenario from some kind of dystopian cold war, but with magically advanced technology.

You entered Hunter, in Darkness into the 1999 IF Comp. It’s a riff on Hunt the Wumpus, which is about the most minimalist imaginable text adventure, if you can even call it that. Your game, by contrast, is a lushly atmospheric, viscerally horrifying fiction. Were you just being cheeky?

Yeah, I was. I just wanted to put in all the stuff that Wumpus didn’t have, without getting away from the core concept. I thought it would be a funny thing to do. I worked really hard on the claustrophobia and the creepy bats. I remember crawling under a chair to try to get the feel of being in a narrow passage and not being able to move around — just to get the bodily sense of that.

Then we have Shade from 2000, which is another of my favorites of your games. Even more than Hunter, in Darkness, it has a horror vibe.

Yes. I leaned into it harder in Shade.

There are all kinds of opinions about what is really going on in Shade. I know you like to let people draw their own conclusions about your games, so I won’t press you on that…

I don’t think there’s a lot of disagreement on the main point, that you’re dying and this is all a hallucination.

Yeah, that was absolutely my take on it, that you’re dying of thirst in the desert. I saw it pointed out in a review that everything you’re trying to do is the opposite of the real problem you have. You’re trying to get out of your apartment in the hallucination, but your real problem is that you are out, lost in the desert. Was that something you were consciously doing, or are we all reading too much into it?

Well, neither. I don’t think I was consciously thinking that way, but that doesn’t mean that you’re reading stuff into it. It’s deliberately ambiguous. I had a lot of images in my head that I threw out at random. I did have the notion that this environment in your apartment was from your past. You really had packed up your apartment and called a taxi and gotten out, and reiterating it was… inappropriate but real. It was in your head while you were having this terrible experience, and it was being replayed by your brain in a broken way. You’re in a place of blinding light — it’s very hot — and the experience you’re replaying is very dim and dark, except that when light occurs it’s painful.

A rare 1999 meeting in the flesh of interactive-fiction luminaries. From left: Andrew Plotkin, Chris Klimas, David Dyte, and Adam Cadre.

Although your games of the 1990s are fondly remembered and still played, you were also making major technical contributions. Probably most important was the Glulx — sorry, I can’t say that word! — virtual machine to let Inform games expand beyond the strictures of Infocom’s old Z-Machine. How did that come about?

No one knows how to pronounce it!

I started to think about it in probably 1996, when Graham [Nelson] came out with version 7 and 8 of the Z-Machine. Version 8 was big — big enough for Graham’s Jigsaw — but it was still just a stopgap. It was only twice as big as Infocom’s version 5. There were all kinds of things that didn’t scale. It seemed worthwhile to make a fresh design that would be 32-bit from the start. I just didn’t want to deal with more incremental changes. And being able to jettison all of the weird legacy stuff about the Z-Machine seemed like a win too — being able to rethink all of these decisions in a technological context that is not 1979.

One of the things I wanted to do was to separate out the input-output layer. I had already written Z-Machine interpreters for X Windows and Mac that used Mark Howell’s ZIP engine with different interface front-ends. When TADS went open-source around 1997, I made an interpreter for that. So, now I had this matrix, right? I’ve got an X Windows front-end and a Mac front-end, and they both slap onto the Z-Machine and the TADS virtual machine. In a pretty clear way, these things are just plug and play. All the virtual machine does is accept text input and generate text output. I mean, yes, there’s the status line, maybe sound and graphics, but fundamentally that’s what it’s doing. And the front-end presents that text in a way that suits the platform on which it’s running. I was doing the same thing that Infocom did, just slicing it into more layers. Infocom had an interpreter and a game file. I said, we’re going to have an interpreter engine and an interpreter front-end. Thus there will be more flexibility.

I designed the front-end first, the Glk library. I made an implementation for Mac and for X Windows and for the Unix command line. Then I started thinking about the virtual machine. I ripped apart the Inform 6 compiler so it could compile to Glulx from the same game source code.

As I recall, the Glulx virtual machine is bigger than the Z-Machine — for all practical purposes, its capacity is infinite — but also simpler. There’s less of the hard-coded stuff that Infocom included, like the object tables.

Yes, exactly. I figured the more generic and simple I could make it, the better. It would be simpler to design and simpler to implement. It adds complexity to the compiler, but the compiler already needs code to generate object tables in a specific format. It would still be doing that, but there wouldn’t be any hardware support for them. I’d just have to include veneer routines to handle object tables in this format. Then, if we ever need to change the format, no problem. We just change the compiler. We don’t need to change the virtual machine.

When did you publish the Glulx specification?

April 1, 1999.

Were you still living in Washington, D.C., at this time?

I had moved around a lot, actually. The job in D.C. only lasted about a year and a half. After the porting project I had been doing finished up, the company dropped me onto a project to do a Highlander licensed game, which we had absolutely no concept of how to do. This would have been like a 3D action game. That project got canned.

Then I worked for a document company in Maryland for a while. Then I moved back to Pittsburgh and worked for a startup. The startup got acquired by Red Hat, and they moved us down to North Carolina. That was from like 1999 to 2000. Then Red Hat fired us and I moved back to Pittsburgh. From 2000 to 2005 I worked for a filesystem company in Pittsburgh.

You took a break from writing interactive fiction for a few years after Shade. Then there was a little bit of a shift in focus when you did come back in 2004 with The Dreamhold. Your earlier games don’t try too hard to be accessible. When you returned, you seemed more interested in outreach and accessibility. What was the thought process there?

Only the obvious one. It’s true that all of my previous games were written very much for the community. They were written for people who knew how IF worked. But The Dreamhold was specifically an outreach game. I wanted to try to expand the community. We’d been doing this for about ten years at that point, and it was kind of the same crowd of people. I thought to create an outreach game as a total wild-ass experiment to try to bring in people from other parts of the gaming world. I didn’t know whether it would work, but I figured it was worth a try. So I designed a game specifically for that purpose, built around explaining how traditional interactive fiction worked to people who didn’t know how to play it.

That meant doing some wacky stuff. There are some rooms in The Dreamhold that you enter by going north, but to go back you have to go east, because I figured, this is really uncomfortable, but people are going to run into this if they get into IF, so they should be familiar with the concept. I’ll try to introduce it as smoothly as possible by putting messages like, “The corridor turns as you head to the north.” Then put in the [room] description, “You can go back the way you came, toward the east,” to try to make it more tangible. But I wanted to introduce complicated maps and darkness and all of the hardcore stuff that the community was used to. And also make it fun.

There were a number of these outreach efforts at the time. Some people were taking IF games to more conventional game jams. There were cheat sheets of “how to play IF” going around. My impression is that these efforts weren’t super successful. Is that your impression as well?

Yes, it is. None of it actually worked. It’s great that we made the on-ramps and it’s good that we still maintain them, but there was not a huge influx of new people coming onto the scene at that point.

My impression is that the community didn’t really start to grow until it opened itself up to non-parser-driven games: the Twine games and ChoiceScript games and so on. Presumably some percentage of those players became willing to try the parser games as well.

Yeah, but that was a little bit later, after 2010 or so. There was still a gap. I decided, well, The Dreamhold didn’t make an impact, so I’m just going to go back to writing wacky puzzle games.

Of course, in 2007 Inform 7 came out. I would say that drew people into creating games, because it was much more approachable for people who were not C programmers. There was a bit of a revolution there. It was just harder to see because it was new authors rather than new players.

The time around 2010 was an exciting one for you personally as well as the community. In addition to the ongoing buzz about Inform 7, Jason Scott released his Get Lamp documentary, and you launched a Kickstarter to make a game called Hadean Lands soon after.

Yes. In 2010, Jason Scott premiered Get Lamp at PAX East. He had interviewed me two or three years earlier — probably in 2007.

Yeah, he worked on that movie for almost ten years.

Exactly. It’s kind of funny to look back at 2007 and see me talking about releasing commercial interactive fiction.

But in 2010, all of the old Infocom guys showed up at PAX East. I was on that panel, sitting with Dave Lebling, Brian Moriarty, and Steve Meretzky. I was going… [genuflecting]

PAX East, 2010. From left: Dave Lebling, Don Woods, Brian Moriarty, Andrew Plotkin, Nick Montfort, Steve Meretzky, and Jason Scott. (Photo by Eric Havir.)

I’m not worthy!

Exactly.

Jason Scott brought Get Lamp to a game class at Tufts University a few weeks later. Since I was living about half a mile away, I came in and said, “Hi, I’m in this movie.” Afterward, I went up to Jason and said, “You know, people are talking about interactive fiction for the first time in fifteen years outside of our little community. Do you think I should do a Kickstarter for a giant IF game?” And Jason looks at me like I’ve got bananas growing out of my ears and says, “Yes, you should!”

He’s the most enthusiastic person in the world.

Yes. And of course, he’d just done a Kickstarter for the Get Lamp release. This was early for Kickstarter. There had been gaming Kickstarter projects before, but no really gigantic ones. So, getting $30,000 for an IF Kickstarter was kind of a big deal in 2010. So I went to the boss at my day job and said, “Well, I guess this is it for us. I’m quitting.” I knew that $30,000 wasn’t actually going to last me very long, living in Boston. But of course, I’d been in the software industry for decades by this point, so I had a fair amount of savings cushion built up. And I had a pile of Red Hat stock which was worth some money. I could live on it while I found my footing as an indie developer.

The Dreamhold had taken me nine months. I thought Hadean Lands would take me a year. Ha! It turned out that writer’s block is a hell of a thing. Hadean Lands kept getting sidelined. I got totally knocked over by the idea of doing a hypertext MUD. I spent a year writing that. That was Seltani, which was hugely popular for about two months in the Myst fan community; I did it as a Myst fan game and presented it at a Myst convention. Everybody loved it. But I wasn’t writing Hadean Lands, and eventually my KickStarter backers started to get upset about that.

I did slog through it. I got Hadean Lands done [in 2014]. I don’t feel like the story is hugely successful, but I’m very happy with the puzzle structure and the game layout.

As you know as well as I do, there’s a whole checkered history of people trying to monetize IF. A few years ago, Bob Bates of Infocom and Legend fame released Thaumistry. I was a beta-tester on that game. The game was very good, but these things just never work. It’s always a disappointment in the end. Nobody has ever cracked that code.

If you look at the Thaumistry Kickstarter and the Hadean Lands Kickstarter, you see that they made almost the same amount of money from almost the same number of backers. It’s the same crowd showing up: “Yeah, we still love ya!” But they’re not enough to make a living from…

The problem is getting outside of that crowd.

It’s no wonder that people like Emily Short have long since decamped, saying, “I have to work on different kinds of games with a larger reach.”

What about you? Do you think you will ever return to parser-based interactive fiction?

That’s a fair question. I’ve had a lot of starts toward things that I thought might be interesting. I started working on a framework for a kind of text game that’s not parser-based but also not hypertext in the sense that Twine is. It’s more combinatoric. I got two-thirds of the way done with building the engine and one-third of the way done with writing a game, then I kind of lost it. But I still think it’s interesting and I might go back to it. I don’t think it would go big the way Twine did, but it might reach a different audience. It’s a different way of thinking about the game structure.

Would you care to talk about your partnership with Jason Shiga to turn his interactive comic books into digital apps? I have played Meanwhile, the first of those.

Sure. I’d been aware of Jason Shiga ever since I started hanging out with Nick Montfort at MIT after I moved to Boston. Nick had a bunch of his early self-published stuff. He had the original printing of Meanwhile, as a black-and-white hand-cut book. I thought it was really neat.

Totally by coincidence, Meanwhile got picked up by a publisher just before that 2010 PAX East we talked about. A nice big hardback version of it was published. It was being sold at PAX East. I thought, man, this is great, I’d really love to do an iPhone version. This was 2010; iPhone games were big.

A little later, I did the Hadean Lands Kickstarter and quit my job. I needed to have more projects than just one text adventure, so I wrote to Jason Shiga and said, “Hey, I’m a big fan. I’d love to do an app version of your book.” Jason was amenable, so we had the usual conversations with lawyers and agents and signed a contract. I worked on that at the same time that I was planning out Hadean Lands. The iPhone app came out in 2011.

So, the finances of making a go of it as an independent creator of digital content without a day job didn’t quite pan out for you in the end. I feel your pain, believe me. It’s a hard row to hoe. What came next?

After Meanwhile and Hadean Lands, I felt very stuck. Jason [Shiga] was off working on non-interactive comics, so there wasn’t anything to do there. I bummed around for a while trying to find something that would make any kind of money at all, but I was not successful.

I’m skipping over huge chunks of time here, but in 2017 Emily Short and Aaron Reed were working on a project to do NPC dialog as a commercial product. It was essentially taking Emily’s old ideas about threaded dialog in parser games and turning them into a plugin which game designers could use in any game to have interesting multi-threaded conversations. I spent a couple of years working on that project with them. But it turned out that management at that company sucked and everybody bailed.

Since then until this year, I’ve been working for big and small games studios, working on the dialog parts of their games.

Coding dialog engines or writing dialog?

I’ve been a software engineer, working on the coding part, but working with the writers.

Also during this period, Jason Shiga started writing what he calls “Adventuregame Comics,” which are shorter Meanwhile-style books. I’ve started porting those. The Steam port of The Beyond and the iOS and Steam port of Leviathan are available now. The iOS port of The Beyond will be coming later.

Since Hadean Lands, you’ve stepped into more of an organizing role in the IF community.

Yes. I’m very proud to have transitioned from being a hotshot game writer to someone who is doing community support, building structures and traditions and conferences. I never wanted to be a person who was only famous for writing games, especially after I started writing fewer games. I really didn’t want to be a person who was famous for having been a big game writer in the 1990s. That’s a sucky position to be stuck in. There needs to be a second act.

It’s maybe a maturation process as well. When you get a little bit older, you realize that some things are important in a way you may not have when you were a young, hotshot game writer.

Yeah. I slowed down writing games because I started to second-guess myself too much. When you’ve written a lot of games that people got really excited about…

Then you’re competing with your own back catalog.

It doesn’t feel good. I’ve had trouble getting away from that.

You’ve done most of your organizational work in the context of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, so maybe we should talk about that more specifically. I’ll give you my impression of the reasons for its founding, and you can tell me if I’m right. You and some other people decided it would be wise to institutionalize things a little bit more, so that the community is no longer so dependent on individuals who come and go. With a foundation and a funding model and all of these institutional aspects, hopefully you set up the community for the long haul, so that it can survive if a server goes down or someone goes away.

Yeah, that’s exactly where it started. We’d been running for decades on people just setting up a server somewhere and saying, “Hey, I’ll run this thing!” That was the original IF Archive, the Usenet newsgroups, IF Comp, the Interactive Fiction Database, the IF Forum. It was workable, but everything was being paid out of somebody’s pocket. There wasn’t a lot of discussion about who was doing what or how much it cost. There was no fallback plan and no thinking about what would come next if somebody stopped doing something. Like, there was a long period when IFDB wasn’t getting any updates because Mike Roberts had a day job. Some things about it were clunky and hard to use, but you couldn’t fix them.

So, in 2015 or early 2016, Jason McIntosh, who was running the IF Comp at that point, had a conversation with somebody who said, “Why don’t you have a non-profit organization to support the IF Comp? Then you could get donations from people.” And Jason started running around in circles with a gleam in his eye, saying, “Yes! We should do this! We should do this! Whom do I know who can help?” He started talking to other people who were longtime supporters of things in the community. That included Chris Klimas, who had been supporting Twine for three or four years, and me — I’d been supporting the IF Archive for a while. Then Carolyn VanEseltine and Flourish Klink joined. Flourish was the only one who knew how to set up a non-profit. They had run a Harry Potter fan conference as a teenager, and, being excited and not knowing things were hard, had just done it.

We got into contact with the same lawyer Flourish had used. The lawyer told us what we needed: forms, bylaws, etc. Jason was the first president, I was the first treasurer. We went down to my bank and opened a business account for the organization. Then we wrote to the IRS to become a 501 C3 non-profit. We set up a website, found someone to give us a basic Web design and a logo. Then we announced it.

At the start, we just did the IF Comp; we collected about $8000 that first year for a prize pool. But over the course of the first couple of years, we added Twine and the IF Archive. The IF Forum was the next big addition. Then the IF Wiki and IFDB. Today each has its own steering group. And we have a grants committee now.

The NarraScope conference is another IFTF project. Would you like to tell a bit about that?

That was my idea. I’d always been keen on the idea of having a narrative-game-oriented conference. I’d been going to GDC for many years. GDC has a sub-track, a narrative-game summit, which is where people like Emily Short and Jon Ingold hang out. But it’s a very tiny slice of what GDC is. And of course GDC is expensive, so it’s hard to bring in the hobbyists and the indie people and the people who write IF Comp games. They just can’t afford GDC. I wanted to provide an alternative that was more approachable and affordable and friendly.

Once we as an organization had steady members and contributors and could bring in money, I said, “It’s time to think about a conference. Our first de novo project.” So, I talked to people I knew who had been involved in conferences, like the Myst fan conference, which is a very tiny thing that happens every year, like 100 people. But it’s been going for years and years. And of course Flourish had run a fan conference.

In 2017 or 2018, I went to GDC with a bunch of business cards that said, “We want to run an interactive-fiction, adventure, and narrative-oriented game conference. Want to help us?” I handed one to everybody I talked to. I found a bunch of people who were interested in helping. Nick Montfort said he could get us a space at MIT for the event relatively cheap. We put up a call for speakers, a website, etc. We were coordinating with the IFTF Education Committee, which is run by Judith Pintar, who goes all the way back to Shades of Gray.

Yeah, I had a great talk with Judith some years ago now.

I had strong opinions about how a friendly conference should feel. We had to bring in lunch so people would sit around and have conversations rather than splitting up and running all over Cambridge. I wanted long breaks between talks so people would have space to socially interact. I wanted badges that didn’t distinguish between speakers and attendees; we’re all here, and we’re not going to have superstars. I wanted an open and honest tone.

We made sure to have a keynote speaker who wasn’t an old fart. We didn’t want somebody like Scott Adams coming in and talking about what it was like back in the 1980s.

You didn’t want to become a retro-gaming conference.

Right. And we deliberately made the scope larger than just interactive fiction as found in the IF Comp or the IFDB. We didn’t want to limit the conference to those topics. We kept the admission price down to about $85.

That was 2019. We had about 250 people, and everything miraculously went perfectly. The worst disaster was when the Dunkin’ Donuts guy was dropping off coffee and hot cocoa. One of the urns blew its spout and dumped gallons of cocoa all over the floor. Someone said, “I know where there’s a mop,” and went and got the mop and cleaned it up. Great, let’s have the rest of the conference!

Local game companies made contributions, maybe $500 or $1000. Between that and the registration fees, the conference broke even. I admit that I threw in $2000 myself to make it balance, but that was because we splurged out and rented a bar on Sunday night. I said, okay, I’ll cover that, so that everybody can go out and have pizza and beer.

A dream achieved: Andrew closes the 2019 NarraScope conference in Boston. Time for pizza and beer!

It was a huge success. We said we would do it again next year. But of course next year was 2020. You know how that story goes.

But it was exciting enough that we wanted to keep going anyway, so we had an online event in 2020. We skipped 2021, then came back in 2022 with an online conference. Then we had a hybrid model for 2023 in Pittsburgh and 2024 in Rochester. And that’s the history of the thing in a nutshell. By now I’ve become just an advisor, which is a great relief.

How many people have attended the later conferences?

It’s very easy to attend an online conference, so about 500 or 600 people signed up for those. But in person in Pittsburgh, there were about 100, either because people didn’t want to travel in the pandemic era or because we were offering an online option, so a lot of people who could have showed up decided to stay home and watch the stream instead. This year was a little higher, like 120.

You were at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester this year?

Yeah. The space was spread out, which turned out to be a win, because we had to walk through the museum and walk past all the cool exhibits. People were jumping out between talks to explore the museum. It was a really neat space — but unfortunately more expensive than a university.

And there will be another conference in 2025?

There absolutely will. It’s going to be in Philadelphia at Drexel University. NarraScope has not yet become big enough to replace GDC, but we’re optimistic. [smile]

I don’t think you want that. It becomes very bureaucratic and soulless.

Yeah, obviously. But Justin Bortnick, who is the current IFTF president, has been talking to GDC about booth space to present IFTF on the show floor. The Video Game History Foundation had a booth there this year. We thought, we’re educational too! We could do that! It may actually happen.

Maybe we can wind up this conversation by talking about the current status of the IF community itself. For many years, it seemed to be quite stagnant in terms of numbers. We already talked about the outreach efforts that took place around 2005 and largely did not succeed. But about five years later, the hypertext systems started to come online. There was a big jump at that point. If you look at the number of games entered in the Comp, they actually trend down through the 2000s, then suddenly there’s a big spike around 2010 to 2012. They’ve stayed at quite a high level since then. Do you have a sense of whether these new, presumably younger people are jumping over to the parser-based stuff as well?

There are new faces on both sides. There is now an active group of retro-fans interested in parser games. That is, people who are excited about making new games and running them on Commodore 64s and the like. We had to update Inform to fix the support for the version 3 Z-Machine, which had been broken over time as everybody was writing bigger and bigger games. Now people want to write small games again.

And there is more interest in hybrid systems, intermediate models which are neither pure hypertext nor pure parser. For years and years, there were no new parser tools. I thought the last great parser development systems had already been implemented; people would stick with TADS 3 and Inform 7 forever. Then a parser system called Dialog appeared, which is a little bit different from them.

But there is certainly more energy on the hypertext side, especially because a lot of us old farts have drifted away. I’m not writing games anymore, Emily Short isn’t writing text games anymore, Jon Ingold and Aaron Reed went off and did their things, Adam Cadre went off to work on film scripts. There are new people writing new games, but I think the pool is going to shrink over time. But that’s okay. Everything that Jon Ingold has done at Inkle Studios is informed by the early text games he worked on and how he wanted to expand that to reach a bigger audience. Everything Sam Barlow has done — Her Story, Telling L!es, Immortality — is informed by his experience writing text games. The same goes for Emily Short. It’s still part of the conversation. It’s just not the center of it anymore.

Yeah. This is a discussion I’ve had from time to time since I started this site. My opinion is that when our generation dies that will probably mark the end of parser-based text adventures. You can say that’s tragic if you want to. At the same time, though, nobody’s writing plays like Shakespeare anymore, but Shakespeare’s plays are still out there.

And there’s still theater.

Yeah. Trends in interactive media, just the same as others forms of entertainment and art, come and go. They have their time, and then their time is over. I’m quite at peace with that.

I’m sort of handicapped by the fact that I haven’t played IF Comp games in quite a while.

I haven’t either. To be honest, I’ve played almost nothing made in the last ten years, just because I have so many old games on the syllabus for this site. Having too many games to play is not the worst problem to have, but it’s made me kind of a time traveler. I live in the past in that sense.

I do know that this year’s IF Comp winner was by Chandler Groover. I don’t think he’s our age. Ryan Veeder is younger than us.

I do look at the Comp website sometimes to see what’s going on. I’ve noticed that it still seems to be a parser-based game that actually wins the thing most of the time. That’s a sign of something, I guess.

Yeah. Maybe it’s a sign of old farts hanging on too long? But seriously, I think there is a new generation of parser-game authors. Whether it’s big enough to sustain itself after you and I are doddering in a nursing home, I don’t know.

There’s been so much progress with computer understanding of natural language. A lot of it is associated with large language models, of course, which is a fraught subject in itself. But I could imagine a system — a front-end — that could take natural language and translate that into something a traditional parser could more readily understand, then funnel it through even an old text adventure. I’m kind of surprised I haven’t heard of anything like that.

Someone did do that as an experiment and posted about it on the forum. Experimenting both with using LLMs on the input side to translate natural language into parserese, and also on the output side to translate generic room descriptions into more flowery, expanded text. I’m more interested in the input side because I like hand-crafted output, but that’s getting into the whole question of AI.

Yes, I have no interest whatsoever in reading AI-generated text in any context.

I think there wasn’t a lot of uptake on that idea just because the kind of people who are excited about AI aren’t excited about parser games in the first place. There have been several attempts to make an AI-generated text adventure, but they’ve all been by people who were not good at text adventures and didn’t know what they wanted out of it. There’s AI Dungeon, which uses an LLM to pretend to be a parser game. But because it’s all AI generated, it doesn’t really produce anything interesting.

The people who are interested in making parser games are mostly old-fashioned artisans who want to hand-craft everything and are not motivated to dive into AI as a shiny new pool. It might be different if someone who was an established parser-game author jumped in and wholeheartedly tried to make it happen. Revolutions are the result of one person getting involved and building something that takes off. Someone has to actually do the work. And to this point, nobody has done that. It’s very possible the whole AI thing will collapse in six months anyway.

I think that’s a very good possibility, but I think that if it does, it will leave behind some pieces in the rubble that are actually useful. Maybe a solution to our parsing problems can be one of them.

But I’ve kept you long enough. Thanks so much for the talk!

Thank you!



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a day ago

Renga in Blue - Dec 05

Crowther’s Adventure and Mirkwood Tales

As an example, suppose that the referee decides to build a story around the Glittering Caves with their unknown treasures and dangers. The referee must then decide when the story takes place, draw maps of the caves, and build the entire setting for the story. Finally, the referee must invent a beginning for a tale […] 2 days ago

As an example, suppose that the referee decides to build a story around the Glittering Caves with their unknown treasures and dangers. The referee must then decide when the story takes place, draw maps of the caves, and build the entire setting for the story. Finally, the referee must invent a beginning for a tale that sets forth some problem for the expeditionary force that will soon make its way into the imaginary realm. Perhaps there are tales of a great storehouse of gold to find or a dragon to be slain. Here, the referee decides that a large party of dwarves has been lost in a previously unexplored region of the Glittering Caves for whom the new expedition must search, discovering treasure and fighting against danger along the way.

— Eric S. Roberts, Mirkwood Tales

Back when I started the All the Adventures project in 2011, I embarked on what I understood at the time to be the first adventure game, Will Crowther’s version of Adventure. Will Crowther had abandoned his unfinished game in 1976 — eventually launching the form known as text adventures — while working at the computing firm Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. Don Woods took up the source the next year making the “canonical” 350 point version of the game which spread across the world. Source for the original (pre-Woods) game was only made public by Dennis Jerz in 2007.

Members of BBN in 1961 when the company went public: Leo Beranek, Jordan Baruch, Dick Bolt, Samuel Labate, and Robert Newman. This is 8 years before the initial demonstration of the ARPANET (leading to the Internet) and more than a decade before Will Crowther started working there. Source.

Before Jerz’s article, it wasn’t known what the original looked like: fantasy or not? How much was a “game” vs. “simulation”? The discovery included puzzles, magic, a maze, and a hint system, resolving this speculation. Still, most writing (including my own) focused more on the simulation-aspect than the magic-aspect of the game, but there was an enormous amount of material about Crowther’s caving experiences and not much about any other possible influences. Off and on Dungeons and Dragons had been mentioned, but even I didn’t make much with the connection, because Crowther didn’t talk about it in interviews and the evidence was light. However:

When a collection of BBNers learned about Dungeons and Dragons, the dungeon master created a game that was particularly detailed, went on for a year, and concluded with a 100-page “final report;” Will Crowther, a participant in Mirkwood Tales, soon after created the first computer adventure game.

That’s quoted from A Culture of Innovation: Insider Accounts of Computing and Life at BBN. Another participant in the campaign (not necessarily the same group) was Dave Lebling, future co-author of Zork and founder of Infocom. The nature of Mirkwood Tales remained murky, and given the lack of the “report” (which is more like a rules description), nobody had opportunity to pull that thread.

You can find the Mirkwood Tales report here. It has not been generally available prior to today (December 5, 2024). (Thanks to Kate Willaert, historian, and Eric Roberts, who ran the campaign and wrote the report. Note that file that Willaert received has had corrections and reformatting, meaning it is no longer 100 pages, but that might have been a round-number estimate anyway.)

I’m going to re-do the entire Adventure story, then replay the game, comparing the virtual cave with the actual cave (as done by Dennis Jerz) and comparing elements of the game with the Dungeons and Dragons campaign that Crowther and Lebling played in (which has never been done before).

In the middle of 1975, Will Crowther got a divorce.

He was married to Patricia Crowther, who had met Will while working on a Physics degree at MIT in the 50s, and they had two children. Even without the connection Patricia would have been famous for her caving prowess, as she was part of the 1972 expedition that discovered a link between the Flint Ridge Cave System and Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky, proving they were the same cave and hence the longest in the world.

As a result, Will started making his new game, combining his caving interests with fantasy:

Suddenly, I got involved in a divorce, and that left me a bit pulled apart in various ways. In particular I was missing my kids.

Also the caving had stopped, because that had become awkward, so I decided I would fool around and write a program that was a re-creation in fantasy of my caving, and also would be a game for the kids, and perhaps some aspects of the Dungeons and Dragons that I had been playing.

My idea was that it would be a computer game that would not be intimidating to non-computer people, and that was one of the reasons why I made it so that the player directs the game with natural language input, instead of more standardized commands. My kids thought it was a lot of fun.

Will Crowther

The timeline, as clarified by Jerz, has Crowther’s sister (Betty Bloom) taking a sabbatical during the development of the game, which we know to be the 1975-1976 academic year; she play-tested the game regularly, and it was her that ended up being the reason for the first magic word:

I was bored having to go through all the steps every time, and I said, “I want to go directly into the game.” [Dramatic pause.] “Ecks-why-zee-zee-why!”

This is referring to XYZZY, a magic word early in the cave, which is usable from the start to warp directly there. It’s a little odd in that it only bypasses what is barely a puzzle (finding keys to unlock the way in) but it makes sense as a vestigial “developer code”. Magic word as a system mechanic get utilized multiple times later by Woods.

The evidence shows the game being developed up from ’75 before progress stops in early ’76, whereupon it was released to Crowther’s system at BBN and seen by the public more generally. (My dating system for mainframe games gives the original Adventure a date of 1976, where it first started being distributed beyond the author’s inner circle.) Enough copies spread that one landed at Stanford, where Don Woods in 1977 saw it and decided he wanted to expand it. It wasn’t clear how to get into contact with Crowther (who was no longer at BBN by that point) so he sent a message to every single domain on the Internet with crowther@ at the front, getting a hit at Xerox.

This was in March 1977; we have a very exact month for this because files retrieved from Woods’s account include time stamps. The source code is here and a compiled version for Windows is here and will be the version I’m playing.

The plot, in this version, is looking for TREASURE AND GOLD. (In original D&D, finding treasure meant getting experience points. This is part of why the player is able to square off against the thief in Zork only after grabbing some treasure.) The “I WILL BE YOUR EYES AND HANDS” perspective imagines that the avatar in the universe and the computer narrator are one and the same. This is exactly analogus to how the “referee” of Mirkwood is described:

As the expedition wanders through the passages beyond the great Door, the referee acts as the party’s eyes and ears and describes each new scene.

The starting building has no analogue in Mirkwood…

YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY.

…but it does in the real cave, with one brick building that is now rubble, and also the historic Bransford Spring Pumphouse built in the 1930s.

Via Wikipedia.

Crowther’s building has keys, lamp, food, and a bottle of water that would be standard in all versions.

YOU ARE INSIDE A BUILDING, A WELL HOUSE FOR A LARGE SPRING.

THERE ARE SOME KEYS ON THE GROUND HERE.

THERE IS A SHINY BRASS LAMP NEARBY.

THERE IS FOOD HERE.

THERE IS A BOTTLE OF WATER HERE.

The outdoors are otherwise very small, and this is reflected by the Mirkwood notes:

Most of the action of the Mirkwood Tales occurs in underground caverns or inside large buildings rather than in open terrain. There are two principal reasons for restricting the setting in this way. First, the geography of a subterranean fortress or dungeon is much easier to define than that of an open area above ground. Rooms and passages may be described in relatively simple terms, and it is much easier to work with right angles and measurable distances than with general topographic descriptions. Furthermore, by restricting the world to a smaller area, it is possible to make the passage of time more meaningful. When large distances are involved, the time required to move from one region to another must be taken into account.

In order to achieve the effect of feeling like a forest where the player can move in any direction, Crowther includes “loops” which became quite standard, but also included “random” exits; sometimes a particular exit would do something different, making the act of mapping feel a little uncertain. This legacy caused some clone-games based on Adventure to have random exits (like The Phantom’s Revenge) and it has generally been awful every time. The reason it works here is that the design clearly is nudging the player away from the outdoors to the underground.

The most nightmarish version of random exits I’ve encountered is Dr. Livingston, where I needed to test every exit 10 times just in case there was a random trigger that caused the exit to do something else.

Exits marked with a color go to the “Forest”. Going north from the Forest will sometimes lead to a second, distinct Forest.

YOU ARE IN A 20 FOOT DEPRESSION FLOORED WITH BARE DIRT. SET INTO THE DIRT IS A STRONG STEEL GRATE MOUNTED IN CONCRETE. A DRY STREAMBED LEADS INTO THE DEPRESSION.

THE GRATE IS LOCKED

The Mirkwood campaign book describes a campaign session which kicks off with a cave with a long-forgotten door having old dwarven lettering.

Behold the Door to the Vault of Khazin, Lord of the Caves. Seek not to force this Door, for it is sealed with the power of the sun and the moon.

The riddle indicates a full moon followed by a sun must pass through the sky before the door opens. The Crowther grate rather just succumbs to the keys from the building, feeling a bit more like the simulation, but the results come across the same:

The Door stands open. Beyond the Door, there is a narrow dark passage that leads straight back into the earth.

Crowther’s tries to be a touch more realistic…

YOU ARE IN A SMALL CHAMBER BENEATH A 3X3 STEEL GRATE TO THE SURFACE. A LOW CRAWL OVER COBBLES LEADS INWARD TO THE WEST.

THE GRATE IS OPEN.

west

YOU ARE CRAWLING OVER COBBLES IN A LOW PASSAGE. THERE IS A DIM LIGHT AT THE EAST END OF THE PASSAGE.

THERE IS A SMALL WICKER CAGE DISCARDED NEARBY.

…and Jerz is able to start matching one-to-one pictures from the real cave with Crowther’s map.

The cage is followed by a “debris room” described akin to a real cave, but with Betty Bloom’s testing magic word, and the iconic three foot black rod with a rusty rod.

YOU ARE IN A DEBRIS ROOM, FILLED WITH STUFF WASHED IN FROM THE SURFACE. A LOW WIDE PASSAGE WITH COBBLES BECOMES PLUGGED WITH MUD AND DEBRIS HERE, BUT AN AWKWARD CANYON LEADS UPWARD AND WEST.

A NOTE ON THE WALL SAYS ‘MAGIC WORD XYZZY’.

IT IS NOW PITCH BLACK. IF YOU PROCEED YOU WILL LIKELY FALL INTO A PIT.

A THREE FOOT BLACK ROD WITH A RUSTY STAR ON AN END LIES NEARBY

The black rod represents the serious magic item that Crowther added, and it curiously enough, has two effects:

a.) a bird that comes shortly after cannot be caught while holding the rod

b.) a gap can only be filled with the rod, forming a crystal bridge

Original D&D does not have an generalized identify spell. Items are meant to be identified by experiment. Zenopus Archives mentions an example from the third OD&D book involving testing on some boots and identifying them as elven. Mirkwood also discusses the identification of magic, and again, the emphasis is on experimentation:

In addition to spells, magic appears in the Mirkwood Tales in the form of magical artifacts and equipment. More often than not, the magical effect of some object will not be clear from simple examination of the object, and it may require experimentation or searching for further clues to its nature.

This means the experience of fiddling with the rod — and finding two effects, both positive and negative — are similar to OD&D campaigns. In fact, it is rare in adventures (up to at least 1982) to have this type of dual-effect paradigm, and is more likely to be happened upon by someone creating a “campaign object”.

THE BIRD WAS UNAFRAID WHEN YOU ENTERED, BUT AS YOU APPROACH IT BECOMES DISTURBED AND YOU CANNOT CATCH IT.

Some more cave-matching rooms happen, and then the Hall of the Mountain King.

YOU ARE IN THE HALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING, WITH PASSAGES OFF IN ALL DIRECTIONS.

A HUGE GREEN FIERCE SNAKE BARS THE WAY!

drop bird

THE LITTLE BIRD ATTACKS THE GREEN SNAKE, AND IN AN ASTOUNDING FLURRY DRIVES THE SNAKE AWAY.

The Mirkwood campaign mentions “orcs and trolls”; with the snake Crowther is likely thinking more on the simulation end, as the Park at least does have venomous snakes (copperheads and rattlesnakes). That’s not the only enemy, as dwarves do appear and throw an axe at first, followed by knives.

THERE IS A THREATENING LITTLE DWARF IN THE ROOM WITH YOU!

In Crowther/Woods, you can pick up the axe and throw it, but that doesn’t work here, as Crowther was seemlingly worried about parser ambiguity in a way almost nobody working with a two-word parser was concerned with afterwards.

I HAVE TROUBLE WITH THE WORD ‘THROW’ BECAUSE YOU CAN THROW A THING OR THROW AT A THING. PLEASE USE DROP OR ATTACK INSTEAD.

Oddly, while you can ATTACK as suggested, the word ATTACK does not take a noun. You have to type ATTACK on its own, without DWARF following.

attack

YOU ATTACK A LITTLE DWARF, BUT HE DODGES OUT OF THE WAY.

The mechanic is clearly fully fleshed out, but Woods obviously did a little fixing here. The other oddity with the Crowther version of the game is that the axe doesn’t need to be held.

THERE ARE 2 THREATENING LITTLE DWARVES IN THE ROOM WITH YOU.

2 OF THEM THROW KNIVES AT YOU!

HE GETS YOU!

Switching back to Mirkwood, the dwarves in the Mirkwood campaign are dead…

The body is clearly that of a dwarf, but you do not recognize it immediately. All of the mail and weapons have been taken from the body, and the middle finger on the right hand has been cut off. Narvi remembers that Darzi wore a ring of gold and sapphire on his middle finger, and believes that this is Darzi’s body, mutilated by a band of orcs.

…but it is not hard to imagine them being alive and hostile. Maybe we’re the orc?

North of the Hall of the Mountain King are bars of silver, and farther north still is a room marked Y2. The Y2 is an actual survey station name in the actual cave. Enough turns in the room will have a hollow voice saying the word “PLUGH”, which this is activated so the player has another method of warping back to the building.

YOU ARE IN A LOW N/S PASSAGE AT A HOLE IN THE FLOOR. THE HOLE GOES DOWN TO AN E/W PASSAGE.

THERE ARE BARS OF SILVER HERE!

get bars
OK

n
YOU’RE AT Y2

A HOLLOW VOICE SAYS ‘PLUGH’

plugh
YOU ARE INSIDE A BUILDING, A WELL HOUSE FOR A LARGE SPRING.

“Jewelry” and “many coins” are off to the south and west of the Hall of the Mountain King and are just lying there (exactly like they are in the Woods version). “Diamonds” are also just lying about to be scooped up.

YOU ARE AT THE EAST END OF A VERY LONG HALL APPARENTLY WITHOUT SIDE CHAMBERS. TO THE EAST A LOW WIDE CRAWL SLANTS UP. TO THE NORTH A ROUND TWO FOOT HOLE SLANTS DOWN.

e
YOU ARE AT THE WEST END OF HALL OF MISTS. A LOW WIDE CRAWL CONTINUES WEST AND ANOTHER GOES NORTH. TO THE SOUTH IS A LITTLE PASSAGE 6 FEET OFF THE FLOOR.

e
YOU ARE ON THE WEST SIDE OF THE FISSURE IN THE HALL OF MISTS.

THERE ARE DIAMONDS HERE!

The only other treasure-puzzle is the “sparkling nugget of gold” which is too large to get up steps, and needs to be teleported via the aforementioned “plugh” method.

THIS IS A LOW ROOM WITH A CRUDE NOTE ON THE WALL.
IT SAYS ‘YOU WON’T GET IT UP THE STEPS’.

THERE IS A LARGE SPARKLING NUGGET OF GOLD HERE!

Crowther clearly intended to expand farther. To the north and down from the Hall of the Mountain King is an area leading to some “messy” rooms which go in random directions, but also one direction that crashes the game…

…and most importantly, an “under construction” sign. This is clearly meant as literal as Crowther was in the middle of “constructing the cave”.

YOU ARE AT A COMPLEX JUNCTION. A LOW HANDS AND KNEES PASSAGE FROM THE NORTH JOINS A HIGHER CRAWL FROM THE EAST TO MAKE A WALKING PASSAGE GOING WEST THERE IS ALSO A LARGE ROOM ABOVE. THE AIR IS DAMP HERE. A SIGN IN MIDAIR HERE SAYS ‘CAVE UNDER CONSTRUCTION BEYOND THIS POINT. PROCEED AT OWN RISK.’

There are exits described that don’t actually exist.

YOU ARE IN SECRET CANYON AT A JUNCTION OF THREE CANYONS, BEARING NORTH, SOUTH, AND SE. THE NORTH ONE IS AS TALL AS THE OTHER TWO COMBINED.

n
THERE IS NO WAY TO GO THAT DIRECTION.

The “crash” on the map incidentally sends the player back to the building at the start, and then immediately quits the game.

The last aspect of note — which has no treasures and is also clearly meant as a stub — is a maze, the “all alike” maze. It has different design than the Woods version, as it is far more regular and there’s no pirate nor pirate treasure.

Mirkwood Tales likely cannot be blamed at all for the maze; the word “maze” does not even appear anywhere in the text.

Crowther’s Adventure has a similar perspective on resurrection as Mirkwood Tales: if you die (via dwarf knife or by trying to walking around in dwarkness) the game simply ends with a PAUSE, unlike the Woods version of the game which offers resurrection for a price. Since Mirkwood is quite directly based on Tolkien, and the player isn’t Gandalf, if they’re dead, they’re dead.

In all games designed along the lines of Dungeons and Dragons, there is a strong temptation to make death somewhat less fatal by allowing resurrection or reincarnation. In Tolkien’s world, the ordinary character has no power over death, and only Gandalf is able to return to the world of the living. As such, resurrection does not play a part in the Mirkwood Tales, and death truly represents the final moment of a character’s existence.

However, the system itself does offer the possibility of resuming the game. Typing “go” will resume a paused program. The overall impression is a “cheater” version of resurrection like the one found later in Orb.

YOU FELL INTO A PIT AND BROKE EVERY BONE IN YOUR BODY!

PAUSE GAME IS OVER statement executed
To resume execution, type go. Other input will terminate the job.

go

Execution resumes after PAUSE.

light lamp

YOUR LAMP IS NOW ON.

It isn’t like Crowther was trying to “adapt Dungeons and Dragons” entirely — this is not an RPG, and nearly every room has an analogue in the real cave — but there’s still clearly some flavor of Crowther’s world found in the campaign he participated in, with the treatment of magic, direct reference to the computer as the “eyes” of the player, and heavy emphasis on dwarves (if a bit more aggressive in this game).

The key to Dungeons and Dragons is that the spirit behind the dragon is not a player in the game. The players all stand together as they come to grips with the forces of the universe. The dragon is part of that universe, and like all things within that universe, good and bad, the dragon is controlled by the designer of the world who acts not as a player, but as a referee in a game of imagination and adventure. The referee sets forth the beginning of each legend, gives out all the new information as the epic unfolds, controls the characters in the story that the players encounter, and manages the workings of the world. And yet, the referee is not the actor in the story. The referee sets the scene, but the players independently determine the course that events will take.

There’s some new material we have when Woods picks up the story, so what I’m going to do next is write about the Software Toolworks version of Adventure (the only one that paid Crowther and Woods) and continue the history at the same time.

Map to the Mirkwood sample adventure given in the document.

(Also, go read Kate Willaert, and the Gaming Alexandria discord, without whom this post would not be possible.)

2 days ago

Gold Machine - Dec 04

After the people have gone, all we have left is humanity (4/?)

A different sort of cosmic horror. Thought Experiments We might all disagree regarding the details, but my guess is that few people would answer “no” with confidence to any of these questions. So What? While it is true that there is a story–a historical account–to be told about the invention of atomic weaponry, I resist […]

The post After the people have gone 3 days ago

A different sort of cosmic horror.

Thought Experiments

  • If the Trinity test never happened, would atomic weapons have nevertheless been invented?
  • If J. Robert Oppenheimer had been anything other than a physicist, would atomic weapons have nevertheless been invented?
  • A more speculative question: would prevention of the Trinity test preclude the inciting incident of Trinity (atomic warfare between the Americans and the Soviets)?
  • Would preventing US atomic testing in the Marshall Islands have precluded the inciting incident of Trinity? What about the Russian test in Siberia?

We might all disagree regarding the details, but my guess is that few people would answer “no” with confidence to any of these questions.

So What?

While it is true that there is a story–a historical account–to be told about the invention of atomic weaponry, I resist the idea that the story is sufficient. If we look at stories about Trinity, we find an account–a legend, perhaps–of the Great Men who overcame seemingly insurmountable problems of science, engineering, project management, and politicking to create The Deadliest Thing to Ever Exist.

It’s important to tell these stories, of course, but it’s good to pull the camera back now and then. With a little distance, what can we say was the essential ingredient that led to creation of the atomic bomb? Oppenheimer? That good old fashioned American can-do spirit? I don’t think so. Other countries were working on their own bombs, and Americans seemed undeterrable. I think hubris made the bomb inevitable, as did a certain amount of what American legal systems refer to as “depraved indifference.”

With a little distance, what can we say was the essential ingredient that led to creation of the atomic bomb? Oppenheimer? That good old fashioned American can-do spirit? I don’t think so.

I assert that atomic weaponry was inevitable because of human nature. This is an important distinction for me, that of “humanity” as opposed to “people.” People are the stuff of stories, of narrative, of history. Humanity, on the other hand, participates in history without being history. History reveals truths about humanity. For instance, history might help us conclude that knowledge of atomic power would make development of atomic power inescapable.

If this separation seems trivial, I counter that Trinity is ultimately about cosmic forces and considerations. What is humanity’s place in the universe? In our world? We ought to consider the moral–not ethical, because ethics is generally concerned with decisions and individuals–implications of making and wielding tools of baffling destructiveness. The mysterious commentator who makes wisecracks throughout the game (an older version of the protagonist?) says that the Wabewalker fails to stop the Trinity test because of causation and “quantum steam” and who knows what else, but perhaps the futility of Trinity‘s ending (more in a future post!) is also a misunderstanding between Wabewalkers of all ages: stopping Trinity wouldn’t stop the advance of atomic weapons.

Which is all to say: Trinity is, in a curious and specific way, a tale of cosmic horror. An implacable force wields a fundamental power of the universe, capable of destroying not only humans but plants and non-human animals who have generally been minding their own business.

Don’t Blame Cthulhu

This brings us back to a previous post about the site of the Ivy Mike test, in which the Wabewalker encounters a rather charismatic dolphin. I argued there that the dolphin episode seemed to crystallize a defining tension in Trinity‘s text: that of humanity’s relationship with the rest of creation (as always, I use “creation” in a secular sense that includes a complex naturally occurring processes like evolution). I’ll quote myself:

Trinity is concerned with humanity’s place in creation, and the ways in which technological superiority has granted humans power without wisdom. Humanity’s relationship with the world is unnatural and distorted, and, rather heartbreakingly, the Wabewalker cannot change that.

In fact, the Wabewalker never tries to change humanity’s place in the natural world. That never even comes up. The Wabewalker–and perhaps we players, too–vainly hope to right cultural and moral wrongs by solving technical problems.

Since that specific episode has been examined in detail, we can quickly review the themes as I see them and then proceed. The Ivy Mike test portrayed in Trinity indicates humanity’s willingness to kill an uncountable number of organisms to better understand and “improve” their weaponry. One report has guessed that the majority of Enewetak Atoll, the site of the specific Ivy Mike detonations (many more would follow elsewhere the Marshall Islands), will once again be habitable in 2026. The enduring plague of radiation in the region has not only harmed dolphins but a great many people as well.

The Ivy Mike test portrayed in Trinity indicates humanity’s willingness to kill an uncountable number of organisms to better understand and “improve” their weaponry.

Since we are pushing beyond persons and individual choices it’s important not to get lost in the minutiae of programs or policies. Trinity takes special care to involve the Soviets in its narrative, as well. They initiated the attack on London, after all, and they have their own program of Siberian testing. Maintaining a species-centered or even cosmic perspective, we see that these belligerences are not merely discrete acts with their own stories and rationales. Rather, they indicate the sorts of things that, by virtue of being capable, humanity does.

Let’s have a look at another episode, considering not only its literal, dramatic content but some extrapolations as well.

The Lemming (Libra Door)

The Libra vignette takes in Soviet territory. Russian speech on a loudspeaker confirms this, but we can be more certain if we press our luck:

>sw
Are you sure you want to go that way?

[Please type YES or NO.] >y

A voice in your ear grumbles, "It's your funeral."

You draw closer to the group of buildings.

Control Bunkers

This cluster of military shelters is choked with scientific instruments, tended by men in heavy overcoats.

One of the guards patrolling the area greets your unexpected arrival by shooting you in the back. As your blood seeps into the permafrost, you note with interest the hammer-and-sickle insignia on the uniform of your grim assailant.

The Wabewalker has almost certainly travelled to the site of the first Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb (note: this is all a bit confusing, as I initially guessed that this took place at the test of “Tsar Bomba,” the most powerful atomic weapon ever used). This creates a parallel with the previously discussed Ivy Mike test, America’s first post-war test. Once again, if the player waits long enough, they’ll be caught at ground zero for an atomic blast:

>z
Time passes.

"Pyat, chetirye, tree, dva, adeen," barks the loudspeaker.

For an instant, you see your own shadow cast in stark silhouette across the ground.

As I’ve already said, I believe that this parallelism implies that the cosmic horror of atomic weaponry transcends individual and even governmental action. Yes, there remains ethical culpability for individual actors, but the grand scope and utility of the science as it is applied indicates something higher and vaster and, it must be said, harder to change.

What’s happening here, at this grim debut? A future post will discuss the experience of playing Trinity, so let’s focus on things on a purely textual level. The ground is covered with lemmings. There are lemmings everywhere!

Cliff Edge
The river bed ends here, on a cliff overlooking an Arctic sea. But where ancient waters once fell, there now pours a living stream of rodents. Driven by mindless instinct, too stupid or frightened to turn away, they plunge by the hundreds into the crashing waves below. You recognize the species now. Lemmings.

The lemming-as-metaphor is a little familiar, isn’t it? And on the nose, too! But it must be asked: whose nose, exactly? My own cold read is an implication that humanity is like a crowd of lemmings running toward and over a precipice. I don’t think it works very well. To me, it speaks to an ethical failure: human beings, individually, fail to think or act as individuals. The lemmings rush past as an uncountable number of separate lapses in existential courage.

Even though that can be true, it doesn’t really speak to what I see in the events of Trinity. The ending of Trinity suggests something quite different, namely that the individual can do very little in the face of such cosmic forces. The Wabewalker can futz around with knives and knobs as well as the next adventurer, but they can’t change humanity. Or the past.

Yes, there remains ethical culpability for individual actors, but the grand scope and utility of the science as it is applied indicates something higher and vaster and, it must be said, harder to change.

The other problem with the Lemming metaphor is that it doesn’t indicate what I have already called humanity’s “depraved indifference.” A more apt metaphor would be a vast array of other animals watching lemmings jump from a cliff with detached boredom. To that point: the Wabewalker is here to catch a lemming. What good is a lemming, anyway? As it turns out, you can feed a frightened lemming to a rattlesnake. Skipping ahead to the endgame:

The lemming sees the rattlesnake and begins to tremble.
...
The lemming covers its face with its paws and trembles.
...
The lemming cowers in the cage, trembling violently.
...
The lemming scrambles through the open closet door, straight into the fangs of the rattlesnake.

The lemming twitches for a while as the venom takes effect. Then the snake drags its prize across the floor, shakes its tail once for effect and slithers out of sight.

[Your score just went up by 3 points. The total is now 71 out of 100.]

Moriarty, a careful and thoughtful writer, almost certainly emphasizes the lemming’s fear for effect. If we consider the lemmings as an indicator of humanity’s place in creation, perhaps we can elaborate on themes of indifference and hubris. It’s worth noting that the lemmings, metaphorical or otherwise, inevitably die even if they have the individuated courage to resist the call of the cliff. The test will kill them all, and any other nearby living things besides.

Just as important, though, is an emerging idea of the natural, or non-human, in terms of utility alone. What good is a rodent in this world? The answer is pure adventure game logic: it is only good for solving problems. Trinity yields up a complicated experience of this phenomenon by insisting upon the animal’s fear. It can be argued, and I’m fairly certain that it has been, that the lemming and the skink (more to come!) push us to feel the weight of our choices. And yes, there is a feeling that the Wabewalker must be a little stonehearted to save the world from atomic destruction. We players must perform this brutal calculus!

For reasons that will be discussed in a future post, that math doesn’t really work. I get that reading, but I think we are invited to question an assumption frequently made regarding adventure games, namely that using and killing are natural answers to the world’s questions. Remember that we are reminded of the nature of Trinity‘s story as an adventure game by the map and book in the cabin. Their placement is humorous, to be sure, and they might or might not say something about freedom or destiny or history. At a very basic and fundamental level, though, they are elements of adventure games that are represented in every single “gray box” instruction manual, including Trinity‘s. The game does not want us to forget that it is a game; it insists upon its own game-ness.

The Wabewalker is a generic Infocom protagonist. I don’t mean an AFGNCAAP. I categorically reject that term because I know that silence has implications that I really ought to consider as a serious (I hope) critic. Seriously! No, I’m talking about what the character actually does. They (“guvnor” strongly indicates “he” in a 1986 game) are not so different from the Zork trilogy’s Adventurer. The player has them take everything and look at everything. Zork I‘s goal is to get all the things and do all the stuff and go all the places until a win-state is reached, and, prose and themes notwithstanding, Trinity is the same way. Depending on the order in which areas are explored, players may not know why they need a lemming in a narrative sense, but they will know that they need one because that’s just how adventure games are. They will get it because they can. I think there’s an interesting critique there that can be developed further.

Just as important, though, is an emerging idea of the natural, or non-human, in terms of utility alone. What good is a rodent in this world? The answer is pure adventure game logic: it is only good for solving problems.

Summing things up: the Wabewalker as individual makes utilitarian decisions based on hoped-for outcomes. The Wabewalker as everyman or stand-in for humanity is not a fearful or mindless follower (as in the lemmings). Rather, they are indifferent to the escalating belligerence between the United States and Soviet Russia. A reminder:

Sharp words between the superpowers. Tanks in East Berlin. And now, reports the BBC, rumors of a satellite blackout. It's enough to spoil your continental breakfast.

But the world will have to wait. This is the last day of your $599 London Getaway Package, and you're determined to soak up as much of that authentic English ambience as you can. So you've left the tour bus behind, ditched the camera and escaped to Hyde Park for a contemplative stroll through the Kensington Gardens.

What does it mean for humanity to behave as if it is the protagonist of an adventure game? Is humanity the lemming, or the snake? Finally, a thought or two regarding depraved indifference, which I have come to fear in our own time. As an American, I struggle to reckon with our policies, our electorate, our attitudes toward the many environmental treasures of this land. Sadly, there is plenty of malice to go around, and greed, too. There are bad actors, of course there are, but is the stupidity or fear of the lemmings responsible for the rest?

No. While we often mistake thoughtlessness for stupidity, they aren’t the same. Step back far enough, and it is hard to miss the influence of a rather depraved sort of indifference.

Ultimately, I don’t think Trinity demands acceptance of any particular philosophy. I do, however, believe that it holds a failure to think or care in contempt. That is the challenge it places before us.

Next

This analysis proved more fruitful than I originally planned. That’s fine, as I’d like to follow things wherever they go. After so much time, I’m committed to seeing this through. The next post will consider the brief and violent life of the skink, though a novel setting–outer space–will ensure that I do more than repeat the contents of this post.

I’ve joined bluesky, and I’m always looking for games and media analysis people to follow.

The post After the people have gone, all we have left is humanity (4/?) appeared first on Gold Machine.

3 days ago

Gold Machine - Dec 02

Is Historicity an Aesthetic Virtue?

I’d like to clarify my thesis. Trinity isn’t about history; it’s of history. Here We Go AGAIN You have to be tired of reading this. I’m tired of writing it! It’s been a long time since my last post. It’s been even longer since I started this series. Over a year, in fact. As a […]

The post Is Historicity an Aesthetic Virtue? appeared first on Gold 5 days ago

I’d like to clarify my thesis. Trinity isn’t about history; it’s of history.

Here We Go AGAIN

You have to be tired of reading this. I’m tired of writing it! It’s been a long time since my last post. It’s been even longer since I started this series. Over a year, in fact. As a writer who used to manage a post or more a week, this is a dramatic plunge in terms of output.

I’ve talked about this here and on the podcast: one thing I’ve struggled with is the critical reception of Trinity. I don’t want to be perceived as the sort of edgy media critic who puts down popular things, possibly driven by weird or less-than-rigorous motives. I’ve tried to work through that by assessing critical receptions to Trinity over the years (part one and part two) in order to identify key critical issues and shifts in perceptions over the years.

Does this mean I hate Trinity? Or dislike it? I’d say my personal opinion is complex, but my final assessment is that it is one of Infocom’s greatest games. Those reasons are entirely literary. That is, Moriarty’s prose style, use of motifs, symbolism, dramatic irony, paradox, and rich intertextuality make it unique among all Infocom games. I’ve had a hard time entering this discourse as an author who considers things like critical reception and paratext because of what I perceive as an ongoing insistence that Trinity is about history. I ultimately don’t accept that history is primarily what makes Trinity compelling or unique as a text. I haven’t felt like refuting that in any kind of vigorous way, because I think that’s a popular opinion and I don’t feel like swimming upstream. That’s been a mistake; that’s why I’m still talking about Trinity, haltingly, a year later. I should just come out and say it.

I don’t think Trinity is about history in the same way that I don’t think my desk is about wood. It isn’t wood for wood’s sake; it’s the place where my monitor and keyboard go.

Knowing something about Niels Bohr–as only one example–doesn’t elucidate the themes of Trinity. Knowing about Bohr might be interesting or enjoyable as a general fact–I certainly think so–but that won’t teach us about fate, absurdity, or the cosmic injustice of man’s scientific power as it is dramatized in Trinity, a computer game written by Brian Moriarty and published by Infocom in 1986. I really don’t think it does. Sure, a lot of historical facts turn up in the browsie, “The Illustrated Story of the Atom Bomb,” but I experience that as a critique–possibly even a mockery–of historical narratives.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of readers disagree. From the very beginning, Infocom and Moriarty emphasized historical research as something that set Trinity apart as something special. I think that makes it special, too, because it fosters a more vivid dramatization of Trinity‘s themes. Some well-regarded critics may have given the impression that talking about Trinity‘s building materials (such as history) is the same as talking about Trinity as a finished text. I don’t think they actually believe this in a strict sense, but a curious onlooker in the midst of a literature review couldn’t be blamed for getting that impression.

It is a relief to have said it directly: I don’t think Trinity is about history. Rather, it is of history.

Also…

I’ve implied as much on the podcast: I dislike the endgame of Trinity. Now, if history makes a game great, then the ending must be great. It’s a faithful map of the Trinity site. We can spy Robert Oppenheimer through a pair of binoculars! I’m impressed with the care with which this final region has been recreated. My impression is that some critics believe its historicity is a rich signifier. I disagree. As I’ve already implied on the podcast, I think this massive efficiency puzzle stifles exploration (in a place where exploring makes sense) and seems at odds with the “magic” of the game. I recognize that I will have to make my case, and so I will. I hope you will find it plausible, when the time comes.

What of the Themes, Then?

Ultimately, I think Trinity‘s concerns are cosmic: it isn’t so much about humans or people as it is about humanity. I’ve started writing about that, and I need to keep going. I don’t think it’s coincidence that so many of Trinity‘s problems involve animals. I wrote about the Dolphin, because I think it is a distillation of a rather dark vision of humanity’s relationship with creation, but episodes with the skink and lemming elaborate further. There are so may other animals: bees, birds, a snake. The roadrunner. What can be made of this?

There has been a lot of talk about the ending. Does the paradox make sense (so far as a paradox can, anyway)? Is the Wabewalker a tragic hero? Jimmy Maher went so far as to name Nietzsche in his assessment. What does one make of that? As I have said here and elsewhere, I am more of a Kierkegaard person. Perhaps the situation calls for Camus, rather than either of them. We shall see!

Clearing the Plate

I’ve said this a few times: last year, I released a parser game that some people have liked. That’s changed my relationship with interactive fiction in some pretty dramatic ways. One of the things I wanted to do as an author was to help people who, like me, are new to Inform, a programming language specifically made for authoring text adventure games. It was my experience that a lot of documentation and/or advice wasn’t right-sized for me; I didn’t understand it.

That’s taken up a lot of my time! I hear from new authors fairly often, and it’s a very rewarding feeling that I get from this work. There’s also the matter of the games I want to write myself. I have three works in progress right now. Two might interest the Zork fans out there, while the third is a more experimental piece.

But I’m tabling all that. This is what I’m working on! I completed a new playthrough of Trinity last night. My interpretation of its text hasn’t changed, which is for the best at this late date, but I do feel new clarity and motivation when it comes to this series. Until it’s completed, I won’t be doing any other interactive fiction work, be it making games or writing about making games. This is it. What’s to come?

  • Gold Machine: The Cosmic Injustice of Scientific Overreach. What is humanity’s relationship with the rest of the earth? Although this language is religious, I mean it in a secular sense: how does humanity exist in creation? Is it special, is it afforded special moral allowances? How or why? If humanity salted the fields of the entire earth, what would be the saddest thing about that? It may be that Trinity has a rather misanthropic answer for its players. We have to unpack that for ourselves.
  • Gold Machine: Understanding the ending of Trinity. It’s inescapable that we engage with Jimmy Maher’s assertions that the Wabewalker is tragic and that the time loop established by the events of the game may be grounded in philosophical tradition. After all, Maher has written more about Trinity than anyone else. Ignoring his work would be strange enough to warrant analysis. As I’ve already implied, I feel led elsewhere by the text, but these distinctions are ultimately fruit from similar trees. I absolutely do believe that Trinity emerges from established literary and philosophical traditions, but I must name those texts and make my case. For now, I’ll say that I see more Yossarian, Strangelove, and Camus’s Sisyphus than I do Rennaissance England or ancient Greece.
  • Podcast: “The Missing ‘Magic’ of a Narrative Game”. In a previous episode, I discussed Graham Nelson’s The Craft of the Adventure as a tool for assessing adventure game design. This time, I will zero in on the concept of a game’s “magic” as defined by Nelson while introducing my own thoughts regarding what might be considered a player/game contract regarding mechanics in isolation as well as within the context of a “promise” made by the game’s world or lore. For the purposes of this discussion, Vampire: The Masquerade Swansong will be discussed. In addition to the audio episode, some gameplay with commentary will be made available.
  • Podcast: “Like Suspended, but Without the Robots”. What is the “magic” of Trinity‘s game world, and does the New Mexico endgame deliver on the promise it makes? Pulling the camera back: what is it like, mechanically, to play Trinity? I have said in the past that it is Infocom’s highest expression of the Zorkian “cave game” design. Why would I say that, and why aren’t contemporary critics saying the same thing? For all the exasperated grief heaped upon the first three commercial Zork games, it may be productive to produce a tally of unwinnable states in Trinity for comparison’s sake. Zooming back in: a consideration of whether or not Trinity is what we thought it was.

Podcasts will be released with transcripts. If there remain outstanding thoughts or questions, I’ll write one last post to address them.

The list is in order, more or less. I have already started work on a post about humanity’s arc toward power without wisdom, and I expect to finish it by Wednesday at the latest. You know, I’ve played through Trinity three times since Gold Machine started. Even though it (and some of the discourse surrounding it) can frustrate me sometimes, each playthrough has deepened my appreciation of its literary and intertextual qualities. There’s nothing else like it in the Infocom catalog, and I’m eager to write about its themes as I experience them.

Next

After the people have gone, all we have left is humanity.

The post Is Historicity an Aesthetic Virtue? appeared first on Gold Machine.

5 days ago

Choice of Games LLC - Dec 02

Coming Thursday, “Honor Bound”—Trailer, demo, and author interview are out now!

Protect an exclusive boarding school and rebuild your life after scandal as a military bodyguard for the children of the rich and famous! Return to the world of Crème de la Crème, this time as a military officer in the Republic of Teran. Honor Bound is an interactive novel by Harris Powell-Smith where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 595,000 words and hundreds of choi 5 days ago

Protect an exclusive boarding school and rebuild your life after scandal as a military bodyguard for the children of the rich and famous! Return to the world of Crème de la Crème, this time as a military officer in the Republic of Teran.

Honor Bound is an interactive novel by Harris Powell-Smith where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 595,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

We’re excited to announce that Honor Bound is releasing this Thursday, December 5th!

The trailer is out now, you can play the first three chapters for free today, and check out the author interview as well!

And don’t forget to wishlist it on Steam!

5 days ago

Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian - Nov 30

Social Media

Hi, folks… I just wanted to give you a very quick heads-up that I’m leaving The Social Media Platform Formerly Known as Twitter. In the future, you can receive notifications about new articles and the occasional other announcement by following me on either Mastodon or Bluesky. My apologies to anyone who’s inconvenienced by this, but […] 7 days ago

Hi, folks…

I just wanted to give you a very quick heads-up that I’m leaving The Social Media Platform Formerly Known as Twitter. In the future, you can receive notifications about new articles and the occasional other announcement by following me on either Mastodon or Bluesky. My apologies to anyone who’s inconvenienced by this, but it does feel like the right time to make the jump, what with Bluesky in particular growing so quickly.

I’ll see you all on Friday with some fresh Digital Antiquaria. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

7 days ago

Key & Compass Blog - Nov 28

New walkthroughs for November 2024

On Thursday, November 28, 2024, 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. Last-Minute Magic (2024) by Ryan Veeder In this […] 9 days ago

On Thursday, November 28, 2024, 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.


Last-Minute Magic (2024) by Ryan Veeder

In this fantasy optimization game, you play as Quistine. Cimberly is putting up her tent for the crafts fair and needs you to collect as many trinkets as you can for her cauldron so she can enchant them at 3:17:35 precisely. To succeed, you must mix and match amulets with eyestones for different magical effects.

This game was an entry in the Le Grand Guignol (English) division of Ectocomp 2024, placement to be determined. The game takes place in the world of Visit Skuga Lake.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Hildy (2024) by J Michael

In this Zorkian fantasy game, you play as Hildy, a twenty-year-old apprentice enchantress at the Accardi Guild of Enchanters, but your unorthodox ways make it difficult for you to fit in. Master Frobar brings you to the Forest of Berlyn to have a few hours to relax and think. But when a spectral coyote brings you a receipt from an abandoned underground shopping mall, you just have to investigate.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2024 where it took 7th place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps


The Little Match Girl in the Court of Maal Dweb (2024) by Ryan Veeder (writing as “Hans Christian Andersen”)

In this game, you once again play as Ebenezabeth Scrooge, the little match girl who can travel to other times and places by looking at fire. You and three others have gathered together in the Woods outside time to find and slay the werewolf Imrath who threatens everyone in all realms and times.

This was an entry in the Le Grand Guignol (English) division of Ectocomp 2024, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps


The Gorreven Papers (2014) by Derek T. Jones

In this espionage game, you play as an intrepid spy sent to retrieve the Gorreven Papers. Unfortunately, you were captured, beaten, and brought to this bare cell. But your mission must succeed. The Papers are somewhere on this side of the electric fence. Find them and escape with them to save the free world… again.

This game was originally written in 1992 as a working example for the Archetype authoring system; the game was later ported to Inform 7.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps


Dark and Deep (2024) by Amanda Walker

In this disturbing story based on the poems of Robert Frost, you play as Reverend Odlin. It’s January 1922 in Coös, New Hampshire. You’ve come to give what comfort you can to Mrs Lajway on her dying day, despite her unsavory reputation as a witch and despite the doubts that grow in your own heart.

This story was an entry in the Le Grand Guignol (English) division of Ectocomp 2024, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Fireboat (2024) by Jeff Greer (aka “fos1”)

In this short heavily-guided game, you play as Captain Kent Decker, a senior fireboat captain with the Fire Department of New York. You’ve seen it all on the Hudson, so when a lady ghost starts leaving notes for you on the galley table about a terrorist, it doesn’t surprise you.

This game was an entry in the Le Grand Guignol (English) division of Ectocomp 2024, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Your Little Haunting (2024) by Christina Nordlander

In this short primitive horror game, you play as someone who stops at a house on a very dark road, hoping you can borrow something to light your way. But no one answers your knock and the door is unlocked, so you let yourself in.

This game was an entry in the La Petite Mort (English) division of Ectocomp 2024, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

9 days ago

Renga in Blue - Nov 28

Island Adventure (Apex Trading, 1982)

Not to be confused with the other Island Adventure game published in 1982. With Vince Apps having many books to his name (admittedly very similar books) it feels strange that his company Apex Trading is still somewhat mysterious. The games have been Devil’s Island Forbidden City Pharoah’s Curse Haunted House (the oddball of the set, […] 9 days ago

Not to be confused with the other Island Adventure game published in 1982.

With Vince Apps having many books to his name (admittedly very similar books) it feels strange that his company Apex Trading is still somewhat mysterious.

The games have been

Devil’s Island

Forbidden City

Pharoah’s Curse

Haunted House (the oddball of the set, more of a strategy game)

where the main games all feature a lot of “deadly exits” where there isn’t necessarily a way to find out about them until hitting the end screen. Island Adventure is no different and follows the same structure as the other games so I’m fairly certain Vince Apps is the author (~99.5%)…

It has the exact same variable definition as his other games, for instance.

…but I also think this might be an early game of his, if for nothing else the fact the game requires the whole text TAKE INVENTORY in order to show what the player is holding (as oppose to just typing INV or INVENTORY).

From the World of Dragon

A January 1983 ad for the company mentions the games Haunted House, Treasure Quest, Forbidden City, and Pharoah’s Curse in order. I have never found an ad that mentions Island Adventure; perhaps it only showed up in the Apex Trading catalog because the author was sheepish about it (again, I think it’s an early game).

You’ll notice I haven’t linked to a playthrough of Treasure Quest. We don’t have this game. We do have a game called Treasure Quest that’s on TI-99…

…but it doesn’t mention Apex Trading and is undated, attributed to a Jim Beck of Canada where he asks players to please send $5 to his address if they like the game.

Not Brighton, England.

It’s an easy name clash to have and I suspect there’s likely just a lost Apex Trading game out there.

With that out of the way, let’s hit the island, where we are hunting for a “FABULOUS TREASURE”.

Things kick off on a beach with a driftwood, which isn’t quite as common as being in a forest with trees, but it feels up there. When you EXAMINE it is described as “very dry”. (This suggests you can light it on fire, but I haven’t been able to do, which is the main catch to why I haven’t beaten the game yet.)

Don’t worry, the forest is nearby, just to the west.

Incidentally, EXAMINE WOLVES says there are too many to fight, and FIGHT WOLVES doesn’t go well.

Laying out the rest of the map as I have it so far:

To the east of the start is a pirate guarding a cave (hanging near a dead rat and an old boot, for some reason)…

…to the north there’s a cave with too many pirates (probably not meant to be entered)…

…and a pirate who needs a password (which I’ll get a little later).

I was hard stuck for a bit and had to make my verb list early.

I was somewhat suspicious of one room which had a “FLAT BLANK FACE OF A CLIFF” but only a bush. A bush is not a normal “secret mechanism” but I ran through my verb list anyway and got a secret opening.

This leads to a orthogonally-arranged set of caves with one pitfall, and two rooms with a item you can use PULL on. One is safe, the other is death. Death first:

The graffiti reads — keeping in mind the word wrap — LLPU ROF TTSNIAN ETCIUNORTDS. This anagrams to PULL FOR INSTANT DESTRUCTION although it’s faster to just test things out.

The other pull-moment has a slight cryptogram, although again it is easier to yank first and solve later.

Move the letters backwards by one to get PULL FOR WEAPON.

The sword has a serial number of 2119562112 61518 16918120519 where the numbers go with the pattern 1 = A, 2 = B, etc. to translate to USEFUL FOR PIRATES. Given the pirate alone at the cave with the dead rat for some reason is described as needing a weapon to be defeated, this seems redundant.

The “NUT CRUNCHIES” mentioned in the cave are the password to get by the other pirate. This leads to a small area with an empty bucket, another deadly fall, and a dragon.

Here I’d like to try lighting the driftwood, but nothing I’ve tried has worked. I especially am interested because at the WOLVES the command HELP gives the information YOU’LL HAVE TO BE BRIGHT TO GET RID OF THESE! Just to summarize, I have:

some sand, a bucket, some driftwood, a rock, a stone, a dead rat, an old boot, a sword, a flask of water (poison)

The stone and rock are not given any description (I might suspect flint and steel, but they’ve been highly resistant to any verbs working on them at all). The source code is BASIC so checking for a solve should be easy but there’s enough to play around with (despite the murderously limited parser) I’m hanging on for a bit longer. In this kind of circumstance it doesn’t feel like an adventure game as much as a puzzle game where I’m in a battle with the machine to find the next command it will understand.

9 days ago

Renga in Blue - Nov 26

1982: The Final Stretch

If you look at Jason Dyer’s blog, he’s been at 1982 for three years with no signs of finishing it yet, and he seems to show no signs of reaching 1983. — MorpheusKitami in a comment on The Adventure Gamer blog Believe it or not, we are getting close to the end of 1982. This […] 11 days ago

If you look at Jason Dyer’s blog, he’s been at 1982 for three years with no signs of finishing it yet, and he seems to show no signs of reaching 1983.

MorpheusKitami in a comment on The Adventure Gamer blog

Believe it or not, we are getting close to the end of 1982. This is my final list. If any games show up after this point they can go on my float-list. That doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily wait, but I don’t need to finish them for 1982 to be “done”.

I am excluding games that are lost media or I am unable to play at the moment for whatever reason (if Testament shows up, for example, I’ll be bumping it up in priority, but it isn’t on this list).

These are more or less in alphabetical order.

Arkenstone: minimal type-in for the VIC-20 with some Tolkien inspiration.

Arsène Larcin: French game from Québec for the Apple II.

Bedlam: The other 1982 game by the author of Xenos.

Circus: The last of the Mysterious Adventures from 1982.

The Colonel’s House: First of a supposed series from Rabbit Software, but it looks like only the first game was written.

Cornucopia: One of the Brian Cotton games, although I need to play Witch Hunt from 1981 first.

Countdown to Doom: Last of the Acornsoft games from 1982.

Crystal Caverns: Hayden’s other text-only Apple II game, other than the buggy Crime Stopper.

The Curse of the Pharaoh: Kirsch, while not busy cranking out Adventures of the Month, also did a graphical adventure that got tossed on one of the Softside special disks.

The Deadly Game, The Dalton Gang, Alaskan Adventure: The final games for the Softside Adventure of the Month.

Danger Island: Another game for the Dragon.

Dark Star, Mexican Adventure: The other SharpSoft games remaining.

Derelict 2147: Roger M. Wilcox’s last game of 1982 (number 20 out of 21 games).

Drive-In: A naughty game, not the earliest but pretty early.

Enchanted Forest: Tandy CoCo game with weird graphics.

Espionage Island: The fourth Artic game after Ship of Doom.

Geheim-agent XP-05: The second-oldest German text adventure game we have.

Grave Robbers: Victory Software, of the minimal VIC-20 games like Jack and the Beanstalk, somehow now also includes text-mode graphics.

Haunted House: The last 1982 game from Aardvark.

The Hobbit: The famous Melbourne House game, probably the most famous game of 1982 I haven’t played yet.

In Search of: The Four Vedas, Stone Age, Fun House: The remaining TI-99 games by ASD&D. Fun House was sleuthed out recently by reader LanHawk.

Island Adventure: The last Apex Trading game for 1982.

Keys of the Wizard: The sequel to the ultrahard Madness and the Minotaur. Probably the hardest game remaining on my list.

Mad Martha: Satirical Britgame with minigames, from the author of Mines of Saturn.

Mysterious Mansion, Troll Hole Adventure: Two games for the Victor Lambda computer from France, based on the US Interact Model One.

Quest: Schatzoeken: Mysterious VIC-20 game.

Rainbow Adventure: Tandy CoCo type-in.

Search For The Ruby Chalice: Type-in via the Rainbow Book of Adventures.

Sherwood Forest: Apple II graphics game.

Softcore software collection: A set of naughty games. Not all the games are available.

The Software Toolworks version of Adventure: With three extra treasures, for CP/M.

Time Adventure, Hitch Hiker: Two from the same author, the latter being a modification of Supersoft Hitch Hiker’s Guide.

Time Warden: An unpublished game by the author of The Scepter.

Tom Sato Adventure: An obscure BBC Micro game, the rest of the games on this collection are lost but the adventure got rescued last year.

Windmere Estate, Zodiac Castle: Two that originally were on North Star, and one is weirdly a modification of the other. Maybe?

There’s also Apple II versions which are supposedly broken due to a bug.

11 days ago

The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction - Nov 26

Oct 2024 Post Mortem

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Thursday Oct 28, 2024 over Zoom.  Stephen, Zarf, Andrew, Matt, EllieB, Josh, Mike Stage, Hugh, Cidney, Keltana, Doug, Mike Hilborn, and Pinkunz attended. We don’t have notes but enjoy the image provided by Zarf, edited by anjchang. 12 days ago

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Thursday Oct 28, 2024 over Zoom.  StephenZarfAndrewMatt, EllieB, JoshMike Stage, Hugh, Cidney, Keltana, Doug, Mike Hilborn, and Pinkunz attended. We don’t have notes but enjoy the image provided by Zarf, edited by anjchang.

12 days ago

Text Adventures Blog - Dec 06

Rebooting textadventures, Quest and Squiffy

I am back. I am Alex Warren, the original creator of the textadventures.co.uk site, and the Quest 5 and Squiffy text adventure systems. I handed over all of these in 2017, and I am very grateful to Luis and Andy for keeping things running for the last few years. Recently I noticed that a few […] a day ago

I am back.

I am Alex Warren, the original creator of the textadventures.co.uk site, and the Quest 5 and Squiffy text adventure systems.

I handed over all of these in 2017, and I am very grateful to Luis and Andy for keeping things running for the last few years.

Recently I noticed that a few things around the site had stopped working, so I quietly dropped in to fix a few issues with Squiffy.

Well, things kind of escalated from there, and it turned out now was a good time to transfer ownership of things again. So I’m happy to announce that I am back in charge of textadventures.co.uk, Quest 5 and Squiffy once more.

There’s a whole bunch of things I want to do to revive and modernise things, and I’ve made a good start on each of them…

  • rebuilding (and maybe rebranding) the textadventures.co.uk site.
  • a major new version of “Quest 5”, using Blazor and WASM to make things work super fast, in browsers and across platforms. This will need a new name (as there’s already a Quest 6), so I am referring to this new version as “Quest Viva”.
  • a major new version Squiffy, built with TypeScript and with the editor implemented as a PWA.

Work is well underway on all of these, and I’ll announce more details as they come closer to fruition.

In the meantime, I have opened up GitHub discussions for textadventures, Quest and Squiffy, and there’s a new official Discord Server you can join. Hope to see you there!

a day ago

Zarf Updates - Dec 06

Me in the media

I guess it's not "the" media any more, it's just media. Anyhow! I recently guested on Topic Lords, Jim Stormdancer's podcast about topics. Along with Ben Wilson, I am featured in episode 266: "Voronoi Cookies". (My title drop, may I say.) A ... a day ago

I guess it's not "the" media any more, it's just media. Anyhow!

I recently guested on Topic Lords, Jim Stormdancer's podcast about topics. Along with Ben Wilson, I am featured in episode 266: "Voronoi Cookies". (My title drop, may I say.) A very random conversation, as is the podcast's brief.

Baking; leaving crosswords on the street; a year isn't 52.0 weeks; Leila Chatti; fidgeting in Zoom; Things of Science.


Less random: A Conversation with Andrew Plotkin on The Digital Antiquarian!

Jimmy Maher has been running through the early history of videogames in intensely-researched detail for, oh, let's not say how many years. Of course many of his early posts were about interactive fiction, but now he's up to the mid-1990s so Infocom is gone and graphical adventures are trailing off.

But guess what happened in the mid-1990s? IFComp! And then my years as a hot young IF auteur. That's what the article is about. Runs from my early encounter with Adventure to the present (NarraScope, etc).

And yes, this is the interview where I admit that I skipped Plundered Hearts on launch because it looked girly. (I played it when the LTOI collection came out.)

Enjoy.

a day ago

The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction - Dec 06

December meeting (hybrid!)

The Boston IF meetup for December will be Friday, December 13, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will meet both on-line and in person! Visit the Trope Tank at MIT (room 14E-316, building 14, the Hayden Library). Or join our Zoom call from the Trope Tank — watch the mailing list for info. After the meeting […] 2 days ago

The Boston IF meetup for December will be Friday, December 13, 6:30 pm Eastern time.

We will meet both on-line and in person! Visit the Trope Tank at MIT (room 14E-316, building 14, the Hayden Library). Or join our Zoom call from the Trope Tank — watch the mailing list for info.

After the meeting we (the in-person ones) will head out to the Cambridge Brewing Company, our dinner spot for many early years of PR-IF. CBC is closing this month, sadly, so this will be our final visit.

2 days ago

Choice of Games LLC - Dec 05

“Honor Bound”—Guard students and secrets at an elite school!

We’re proud to announce that Honor Bound, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app. It’s 40% off until December 12th! And you can catch up on the other games in the Crème de la Crème world, too: Crème de la Crème, Royal Affairs, and Noblesse Oblige are 2 days ago

Honor BoundWe’re proud to announce that Honor Bound, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app.

It’s 40% off until December 12th! And you can catch up on the other games in the Crème de la Crème world, too: Crème de la Crème, Royal Affairs, and Noblesse Oblige are all on sale this week for 40% off!

Protect an exclusive boarding school and rebuild your life after scandal as a military bodyguard for the children of the rich and famous! Return to the world of Crème de la Crème, this time as a military officer in the Republic of Teran.

Honor Bound is an interactive novel by Harris Powell-Smith where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 595,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

You’ve built a promising career in the Teranese military, a force which has not seen major engagement in decades but which holds vast influence. Thanks to an injury, you’re no longer in the field. Thanks to the complicated (read, scandalous) circumstances of that injury, you’ve been quietly reassigned as a bodyguard for the teenage child of a famous scientist. This should be an easy assignment: your charge is at boarding school in the wilderness, an exclusive sanctuary where the children of the rich and powerful become artists and scientists of the future. The school sits close to your own hometown, so you’ll be familiar with the area. Finally, you can recover your health and get your career back on track.

But danger is closing in, and peril can come from inside as well as out. What secret projects are your colleagues pursuing in the dead of night? What is your commanding officer not telling you? Bandits lurk in the wilderness—including one of your childhood friends!—and natural disasters constantly threaten the fragile environment. And then there’s the danger to your heart, from the complicated feelings that come from returning to your birthplace, and from adjusting to the new reality of your life. Can you really go home again?

Build a warm community and bond with your colleagues, or impress everyone with your aloof competence. Chase ambition to receive glowing reports and get your life back on track—or become such a disaster that only bandits will tolerate your presence. Or, just maybe, you will have to risk it all for the sake of doing the right thing.

  • Play as male, female, or nonbinary; cis or trans; gay, straight, or bisexual; asexual and/or aromantic; allosexual and/or alloromantic; monogamous or polyamorous.
  • Customize your age: play a junior officer in your 20s, a mid-ranking officer in your 30s, or a senior officer in your 40s.
  • Befriend or romance a severe military officer; a bold, easygoing outdoors expert; a determined and overworked priest; an earnest but scatterbrained fellow bodyguard; a childhood friend turned disgraced bandit; or the anxious, serious widowed parent of your charge.
  • Pet the dog, the cat, or both.
  • Meet the main characters of Crème de la Crème, Royal Affairs, and Noblesse Oblige, and find out what their lives are like now!
  • Shape the school life of your teenage charge: encourage her to make friends or sabotage her rivals; let her slack off or push her to achieve; and get caught up in boarding-school drama.
    Unearth and thwart shadowy schemes—or join in the scheming for your own gain.

How far will you go for ambition, duty, and your country?

We hope you enjoy playing Honor Bound. 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.

2 days ago

Renga in Blue - Dec 03

Circus: Orthography Ultimate Final Boss

I had only one (1) puzzle to go. (My prior posts on Circus are here.) Before explaining, I should mention something about my job. I work for a company in Europe. We have both European and US clients. I quite routinely will work on two projects in one day, meaning midstream I need to swap […] 4 days ago

I had only one (1) puzzle to go. (My prior posts on Circus are here.)

Before explaining, I should mention something about my job.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

I work for a company in Europe. We have both European and US clients. I quite routinely will work on two projects in one day, meaning midstream I need to swap my spelling conventions, so instead of analyzing someone’s work I am now analysing it. I have gotten decently good at swapping continents at will.

With Circus, I had received a snorkel from a seal lion, and had surmised there was some petrol hiding the generator but I just needed to get it out. I mentioned, in passing in my last post, the possibility of using the petrol to siphon some petrol.

I have never, in any of my business dealings, had to spell the word “siphon”.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

That was it. That was the only puzzle. The game wanted “syphon”. Unless you count having yet another parser struggle spot right after as a puzzle.

The rest is straightforward: short the circuits as I mentioned before (you need to be holding the spanner/wrench, though) and book it for the car, taking off while everything explodes.

You might ask: what about the hacksaw and the cannon and the net? Those were, according to Dale Dobson, part of alternate solutions, but I’m honestly confused about them. To place the net you need to ERECT NET (more parser loveliness) and you can then fall off the tightrope safely, but why fall off the tightrope? Why break into the maintenance shed for a hacksaw? (It can’t be the chest — you have to get into the chest to get the tool to break into the maintenance shed, unless I’m missing something.) The cannon is especially baffling as there really is plenty of time to just walk out, flip on your cool shades, and let the cursed circus explode behind you.

it’s amazing when an adventure game makes you feel like Indiana Jones

too bad it was Indiana Jones trying to spell “Jehovah”

— Voltgloss in the comments to my last post

Unfortunately there was no extra dose of Evil tangling up the plot, unless you count the major parser issues (at least six of them). There was a lot of potential that just never had a pay-off; it’s like if Something Wicked This Way Comes didn’t have Mr. Dark.

Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark, who was also in Brazil as Sam Lowry and recently was David Cartwright in Slow Horses.

This game does seem to be remembered fondly by children, so I should add of all the Howarth games so far it was the most fun to “noodle around” in; it’s a place to explore without too many stopping points like Avventura nel Castello. Even though the enigmatic feel might dissipate in the end, your average 6 year old might have never beat it, meaning the game holds onto its mystery.

Coming up: returning to Crowther’s Adventure, the very original before Woods, as history has been found since I last wrote about it, including a 48-page document that has only recently been unearthed.

4 days ago

Renga in Blue - Dec 02

Circus: Doomed by Evil but Maybe Only a Little Evil

I am likely just a few puzzles away from the end. (Previous post on Circus here.) In the the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Elementary, Dear Data (season 2) Data tries to play a Sherlock Holmes themed simulation on the holodeck but runs into an issue: the computer mashes all the previous Conan Doyle […] 5 days ago

I am likely just a few puzzles away from the end. (Previous post on Circus here.)

Via World of Spectrum.

In the the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Elementary, Dear Data (season 2) Data tries to play a Sherlock Holmes themed simulation on the holodeck but runs into an issue: the computer mashes all the previous Conan Doyle stories, ChatGPT-style, such that Data knows exactly what the solution is to the mystery he’s given. Hence what ought to be a jaunt lasting many hours is cut into a minute.

Data, Geordi, and Doctor Pulaski in front of a sign indicating The Red-Headed League, giving away significant details of the mystery.

Circus has a related issue. The design is fairly wide-branching (in contrast, with, say, the heavily linear Arrow of Death games), meaning it is possible to access many puzzles at once and solve them in any order. One of the very easiest turns out to be the method of destroying the circus.

Specifically:

STEP 1: Pick up the whip, out in the open in the circus tent.

STEP 2: Go over to the tiger and use the command CRACK WHIP (that exact verb was what I was missing before).

STEP 3: Go down beneath, where you’ll eventually find some terminals and a blueprint. The blueprint says that shorting the terminals will cause a detonation sequence.

STEP 4: SHORT TERMINALS, run away, and boom.

There is still of course a problem given that end screen: there’s still no way to drive away with the car without the petrol. But in a dramatic sense, it feels very weird to have a method already for blowing up the cursed circus (which didn’t involve anything mystical) and just need to get fuel. I was expecting the Evil to somehow interfere.

It is still possible the Evil might interfere because there’s a whole sequence with the cannon that otherwise doesn’t make sense. For the moment, though, the story tree feels a little deflated compared to the high I was on last time. A good analogy is how Geordi and Doctor Pulaski reacted when Data solved the newly constructed mystery instantly. It isn’t like the game is over, but I feel like I’ve skipped to the end nonetheless.

Let’s get to that cannon:

Launching it “splatters you against the canvas”. I had already experienced using the trapeze to get up to the canvas roof, but hadn’t been able to do anything with it; I was trying to open a hole with the penknife that the player starts the game with. I just needed to CUT CANVAS, not CUT ROOF (sigh).

I had trouble getting back, and I think I must have mistyped something before, because I tested again trying to get back on the trapeze (ENTER TRAPEZE) and it worked just fine. Then SWING TRAPEZE a second time lands the player back where they started, so it is possible to go back to the cannon with a cut-ceiling and die again:

Now, I already suspect what I need to do. If you LOOK ROPE it turns out to be a SAFETY NET, so I need to drop it in the right place, but I have no idea where the landing is from that description so I’m going to need to test everywhere I guess (and hope DROP NET is the right command and I’m not supposed to use something fancy). Why do the launch anyway, though? If you set the tent to blow up you can just walk to the exit. Maybe, if you have the car filled up, there’s one more spirit-obstacle that appears that threatens you, and finally Only a Little Evil becomes Actual Evil.

In the department of other-stuff-I’ve solved: I mentioned last time a chest I couldn’t open. OPEN CHEST says “Nothing Happened!”, UNLOCK CHEST gets the response “I don’t understand what you mean”, and SMASH CHEST says

How destructive!

The latter is the worst message of all: it essentially conveys to the player that violence is not the answer and they’re barking up the wrong tree. Yet, the answer is destruction, as you are required to specifically type KICK CHEST.

You can just feel my goodwill for the game soaking away.

With the slippers on, it is now possible to tackle the tightrope, and at the end there is a metal rod. So Matt’s prediction was kind-of on but reversed.

The metal rod isn’t used for tightrope walking at all, though. Back outside the circus tent there was a maintenance door where all the various destroy-verbs (including KICK) don’t work. However, if you are holding the metal rod and try to OPEN DOOR, it works, revealing a HACKSAW:

I don’t yet know what the hacksaw does. I did also figure out the water tank, which had some entirely different cryptic parser shenanigans.

Typing EAST enters the player in the water location, and makes it seem like they are swimming automatically. SEARCH WATER and so forth yield nothing. However, if you type SWIM while you are already swimming (?!) a sea-lion is revealed.

Bringing the fish over (which I previously assumed was for the tiger, but nyet) and feeding the sea-lion yields a snorkel.

To summarize: I have a hacksaw and a snorkel I haven’t used yet. I have a cannon where I can launch myself to the outside, but I don’t know the landing spot to put a safety net (assuming that’s even the intended act). I have yet to get the petrol for the car to escape. The generator is still broken (mentioning the lack of a cable) but it may be there’s petrol in the generator and we’re just supposed to get it out (siphoning with the snorkel, maybe?) but I haven’t gotten any commands like SAW GENERATOR to yield fruit, so I must have a puzzle or two still outstanding.

A good ending might rescue the game, but for now, the parser deception did not make me happy.

5 days ago

Renga in Blue - Nov 30

Circus (1982)

Circus is the next of our Mysterious Adventures, and allegedly better than the last, Pulsar 7. According to the author it is his favorite. Circus comes to mind as the effort that satisfied me most. (Nobody collaborated with me on the one BTW – entirely my own effort). Can’t think exactly why it’s my favourite, […] 7 days ago

Circus is the next of our Mysterious Adventures, and allegedly better than the last, Pulsar 7. According to the author it is his favorite.

Circus comes to mind as the effort that satisfied me most. (Nobody collaborated with me on the one BTW – entirely my own effort). Can’t think exactly why it’s my favourite, but I did think it was cool that a number of people felt it was somehow reminiscent of “Something Wicked This Way Comes” by Ray Bradbury.

From an interview with Brian Howarth

I don’t have more history to share at the moment that hasn’t been in my previous Mysterious Adventures posts; eventually Brian will form the company Digital Fantasia to sell his own games but that doesn’t come until 1983.

As is typical of spooky protagonists everywhere, our car has run out of gas on a strange road. We go exploring and find, strangely, an abandoned circus.

Despite us seeing many spooky domiciles games, this one feels a little different; there’s no immediate vampires or clowns with axes chasing the player around and there’s a genuine attempt at a slow burn. Something Wicked This Way Comes doesn’t start with a circus, but rather a storm, where near the end of the fourth chapter there is the incidental smell of licorice and cotton candy.

You can first go south back to the road to visit the car. Going all the way back there’s a hole for petrol, and a boot that is not described in the text version; fortunately, I was playing the graphical version so it was prominent enough for me to try opening it.

The boot (or TRUNK, the game is nice enough to have US/UK synonyms) has a spanner (wrench) and a flashlight, which supplements the player’s starting inventory of car keys, a penknife, and an empty petrol can. We’re better equipped than a doctor dropped off on a secret operation by the Air Force!

Staying outside the circus…

…to the east there’s a generator which needs a cable to be fixed, and a field with a shovel. The shovel digs up a “starting handle” which I presume goes to the generator, but I don’t have a cable yet.

To the west is a maintenance wagon with a locked door. The resistance to my attempts to break the door or pick the lock suggest a key simply comes up later.

Heading inside the tent, having the flashlight on is required.

Again, slow burn: there are no obvious mystical things going on. A clown will occasionally appear and run away, and I’ll show off what happens after the tour:

To the east of the entrance is, straightforwardly, a tank of water you can enter (but DIVE doesn’t work). To the west is a closet, a chest which I can’t open, a clown costume which we’ll get back to, and a whip.

Headed into the ring, there’s a rope you can pick up and two ladders. One leads to a tightwalk (walking leads to death) and another leads to a trapeze. I was able to SWING TRAPEZE to find a new “room” where I was swinging near the roof, but I was unable to do anything yet from there.

Off to the west there’s a freezer with some fish, and off to the right there’s a cage with a tiger. I assume whip + fish + tiger can get something interesting but I haven’t experimented enough yet.

To the north side of the tent there’s another ring where the clown starts appearing (“Clown runs off!”) and a cannon adjacent. You can climb in the cannon and pull a lever to launch it from the inside, which kills you.

If you go back and wear the clown costume, rather than the clown running away they hover nearby instead, and point at the ground. A note appears.

That is, even though we are not technically trapped (we can still walk back to the car just fine) and there are no immediate threats in the circus, the circus is nonetheless cursed and our fate is to destroy it.

This is far stronger (so far) than Howarth’s last game. Somehow the sparse Adams-minimal prose works together with the premise better than any of his regular fantasy games. I also like how there’s a reason for open exploration which nonetheless promises we’re going to get layers as we figure out a mystery, something akin to Voodoo Castle requiring the player to enact a ritual.

Mr. Crosetti looked at the pole, as if freshly aware of its miraculous properties. He nodded, gently, his eyes soft. “Where does it come from, where does it go, eh? Who knows? Not you, not him, not me. Oh, the mysteries, by God. So. We’ll leave it on!”

It’s good to know, thought Will, it’ll be running until dawn, winding up from nothing, winding away to nothing, while we sleep.

“Good night!”

“Good night.”

And they left him behind in a wind that very faintly smelled of licorice and cotton candy.

— from Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury

7 days ago

Renga in Blue - Nov 29

Island Adventure: Man vs. Source Code

I’ve finished, but my “win” had hacking involved; it became a meta-solve where I was prodding at the source code trying to figure out what was wrong, essentially creating a new puzzle in the process. The true 1982 experience! (Also, my previous post is needed for context.) My first step after last time you might […] 8 days ago

I’ve finished, but my “win” had hacking involved; it became a meta-solve where I was prodding at the source code trying to figure out what was wrong, essentially creating a new puzzle in the process.

The true 1982 experience!

(Also, my previous post is needed for context.)

Via World of Dragon.

My first step after last time you might think was a major one; after all, I had trouble lighting some driftwood to scare some wolves.

DIG BEACH yields matches, so I cheerfully took them over to the wolves with driftwood also in hand and tried LIGHT MATCHES and … still nothing. Nope. The game does not understand.

The game does understand LIGHT MATCH but in a different spot: near the dragon there’s a dark room right before the pit.

This means, technically speaking, you can be forewarned about the pit, but it’s faster to die than figure the secret out.

With the crossbow in hand, FIGHT DRAGON goes down a little better than last time (“YOU CAN’T GET TOO CLOSE”, the game said).

Unfortunately the treasure chest is locked, so this still doesn’t win the game. The wolves needed resolving, and I ended up just dumping the source code, which I have here (start Xroar with -lp-file nameoffile.txt to assign a printer target, then type LLIST to send the source code to the printer). The offending portion:

470 IF NO=16 AND OB(5)=1 AND (OB(4)=1 OR OB(7)=1) AND CP=6 THEN PRINT”THE WOLVES HAVE FLED!”:M(6,1)=7:OB(4)=0:R$(6)=”AT THE EDGE OF A PINE FOREST”:GOTO280
480 IF NO=5 AND OB(5)=1 AND CP=28 THEN PRINT “THERE’S A CROSSBOW ON A LEDGE AND A DEEP PIT TO THE EAST”:OL(1)=28:GOTO 280
490 IF NO=16 AND OB(5)=1 AND (OB(4)=1 OR OB(7)=1) AND CP=28 THEN PRINT”THERE’S A CROSSBOW ON A LEDGE AND A DEEP PIT TO THE EAST!”:OL(1)=28:OB(7)=0:GOTO 280
500 IF NO=16 AND OB(7)=0 AND OB(4)=0 THENPRINT”THERE’S NOTHING TO BURN”:GOTO 280
510 IF NO=16 AND OB(5)=1 AND (OB(7)=1 OR OB(4)=1) THEN PRINT”NOTHING HAPPENED”:GOTO 280

To goal is to get line 470 to trigger. Let’s isolate the conditions:

470 IF NO=16 AND OB(5)=1 AND (OB(4)=1 OR OB(7)=1) AND CP=6

The objects are numbered in order starting from 1: the crossbow is OB(1), sword is OB(2), a key you’ll see in a moment is OB(3), the driftwood is OB(4), and the box of matches is OB(5). OB(5)=1 means the box of matches is in the player’s inventory. The line only triggers if you’re holding the matches.

470 IF NO=16 AND OB(5)=1 AND (OB(4)=1 OR OB(7)=1) AND CP=6

OB(4) is the driftwood or OB(7) are some pinecones you only find after scaring the wolves (strange logic there), so the driftwood also needs to be held for the line to trigger.

470 IF NO=16 AND OB(5)=1 AND (OB(4)=1 OR OB(7)=1) AND CP=6

CP is the character’s location (“character place”); CP = 1 is the room EMPTY, CP = 2 is the beach, 3 is a cove, 4 is the first pirate, 5 is the cave they’re guarding, and 6 is the forest. The source after also shows the effects of going north, south, east, and west; 88 means the player is stopped by an obstacle. From the pine forest, the player can normally go north, but they are stopped by the wolves.

1120 DATA EMPTY,0,0,0,0
1130 DATA ON A BEACH,9,0,3,6
1140 DATA IN A SMALL COVE,0,0,4,2
1150 DATA AT THE ENTRANCE TO A CAVE GUARDED BY AN EVIL LOOKING PIRATE!,0,0,88,3
1160 DATA IN A CAVE WITH WRITINGON THE WALL,0,0,0,4
1170 DATA AT THE EDGE OF A PINE FOREST.A PACK OF WOLVES GUARDS THE ENTRANCE,88,0,2,0

On to the last condition:

470 IF NO=16 AND OB(5)=1 AND (OB(4)=1 OR OB(7)=1) AND CP=6

NO is the noun object. This baffled me for a bit; lines 480 and 490 both are “you found the crossbow” triggers, where the noun can be number 5 or number 16 and get the same effect. 5 is the matches, and 16 is…

…the word FIRE. Argh!

So to summarize, you need, upon typing LIGHT as a verb: to be holding the matches, to be holding the driftwood, to be in the pine forest, and to use the noun FIRE. LIGHT MATCH works in the other place because the author anticipated this is a much (much) more normal thing to type than LIGHT FIRE, which requires arbitrarily realizing the noun that previously didn’t exist in the game should be the target.

The wolves are still shown in the room, but they’ve also fled.

After THE WOLVES HAVE FLED! the north exit allows the player in:

The sign indicates you should try going NORTH repeatedly and eventually you’ll get somewhere new: a hut with a key.

This is the very key needed to unlock the treasure.

With most of these games there’s typically some sort of hints and/or a map up at CASA or elsewhere; here I was on my own (it got added to CASA by Strident but with no walkthrough or map). Of course, most people in 1982 were on their own! This is why there were letters to send in to companies, or help columns, or hint phone lines, or authors begging people not to call their phone. Without that, players had to pry at the source code like I did so it was more of an essential part of the 1982-experience than I sometimes get across with these write-ups.

Coming next: Roll up! Roll up!

8 days ago

:: CASA :: - Nov 27

CASA Update - 152 new game entries, 230 new solutions, 269 new maps, 2 new hints, 9 new fixed games, 1 new clue sheet

♦ If you've been checking our news section for months, it might have seemed that nothing was happening and that the site was dead. This is far from the truth, as the list below will suggest. But we did have a major bug with our Systems tag which got in the way of processing much of your input. And for that I'd like to apologise.
Thanks to Mr. Creosote for fixing the bug!

Other than p 10 days ago

Image
If you've been checking our news section for months, it might have seemed that nothing was happening and that the site was dead. This is far from the truth, as the list below will suggest. But we did have a major bug with our Systems tag which got in the way of processing much of your input. And for that I'd like to apologise.
Thanks to Mr. Creosote for fixing the bug!

Other than promising to make more frequent updates, we're also having an extensive behind-the-scenes discussion about what to do with the site in the future and how to ensure that it keeps running and how to best service its users. Maintaining CASA is voluntary work and we need to make sure that this work fits in with our admin "staff"'s other obligations while making sure that the site does what it's supposed to to. We'll never be able to make everybody happy but we'll try to cover the most important bases.

A nifty new feature has been added to our advanced search page - the ability to exclude certain genres from a search. So if you're interested in Horror games but do not want to include Type-in games because you abhorred these as a child, well, today's your lucky day! Simply choose "Genre is: Horror" and "Genre is not: Type-in" - and by the miracle of the internet, boom! 439 results for your viewing pleasure. We'd love to hear your feedback, so please head over to the Site feedback & announcements section in the forum and share your thoughts.

Finally, a nod to the News image - it's taken from the hugely ambitious 2024 C64 game Kingdom of the Seven Stones. It pleases me to no end to see such an undertaking for my favourite 8-bit machine.


Contributors: Bieno, Alex, FredB74, J-_-K, GoNorth, Simon, mdmdmdm, boldir, iamaran, Garry, urbanghost, suika, OVL, Exemptus, Templar, nimusi, benkid77, redhighlander, Csabo, GusBrasil, wmoczarski, johnssavage, Strident, ASchultz, jgerrie, Canalboy, dave, auraes, Oloturia, raymond, Bodhi1969, Kozelek

10 days ago

Choice of Games LLC - Nov 27

“Magehunter: Phoenix Flame”—Overthrow the mages and save the kingdom!

We’re proud to announce that Magehunter: Phoenix Flame, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app. It’s 30% off until Dec 4th!  Wield ancient technology to overthrow your mage oppressors! Can your secret order of mage hunters save the kingdom, or 10 days ago

Magehunter: Phoenix FlameWe’re proud to announce that Magehunter: Phoenix Flame, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app.

It’s 30% off until Dec 4th! 

Wield ancient technology to overthrow your mage oppressors! Can your secret order of mage hunters save the kingdom, or will internal strife tear you apart?

Magehunter: Phoenix Flame is an interactive fantasy novel by Nic Vasudeva-Barkdull, set in the same world as Battlemage: Magic By Mail. It’s entirely text-based, 300,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Generations ago, invaders brought magic to the Kingdom of Jubai, setting battlemages at the top of the noble power structure and leaving everyone else oppressed. Now, a secret organization of mage hunters has risen up, phoenix-like, to stand against the mages’ power and overthrow their rule.

As one of these mage hunters, you wield the power of slipflame, a potent energy source that powers hunter technology. When you are called to go into battle against the mages, will you blast explosive bolts from your bow, throw silence bombs to cover your stealthy approach, or control your enemies from afar with puppet darts?

But the mages are not the only foes that you will face. The mage hunters have split into factions, and internal discord threatens their mission. Is there still hope for peaceful elections—and if so, which candidate will you support? And what secrets lie buried in the history of your realm? When the time comes for your uprising against the mages, will you stay loyal to your order—or will the mages’ power lure you to their cause?

  • Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, or pan; poly or monogamous.
  • Master the three types of slipflame, fight with sword and bow, or attempt to achieve your goals through peaceful means.
  • Join one of the mage hunters’ four factions, and steer the future of the order!
  • Investigate a mysterious famine and fight for the welfare of the common people!
  • Uncover deep secrets about your order, the power you wield, the history of the realm—and even your closest companions!

Rise from the ashes, and be reborn a mage hunter!

We hope you enjoy playing Magehunter: Phoenix Flame. 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.

10 days ago

The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction - Nov 26

November Post Mortem

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday November 25, 2024 over Zoom. Pinkunz, anjchang, Cidney, Hugh,  Mike Stage, Doug, Zarf, and Stephen attended. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories. If you’re looking for older version of Inform. you download […] 12 days ago

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday November 25, 2024 over Zoom. Pinkunz, anjchang, Cidney, Hugh,  Mike Stage, Doug, Zarf, and Stephen attended. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.

If you’re looking for older version of Inform. you download 6M62 from https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/downloads/ it should work on 2017 MacOS.

What we’re playing:

StardewValley – experience of playing a game across years. Think about designing updates that are unexpected, but fit within the overall designed world. The game is also interesting because it supports different player rolls collaboratively.

Scroll Thief and puzzles within it were discussed.

Rise of the Golden Idol from a series (first one is Case of the Golden Idol)l. Evidence hunting game, reminiscent of Case of Auberdim). Game quizzes you on what happened. Story is about ancient idol that people are stealing and then there’s a mystery around it.

Enjoy the worldbuilding in Color of Magic, great allegory to real fables like the Tooth Fairy, Santa Clause, and other contemporary myths. HogFather is great for holidays.

Dune Series – world building is so comprehensive. David Lynch movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(1984_film) Mention of game about Dune. Newer movies are deeper in the story. Talk about book versions– much better than the movies. First book is a must-read. Second book has some elements.

Recommendation for Enchanted Castle Puzzle Hunt https://thetravelers.guide/ Online Escape Room by Laura Hall. Synchronous activity over Zoom!

Real world immersion with CluedUup’s Alice in Wonderland. Mystery hunt, and Miami Herald Tropic Hunt mentioned.

Geocaching – riddles and puzzles mixed into geocaches. What if geocaching x IF? Considerations regarding safety https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/treasure-chest-worth-millions-rocky-mountains-found-after-decade-long-n1227231 The need for playtesting and guard rails. Sunsetting for timeline of game. Reddit whereIsThis WhatIsIt collaborative identification. Collaborative Crimesolving… Traveling Figurines and history of the figurine over the world.

Forbidden Island, forbidden Desert games where you play collaboratively as a particular character with separate roles.

Ryan Veeder’s Fly Fishing mentions geocaching. https://rcveeder.net/flyfishing/

https://rcveeder.net/tacofiction

How clues are given to help puzzle solving? We also talked about playing the rated games from IFComp and EctoComp. People enjoyed ones that didn’t rank so high, mentioned:

Please sign here from last year’s IFComp (ifdb)

Human resources stories spawned Dragon Resources Stories.

Potential meeting in Cambridge to commemorate the closing of Cambridge Brewing Company. Next meeting poll will include a link to who can make possible meetup at MIT (potentially Trope Tank) followed by CBC.

12 days ago

Renga in Blue - Nov 26

Xenos: hit the head / and not the chest / headshots are / the very best

I’ve finished the game, and my previous post is needed for context. I was actually near-done with the town. I had mentioned finding BREAK working as a verb for the crowbar, but I hadn’t tried it yet at the sheriff’s office desk drawer (I think I did in my head but hadn’t actually gone through […] 12 days ago

I’ve finished the game, and my previous post is needed for context.

I was actually near-done with the town. I had mentioned finding BREAK working as a verb for the crowbar, but I hadn’t tried it yet at the sheriff’s office desk drawer (I think I did in my head but hadn’t actually gone through with it).

One of the keys (the small one) goes to the gun chest, and lets you get the shotgun. I immediately went to try it in the desert and it worked:

However, the monster is kind of like the dwarves in Crowther/Woods; that is, there’s more than one, and the shotgun only works twice. The other shotgun target was the snake, so I didn’t have to bother with all that “antidote” nonsense.

The shovel then can dig up the big sand pile I mentioned, and find a storm cellar. Nobody in the storm cellar, but there is dynamite, because (???).

I tried goofing around the town more (you can blow open the bank vault, it’s the wrong use of the dynamite) but really that’s everything: the tires and truck are a complete red herring, as is the bottle, and the water, and even the food. I discovered while mucking about the desert you get a fairly generous timer so I figured all I needed to do was puzzle out a route and I wouldn’t even need to bother.

There are random loops and bits of geography that don’t make sense in the desert, but I did finally manage a path:

Midway there’s a stop with a dead alien.

(The cube is useful, the rod does nothing as far as I know.) From there there’s a path with “crawl marks” so it isn’t hard to then find the crashed alien spaceship, which I knew had to be there because it’s on the cover of the game.

The whole purpose of the town section is to give the player the dynamite and the shotgun (I had the monster chase me to the end, here, and used my second shotgun blast so I could deal with the UFO entrance without fuss.) The dynamite is fussy to use: it gives the parser command STRIKE FUSE, but my process of

DROP DYNAMITE
STRIKE FUSE
EAST

in order to get away just blew me up. It took a while (after the fact, really) before I understood the game was implicitly picking up the dynamite again in order to “STRIKE” it even though that never gets said outright in the text. THROWing the dynamite didn’t work either.

The actual sequence is

STRIKE FUSE
DROP DYNAMITE
EAST

which is irritatingly specific. With the boulder blasted, you can go in to a brand-new area which feels like a Part 2 to the game.

(It’s not clear at all from the text, but LEAVE OUT from the entrance of the UFO lets you leave again — it felt for a while there I was trapped in.) Compass directions now get dropped: you’re supposed to PUSH X BUTTON followed by ENTER OVAL to go anywhere on the ship. The overall impression is slightly tedious and would be triply irritating for a slow typist.

The strange room descriptions do get cleared up later, but (I suspect for most players) pretty late, as in after the entire map is done being made.

Important rooms marked in color.

There’s a lot of rooms with weirdly-described cylinders and I admit I appreciated the atmosphere of feeling alien as opposed to, say, Menagerie, which clearly was a thinly-veiled Earth-type zoo. The odd movement reinforced this even though it got irritating by the end.

To get in at all you need to fill a hole with the cube from the desert; that causes to buttons to start working. Then deeper in there’s a “grey cube” that gets used on another machine to form a “white cube” and finally on a third machine to make it so you understand the alien language. Nothing is labeled and all three are somewhat distant from each other so it really is just luck for things to happen.

With the final effect, you can understand what rooms are and what the messages mean.

The particularly interesting room is the weapons room.

The white button pops up a viewscreen, and the green button (while the white button is active) gives instructions on how to shoot things. You can pick your target.

Being a loyal Earthling.

With the mothership destroyed, the overall threat is gone, and you can escape the way you came all the way back to the entrance. I had a monster chasing me half the time, so it’s not like the desert is entirely peaceful, but I guess the Air Force can roll in now with guns blazing for the rest.

This game has some vivid memories. Some of this just comes from the distribution influence (Tandy really did not sell much other than Tandy product in their stores, so TRS-80 players often only saw the “official” games like this one) but there is a certain vivid haunting-ness to the environment that I found appealing. From Figment Fly:

I could manage to kill one alien with the shotgun, but I never found a spaceship. I never knew what the game was about back then. One of my dad’s co-workers told me about a spaceship and all that, but I wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not.

I could only remember one: An adventure game that began with “Xe…” It featured a dusty empty town, a hot desert, aliens, and a space ship.

Lately I had a yearning to complete the memory, and luckily I found your site. A few emulators later, I’m in Purgatory, and this time I shoot that rotten nine-foot diamondback snake in two. And finally I get past the boulder and get in the spaceship that has taunted me since the early 80s.

I didn’t know there was a UFO back then, until I found your website. I originally thought the game was going to be about ghosts or something like that because of the ghost town feeling in the first half of the game. I preferred the first half “old town” part of the game to the last half about the UFO. It was a lot of fun exploring the town, and the way it was written really made the town come alive for me in my imagination. I could almost hear the wind blowing and see the tumbleweeds moving through the desert.

I’m guessing not a lot of people played with their eye on the art cover. Like: they found it on a parent’s computer and the disk was copied third hand via a piracy network. The desert maze really is very stressful and there’s lots of spaces where you just loop around, and the whole time there’s chasing monsters + messages about dying from lack of food and water (and as far as I know, no portable way to carry water!)

Still not bad for a modern experience, although the parser remained horribly finicky to the end; having a straightforward error message is really so much better that what happened here. It’s one of those route-not-taken in UI history where I think it could have been turned into something special, but people were eyeballing Infocom (and eventually, Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls) as the model to follow, with only a few weird experiments (like Amnesia) otherwise.

One last comment on the title: it refers to the shotgun in the game. We have had, almost as a complete stereotype now, so many weapons fail to work on enemies; they get laid low via some roundabout puzzle instead. This is normal for adventure games. But the shotgun just works and starts blasting things and I had the brief pleasure that usually comes from playing DOOM or something where the hordes fall by the wayside.

12 days ago