Planet Interactive Fiction Last Update: Monday, 30. June 2025 22:01

Rewind

A little over three years ago I started playing around with elements of a new IF Platform built in C#. The vision included a graph data store, text service, and not much else. Then when ChatGPT arrived, I was able to make some progress, especially learning new patterns, but those early models were very bad. Each time a new model was introduced, I'd start over and see where it would lead, but the capability of the model, the context window, and the amount of time given was nowhere near enough to handle a complex system.

When Anthropic released its first model under Claude, I switched over to their paid plan. The context window was still a serious limitation and the interface was limited. You could upload your files to a project, but eventually you'd reach the limit and have to figure out ways to cheat that limitation. Eventually I paused, realizing the model and context windows were close, but not good enough.

I also struggled to get Claude to write C# well and so I asked it why this seemed to be a problem. Shockingly, it admitted that C# was a second-tier language in its database and that the optimal languages were Typescript and Python. SO after doing some R&D and switching to Typescript, it became clear that Typescript was a better platform in any case. And if I want, I can do a secondary project to convert a working Typescript version back to C#.

Then Claude Opus 4 arrived as well as higher subscriptions. I started with Opus 4, but almost instantly upgraded to the MAX $100/month subscription. I also downloaded Claude Desktop which allows you to use MCP (Model Context Protocol) which is an obscure method of talking to "other things". The built-in MCP is file_system, which allows Claude Desktop to see a directory on your local file system. I'd tried using before the MAX upgrade, but it was cranky. There's a known bug where Claude will respond to a prompt, then wipe out your prompt and its response before you can read it. Upgrading to MAX has mostly eliminated this issue and restarting the app seems to clear it up.

With Opus 4 and MCP and MAX to Success

This combination is the game changer for generating code with GenAI. There are still a lot of general engineering disciplines you have to adhere to, but you can get extraordinary results when you learn these guardrails.

The guardrails include:

• Write design documents with development standards.
• Write ADRs (Architecture Decision Records)
• Repeatedly request "professional" assessments. (You are a professional IF Platform Designer and Developer but also know my vision)
• State your vision and criteria clearly to Claude. For Sharpee, this was:
  • queryable world model
  • event source story and system messages
    • story messages will allow a post-turn text service to construct output
    • system messages show everything that happened within the turn (parser, validation)
  • loosely-coupled architecture stack
  • fluent user DSL for authors
  • no virtual machine
  • typescript (with some dev standards like don't use enums)
  • no unit tests until a layer/module is "design stable"
• Repeatedly request check lists of bursts of work to keep the model on track. I can stress this enough. These models will run amok if you don't contain them. Even with these guardrails, Claude will sometimes get confused about "where we are" and start undoing or reworking solved problems. Luckily it's very good when you scold it and it will revert changes correctly.

Today

There is still a lot of work to do. I have no indulged in the Forge DSL authoring layer yet, but I occasionally will ask Claude to validate what something might look like and that we're not breaking our vision. The Text Service is still a theory, though I am confident the event source will be more than sufficient to emit text in standard IF form. The challenge of combing text will be an interesting effort.

The diagram is slightly out of date, but it's close enough to share. I don't see any major changes at this point. The internal pattern of Validate->Execute and external pattern of Parse->Validate-Execute seem to offer an elegant design.

Traits and Behaviors

One thing that came through in the design process was stepping away from "objects" and moving to something different. From this Traits and Behaviors were born. Traits are things in the traditional sense. So RoomTrait is what you add to an Entity to make it a Room. The RoomTrait contains the data. RoomBehavior contains the logic. Claude and I have thoroughly examined how this extends to story development and its quite beautiful.

Summary

I would say Sharpee is about 75% complete with no major architecture changes in its future. The remaining work is integration, testing, and developing the Text Service and a few sample games.

Layoffs at a game studio aren't news any more, but I guess I'm on this beat. If nothing else, this blog has a longer searchable history of Cyan history than Cyan does.

Yesterday Cyan posted one of those all-too-familiar dark-mode press releases:

(Cyan people confirmed on Discord that this was discussed in advance within the company.)

The Bluesky thread goes on to link a list of ten of the affected people. The only name I recognize is Ryan "Greydragon" Warzecha, who's been a producer and animator at Cyan going back to the Uru days. I recall Ryan telling me in 2018 that he'd been laid off by Cyan three times! I guess now it's four.

This news comes right after their announcement that Firmament has entered Playstation certification, and a week after they released Rime for the new Myst. In retrospect, it looks like they've been clearing the backlog of dev work before the planned layoff.

Why did this happen? Cyan hasn't given any more detail, but the only possible answer is "Myst and Riven didn't sell as well as we'd hoped." And whoever they called to get financing hasn't come through.

Note that Cyan is an independent studio which is still owned by its original founders. A lot of these layoff announcements happen when a corporate megalith controls a studio and decides to slash it for the sake of their quarterly earning calls. But that's not what's happening here.

The "next project" Cyan mentions is the "new game in the D'ni-verse" -- that is, the Myst setting but not a direct sequel to the Myst series. We recall that they snuck the word "PREFALL" into a store page, so that's what fans have been calling it.

(Cyan has never ever called this game "Myst 6". Then again, around 2022 CDPR was insisting that the next Witcher game would never be called "The Witcher 4". Sometimes Marketing wins the argument.)

Whatever the title, Cyan has a game planned, and they still have enough people to make progress on it while they hunt for funding. Presumably if they get money they'll hire back up.

What about Kickstarter?

Cyan bootstrapped themselves out of their post-Uru slump by running Kickstarters for Obduction and Firmament. (Also some stuff in 2018 celebrating Myst's 25th anniversary; but that was primarily aimed at long-time fans.)

However, it's notable that neither Obduction nor Firmament was fully funded by those Kickstarters. Crowdfunding brought in seed money and an estimate of audience interest that Cyan could use to secure platform funding. Once those games shipped -- in fact, even before Firmament -- Cyan was able to leverage their track record to get financing directly. At that point they didn't need Kickstarter any more.

I guess it's not impossible that they'd try again, but it seems unlikely to work. Crowdfunding is depressed in the current economy just like everything else. And even if a campaign succeeded, Cyan would still need to go out looking for full funding. Which is what they're doing now.

Historical context

Cyan has been up and down, size-wise, since Riven shipped. For a few weeks in 2005 they shut down completely! That was after the original Myst Online launch was cancelled; they spent a year putting Myst 5 together out of leftover pieces, got it out the door, and laid off everybody.

Three weeks later Gametap agreed to fund Myst Online, and Cyan started back up. Except the relaunch didn't go great, and they wound up laying off a bunch of people again in 2008.

Then they went through the Kickstarter stuff I just mentioned. They scaled up again for Obduction, and then scaled back down after that shipped. ("About ten developers" in 2018.) Then Firmament was funded, and they were back up again. Myst got platform funding in 2019 (Facebook by all reports), which carried Cyan through Riven. But no farther, it seems.

So this is just another loop on the roller coaster. We hope! The badness of 2025 is really unprecedented. (You can talk about 1983 but the industry was so much smaller then.) Maybe the investment industry will decide to diversify and start putting money into smaller studios. Maybe the entire US economy will tank. Really no point making predictions at this stage.

Like I said last week: check back in August for the news from Mysterium.

Update (late June)

Even more layoffs today:

Note that the linked spreadsheet includes people from the March layoff. (Ryan Warzecha, for example.) The list was ten people in March; it's up to 14 now, but I didn't track how many people got jobs and thus removed their names.

I can only imagine that the company is winding down. Not going out of business -- they have some kind of long tail off the existing games -- but dropping down to a few people and putting all future development on hold.

This is pure theorizing, mind you. I have no inside sources at Cyan; I don't even know what the current headcount is. (If I find out I'll update this post!) But two end-of-quarter layoffs with no good news is, well, bad news.

We're probably not getting any info at Mysterium time, either. Cyan has not scheduled a company update or chat event. I don't expect any more announcements until and unless they land some kind of deal -- and that could be any time or never.

This post is mainly to announce that after an immense amount of work, a group at Gaming Alexandria (mainly gschmidl, ftb1979, bsittler, and eientei) have managed to repair the damage to the NEC PC-6001 version of Mystery House II to the extent that the second part is now playable. I have a version (with emulator) here. Just drag and drop one of the three save states onto the executable to play either part 1, 2, or 3.

The starting screen of the second part.

I did play through parts 2 and 3 but first I need to get some inside baseball out of the way, abstruse enough it won’t make sense unless you’ve read all my previous posts on Mystery House II. So much effort was expended trying to work things out it is at least worth recording as reference, especially because some pieces are still missing (like the first volume of the MZ-2000 version of the game).

Just which versions are out there?

To start, we can put together the information from the I/O Magazine ad I’ve shown already…

I/O Magazine, May 1983.

…and the old 1983 Sharp Micro Cabin catalog that came up while puzzling out Diamond Adventure.

The first version, written by Dr. Moritani (the dentist) seems to have been for MZ-80B. The system Sharp sold had cassettes by default with floppy disks an optional purchase. The ad clearly states the “FD” version was by Moritani so that’s likely the original platform, meaning this was written without any kind of volume-splitting. The cassette version was then made by Ohyachi (computer store owner, and collaborator on Mystery House I). This is where there are two volumes that get listed as separate purchases. This is all confirmed by the catalog as well.

The MZ-2000 is extremely close to the MZ-80B so there was likely minimal work done to create a port; we do know they were sold separate, though.

From Giant Bomb, uploaded by bowloflentils.

As shown in an image from one of my earlier posts, the cassettes ended up also packaged together in a later printing, while floppy disk had MZ-80B, MZ-2000, PC-8801, and FM-8 (Fujitsu Micro 8).

There’s also copies of the game for FM-7 (shown below, and the FM-7 came out after the FM-8)…

…PC-6001 (our recovered one, although technically for the Mark II), Epson QC-10 (QX-10 in the West), and MSX. My playing sequence:

1.) I started with the MSX version from ARROW SOFT, which is not only dumped but has a fan translation into English. It is significantly changed from the other versions and can be treated as a different game.

2.) I then moved on to start the PC-6001 version — broken into three parts rather than two, although the “volume 2” tape contains parts 2 and 3. This turned out to have a corrupted tape and some damage over part 2.

3.) Because I had a copy of MZ-200 Vol 2, I switched to that version, starting on the second floor of the house. Unlike the NEC version it ends after part 2 and there are puzzle differences (which I’ll explain a little later).

A chart, just to keep everything straight:

Both the tapes and the program parts are called “volumes” but I tweaked the terminology to keep things clear. I have no idea the differences between the versions I haven’t touched (other than I highly suspect MZ-80B and MZ-2000 are quite close). Did someone care enough about the obscure Epson QC-10 to make a custom port with its own puzzles?

What changes were made in the NEC PC 6001 version?

The map looks the same at the start, but if you turn right, while formerly there was a slightly surreal elevator, taking you to a “garden” and a dark area with the safe/key-to-exit…

…the NEC version has a bedroom.

Turning south there’s a part with a floor that looks fragile, and you can KICK FLOOR in order to open it up. This will get used later.

Additionally the bed is next to what the game calls a RACK, which can be searched to find some tobacco and a matchbook (that was in a fireplace in the other version of the game).

The layout otherwise starts out the same, with a memo in a frame in the same position as before.

Different content, though. MZ-2000 here talked about setting a clock to 1 o’clock. We already got a clock setting in part 1 (which said to use 3 o’clock) and this spot has a clue for the safe instead.

The fireplace which previously had matches now has a rope.

Climbing up to the third floor is mostly the same (except the HATCH is now a DOOR). The windows which oddly give numbers when opened (corresponding to the safe) are mostly gone, except for one that just doesn’t open (we already got the code from the memo in the picture).

Still a SCOOP. One of the windows in the MZ-2000 version was straight ahead.

ADJUST TIME to 3 rather than 1.

PUSH BUTTON instead of PLAY MZ2000.

The MEMO at the end gives steps for digging, just like the MZ-2000 port.

However, the way to the garden previously in order to dig was the elevator. There’s no elevator this time. That rope from earlier can be tied to the balcony (which was just scenery before) in order to climb down.

The DIG GROUND mechanics work the same (no Microcabin logo this time) yielding the treasure. In order to escape, you need to take the rope (previously tied to the balcony) now over to the bedroom and the hole, and tie it there. If you try to go down without matches the game will ask if you have any (this is the same “enforce the world-state” trick we saw in part 1). Assuming you have them, you can go down and enter part 3.

Part 3 is very short. You are in the room with a hole and the rope, and need to get down in the cellar to get a key. You can go DOWN, the LIGHT MATCH to see in the darkness. There are five matches and they last a random amount of real time.

You can go west now — one-way trip — to the spot underneath the hole you previously busted way back in part 1. You can move a ladder and climb up to get out, but you need to grab the key first, which you can find by turning to the right to see a safe.

Using the code from memo 3. I assume the game forces you to stay in part 2 if you haven’t gotten the memo yet.

You still have a 2-item limit and you’re holding the box/jewel from the garden, so you need to ditch the matches to take the key. Basically, you need to a.) wait for the match to go out b.) LIGHT MATCH c.) CAST MATCH d.) grab the key and book it to the ladder while you can still see. (In the MZ version, casting the match automatically made it go out.)

This basically says now you’re wealthy, so you should buy more Microcabin software.

Is Isao Harada anybody?

Yes. He also worked for a NEC port of Dream Land, which is Dr. Moritani’s third game (from 1983, so we’ll see it sooner rather than later). His Mobygames list of credits is here although I don’t know how complete it is.

I do think it quite possible worked on the (disk-based) PC-8801 version first, then had the same split-program issue as other Micro Cabin people did in order to get it onto cassette, except because he fiddled with removing the elevator (too Willy Wonka, I guess?) and giving the game a different ending section the game landed in 3 parts rather than 2.

My first new official update comes next week, as we embark on 1983 once more!

Eternal Affairs

Recover a stolen artifact and lose your heart as a secret magical agent! Can you uncover an arcane conspiracy before the clock runs out? After you lost your beloved brother in a magical anomaly, you joined the Bureau of Magic to investigate magical anomalies and prevent the same tragedy from befalling anyone else. Eternal Affairs is an interactive urban fantasy romance novel by Jamie Maurer. I sat down with Jamie to talk about their writing process and inspirations. Eternal Affairs releases this Thursday, June 26th. You can play the first three chapters today for free and wishlist the game on Steam!

This is your first time writing for Heart’s Choice but not your first time writing interactive fiction, I think. Tell me a little about your background with IF.

I’ve worked with several different interactive fiction games on mobile platforms. I started out adapting romance novels into an interactive visual novel format, and I later wrote some original content for the platform Storyloom (sadly no longer available). More recently, I wrote several chapters of an original story called Once Upon a Scheme on the platform Dorian.

How does ChoiceScript and our game design style compare for you to the other tools and places you’ve worked on projects?

There’s definitely a learning curve with ChoiceScript, but that complexity also gave me a lot more freedom and control over the types of mechanics I could implement compared to other platforms I’ve worked with.

What surprised you most about the writing of Eternal Affairs?

This was by far my most ambitious game writing project and it required a lot of trial and error. It also came about during a really tumultuous period of my personal life, which was a very interesting time to be writing a romance novel! I found that one of the best ways to maintain my own writing momentum and that of the story’s pacing was to imagine playing a tabletop roleplaying game with myself, where I was both the game master and the player.

Do you have a favorite NPC?

Charlie has sort of a vampy femme fatale quality to their romantic dialogue that was a lot of fun to play with. I also enjoyed writing Moth and the stream-of-consciousness poeticness that many of the Fae characters speak with.

It’s quite an interesting magical world you’ve created in this game. What sources of inspiration did you have in writing this?

Men in Black, The X-Files, and the video game Control were definitely major influences for the basic premise. The book and TV series The Magicians helped inspire the concept of a hidden magical world influenced by modern politics and socioeconomics. The aesthetic of the Fae world was very much inspired by vaporwave artwork and the paintings of Patrick Nagel. I also once worked for a company that did custom printed products, which, weirdly enough, kind of inspired my game’s CMYK-based magic system.

What are you working on next/what else are you working on now?

I’ve been on an extended hiatus from my YouTube channel about queer media and culture, but I’m looking to get back into creating more videos very soon!

In the spring of 1996, Brian Reynolds and Jeff Briggs took a long, hard look around them and decided that they’d rather be somewhere else.

At that time, the two men were working for MicroProse Software, for whom they had just completed Civilization II, with Reynolds in the role of primary designer and programmer and Briggs in that of co-designer, producer, and soundtrack composer. They had brought the project in for well under $1 million, all that their bosses were willing to shell out for what they considered to be a game with only limited commercial potential. And yet the early sales were very strong indeed, proof that the pent-up demand for a modestly modernized successor to Sid Meier’s masterstroke that Reynolds and Briggs had identified had been very, very real. Which is not to say that they were being given much credit for having proved their managers wrong.

MicroProse’s executives were really Spectrum Holobyte’s executives, ever since the latter company had acquired the former in December of 1993, in a deal lubricated by oodles of heedless venture capital and unsustainable levels of debt. Everything about the transaction seemed off-kilter; while MicroProse had a long and rich history and product portfolio, Spectrum Holobyte was known for the Falcon series of ultra-realistic combat flight simulators, for the first version of Tetris to run on Western personal computers, and for not a whole lot else. Seeing the writing on the wall, “Wild Bill” Stealey, the partner in crime with whom Sid Meier had founded MicroProse back in 1982, walked out the door soon after the shark swallowed the whale. The conjoined company went on to lose a staggering $57.8 million in two years, despite such well-received, well-remembered, and reasonably if not extraordinarily popular games as XCOM, Transport Tycoon, and Colonization. By the spring of 1996, the two-headed beast, which was still publishing games under both the Spectrum Holobyte and MicroProse banners, was teetering on the brink of insolvency, with, in the words of its CEO Stephen M. Race, a “negative tangible net worth.” It would require a last-minute injection of foreign investment capital that June to save it from being de-listed from the NASDAQ stock exchange.

The unexpectedly strong sales of Civilization II — the game would eventually sell 3 million copies, enough to make it MicroProse’s best seller ever by a factor of three — were a rare smudge of black in this sea of red ink. Yet Reynolds and Briggs had no confidence in their managers’ ability to build on their success. They thought it was high time to get off the sinking ship, time to get away from a company that was no longer much fun to work at. They wanted to start their own little studio, to make the games they wanted to make their way.

But that, of course, was easier said than done. They had a proven track record inside the industry, but neither Brian Reynolds nor Jeff Briggs was a household name, even among hardcore gamers. Most of the latter still believed that Civilization II was the work of Sid Meier — an easy mistake to make, given how prominently Meier’s name was emblazoned on the box. Reynolds and Briggs needed investors, plus a publisher who would be willing to take a chance on them. Thankfully, the solution to their dilemma was quite literally staring them in the face every time they looked at that Civilization II box: they asked Sid Meier to abandon ship with them. After agonizing for a while about the prospect of leaving the company he had co-founded in the formative days of the American games industry, Meier agreed, largely for the same reason that Reynolds and Briggs had made their proposal to him in the first place: it just wasn’t any fun to be here anymore.

So, a delicate process of disentanglement began. Keenly aware of the legal peril in which their plans placed them, the three partners did everything in their power to make their departure as amicable and non-dramatic as possible. For instance, they staggered their resignations so as not to present an overly united front: Briggs left in May of 1996, Reynolds in June, and Meier in July. Even after officially resigning, Meier agreed to continue at MicroProse for some months more as a part-time consultant, long enough to see through his computerized version of the ultra-popular Magic: The Gathering collectible-card game. He didn’t even complain when, in an ironic reversal of the usual practice of putting Sid Meier’s name on things that he didn’t actually design, his old bosses made it clear that they intended to scrub him from the credits of this game, which he had spent the better part of two years of his life working on. In return for all of this and for a firm promise to stay in his own lane once he was gone, he was allowed to take with him all of the code he had written during the past decade and a half at MicroProse. “They didn’t want to be making detailed strategy titles any more than we wanted to be making Top Gun flight simulators,” writes Meier in his memoir. On the face of it, this was a strange attitude for his former employer to have, given that Civilization II was selling so much better than any of its other games. But Brian Reynolds, Jeff Briggs, and Sid Meier were certainly not inclined to look the gift horse in the mouth.

They decided to call their new company Firaxis Games, a name that had its origin in a piece of music that Briggs had been tinkering with, which he had dubbed “Fiery Axis.” Jason Coleman, a MicroProse programmer who had coded on Civilization II, quit his job there as well and joined them. Sid Meier’s current girlfriend and future second wife Susan Brookins became their office manager.

The first office she was given to manage was a cramped space at the back of Absolute Quality, a game-testing service located in Hunt Valley, Maryland, just a stone’s throw away from MicroProse’s offices. Their landlords/flatmates were, if nothing else, a daily reminder of the need to test, test, test when making games. Brian Reynolds (who writes of himself here in the third person):

CEO Jeff Briggs worked the phones to rustle up some funding and did all the hard work of actually putting a new company together. Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds worked to scrape together some playable prototype code, and Jason Coleman wrote the first lines of JACKAL, the engine which these days pretty much holds everything together. Office-manager Susan Brookins found us some office furniture and bought crates of Coke, Sprite, and Dr. Pepper to stash in a mini-fridge Brian had saved from his college days. We remembered that at some indeterminate point in the past we were considered world-class game designers, but our day-to-day lives weren’t providing us with a lot of positive reinforcement on that point. So, for the first nine months of our existence as a company, we clunked over railroad tracks in the morning, played Spy Hunter in the upstairs kitchen, and declared “work at home” days when Absolute Quality had competitors in the office.

Once the necessary financing was secured, the little gang of five moved into a proper office of their own and hired more of their former colleagues, many of whom had been laid off in a round of brutal cost-cutting that had taken place at MicroProse the same summer as the departure of the core trio. These folks bootstrapped Firaxis’s programming and art departments. Thanks to the cachet of the Sid Meier name/brand, the studio was already being seen as a potential force to be reckoned with. Publishers flew out to them instead of the other way around to pitch their services. In the end, Firaxis elected to sign on with Electronic Arts, the biggest publisher of them all.

The three founding fathers had come into the venture with a tacit understanding about the division of labor. Brian Reynolds would helm a sprawlingly ambitious but fundamentally iterative 4X strategy game, a “spiritual successor” to Civilization I and II. This was the project that had gotten Electronic Arts’s juices flowing; its box would, it went without saying, feature Sid Meier’s name prominently, no matter how much or how little Meier ultimately had to do with it. Meanwhile Meier himself would have free rein to pursue the quirkier, more esoteric ideas that he had been indulging in ever since finishing Civilization I. And Briggs would be the utility player, making sure the business side ran smoothly, writing the music, and pitching in wherever help was needed on either partner’s project.

Sid Meier has a well-earned reputation for working rapidly and efficiently. It’s therefore no surprise that he was the first Firaxis designer to finish a game, and by a wide margin at that. Called simply Gettysburg! — or rather Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! — it was based upon the battle that took place in that Pennsylvania city during the American Civil War. More expansively, it was an attempt to make a wargame that would be appealing to grognards but accessible enough to attract newcomers, by virtue of being real-time rather than turn-based, of being audiovisually attractive, and of offering a whole raft of difficulty levels and tutorials to ease the player into the experience. Upon its release in October of 1997, Computer Gaming World magazine called it “a landmark, a real-time-strategy game whose unique treatment of its subject matter points to a [new] direction for the whole genre.” For my own part, being neither a dedicated grognard nor someone who shares the fascination of so many Americans for the Civil War, I will defer to the contemporary journal of record. I’m sure that Gettysburg! does what it does very well, as almost all Sid Meier games do. On the broader question of whether it brought new faces into the grognard fold, the verdict is more mixed. Meier writes today that “it was a success,” but it was definitely not a hit on the scale of SSI’s Panzer General, the last wargame to break out of its ghetto in a big way.

To the hungry eyes of Electronic Arts, Gettysburg! was just the appetizer anyway. The main dish would be Alpha Centauri.

The idea for Alpha Centauri had been batted around intermittently as a possible “sequel to Civilization” ever since Sid Meier had made one of the two possible victory conditions of that game the dispatching of a spaceship to that distant star, an achievement what was taken as a proof that the nation so doing had reached the absolute pinnacle of terrestrial achievement. In the wake of the original Civilization’s release and success, Meier had gone so far as to prototype some approaches to what happens after humanity becomes a star-faring species, only to abandon them for other things. Now, though, the old idea was newly appealing to the principals at Firaxis, for commercial as much as creative reasons. They had left the rights to the Civilization franchise behind them at MicroProse, meaning that a Firaxis Civilization III was, at least for the time being, not in the cards. But if they made a game called Alpha Centauri that used many of the same rules, systems, and gameplay philosophies, and that sported the name of Sid Meier on the box… well, people would get the message pretty clearly, wouldn’t they? This would be a sequel to Civilization in all but its lack of a Roman numeral.

When he actually started to try to make it happen, however, Brian Reynolds learned pretty quickly why Sid Meier had abandoned the idea. What seemed like a no-brainer in the abstract proved beset with complications when you really engaged. The central drama of Civilization was the competition and conflict between civilizations — which is also, not coincidentally, the central drama of human history itself. But where would the drama come from for a single group of enlightened emissaries from an earthly Utopia settling an alien planet? Whom would they compete against? Just exploring and settling and building weren’t enough, Reynolds thought. There needed to be a source of tension. There needed to be an Other.

So, Brian Reynolds started to read — not history this time, as he had when working on Civilization II, but science fiction. The eventual manual for Alpha Centauri would list seven authors that Reynolds found particularly inspiring, but it seems safe to say that his lodestar was Frank Herbert, the first writer on the list. This meant not only the inevitable Dune, but also — and perhaps even more importantly — a more obscure novel called The Jesus Incident that Herbert co-wrote with Bill Ransom. One of Herbert’s more polarizing creations, The Jesus Incident is an elliptical, intensely philosophical and even spiritual novel about the attempt of a group of humans to colonize a planet that begins to manifest a form of sentience of its own, and proves more than capable of expressing its displeasure at their presence on its surface. This same conceit would become the central plot hook of Alpha Centauri.

Yes, I just used the word “plot.” And make no mistake about its significance. Of the threads that have remained unbroken throughout Sid Meier’s long career in game design, one of the most prominent is this mild-mannered man’s deep-seated antipathy toward any sort of set-piece, pre-scripted storytelling in games. Such a thing is, he has always said, a betrayal of computer games’ defining attribute as a form of media, their interactivity. For it prevents the player from playing her way, having her own fun, writing her own personal story using the sandbox the designer has provided. Firaxis had never been intended as exclusively “Sid Meier’s company,” but it had been envisioned as a studio that would create, broadly speaking, his type of games. For Reynolds to suggest injecting strong narrative elements into the studio’s very first 4X title was akin to Deng Xiaoping suggesting to his politburo that what post-Cultural Revolution China could really use was a shot of capitalism.

And yet Meier and the others around Reynolds let him get away with it, just as those around Deng did. They did so because he had proven himself with Colonization and Civilization II, because they trusted him, and because Alpha Centauri was at the end of the day his project. They hadn’t gone to the trouble of founding Firaxis in order to second-guess one another.

Thus Reynolds found himself writing far more snippets of static text for his strategy game than he had ever expected to. He crafted a series of textual “interludes” — they’re described by that word in the game — in which the planet’s slowly dawning consciousness and its rising anger at the primates swarming over its once-pristine surface are depicted in ways that mere mechanics could not entirely capture. They appear when the player reaches certain milestones, being yet one more attempt in the annals of gaming history to negotiate the tricky terrain that lies between emergent and fixed narrative.

An early interlude, delivering some of the first hints that the planet on which you’ve landed may be more than it seems.

Alpha Centauri became a darker game as it became more story-oriented, separating itself in the process from the sanguine tale of limitless human progress that is Civilization. Reynolds subverted Alpha Centauri’s original backstory about the perfect society that had finally advanced so far as to colonize the stars. In his new version, progress on Earth has not proved all it was cracked up to be. In fact, the planet his interstellar colonists left behind them was on its last legs, wracked by wars and environmental devastation. It’s strongly implied if not directly stated that earthly humanity is in all likelihood extinct by the time the colonists wake up from cryogenic sleep and look down upon the virgin new world that the game calls simply “Planet.”

Although the plot was destined to culminate in a reckoning with the consciousness of Planet itself, Brian Reynolds sensed that the game needed other, more grounded and immediate forms of conflict to give it urgency right from the beginning. He created these with another piece of backstory, one as contrived as could possibly be, but not ineffective in its context for all that. As told at length in a novella that Firaxis began publishing in installments on the game’s website more than six months before its release, mishaps and malevolence aboard the colony ship, which bore the sadly ironic name of Unity, led the colonists to split into seven feuding factions, each of whom inflexibly adhere to their own ideology about the best way to organize human society. The factions each made their way down to the surface of Planet separately, to become Alpha Centauri’s equivalent of Civilization’s nations. The player chooses one of them to guide.

So, in addition to the unusually strong plot, we have a heaping dose of political philosophy added to the mix; Alpha Centauri is an unapologetically heady game. Brian Reynolds had attended graduate school as a philosophy major in a previous life, and he drew from that background liberally. The factions’ viewpoints are fleshed out largely through a series of epigrams that appear as you research new technologies, each of them attributed to one of the seven faction leaders, with an occasional quote from Aristotle or Nietzsche dropped in for good measure.

The factions are:

• Gaia’s Stepdaughters, staunch environmentalists who believe that humanity must learn to live in harmony with nature to avoid repeating the mistakes that led to the ruination of Earth.
• The Human Hive, hardcore collectivists whose only complaint about Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution is that it didn’t go far enough.
• Morgan Industries, hardcore capitalists whose only complaint about Ayn Rand is that she didn’t go far enough.
• The University of Planet, STEM specialists who are convinced that scientific and technological progress alone would correct all that ails society if people would just let it run unfettered and go where it takes them.
• The Lord’s Believers, a fundamentalist sect who are convinced that God will deliver humanity to paradise if we all just pray really hard and abide by a set of stringent, arbitrary dictates.
• The Spartan Federation, who train their children from birth to be hardened, self-sacrificing warriors like the Spartans of old.
• The Peacekeepers, the closest thing to pragmatists in this rogue’s gallery of ideologues; they value human rights, democracy, dialog, and consensus-building, and can sometimes seem just as wishy-washy and ineffectual in the face of militant extremism as the earthly United Nations that spawned them.

Unlike the nations that appear in Civilization I and II, each of the factions in Alpha Centauri has a very significant set of systemic advantages and disadvantages that to a large extent force even a human player to guide them in a certain direction. For example, the Human Hive is excellent at building heavy infrastructure and pumping out babies, but poor at research, and can never become a democracy; the University of Planet is crazily great at research, but its populace has little patience for extended wars and is vulnerable to espionage. Trying to play a faction against type is, if not completely impossible for the advanced player, not an exercise for the faint of heart.

There is a lot of food for thought in the backstory of a ruined Earth and the foreground story of an angry Planet, as there is in the factions themselves and their ideologies, and trust me when I say that plenty of people have eaten their fill. Even today, more than a quarter-century after Alpha Centauri’s release, YouTube is full of introspective think-pieces purporting to tell us What It All Means.

Indeed, if anything, the game’s themes and atmosphere resonate more strongly today than they did when it first came out in February of 1999, at which time the American economy was booming, our world was as peaceful and open as it has ever been, and the fantasy that liberal democracy had won the day and we had reached the end of history could be easily maintained by the optimistic and the complacent. Alas, today Alpha Centauri feels far more believable than Civilization and its sang-froid about the inevitability of perpetual progress. These days, Alpha Centauri’s depiction of bickering, bitterly entrenched factions warring over the very nature of truth, progressing not at all spiritually or morally even as their technology runs wild in a hundred different perilous directions, strikes many as the more accurate picture of the nature of our species. People play Alpha Centauri to engage with modern life; they play Civilization to escape from it.

The original Civilization was ahead of the curve on global warming, prompting accusations of “political correctness” from some gamers. Paying heed to the environment is even more important in Alpha Centauri, since failing to do so can only aggravate Planet’s innate hostility. The “Eco-Damage” statistic is key.

That said, we must also acknowledge that Alpha Centauri is disarmingly good at mirroring the beliefs of its players back at them. Many people like to read a strong environmentalist message in the game, and it’s not hard to see why. Your struggles with the hostile Planet, which is doing everything it can to protect itself against the alien parasites on its surface, is an extreme interpretation of the Gaia hypothesis about Earth, even as Alpha Centauri’s  “transcendence” victory — the equivalent of Civilization’s tech victory that got us here in the first place — sees humanity overcoming its estrangement from its surroundings to literally become one with Planet.

For what it’s worth, though, in his “Designer’s Notes” at the back of the Alpha Centauri manual, the one message that Brian Reynolds explicitly states that he wishes for the game to convey is a very different one: that we ought to be getting on with the space race. “Are we content to stew in our collective juices, to turn inward as our planet runs inexorably out of resources?” he asks. “The stars are waiting for us. We have only to decide that it’s worth the effort to go there.” Personally, although I have nothing against space exploration in the abstract, I must say that I find the idea of space colonization as the solution to the problem of a beleaguered Planet Earth shallow if not actively dangerous. Even in the best-case scenario, many, many generations will pass before a significant number of humans will be able to call another celestial object their permanent home. In the meantime, there is in fact nothing “inexorable” about polluting our own planet and bleeding it dry; we have the means to stop doing so. To steal a phrase from Reynolds, we have only to decide that it’s worth the effort.

But enough with the ideology and the politics, you might be saying — how does Alpha Centauri play as a game? Interestingly, Brian Reynolds himself is somewhat ambivalent on this subject. He recalls that he set aside a week just to play Civilization II after he pronounced that game done, so thrilled was he at the way it had come out. Yet he says that he could barely stand to look at Alpha Centauri after it was finished. He was very proud of the world-building, the atmosphere, the fiction. But he didn’t feel like he had quite gotten the gameplay mechanics sorted so that they fully supported the fiction. And I can kind of see what he means.

To state the obvious: the gameplay of Alpha Centauri is deeply indebted to Civilization. Like, really, really indebted. So indebted that, when you first start to play it, you might be tempted to see it as little more than a cosmetic reskin. The cities of Civilization are now “bases”; the “goody-hut” villages are now supply pods dropped by the Unity in its last hours of life; barbarian tribes are native “mind worms”; settler engineers are terraformers; money is “energy credits”; Wonders of the World are Secret Projects; etc., etc. It is true that, as you continue to play, some aspects will begin to separate themselves from their inspiration. For example, and perhaps most notably, the mind worms prove to be more than just the early-game annoyance that Civilization’s barbarians are; instead they steadily grow in power and quantity as Planet is angered more and more by your presence. Still, the apple never does roll all that far from the tree.

Very early in a game of Alpha Centauri, when only a tiny part of the map has been revealed. Of all the contrivances in the fiction, this idea that you could have looked down on Planet from outer space and still have no clue about the geography of the place might be the most absurd.

Where Alpha Centauri does innovate in terms of its mechanics, its innovations are iterative rather than transformative. The most welcome improvement might be the implementation of territorial borders for each faction, drawn automatically around each cluster of bases. To penetrate the borders of another faction with your own units is considered a hostile act. This eliminates the weirdness that dogged the first two iterations of Civilization, which essentially saw your empire as a linked network of city-states rather than a contiguous territorial holding. No longer do the computer players walk in and plop down a city… err, base right in the middle of five of your own; no longer do the infantry units of your alleged allies decide to entrench themselves on the choicest tile of your best base. Unsurprisingly given the increased verisimilitude they yielded, national borders would show up in every iteration of the main Civilization series after Alpha Centauri.

Other additions are of more dubious value. Brian Reynolds names as one of his biggest regrets his dogged determination to let you design your own units out of the raw materials — chassis, propulsion systems, weapons, armor, and so on — provided by your current state of progression up the tech tree, in the same way that galaxy-spanning 4X games like Master of Orion allowed. It proved a time-consuming nightmare to implement in this uni-planetary context. And, as Reynolds admits, it’s doubtful how much it really adds to the game. All that time and effort could likely have been better spent elsewhere.

When I look at it in a more holistic sense, it strikes me that Alpha Centauri got itself caught up in what had perchance become a self-defeating cycle for grand-strategy games by the end of the 1990s. Earlier games had had their scope and complexity strictly limited by the restrictions of the relatively primitive hardware on which they ran. Far from being a problem, these limits often served to keep the game manageable for the player. One thinks of 1990’s Railroad Tycoon, another Sid Meier classic, which only had memory enough for 35 trains and 35 stations; as a result, the growth of your railroad empire was stopped just before it started to become too unwieldy to micro-manage. Even the original Civilization was arguably more a beneficiary than a victim of similar constraints. By the time Brian Reynolds made Civilization II, however, strategy games could become a whole lot bigger and more complex, even as less progress had been made on finding ways to hide some of their complexity from the player who didn’t want to see it and to give her ways of automating the more routine tasks of empire management. Grand-strategy games became ever huger, more intricate machines, whose every valve and dial still had to be manipulated by hand. Some players love this sort of thing, and more power to them. But for a lot of them — a group that includes me — it becomes much, much too much.

To its credit, Alpha Centauri is aware of this problem, and does what it can to address it. If you start a new game at one of the two lowest of the six difficulty levels, it assumes you are probably new to the game as a whole, and takes you through a little tutorial when you access each screen for the first time. More thoroughgoingly, it gives you a suite of automation tools that at least nod in the direction of letting you set the high-level direction for your faction while your underlings sweat the details. You can decide whether each of your cities… err, bases should focus on “exploring,” “building,” “discovering,” or “conquering” and leave the rest to its “governor”; you can tell your terraforming units to just, well, terraform in whatever way they think best; you can even tell a unit just to go out and “explore” the blank spaces on your map.

Is the cure worse than the disease?

Sadly, though, these tools are more limited than they might first appear. The tutorials do a decent job of telling you what the different stuff on each screen is and does, but do almost nothing to explain the concepts that underlie them; that is to say, they tell you how to twiddle a variety of knobs, but don’t tell you why you might want to twiddle them. Meanwhile the automation functions are undermined by being abjectly stupid more often than not. Your governor will happily continue researching string theory while his rioting citizens are burning the place down around his ears. You can try to fine-tune his instructions, but there comes a point when you realize that it’s easier just to do everything yourself. The same applies to most of the automated unit functions. The supreme booby prize has to go to the aforementioned “explore” function. As far as I can determine, it just causes your unit to move in a random direction every turn, which tends to result in it chasing its tail like a dog that sat down in peanut butter rather than charging boldly into the unknown.

This, then, is the contradiction at the heart of Alpha Centauri, which is the same one that bothers me in Civilization II. A game that purports to be about Big Ideas demands that you spend most of your time engaged in the most fiddly sort of busywork. I hasten to state once again that this is not automatically a bad thing; again, some people enjoy that sort of micro-management very much. For my own part, I can get into it a bit at the outset, but once I have a dozen bases all demanding constant attention and 50 or 60 units pursuing their various objectives all over the map, I start to lose heart. For me, this problem is the bane of the 4X genre. I’m not enough of an expert on the field to know whether anyone has really come close to solving it; I look forward to finding out as we continue our journey through gaming history. As of this writing, though, my 4X gold standards remain Civilization I and Master of Orion I, because their core systems are simple enough that the late game never becomes completely overwhelming.

Speaking of Master of Orion: alongside the questionable idea of custom-built units, Alpha Centauri also lifts from that game the indubitably welcome one of a “diplomatic victory,” which eliminates the late-game tedium of having to hunt down every single enemy base and unit for a conquest victory that you know is going to be yours. If you can persuade or intimidate enough of the other factions to vote for you in the “Planetary Council” — or if you can amass such a large population of your own that you can swamp the vote — you can make an inevitability a reality by means of an election. Likewise, you can also win an “economic” victory by becoming crazy rich. These are smart additions that work as advertised. They may only nibble at the edges of the central problem I mentioned above, but, hey, credit where it’s due.

Aesthetically, Alpha Centauri is a marked improvement over Civilization II, which, trapped in the Windows 3.1 visual paradigm as it was, could feel a bit like “playing” a really advanced Excel spreadsheet. But Alpha Centauri also exhibits a cold — not to say sterile — personality, with none of the goofy humor that has always been one of Civilization’s most underrated qualities, serving to nip any pretentiousness in the bud by reminding us that the designers too know how silly a game that can pit Abraham Lincoln against Mahatma Gandhi in a nuclear-armed standoff ultimately is. There’s nothing like that understanding on display in Alpha Centauri — much less the campy troupe of live-action community-theater advisors who showed up to chew the scenery in Civilization II. The look and feel of Alpha Centauri is more William Gibson than Mel Brooks.

While the aesthetics of Alpha Centauri represent a departure from what came before, we’re back to the same old same old when it comes to the actual interface, just with more stuff packed into the menus and sub-menus. I’m sure that Brian Reynolds did what he could, but it will nevertheless come off as a convoluted mess to the uninitiated modern player. It’s heavily dependent on modes, a big no-no in GUI design since the days when the Apple Macintosh was a brand new product. If you’re anything like me, you’ll accidentally move a unit about ten times in any given evening of play because you thought you were in “view” mode when you were actually in “move” mode. And no, there is no undo function, a feature for which I’d happily trade the ability to design my own units.

The exit dialog is one of the few exceptions to Alpha Centauri as a humor-free zone. “Please don’t go,” says a passable imitation of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. “The drones need you.” Note that this is a game in which you click “OK” to cancel. Somewhere out there a human-factors interface consultant is shuddering in horror.

As so often happens in reviews like these, I find now that I’ve highlighted the negative here more than I really intended to. Alpha Centauri is by no means a bad game; on the contrary, for some players it is a genuinely great one. It is, however, a sharply bifurcated game, whose fiction and gameplay are rather at odds with one another. The former is thoughtful and bold, even disturbing in a way that Civilization never dared to be. The latter is pretty much what you would expect from a game that was promoted as “Civilization in space,” and, indeed, that was crafted by the same man who gave us Civilization II. A quick survey of YouTube reveals the two halves of the whole all too plainly. Alongside those earnest think-pieces about What It All Means, there are plenty of videos that offer tips on the minutiae of its systems and show off the host’s skill at beating it at superhuman difficulty levels, untroubled by any of its deeper themes or messages.

As you’ve probably gathered from the tone of this article, Alpha Centauri leaves me with mixed feelings. I’m already getting annoyed by the micro-management by the time I get into the mid-game, even as I miss a certain magic sauce that is part and parcel of Civilization. There’s something almost mythical or allegorical about going from inventing the wheel to sending a colony ship on its way out to the stars. Going from Biogenetics to the “Threshold of Transcendence” in Alpha Centauri is less relatable. And while the story and the additional philosophical textures that Alpha Centauri brings to the table are thought-provoking, they can only be fully appreciated once. After that, you’re mostly just clicking past the interludes and epigrams to get on to building the next thing you need for your extraterrestrial empire.

In fact, it seems to me that Alpha Centauri at the gameplay level favors the competitive player more than the experiential one; being firmly in the experiential camp myself, this may explain why it doesn’t completely agree with me. It’s a more fiercely zero-sum affair than Civilization. Those players most interested in the development side of things can’t ensure a long period of peaceful growth by choosing to play against only one or two rivals. All seven factions are always in this game, and they seem to me far more prone to conflict than those of Civilization, what with the collection of mutually antithetical ideologies that are such inseparable parts of their identities. Suffice to say that the other faction leaders are exactly the self-righteous jerks that rigid ideological extremists tend to be in real life. This does not lend itself to peace and harmony on Planet even before the mind worms start to rise up en masse. Even when playing as the Peacekeepers, I found myself spending a lot more time fighting wars in Alpha Centauri than I ever did in Civilization, where I was generally able to set up a peaceful, trustworthy democracy, forge strong diplomatic and trading links with my neighbors, and ride my strong economy and happy and prosperous citizenry to the stars. Playing Alpha Centauri, by contrast, is more like being one of seven piranhas in a fishbowl than a valued member of a community of nations. If you can find one reliable ally, you’re doing pretty darn well on the diplomatic front. Intervals of peace tend to be the disruption in the status quo of war rather than the other way around.

The other factions spend an inordinate amount of time trying to extort money out of you.

There was always an understanding at Firaxis that, for all that Alpha Centauri was the best card they had to play at that point in time from a commercial standpoint, its sales probably weren’t destined to rival those of Civilization II. For the Civilization franchise has always attracted a fair number of people from outside the core gaming demographics, even if it is doubtful how many of them really buckle down to play it.

Nonetheless, Alpha Centauri did about as well as one could possibly expect after its release in February of 1999. (Electronic Arts would surely have preferred to have the game a few months earlier, to hit the Christmas buying season, but one of the reasons Firaxis had been founded had been to avoid such compromises.) Sales of up to 1 million units have been claimed for it by some of the principals involved. Even if that figure is a little inflated, as I suspect it may be, the game likely sold well into the high hundreds of thousands.

By 1999, an expansion pack for a successful game like Alpha Centauri was almost obligatory. And indeed, it’s hard to get around the feeling that Alpha Centauri: Alien Crossfire, which shipped in October of that year, was created more out of obligation than passion. Neither the navel-gazers nor the zero-summers among the original game’s fan base seem all that hugely fond of it. Patched together by a committee of no fewer than eight designers, with the name of Brian Reynolds the very last one listed, it adds no fewer than seven new factions, which only serve to muddy the narrative and gameplay waters without adding much of positive interest to the equation; the two alien factions that appear out of nowhere seem particularly out of place. If you ask me, Alpha Centauri is best played in its original form — certainly when you first start out with it, and possibly forever.

Be that as it may, the end of the second millennium saw Firaxis now firmly established as a studio and a brand, both of which would prove very enduring. The company remains with us to this day, still one of the leading lights in the field of 4X strategy, the custodian of the beloved Civilization…

Yes, Civilization. For their next big trick, Firaxis was about to get the chance to make a game under the name that they thought they’d left behind forever when they said farewell to MicroProse.

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

Sources: The book Sid Meier’s Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games by Sid Meier with Jennifer Lee Noonan. Computer Gaming World of August 1996, January 1998, September 1998, April 1999, and January 2000; Next Generation of July 1997; Retro Gamer 241. Also the Alpha Centauri manual, one of the last examples of such a luxuriously rambling 250-page tome that the games industry would produce.

Online sources include Soren Johnson’s interview of Brian Reynolds for his Designer’s Notes podcast and Reynolds’s appearance on the Three Moves Ahead podcast (also with Soren Johnson in attendance). The YouTube think-pieces I mentioned include ones by GaminGHD, Waypoint, Yaz Minsky, CairnBuilder, and Lorerunner.

Where to Get It: Alpha Centauri and its expansion Alien Crossfire are available as a single digital purchase at GOG.com.

Hi, folks! I have an update at this unusual time because, as of the last proper article, we’ve actually finished with our coverage of 1998, and I wanted to give you a preview of what’s coming for 1999. As usual, these subjects are more 1999-adjacent than pedantically bound to that year. And also as usual, what follows is a tentative plan only. Nonetheless, if you prefer for every article to be a complete surprise when it pops up in your browser, you might want to stop reading now.

Note that some of these subjects will be just one article, while some will spread out over two or more.

• Alpha Centauri.
• Everquest.
• Heroes of Might and Magic III, Might and Magic VII, and the decline of New World Computing thereafter.
• Rollercoaster Tycoon.
• Discworld Noir.
• Bullfrog Productions from 1996 on, with a particular focus on Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2.
• Metal Gear Solid. This one is pretty far out of my wheelhouse, but several of you suggested that I look at it. So, I’m going to follow your advice, examining it mostly as a piece of interactive narrative.
• Looking Glass Studios from 1996 on, with a particular focus on Thief I and II and System Shock 2. Just as is the case for Metal Gear Solid, I don’t feel all that well-equipped to do full justice to Looking Glass — as many of you have come to recognize, first-person 3D tends not to be my personal cup of tea — but I’ll do my best to honor some brave, uncompromising, visionary games.
• Turn-based fantasy strategy. My love for the Heroes of Might and Magic series prompted me to try out some of the contemporaries of the third game in that series, specifically Warlords III: Darklords Rising, Disciples: Sacred Lands, and Age of Wonders. The results were mixed but interesting.
• The final wave of commercially prominent space simulators, especially the Freespace games. Plus that so-bad-it’s-almost-good Wing Commander movie, because how can a writer resist a temptation like that?
• For my interactive-fiction coverage this time, I want to review some really long games that came out between 1998 and 2000. Damaging as it may be to my literary bona fides, I must admit that a sprawling old-school game that I can keep up on one of my virtual desktops for weeks on end, poking at it during lunch breaks and other snatched moments, is still my personal Platonic ideal for the genre.
• Homeworld.
• Omikron: The Nomad Soul.
• Ultima IX: Ascension.
• Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Because I’m me, I want to do a bit of a deep dive into the longstanding pseudo-historical cult that surrounds Gabriel Knight 3′s setting of Rennes-le-Château, France, out of which also sprang The Da Vinci Code just a few years after this game. But never fear, the infamous cat-hair-mustache puzzle will also get its due.
• The Longest Journey.
• Planescape: Torment.

As I said, these lists are always subject to change; those of you with long memories will notice that quite a lot of what was on the previous list wound up falling by the wayside. This is because some other tales grew in the telling, even as one tale — the story of Legend’s late adventures — got added, and I’m doggedly determined not to let one year of history take up more than one year of real time. Some topics that had been earmarked for the previous group, like Windows 98 and the Deer Hunter-driven phenomenon of “Wal Mart games,” will get folded into other articles in due course. Others, like my dream of doing a series on television game shows, are most likely simply a bridge too far for these histories as currently constituted. (I don’t think there’s a big appetite out there for The Digital Antiquarian turning into The Television Antiquarian for the six months or more it would take to even begin to do such a topic justice…)

There have been some specific reader requests that haven’t (yet?) come to fruition. I perhaps owe you a more complete explanation for these.

• Some of you asked for Oddworld, and I did try. Really, I did. But those games are coming from so far outside of my frame of reference as a lifelong computer rather than console gamer, and are so off-puttingly difficult to boot, that I just don’t feel like I can provide the necessary context or enthusiasm.
• Some of you asked me to look at the Laura Bow games. And I did fire up The Colonel’s Bequest, only to be killed without warning by three separate pieces of inexplicably collapsing architecture within the first fifteen minutes. I’m sorry, readers. I’m just so done with this kind of player-hostile design, and I’ve already taken Roberta Williams and her colleagues to task more than enough for it over the years.
• Some of you would like to see articles about the Impressions city builders, and, indeed, I’ve done more than dabble with them in recent months. I desperately wanted to love Pharaoh, but certain design choices — such as the excruciating worker-recruitment system, the rote busywork of having to constantly schedule festivals to keep the gods from ruining your day, and the drawn-out, repetitive campaign that makes you build city after city from scratch — made it impossible for me to do so. But it looks like the city builder after Pharaoh, 2000’s Zeus: Master of Olympus, fixed all of these problems and more. I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to write the whole story when I get there, and end it on the sort of positive note I always prefer to go out on.
• A similar logic applies to Her Interactive, for which I’ve been promising coverage for literally years now. The two Nancy Drew games that I’ve played to date have both been rather underwhelming, awkward affairs. But the good news is that each successive Her Interactive game that I’ve played — four of them in all now — has been a little better than the one before it. So, I remain optimistic that they’ll eventually figure it out, and I’ll be able to write the story I want to write about them as well. Stay tuned.
• The return of Steve Jobs to Apple and the rebirth that followed is another subject that’s been lingering out there for a while. Again, it’s just a question of finding the right grace note. The launch of OS X in 2001 might be it. We’ll see.
• On the flip side, some of you told me that Final Fantasy VIII was probably not the best choice for improving my fraught relationship with JRPGs, and after a brief investigation I’ve decided that I agree with you. But I haven’t given up on the genre. I may give 2000’s Grandia II a shot.

A couple of notes from the Department of Miscellanea:

It will mostly likely be a few months before I have 1998 ebooks for you, folks. The old system for creating them relies on a Python 2 software stack that is deprecated and all but broken by now. A good friend of mine whose coding skills have not atrophied as badly as my own is going to help me bring it up to date. But we’re in the midst of the all too short Danish summer right now, a time to be outside as much as possible; extracurricular programming projects are best reserved for other times of the year. Please bear with us.

I haven’t found a good place to mention this before today, but I actually switched from Windows 10 to Linux Mint as my primary operating system back in December; the end user in me was fed up with the creeping enshitification of the Windows 11 ecosystem, while my inner environmentalist and social-justice warriors were incensed by the arbitrary obsolescence Microsoft wishes to impose upon tens if not hundreds of millions of perfectly viable computers. I couldn’t be happier. I can recommend Linux as a fine everyday operating system for anyone who is reasonably technically proficient, or who has someone who is to call upon when the occasional lingering issue does crop up. It’s come a long, long way since the last time I tried to run it on the desktop, about 25 years ago. And with the aid of Lutris and/or Steam, Linux runs old Windows games better and more effortlessly than recent releases of Windows itself in many cases, whilst keeping them nicely sandboxed from the core operating system in a way that Windows does not. If you’re a retro-gamer or just a gamer in general who’s been contemplating giving Linux a try, by all means do so. What with Valve putting serious resources behind it, I expect that it will only continue to improve as a gaming platform.

Which reminds me: Linux is another story I should try to tell soon… Sigh.

Anyway, thank you for reading and supporting these histories for so many years! As always, feel free to suggest topics and games you’d really like to see in the next few years. Even when I can’t give them separate articles, I can sometimes shoehorn them in somewhere. And if you haven’t yet taken the Patreon plunge and have the means to do so, do give it some thought. It’s only thanks to readers just like you that I can afford to keep doing this.

I’ll see you tomorrow — yes, tomorrow already! — when we’ll get started on our bullet list for 1999. We’ve got our work cut out for us…

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

Take to the skies! You fell to Earth as the last remnant of a dying world – can you rise as the planet’s greatest hero and triumph as a beacon of justice? Shrug off bullets, smash buildings with your bare hands, and soar through the air as you battle against vicious villains! 

The Last Scion is an interactive superhero novel by D. G. P. Rector. It’s entirely text-based, 200,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination. I sat down with the author to talk about his background as a writing and his experiences writing for Choice of Games. The Last Scion releases this Thursday, June 19th. You can play the first three chapters today, for free.

Tell me about your background in writing.

I’ve always enjoyed telling stories, something I think I got from my father. He’s an incredible story teller, always sharing ghost stories, anecdotes from his life, and sometimes creations entirely of his own with me when I was a child. Both my parents encouraged my creative pursuits when I was growing up, which is something I’m extremely grateful for.

As far as professional writing goes, I had always wanted to make my way in the world as an author. A dear friend and coworker of mine on the late shift made me swear a pact with her to pursue writing more seriously; to actually buckle down and finish projects. Then, in January of 2020, I quit my day job to pursue writing professionally. My intention had been to take six months off, finish my first novel, and submit some short stories. As fate would have it, there was a massive global pandemic, and I wound up out of work for significantly longer than six months. Still, it gave me time to refine my craft. I wound up getting some short stories published, including some science fiction work in Analog and Mysterion, as well as other places. I was searching for places to submit my fiction to when I stumbled across COG, and here we are!

What inspired you to write this game?

I’ve always wanted to write a super hero story! Like many people, I’ve enjoyed the genre since I was a kid, and I thought the ability to engage with the fantasy more directly as a work of interactive fiction would be thrilling. I went for a “flying brick” type of character as the protagonist (think Superman, Captain Marvel, Shazam, the Mighty Thor, etc) in part because they’re so archetypal, but also because the IF medium fits that kind of character particularly well. After all, in a more traditional computer game it would be quite tricky to make encounters fun and challenging for a character who’s bullet proof and can lift a truck over their head, but in an interactive novel, the challenges the character faces are often as much personal decisions as they are questions of skill. Sure, there’s no doubt you’ll win a fight with some bank robbers, but do you prioritize bringing them to justice or protecting the people they’ve taken hostage? That tension seemed very exciting to me.

What did you find most challenging about writing interactive fiction in the COG style?

Well, I have exactly ZERO skill in coding, so I was pretty much a baby when it came to that. Fortunately my editor Jason and everyone at COG was extremely helpful, and I discovered a lot of great guides online. It’s very challenging to think of a work of fiction not just as a series of events in a story, but also as balanced game encounters. After all, when I’m writing prose I usually have one or two ways a particular moment can play out, and I try to select the one that works best for the story. In an IF, every decision point has to have multiple outcomes, so any given scene might play out many different ways. Sometimes these choices are more about flavor, moments where the player gets to frame an encounter in a particular way. Other times these decisions lead to radically different outcomes: falling in love, letting someone die, destroying half the city, and so on!

What are your favorite comics?

Too many to name! Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’ “Watchmen” of course redefined and elevated the genre. I’m a big fan of Moon Knight, and Charlie Huston’s grim-n-gritty arc called “The Bottom” really made me fall in love with that character. Cable & Deadpool by Fabian Nicieza was a funny, genuinely sweet story about two very troubled people coming to accept each other and learn how to trust. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the late, great Steve Ditko. Spider-Man is of course a giant, but I really enjoyed his work on “The Question”, and his bizarre, intense “MR. A” stories. Ditko was a man of ferocious personal beliefs that he put on display in his work, and while I can’t say I entirely agree with his world view or didactic-ism, I really admire what a direct and unvarnished insight he gave into his mind through the medium of these fantasy-action characters.

(This is of course leaving aside the non-super hero stuff and the whole amazing world of non-
anglophone comics.)

Was there an NPC you enjoyed writing most?

There’s of course a little of myself in all of my characters, but I think Hawkshaw and the Poppet were the most fun to write. I got a lot of really great editorial feedback that really helped me refine and refocus those two. They’re kind of opposites, with Hawkshaw being stoic, direct, and grim, while the Poppet is whimsical and sarcastic, but the two of them also come from this very deep place of pain and alienation. I’m also very fond of Six-Gun Slim, who adds a lot of levity to the scenes she’s in. She doesn’t take any of the heroing stuff too seriously, which provides a fun contrast to the other characters. And I really enjoyed writing her relationship with Sky Pilot, who’s kind of a flustered surrogate-uncle to her.

Finally, I of course enjoyed writing the Conqueror. We’ve all got a few good “Villain Monologues” in us, and having the excuse to write such a grandiose character was a lot of fun. I also tried to include as many opportunities for the player character to mock him as I could, without undermining the genuine danger he represents.

What else are you working on/what’s next for you?

Oof! Who knows? The life of an artist is an uncertain one. I’ve got my debut science fiction novel “The Exile” coming out very soon with Blue Forge Press. It’s a Space Opera Epic about a wanderer with a dark past, caught on the frontier between two interstellar empires on the eve of war. I actually first wrote it about five years back, so it’s exciting to me that it’s finally going to see print. I’ve also done a lot of work in the Battletech fictional universe with Shrapnel Magazine, and I’m hoping to work more in that world.

And of course, I have one two ideas for a sequel/spinoff to the Last Scion!

Bonus surprise post!

Mystery House II running on a Sharp MZ-80B2 (a slight variant of the MZ-80B, the original platform for the game). Via bowloflentils.

Yes, I arise from my slumber for at least a little while. This is the sequel to Japan’s first graphical adventure game, using the same first-person-with-directions view as the previous game. (If this isn’t ringing bells, you probably want to read my posts on the game first. The important thing to emphasize is that despite the name and opening graphic clearly coming via the Roberta Williams Mystery House, the Japanese game entitled Mystery House goes in an entirely different direction in both gameplay and content, and the sequel follows suit.)

I have already technically finished Mystery House II in one of its ports — the MSX version, which has an English translation patch — but I had enough disappointment that I mentioned I would return to tackle the NEC PC-6001 port, which I knew from testing was very different.

The situation turned out to be even more complicated than I expected.

“Mystery House is now 200% more powerful … The program size has now doubled, making the adventure even more exciting.” From I/O Magazine, May 1983.

Parsing the ad above, it mentions versions for cassette selling for 3800 yen and for disk selling for 9800 yen. The big catch is that cassette (due to size) was sold as volume 1 and volume 2. In other words, this game was split originally into two entirely separate parts. Volume 1 involves the ground floor (and possibly the basement below); Volume 2 involves the upper floors. You can’t get to the upper floors without finishing everything below, and the way this is enforced is extremely cryptic (I thought for a while I was running across a bug, for reasons you’ll discover).

The PC-6001 version that I did my playing has all the pieces on one tape, but I also have (with the help of the Gaming Alexandria discord and gschmidl) a copy of Volume 2 (and only Volume 2) for Sharp MZ-2000. The “volume 2” version of the game starts on the upper floor of the House; if you walk down to the ground floor, you can only see the room at the bottom of the stairs (identical to the first part of the game) but can’t walk anywhere.

We have seen a trick like this before, with Robert Arnstein’s Haunted House from way back in 1979, as published by Radio Shack. It was made when 16k wasn’t quite as common for TRS-80 so it was stuffed into 4k instead, meaning to get a little more content there’s a tape swap upon arriving upstairs (and the trip is one-way).

There was a cassette version of PC-6001 as well, except both volumes were sold together. Via eBay.

This is very different from the MSX version which had quite a bit of trekking up and down — made painful by an inventory limit of two. The inventory limit carries on here but there’s less space to travel around in. I’m still quite stuck, though, and this is without a walkthrough to consult this time.

The opening graphic is still essentially cribbed from Roberta Williams.

The NEC PC-6001 version is fortunately like the FM-7 version of Mystery House 1 in how it controls. You type commands in regular English VERB NOUN form; this is unlike the MZ versions which have you type each as a separate line. If you are facing a direction like EAST typing the same direction will move forward; if you aren’t facing that direction it will turn you that way. Chronologically Gaming managed to land a copy of the MZ version with volume 1 so you can watch some of the opening of that version here:

It has a major difference you can see by going NORTH, turning EAST, walking EAST, and then turning NORTH.

That’s a MEMO on the ground, not present in the MZ version. You can TAKE MEMO and then READ MEMO, at which point the game prompts you for a number (there are memos 1 and 2 at least, I think up to 4).

That is

メモをさがせ
ちかしつのいりぐちにきをつけろ !!
2Fへまわれ

Search for the memo.
Be careful of the entrance to the basement!!
Go to the second floor.

Just to reinforce the idea I’ve mentioned before that the “VERB NOUN” form is strange for Japanese, from left to right, the first line メモをさがせ can be parsed literally as メモ (memo) を (is the object of action) さがせ (action is search for, imperative form).

Heading in further…

…the first room is a kitchen. Of the items to the south, the only one I’ve been able to refer to is a REFRIGERATOR which has a CUP. To the north is a CABINET, although rather than OPEN CABINET you’re supposed to type SEARCH CABINET.

Both the CUP and CABINET are part of the later MSX game; the TOWEL was not part of it, but the KNIFE did get used for an identical purpose to this game.

Before going on, I should point out while the CUP was referenced in the Japanese text that went with the picture, the CABINET wasn’t, and of course translations can differ so even when at item gets named like the cup was it can be a pain to figure out the English word to type in the parser. Fortunately, the game has a HELP command that gives a fair amount of the needed words:

The game is written in BASIC so normally a list could also be obtained via the method of listing the source code, but the game has some sort of memory-protection preventing this. There’s an emulator (iP6+) that allows dumping the memory into a file, and I used this while the game was on to get a 100% complete list of understood words.

N, E, S, W, U, D, ADJUST, BREAK, DIG, LIGHT, LOOK, MOVE, OPEN, PRESS, PUSH, PUT, READ, RUN, SEARCH, SET, TAKE, TIME, INVENTORY, CAST, USE, TIE, KICK, HELP, UNLOCK, SAVE, BATH, BED, BOARD, BOOK, BOX, CABINET, CARPET, CHEST, CLOCK, CUP, DOOR, FIREPLACE, FORK, GARDEN, GROUND, HAMMER, JEWEL, KEY, KNIFE, MATCH, PAPER, PICTURE, PLATE, RACK, SAFE, REFRIGERATOR, SCOOP, SIDEBOARD, SPOON, TABLE, TOBACCO, TOILET, TOWEL, WALL, WINDOW, MEMO, ROPE, FLOOR, BUTTON, LADDER

Moving on, to the west is a 2-section room of the type seen multiple times in the original Mystery House.

Trying to ADJUST CLOCK (like was possible with the MSX game) gets the message that the clock is broken.

Attempting OPEN WINDOW on the first window (the one to the east) just gets the response that it won’t open; the window after is subtly different:

“Because the window latch is so stiff, it’s difficult to open.”

USE KNIFE works here. I complained about this in the MSX version being arbitrary. The text is a strong clue; the text wasn’t quite so explicit in that version.

After this I dropped the knife because of the stringent inventory limit of only 2 items at a time. It goes back to the cabinet (by “magic”) if you need it again. The verb the game uses for dropping items is CAST.

The scene here doesn’t let you turn; you can only go SOUTH which will put you back in the house. The hammer is used in the MSX version to bust a hole in a wall and there’s also a SCOOP (shovel) later which can be used to dig.

Moving on, south of the two-space room with the clock, there’s a four-way door intersection with stairs.

The south is the front door (locked). Trying to go east leads to a hole going down…

…and trying to go down kills you. (I assume the ROPE mentioned in the object list is used later.) Just like the outside section with the hammer the scene here is “locked” and you can’t turn.

Heading west instead leads to a room with windows to the west and south (OPEN WINDOW just gets “NO!”) and some books to the north.

When trying to TAKE BOOK you are prompted with which book you mean; the game wants you to type a digit from 1 through 6.

Being prompted for a digit. My first time through here I had the CUP and HAMMER which was too many inventory objects, and I was confused why the game wasn’t letting me take a book.

Each book is identical except for one (chosen randomly at the start of the game, I’ve had it be book 2 or book 4), which includes an extra surprise.

Memo 2 says to enter a door at 3 o’clock (3時のとびらをくぐれ). I assume this matches the MSX puzzle of setting the clock, but as I indicated earlier, ADJUST CLOCK just says it is broken, so something is different in the sequencing.

Finally let’s get around to those stairs. Trying to go up them right away, the game asks if you’ve found the second memo. Trying to go up them after finding the second gets the message

ちかしつのいりぐ ちを、あつけましたか?

or something like “did you figure out how to get into the basement?” (Maybe? I could use a Japanese expert to confirm here.)

I mentioned earlier I thought maybe this was a bug; I had no idea why going up stairs would provoke these kinds of “hint” messages (first indicating to find a memo, then pointing to the basement). Once I realized this was a “split” game (unlike the MSX version) the logic clicked into place. It also clicked into place why the MSX version might have changed things around; I can say that the “view” still is far superior in this game as you can see what’s going on to the left or right. You can even see changes in the distance; going back to the two-square room, notice how while looking west you can see the window open to the far right, which is not a detail the MSX version had at all.

I’m technically not on the hook for finishing this version of this game; I’m satisfied enough knowing why the different versions came out the way they did. I’m still interested if anyone has any helpful suggestions for progress. I have a copy of the game here; boot the emulator, pick option 2 for BASIC 32k, say you want 2 pages, type CLOAD, right click and pick Tape->Insert followed by the Mystery House file, then type RUN.

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday, June 2, 2025 over Zoom. JP Tuttle, Doug Orleans, Mike Stage, zarf,  anjchang, Josh,  Matt Griffin (with special guest Gussie), and Hugh,  welcomed newcomer. Alice. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just a log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories. This meeting notes are short due to the notetaker having run off early.

July is Narrascope month. In the tradition of PR-IF we typically take a hiatus to encourage everyone to attend Narrascope (virtual registration open until 6/18). On our Boston IF group, there is a discussion about IFTF @ Narrascope. https://narrascope.org/

Narrascope happening June 20-22nd! There’s a special online performance announced for registered attendees. 10/10 would recommend!

Also worth checking out the IFTF showcase:
https://itch.io/jam/narrascope-showcase-2025

Looking forward to seeing you at Narrascope, and let us know on the Boston IF group if you’re giving a talk!!!

FYI from the discussion group– A blog. post by Emily Short about running IF meetups.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Play as a Norse god living in Asgard. Will you hold your home together with a silver tongue—or walk away and leave the other gods to their quarrels? 

In the Halls of Asgard is 30% off until June 19th!

In the Halls of Asgard is a 300,000-word interactive novel by Eleanor Cooke. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination. 

As a god of Asgard, you’ve dealt with your fair share of difficulties, from Loki’s mischief to Odin’s machinations. Still, Ragnarök looms. Will you work with the other gods to prevent it or form your own team and try to win it instead? Either way, you’ll need allies. And power.

Find both as you navigate Asgard’s political waters and deal with its enemies, from the World Serpent, Jormungandr, to the giants in Jotunheim. Send them off with clever words and charm or ride to war with magical weapons.

• Play as a god; gender and sexuality are unspecified.
• Choose from five godly domains.
• Befriend Fenris Wolf—or betray him.
• Wield Thor’s hammer.
• Fight against the giants—or join them.

Ragnarök is coming, and Asgard is starting to fracture. Can you keep it together, or will you fall on the final battlefield?

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

A couple of months ago, I wrote:

I was replying to a comment by Charlie Stross, who noted that LLMs are trained on existing data and therefore are biased against recognizing new phenomena. My point was that in tech, we look forward to learning about new inventions -- new phenomena by definition. Are AI coding tools going to roadblock that?

Already happening! Here's Kyle Hughes last week:

That's not even a new language, it's just a new major version. Is C++26 going to run into the same problem?

Hat tip to John Gruber, who quotes more dev comments as we swing into WWDC week.

Speaking of WWDC, the new "liquid glass" UI is now announced. (Screenshots everywhere.) I like it, although I haven't installed the betas to play with it myself.

Joseph Humphrey has, and he notes that existing app icons are being glassified by default:

Kinda shocked to see these 3rd party app icons having been liquid-glassed already. Is this some kind of automatic filter, or did Apple & 3rd parties prep them in advance?? --@joethephish, June 10 (thread)

The icon auto-glassification uses non-obvious heuristics, and Joe's screenshots show some weird artifacts.

I was surprised too! For the iOS7 "flatten it all" UI transition, existing apps did not get the new look -- either in their icons or their internal buttons, etc -- until the developer recompiled with the new SDK. (And thus had a chance to redesign their icons for the new style.) As I wrote a couple of months ago:

[In 2012] Apple put in a lot of work to ensure that OS upgrades didn't break apps for users. Not even visually. (It goes without saying that Apple considers visual design part of an app's functionality.) The toolkit continued to support old APIs, and it also secretly retained the old UI style for every widget.

-- me, April 9

Are they really going to bag that policy for this fall? I guess they already sort of did. Last year's "tint mode" squashed existing icons to tinted monochrome whether they liked it or not. But that was a user option, and not a very popular one, I suspect.

This year's icon change feels like a bigger rug-pull for developers. And developers have raw nerves these days.

This is supposed to be a prediction post. I guess I'll predict that Apple rolls this back, leaving old (third-party) icons alone for the iOS26 full release. Maybe.

(I see Marco Arment is doing a day of "it's a beta, calm down and send feedback". Listen to him, he knows his stuff.)

But the big lurking announcement was iPadOS gaining windows, a menu bar, and a more (though not completely) file-oriented environment. A lot of people have been waiting years for those features. Craig Federighi presented the news with an understated but real wince of apology.

Personally, not my thing. I don't tend to use my iPad for productive work. And it's not for want of windows and a menu bar; it's for want of a keyboard and a terminal window. I have a very terminal-centric work life. My current Mac desktop has nine terminal windows, two of which are running Emacs.

(No, I don't want to carry around an external keyboard for my iPad. If I carry another big thing, it'll be the MacBook, and then the problem is solved.)

But -- look. For more than a decade, people have been predicting that Apple would kill MacOS and force Macs to run some form of iOS. They predicted it when Apple launched Gatekeeper, they predicted it when Apple brought SwiftUI apps to MacOS, they predicted it when Apple redesigned the Settings app.

I never bought it before. Watching this week's keynote, I buy it. Now there is room for i(Pad)OS to replace MacOS.

Changing or locking down MacOS is a weak signal because people use MacOS. You can only do so much to it. Apple has been tightening the bolts on Gatekeeper at regular intervals, but you can still run unsigned apps on a Mac. The hoops still exist. You can install Linux packages with Homebrew.

But adding features to iPad is a different play! That's pushing the iPad UI in a direction where it could plausibly take over the desktop-OS role. And this direction isn't new, it's a well-established thing. The iPad has been acquiring keyboard/mouse features for years now.

So is Apple planning to eliminate MacOS entirely, and ship Macs with (more or less) iPadOS installed? Maybe! This is all finger-in-the-wind. I doubt it's happening soon. It may never happen. It could be that Apple wants iPad to stand on its own as a serious mobile productivity platform, as good as the Mac but separate from it.

But Apple thinks in terms of company strategy, not separate siloed platforms. And, as many people have pointed out, supporting two similar-but-separate OSes is a terrible business case. Surely Apple has better uses for that redundant budget line.

Abstractly, they could unify the two OSes rather than killing one of them. But, in practice, they would kill MacOS. Look at yesterday's announcements. iPad gets the new features; Mac gets nothing. (Except the universal shiny glass layer.) The writing is not on the wall but the wind is blowing, and we can see which way.

Say this happens, in 2028 or whenever. (If Apple still exists, if I haven't died in the food riots, etc etc.) Can my terminal-centric lifestyle make its way to an iPad-like world?

...Well, that depends on whether they add a terminal app, doesn't it? Fundamentally I don't care about MacOS as a brand. I just want to set up my home directory and my .emacs file and install Python and git and npm and all the other stuff that my habits have accumulated. You have no idea how many little Python scripts are involved in everyday tasks like, you know, writing this blog post.

(Okay, you do know that because my blogging tool is up on Github. The answer is four. Four vonderful Python scripts, ah ah ah!)

If I can't do all that in MacOS 28/29/whichever, it'll be time to pick a Linux distro. Not looking forward to that, honestly. (I fly Linux servers all the time, but the last time I used a Linux desktop environment it was GNOME 1.0? I think?)

Other notes from WWDC. (Not really predictions, sorry, I am failing my post title.)

• Tim Cook looks tired. I don't mean that in a Harriet Jones way! I assume he's run himself ragged trying to manage political crap. Craig Federighi is still having fun but I felt like he was over-playing it a lot of the time. Doesn't feel like a happy company. Eh, what do I know, I'm trying to read tea leaves from a scripted video.

• I said "Mac gets nothing" but that's unfair. The Spotlight update with integrated actions and shortcuts looks extremely sexy. Yes, this is about getting third-party devs to support App Intents so that Siri/AI can hook into them. But it will also be great for Automator and other non-AI scripting tools.

• WWDC is a software event; Apple never talks about new hardware there. I know it. You know it. But it sure was weird to have a whole VisionOS segment pushing new features when the rev1 Vision Pro is at a dead standstill. My sense is that the whole ecosystem is on hold waiting for a consumer-viable rev2 model.

• I think the consumer-viable rev2 model is coming this fall. There, that's a prediction. Worth what you paid for it.

• I'm enjoying the Murderbot show but damn if Gurathin isn't a low-key Vision Pro ad. He's got the offhand tap-fingers gesture right there.

• I'm excited about the liquid glass UI. I want to play with it. Fun is fun, dammit.

• I hate redesigning app icons for a new UI. Oh, well, I'll manage. (EDIT-ADD: Turns out Apple is pushing a new single-source process which generates all icon sizes and modes. Okay! Good news there.)

The early days were the best. We had successes, we had fun, and we had a good business model. As the industry changed, everything became more complicated and harder.

— Bob Bates

The history of Legend Entertainment can be divided into three periods. When Bob Bates and Mike Verdu first founded the company in 1989, close on the heels of Infocom’s shuttering, they explicitly envisioned it as the heir to the latter’s rich heritage. And indeed, Legend’s early games were at bottom parser-based text adventures, the last of their kind to be sold through conventional retail outlets. That said, they were a dramatic departure from the austerity of Zork: this textual lily was gilded with elaborate menus of verbs, nouns, and prepositions that made actual typing optional, along with an ever increasing quantity of illustrations, sound effects, music, eventually even cutscenes and graphical mini-games. At last, in 1993, the inevitable endpoint of all this creeping multimedia was reached. Between Gateway II: Homeworld and Companions of Xanth, the parser that had still been lurking behind it all disappeared. Thus ended the text-adventure phase of Legend’s existence and began the point-and-click-adventure phase.

Legend continued happily down that second road for a few years. Its games in this vein weren’t as flashy or as high-profile as those of Sierra or LucasArts, but a coterie of loyal fans appreciated them for their more understated aesthetic qualities and for their commitment to good, non-frustrating design — a commitment that even LucasArts proved unable or unwilling to match as the decade wore on. Legend’s games during this period were almost universally based on licensed literary properties, which, combined with in-gaming writing that remained a cut above the norm, still allowed the company to retain some vestige of being the heir to Infocom.

By 1996, however, another endpoint seemed to be looming. One of Legend’s two games of the year before had been the biggest, most expensive production they had yet dared to undertake, as well as a rare foray into non-licensed territory. Mission Critical had been made possible by a $2.5 million investment from the book-publishing giant Random House. The game was the brainchild and the special baby of founder Mike Verdu, a space opera into which he poured his heart and soul. It filled three CDs, the first of which was mostly devoted to a bravura live-action opening movie that starred Michael Dorn, well known to legions of science-fiction fans as the Klingon Lieutenant Worf on Star Trek: The Next Generation, here taking the helm of another starship that might just as well have been the USS Enterprise. But there was more to Mission Critical than surface flash and stunt casting. It was an astonishingly ambitious production in other ways as well: from the writing and world-building (Verdu created a detailed future history for humanity to serve as the game’s backstory) to the multi-variant gameplay itself (a remarkably sophisticated real-time-strategy game is embedded into the adventure). I for one feel no hesitation in calling Mission Critical one of the best things Legend ever did.

But when it was released into a marketplace that was already glutted with superficially similar if generally inferior “Siliwood” productions, Mission Critical got lost in the shuffle. The big hit in this space in 1995 — in fact, the very last hit “interactive movie” ever — was Sierra’s Phantasmagoria, which evinced nothing like the same care for its fiction but nevertheless sold 1 million copies on the back of its seven CDs worth of canned video footage. Mission Critical, on the other hand, struggled to sell 50,000 copies, numbers which were actually slightly worse than those of Shannara, Legend’s other game of 1995, a worthy but far more modest and traditionalist adventure. The consequences to the bottom line were devastating. After hovering around the break-even point for most of its existence, Legend posted a loss for 1995 of more than $2 million, on total revenues of less than $3 million. Random House, which despite its literary veneer was perfectly capable of being as ruthless as any other titan of Corporate America, decided that it wanted out of Legend — in fact, it wanted Legend to pay it back $1 million of its investment, a demand which the fine print in the contract allowed. (Random House was certainly not making any friends in the world of nerdy media at this time; it was holding TSR, the maker of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, over another barrel.)

Beset by existential threats, Legend managed in 1996 to put out only one game, an even more radical departure from the norm than Mission Critical had been. Star Control 3 had the fortune or perhaps misfortune of being the sequel to 1992’s Star Control II, an unusual and much-loved amalgamation of outer-space adventure, action, and CRPG that was created by the studio Toys for Bob and published by Accolade. As it happened, Accolade also served as Legend’s distributor from 1992 to 1994. (RandomSoft, the software arm of Random House, took up that role afterward.) It was through this relationship that the Star Control 3 deal — a licensing deal of a different stripe than that to which the company had grown accustomed — came to Legend, after Toys for Bob said that they weren’t interested in making another game in the series right away. Michael Lindner, a long-serving music composer, programmer, and designer at Legend who loved Star Control II, lobbied hard with his bosses to take on Star Control 3, and was duly appointed Lead Designer once the contract was signed. Being so different from anything Legend had attempted before, the game took a good two years to complete.

Again I have to save the galaxy? Even the box copy seemed determined to undermine Star Control 3.

Star Control 3 received good reviews from the professionals immediately after its release in September of 1996. Computer Gaming World magazine, for example, called it a “truly stellar experience” and “the ultimate space adventure,” while the website GameSpot deemed it “one of the best titles to come out this year.” It initially sold quite well on the strength of these reviews as well as its name; in fact, it became Legend’s best-selling game to date, their first to shift more than 100,000 units.

Yet once people had had some time to settle in and really play it, an ugly backlash that has never reversed itself set in. To this day, Star Control 3 remains about as popular as tuberculosis among the amazingly durable Star Control II fan base. In the eyes of many of them, it not only pales in comparison to its predecessor, but the non-involvement of the Toys for Bob crew makes it fundamentally illegitimate.

Whatever else it may be, Star Control 3 is not the purely cynical cash-grab it’s so often described as; on the contrary, it’s an earnest effort that if anything wants a little bit too badly to live up to the name on its box. And yet it’s hard to avoid the feeling when playing it that Legend has departed too much from their core competencies. The most significant addition to the Star Control II template is a new layer of colony management: you have to maintain a literal space empire in order to produce the fuel you need to send your starship out in search of the proverbial new life and new civilizations. Unfortunately, the colony game is more tedious than fun, a constant nagging distraction from what you really want to be doing. The other layers of the genre lasagna are better, but none of them is good enough to withstand a concerted comparison to Star Control II. The feel of the action-based starship combat — Legend’s first real attempt to implement a full-on action game — is subtly off, as is the interface in general. For example, a hopelessly convoluted 3D star map makes navigation ten times the chore it ought to be.

In the end, then, Star Control 3 is a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Where it’s bold, it comes off as ill-considered: it represents the aliens you meet as digitized hand puppets, drawing mocking references to Sesame Street online. Where it plays it safe, it comes off as tepid: the writing — usually Legend’s greatest strength — reads like Star Control fan fiction. Still, Star Control 3 isn’t actively terrible by any means. It’s better than its rather horrendous modern reputation — but, then again, that’s not saying much, is it? There are better games out there that you could be playing, whether the date on your calendar is 1996 or 2025.

In its day, however, its strong early sales allowed Bob Bates and Mike Verdu to keep the lights on at Legend for a little while longer. A shovelware compilation of the early games called The Lost Adventures of Legend, whose name consciously echoed Activision’s surprisingly successful Lost Treasures of Infocom collections, brought in a bit more much-needed revenue for virtually no outlay.

Nevertheless, Bob Bates and Mike Verdu were by now coming to understand that securing Legend’s future in the longer term would likely require nothing less than a full-fledged reinvention of the company and its games — a far more radical overhaul than the move from a parser-based to a point-and-click interface. Everything about the games industry in the second half of the 1990s seemed to militate against a boutique studio and publisher like Legend. As the number of new games that appeared each year continued to increase, shelf space at retail was becoming ever harder to secure, even as digital distribution was at this point still a non-starter for games like those of Legend that filled hundreds of megabytes on CD. Meanwhile it was slowly becoming clear that the adventure genre had peaked in 1995 and was now sliding into a marked decline; there were no new million-selling adventure games like Phantasmagoria to be found in 1996. The games that sold best now were first-person shooters and real-time strategies, two genres that hadn’t existed back when Legend had been founded.

Mike Verdu, whose gaming palette was more diverse than that of the hardcore adventurer Bob Bates, hatched a plan to enter the 3D-shooter space. Three years on from the debut of DOOM, he sensed that John Carmack’s old formulation about the role of story in this sort of game — “Story in a game is like the story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” — no longer held completely true in the minds of at least some developers and players; he sensed that the world was ready for richer narratives and more coherent settings in its action games. His thinking was very much on trend: LucasArts was in the latter stages of making Jedi Knight at the time, and Valve had already embarked on Half-Life. Verdu believed that Legend might be able to apply their traditional strengths — writing, storytelling, aesthetic texture, perhaps even a smattering of adventure-style puzzle-solving — to the shooter genre with good results.

To do that, however, he and Bob Bates would need to drum up a new investor or investors, to stabilize the company’s rocky finances, pay Random House its $1 million ransom, and, last but by no means least, fund this leap into the three-dimensional unknown. As they wrote in their investor’s prospectus at this time, “Legend’s strengths in storytelling and world creation will be used to craft a unique game experience that combines combat, character interaction, exploration, and puzzle solving.” They had already secured what they thought was the perfect literary license for the experiment: the Wheel of Time novels by Robert Jordan, which were currently the best-selling epic-fantasy books in the world from an author not named J.R.R. Tolkien.

After months of beating the bushes, they found the partner they were seeking in GT Interactive, an outgrowth of a peddler of home-workout videos that had exploded onto the games industry in 1994 by publishing DOOM II exclusively to retail stores. (The original DOOM had been sold via the shareware model, with boxed distribution coming only later.) Now, GT was to be the publisher of Epic MegaGame’s Unreal, a shooter whose core technology was, so it was said, even better than id Software’s latest Quake engine. GT was able to secure the Unreal engine for Legend’s use long before the game that bore its name shipped. Even with that enormous leg-up, Legend would need every bit of their new publisher’s largess and patience; The Wheel of Time would prove a much bigger mouthful to swallow than Bob and Mike had ever anticipated, such that it wouldn’t be done until the end of 1999, more than two and a half years after the project was initiated.

As you’ve probably gathered, these events herald the beginning of the transition from the second to the third phase of Legend’s history, from Legend as a purveyor primarily of adventure games to a maker of 3D shooters that retain only scattered vestiges of the company’s past. Yet this transition wasn’t as clean or as abrupt as that from parser-driven to point-and-click adventures. While most of Legend was chasing reinvention in the last years of the 1990s, another, smaller part was sticking to what they had always done. There would come two more traditionalist adventure games before The Wheel of Time made it out the door to signal to the world that Legend Entertainment had become a very different sort of games studio.

So, we’ll save The Wheel of Time and what came after for a later article. I’d like to use the rest of this one to look at that those last two purist adventures from Legend.

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon is one of those games that I would love to love much more than I actually do. It’s warm-hearted and well-meaning and wants nothing more than to show me a good time. Unfortunately, it mostly just bores me. In all of these respects, it has much in common with its literary source material.

Said source is the Callahan’s series by the science-fiction journeyman Spider Robinson, the first volume of which shares its name with the game. Born in the 1970s as loosely linked short stories in the pages of Analog magazine, it’s written science fiction’s nearest equivalent to the television sitcom Cheers; the stories all revolve around a convivial bar where everybody knows your name, owned and operated by a fellow named Mike Callahan in lieu of Sam Malone. The tone is what we like to call hyggelig here in Denmark: cozy and welcoming, both for the patrons of the bar and for the reader. A sign that Mike Callahan keeps hanging on the wall behind his post says it all: “Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased.” The stories manage to qualify as science fiction — or maybe a better description is urban fantasy? — by including elements of the inexplicable and paranormal: aliens drop in for a drink, as do time travelers, a talking dog, and plenty of other freaks and oddities. If you read long enough, you will begin to realize that Mike Callahan himself is not quite what he appears to be. But never fear, he’s still a good guy for all that.

It’s very hard even for a curmudgeon like me to work up any active dislike for a series that so plainly just wants to make us feel good. And yet I must admit that I’ve never been able to work up the will to read beyond the first book either. Even when I first encountered Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon in the stacks of my local library at the ripe old age of twelve or so, it felt so slight and contrived that I couldn’t be bothered to finish it. When I picked the first book up again as part of my due diligence for writing this article, I wound up feeling precisely the same way, thus illustrating that I either had exceptionally good taste as a twelve-year-old or that I am a sad case of arrested development.  (The child is the father to the man, as they say.)

Still, none of this need be the kiss of death for the game. I’ve played a fair number of games, from Legend and others, that are based on books that I would never choose to read on my own, and enjoyed a surprising number of them. But, as I noted at the outset, the game of Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon isn’t in this group.

Callahan’s was the second Legend adventure game to be masterminded by a former Sierra designer, after Shannara, by Corey and Lori Ann Cole of Quest for Glory fame. This time up, we have Josh Mandel, a former standup comedian who had once been a regular on the same circuit as such future stars as David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Jerry Seinfeld. His own life took a very different course when a close encounter with Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards caused him to seek a job with the company that had made it. His design credits at Sierra included Pepper’s Adventures in Time, Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, and Space Quest 6: The Spinal Frontier. Having left Sierra in the middle of the Space Quest 6 project because he was unhappy with the company’s direction, he was available for Legend to sign to a design contract circa late 1995.

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon is a very well-made game by any objective standard. The graphics and sound, created by a stable of out-of-house free agents to whom Legend returned again and again, are attractive and polished and perfectly in tune with the personality of the books. If the overriding standard by which you judge this game is how well it evokes its source material, it can only be counted a rousing success. Hewing to the series’ roots as a collection of short stories rather than anything so ambitious as a novel, the game uses Callahan’s Bar as a jumping-off point for half a dozen largely self-contained vignettes, which take you everywhere from Manhattan to Brazil, from outer space to Transylvania. (Yes, there is a vampire.)

The worst objective complaint to be made about it is that, if you were to hazard a guess, you might assume it to be two or three years older than it actually is. Barring the addition of a 360-degree panning system, the interface and presentation of the game aren’t very far removed at all from what we were seeing at the beginning of the point-and-click phase of Legend’s existence in 1993. For example, there’s still no audible narrator guiding the show, just lots and lots of textual descriptions of the things you click on. (The characters you speak to in the game, on the other hand, are fully voice-acted.) Its dated presentation may have represented a marketing problem when Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon made its debut in the spring of 1997, but there’s no reason for it to bother tolerant retro-gamers like us unduly today.

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon was the last hurrah for Legend’s original adventure engine, which had been steadily improved since their very first game, 1990’s Spellcasting 101.

So much for objectivity. Subjectively, this is my least favorite point-and-click Legend adventure game, with the possible exception only of Companions of Xanth, for which my distaste is driven more by the pedophiliac overtones of the books on which it is based than by anything intrinsic to the game itself. I can’t accuse Spider Robinson of so serious an offense as that, only of a style of humor to which I just don’t respond. Alas for me, Josh Mandel chooses to ape that style of humor slavishly. This game is a hall of mirrors where every pane of glass hides a wretched pun or a groan-inducing dad joke or a pseudo-heart-warming “I feel you, man!” moment. It sets my teeth on edge.

And the thing is, you just can’t get away from it. Josh Mandel has chosen to implement every single thing you see in the scenery as a hot spot. And because this is a traditional adventure game, any one of those hot spots could hide the thing or the clue or the action you need to advance. So, you have to click them all. One by one. And it’s absolutely excruciating. The words just run on and on and on… so many words, vanishingly few of them funny or interesting, a pale imitation of a writer I don’t like very much in the first place. I get tired and fidgety just thinking about it. For me at least, Callahan’s is proof that it’s possible to over-implement an adventure game, with disastrous effects on its pacing — a problem that tended not to come up in the earlier years of the genre, when space constraints served as a natural editor.

Sigh…

But of course, it’s well known that comedy is notoriously subjective. You might respond very differently to this game, especially if Spider Robinson happens to be a writer you enjoy, or perhaps if the humor in Sierra’s comedy adventures is more to your taste than it is to mine. I’d be lying if I said I finished it — dear reader, there came a point when I just couldn’t take it anymore — but what I did see of it gave me no reason to doubt that it’s up to Legend’s usual standards of meticulous, scrupulous fairness.

Okay… every once in a while, a joke does kind of land.

Sadly for Legend, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon sold like a Popsicle in the Arctic. And small wonder: whatever its intrinsic merits or demerits, it’s hard to imagine a game more out of touch with the way the industry was trending in 1997. In light of this, that could very well have been that for Legend Entertainment as a maker of adventure games. Instead, the company ponied up for one last adventure while the drawn-out Wheel of Time project was still ongoing. It was permitted only a limited budget, but it seems like a minor miracle for ever having gotten made at all. Best of all, John Saul’s Blackstone Chronicles: An Adventure in Terror is really, really good.

This project was an unusual one for Legend, in that for once the author behind the literary work that was being borrowed from showed an active, ongoing interest in the game. John Saul was riding high at this point in his career, being arguably the most popular American horror writer not named Stephen King. He was also, as he said at the time, “an old computer gamer, going back to the days of Zork when the adventure was all in text.” He first began to speak with Bob Bates about some sort of collaboration as early as 1995. The two initially discussed a book and game that would be released at the same time, to serve as companion pieces to one another. When that became too logistically challenging — a book tends to be a lot faster to create than a game — they decided that the game could come out later, to serve as a sequel to the book. Even so, Bates was already sketching out a design at the same time that Saul was writing his manuscript.

In the midst of all this, the aforementioned Stephen King tried out a unique publication strategy for his story The Green Mile: in an echo of the way the Victorians used to do these things, it appeared as six thin, cheap paperbacks, one per month over the course of half a year. The experiment was a roaring commercial success, convincing John Saul that it would serve his own burgeoning Blackstone Chronicles equally well. Thus the latter too was published in six parts over the first half of 1997 (after which the inevitable omnibus volume which you can still buy today appeared).

The Blackstone Chronicles revolves around an old, now abandoned asylum that looms physically and psychically over the New Hampshire town of Blackstone. In each of the first five installments, a resident of the town receives a mysterious gift of some sort, an object that once belonged to one of the inmates of the asylum. Strange events ensue on each occasion, until it all culminates in a showdown between a dark past and a hopefully brighter future in the sixth installment. The Blackstone Chronicles isn’t revelatory — creepy asylums in bleak New England towns aren’t exactly the height of innovation in horror fiction — but I found it to be a very effective genre piece nonetheless, one that’s wise enough to understand that shadows in the mind are always scarier than blood on the page. It was also a commercial success in its day to rival its inspiration The Green Mile, with each of the installments reportedly selling in the neighborhood of 1 million copies.

Sales figures like that do much to explain why Legend decided to continue with their game of The Blackstone Chronicles despite the headwinds blowing against the adventure genre. The project marked the first time that Bob Bates had taken on the role of Lead Designer since Eric the Unready back in 1993. Designing games was what he had started Legend in order to do, but navigating the shifting winds of the industry had come to demand all of the time he could give it and then some. Now, though, the situation was a bit more settled, thanks to GT Interactive stepping in with a long-term commitment to The Wheel of Time. Not being an FPS gamer, Bates wasn’t sure how much he could contribute there. Meanwhile his loyal friend and partner Mike Verdu felt strongly that, if Bates wanted to take a modest budget and make an adventure game with John Saul’s help, he had earned that right. The way things were going for Legend and the industry as a whole, it might very well be the last such chance he would ever get.

Bob Bates looks back on the time he spent making this game about madness, sadism, and tragedy as a thoroughly happy period in his own life. The constant stress over how Legend was to make payroll from month to month had, at least for the time being, abated, allowing him to do what he had really wanted to be doing all along: designing an adventure game that he could be proud of. It was gratifying as well to be working with such a literary partner as John Saul, who was, if far from a constant presence around the office, genuinely interested in what he was doing and always available to answer questions or serve as a sounding board. The contrast with most of the authors Legend had worked with in the past was stark.

The game takes place several years after the last of John Saul’s novellas, casting you in the role of Oliver Metcalf, the son of Malcolm Metcalf, the Blackstone Asylum’s last and most infamous superintendent. With a plan to demolish the old building and erect a shopping center in its place having backfired in the books, the town council now wants to make a museum of psychiatric history out of it. Before the museum can open, however, Malcolm’s malevolent spirit kidnaps your — Oliver’s, that is to say — flesh-and-blood son and hides him somewhere in the building. You go there to rescue him, which is exactly what your father wants you to do, having hatched a special plan for your soul. It’s a classic haunted-house setup, no more original in the broad strokes than the premise of the books, but executed equally well. The museum conceit is indicative of the design’s subtle cleverness: the exhibits you find in each room fill in the backstory of what you’re seeing, making the game completely accessible and comprehensible whether you’ve read the books or not.

Instead of pulling out Legend’s standard third-person adventure engine for one more go-round, Bob Bates opted for a first-person perspective with node-based movement through a contiguous pre-rendered-3D space — i.e., the sturdy Myst model, which Legend had previously used only for Mission Critical. With most of the small company busy with The Wheel of Time, the majority of the graphics and much of the programming were outsourced to Presto Studios, who were just wrapping up their third and final Journeyman Project game and were all too eager for more projects to take on in these declining times for the adventure genre. The end result betrays that the budget was far from expansive, but the sense of constrained austerity winds up serving the fiction rather than detracting from it.

Indeed, the finished game is something of a masterclass in doing more with less. The digitized photographs that drift across the screen from time to time serve just as well or better than full-fledged expository movies might have. Then, too, The Blackstone Chronicles uses its sound stage as effectively as any adventure game I’ve ever played; when I think back on the experience, I remember what I heard better than what I saw. Artfully placed creaks and groans and grinds and drips keep you from ever feeling too comfortable as you roam, as does the soundtrack, all brooding minor chords that swell up from time to time into startling crescendos.

And then there are the disembodied voices you converse with as you explore the asylum, who are sometimes deeply unsettling, sometimes downright heart-wrenching. In the category of the former is an all-American boy who talks like a cast member of Leave It To Beaver, but who has found his true calling as the operator of the asylum’s basement torture chamber, where iron maidens are only the tip of a sadistic iceberg. (“When I was a teenager, I killed a few animals and skinned them. People got upset. They said something was wrong with me. I guess what tipped the balance was when I cut up my best friend and put him in my closet…”) In the category of the latter is a little boy who prefers to wear dresses. Following the theories of the real psychiatrist Henry Cotton that such “disorders” of the mind reside in an organ of the body, Malcolm Metcalf proceeded to dismantle the boy piece by piece, beginning by pulling out his teeth and proceeding on to liver, spleen, kidneys, eyes, ears, and finally limbs. Standing there in a bare little room, surrounded by the remnants of the boy in Mason jars, listening to him tell his story… well, I found it fairly shattering. I’m not scared of werewolves or vampires, but I can be scared by monsters who appear in the guise of ordinary humans.

The fact is that many of the horrors The Blackstone Chronicles unveils really did happen inside mental institutions, and not all that long ago. During Medieval and Renaissance times, convents were the places one used to hide away embarrassing or inconvenient family members — usually women. (When Hamlet tells Ophelia to “get thee to a nunnery,” it isn’t meant as a tribute to her religious devotion.) So-called “lunatic” asylums took over this role during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When in The Blackstone Chronicles you meet the spirit of an unmarried young woman who tells you she is pregnant, you don’t know whether to believe her own words or to believe her official admission record, which says that she is suffering from an “hysterical pregnancy.” You just know that your heart goes out to her.

The puzzles you encounter as you explore the asylum and engage with its inmates and their persecutors aren’t exceptionally memorable in and of themselves, but they do their job of guiding your progress through the drama; in an echo of the books, they’re mostly object-oriented affairs, with most of the objects being intimately connected to the people who once lived here. Every once in a while, Oliver gets tossed into a situation that led to the death of an inmate: he might get locked inside the “heat chamber,” get hooked up to an ECT (“electroconsulsive therapy”) machine, or find himself strapped down underneath a swinging pendulum straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. If you don’t escape in time, you die — but never fear, the game gives you a chance to try again, as many times as you need. These sequences are as minimalist as the rest of the game, doing much with a few still frames and the usual brilliant sound design. And once again, the end result is more unnerving than a hundred blood-drenched videogame zombies.

The Blackstone Chronicles definitely isn’t for everyone; some might find it traumatizing, while others might simply prefer to play something that’s a little bit more cheerful, and that’s perfectly okay. But if it does strike a chord with you, you’ll never forget it. It’s one of only a few games I’ve played in my life that I’m prepared to call haunting — not haunting in a jump-scare sort of way, but in the way that can keep you up at night, wondering what on earth is wrong with us that we can do the things we do to one another.

If anyone had thought that being tied to such a successful series of books would make the game of The Blackstone Chronicles a hit in its own right, they were destined to be disappointed. GT Interactive saw so little commercial potential in Legend’s side project that they didn’t even want to distribute the game. Released in November of 1998 under the auspices of Red Orb Entertainment, a division of Mindscape, it performed only slightly better than Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, offering up no justification whatsoever for Legend to continue to make adventure games even as a sideline to their new direction. The future of the studio founded as the heir to Infocom lay with first-person shooters.

What was there to be said about that? Only that it had been one hell of a transformative decade for Bob and Mike’s most-excellent adventure-game company, as it had been for gaming in general.

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

Sources: The books Masters of DOOM: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner, Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine by Andrew Scull, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson, and The Blackstone Chronicles by John Saul. Computer Gaming World of August 1996, December 1996, February 1997, September 1997, January 1999, and February 1999; Retro Gamer 180; PC Gamer of December 1995. and May 1996

Online sources include GameSpot’s vintage review of Star Control 3 and an old GA Source interview with Michel Kripalani of Presto Studios.

I also made extensive use of the materials held in the Legend archive at the Strong Museum of Play.

In addition to the above, much of this article is based on a series of conversations I’ve had with Bob Bates and Mike Verdu over the last ten years or so. My thanks go to both gentlemen for taking the time out of their still busy careers to talk to me.

Where to Get Them: Star Control 3 is available for digital purchase at GOG.com. Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon and The Blackstone Chronicles can be downloaded as ready-to-run packages from The Collection Chamber; doing so is not, strictly speaking, legal, but needs must.

On Friday, June 27, 2025, 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.

Cut the Sky (2025) by SV Linwood

In this science fiction story, you play as a swordsman. You’ve been wandering for a long time. In the Oeserl Plains, a brigand demands your valuables. You should examine what lies here, and you should talk to him, but you solve most problems with your sword.

This game was an entry in the Main Festival of Spring Thing 2025, where it was awarded Best in Show.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Fat Bear (2025) by Charles Moore, Jr.

In this game, you play as a mature adult North American brown bear, also known as a grizzly. And what does a bear in the woods do? Eat everything he can. After you’ve eaten twelve meals, there’s one last place to explore.

This game was written in Dialog and was an entry in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam (TALP) of 2025, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Fixing Time: A Hack & Makerspace Adventure (2025) by Richard Pettigrew

In this adventure, it’s 2025 and you’re visiting the Hack & Makerspace, a place where everyone can build, repair, and experiment with technology. Someone’s even made a temporal relocator, but it’s missing a few parts. Where and when will this quest take you? Who will you meet? And what will you make?

This game was written in Adventuron and was an entry in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam (TALP) of 2025, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Escape from the SS Borgarís (2003) by Kevan Davis

In this escape game, you play as a stowaway on a cruise ship, but when you emerge from your hiding place, you find the ship deserted except for an abandoned baby and a cat. What happened? The decks outside are freezing!

This game was one of three participants in the Second 24 Hours of Inform.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Escape from the Troll’s Cave (2024) by Garry Francis

In this short and very easy game, you play as a student who skipped school to visit a carnival. But the “Troll’s Cave” wasn’t a free ride. It’s an administration building, and the resident troll demands you pay a toll of 41 cents to leave.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Guilded Youth (2012) by Jim Munroe

In this game that switches between a BBS guild of RPG-themed adventurers and their real-life teenage counterparts, you play as Tony the Thief. In a few days, the Oakville Manor will be demolished. You intend to make several midnight raids to loot the place of its remaining valuables before then, but you may need a little help.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2012 where it took 3rd place; it also won the Miss Congenality award. At the 2012 XYZZY Awards, it won the Best NPCs award; it was also a finalist in the Best Use of Innovation category.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Retool Looter (2025) by Charm Cochran

In this sci-fi espionage wordplay game, you play as Agent Quintrell, armed with a portable reverser that can reverse maps into spam. Seven agents have been reversed by your adversaries into inanimates. Your mission is to infiltrate their compound, locate the reversed agents, and rescue them.

This game was an entry in the Main Festival of Spring Thing 2025, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Stealth Adventure (2024) by not me

In this very short and deliberately bad and broken game, you play as a secret agent. Your mission is to find the secret papers and destroy them before they fall into the wrong hands. Not recommended.

This was an entry in the Really Bad IF Jam of 2024. By the author’s request, this game is not listed on IFDB.

My walkthrough and map

Home from NarraScope! Here's what I've played this month.

• The Operator
• Dungeons of Hinterburg
• TRON: Catalyst

The Operator

• by Bureau 81 -- game site

A shortish narrative game which falls somewhere between the "hacker game" and "bureaucrat game" tropes. You have a computer screen, which is most of your interface with the world. (Not entirely, and the game makes some hay with that.) You're a faceless Fed intelligence operator (not entirely faceless, and see above). You do database searches for the cops out in the field. Mostly this means digging through folders of evidence to find the field that answers a specific question -- "What is the shooter's name?" "What is the inconsistency in this transcript?" And so on.

But then you stumble across Wot You Ought Not, and some nice hackerly interactions get mixed into the gameplay. More realistic than the usual pipe-puzzle hacker minigame, although it never gets trickier than "use this terminal command correctly."

(I appreciated that you can browse databases and evidence folders entirely from the simulated terminal. I get the feeling the game was designed as a pure CLI setup, and the devs added GUI affordances in player testing? Just a feeling.)

The story feels somewhat loose around the edges, and the writing is pretty clunky. Or the translation is -- the developer is French, and the game's faux-American-FBI schtick doesn't really hold up. In particular, when someone is introduced as "Mike TRENCH" and you need to type their full name, it's "MIKE TRENCH" rather than "MICHAEL". Full-ish. And yes, the whole game uses French-style last name capitalization.

And I suspect the voice actors were mostly running on "ham it up and hit these plot points". (Sorry, Barry! Good job on the drawling!)

Anyhow, it's an effective spy thriller if not an effective story. The real-world interstitials, cast in super-blurry non-video, are a neat way to provide FMV ambience on a super-low budget. (And, again, a bit of gameplay...) The story has quite a bit of narrative variation -- a single ending, but several ways to get there depending on how individual chapters go. Mind which wire you cut, now.

Dungeons of Hinterburg

• by Microbird -- game site

Combination dungeon-crawler and visual novel. Dungeons have appeared in a cute village in the German Alps; now local hostels and weapon merchants are making bank as tourists flock in for slay-cations. You alternate between dungeon-grinding (daytime) and buffing your relations with the locals (evenings).

The dungeons are primarily puzzle dungeons, padded out with combat scenes. Feel free to play on easy or very-easy combat mode. The puzzles are the feature here. Puzzle-solving tools are a fairly familiar mix of bombs and hookshots and magic skateboards, plus some more creative spells. The tool mix changes up from region to region so there's plenty of variety.

This is very cute. (And very relatable to my vacation last year in a cute village in the Dolomites. No monsters on Lake Garda but many ducks!) Exploring the town and chatting people up is fun, and so is the game's take on the bizarre social environment of RPG-as-tourist-industry. Much like Boyfriend Dungeon's "let's dunj" vibe, albeit without the talking swords.

However, the puzzles weren't quite engaging enough to hold my interest, and the combat was just repetitive and boring. (C.f. South of Midnight.) The game clearly wants to break up the dungeoning with visual-novel stuff -- like I said, you alternate modes. But then I found the enforced alternation to be annoyingly restrictive! I wanted to spend time just chilling with the cute slayer chick at the ice-cream stand, but nope, gotta dunj during the day, every day.

I mean, you don't have to. You can spend the afternoon at a scenic vista, or just take the bus back to town. Similarly, you can spend an evening at the movie theater rather than finding an NPC to talk to. It was just... regimented. Every clock tick hustles you along.

I got about halfway through the game, and then decided that it felt too much like work and put it away. The plot was just getting interesting, mind you. Smarmy Mayor! Engaged, difficult character arguments over the future of the dungeon industry! Drat, I'd better not talk myself into reinstalling...

TRON: Catalyst

• by Bithell Games -- game site

One more delivery in computer-land and you can call it a night... except the package explodes. Suspicious! The red-neon Core cops want to throw you in the game arena. You would prefer to avoid this. Luckily, or "luckily", the explosion glitched you out and you seem to be experiencing déjà vu...

(You might wonder what kind of a legal system revolves around a game arena. To some extent Catalyst is a novel-length exploration of a political situation-slash-conspiracy that makes sense of this Tron cliché. The game isn't actually an arena story -- spoiler, you escape almost immediately -- but I wonder if that wasn't the seed of it.)

Tron: Identity, Bithell's previous effort, was a short visual novel with a bit of puzzle solitaire. Catalyst is much more ambitious: a narrative-heavy action-RPG which sprawls across the Arq Grid, from the towering city of Vertical Slice to the storm-whipped Outlands. It took me about ten hours to play through. I guess that's a smallish game by commercial RPG standards, but it felt big to me.

I have to say it was somewhat padded at that length. The designers clearly want you to feel like you're exploring a living world. The early areas are pretty well packed with chatty pedestrians, but as the game gets more expansive, it starts to feel like an RPG -- big maps dotted with people saying "Have a nice cycle" plus a few side quests. Lots of "go here next" plot arrows; on a map like that, there's no shame in using them. The story involves lots of running back and forth across the city. And fighting roomfuls of guards at every turn. And then there's enough dialogue to balance out all the running around and fighting -- which is a lot of dialogue.

I mean, it's good dialogue! I really liked the story. It's intricate and political and flamboyant and personal. It involves grand ambitious schemers and little people getting on with their lives. It extends the world of Tron: Identity; you will eventually run into some familiar faces. Now with voices! Catalyst isn't fully voice-acted -- way too many side characters and RPG side-chats -- but key plot scenes are voiced.

On the down side, it is not fully animated. Of course that's an unfair expectation. It's delightful that a small indie studio gets to play in the Tron universe. Disney could be cranking out soulless multiple-A trend games, and I suppose they will before the new movie hits. But I am very happy to play something on the low-budget-with-heart side.

The visual style is terrific, to be sure. It's a top-down view, so it's not intensively modelled; but the architecture has a wonderful sense of space and depth. Lots of tiny brush-stroke details. (I particularly loved that the city streets have bike racks. Not Tron motorcycles, but, like, Tron bicycles.)

It's just off-balance for a critical action scene to be represented by a fade-out and a couple of sound effects. Same goes for a chapter-transitional voyage down the Source River. Give us a comic-book illo panel, at least!

Still, this is neon-red meat for Tron fiends. Yes, the pacing is padded and clunky and you will get tired of derezzing guards. But it's Tron -- gleaming towers and glittering polygon trees and abysses of backlit code. If you don't shout "How effin' awesome is this?" every time you turn a corner, what are you even doing here?

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

It’s 40% off until July 3rd!

Recover a stolen artifact and lose your heart as a secret magical agent! Can you uncover an arcane conspiracy before the clock runs out?

Eternal Affairs is an interactive urban fantasy romance novel by Jamie Maurer. It’s entirely text-based, 100,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

After you lost your beloved brother in a magical anomaly, you joined the Bureau of Magic to investigate magical anomalies and prevent the same tragedy from befalling anyone else. Of course, it takes magic to investigate magic: when thieves can use shadow manipulation charms to evade security cameras and hackers can insert necromantic malware into computers, you need to learn some tricks of your own. You can shapeshift, move objects with your mind, teleport, heal the most grievous injuries – or cause them by flinging fireballs. You can even manipulate time itself, gazing into the past or future.

When a dangerous artifact is stolen right out of one of the Bureau’s most secure vaults, you and your partner are tasked with recovering it. But your investigation turns up a web of conspiracies that lead to the highest levels of the Bureau, into other worlds – and even into your own traumatic past.

As the portals spin and the spells fly, your heart is beating with much more than just the thrill of the chase. Maybe you’ll be drawn to rogue mage Charlie, a loose-cannon Bureau consultant with platinum-bleached hair, a whole gallery’s worth of tattoos, fabulously tight leather pants and a cheekily rebellious attitude. Or, there’s Lex, your ride-or-die partner at the Bureau. Loyal, serious, with brown hair and freckles, a stocky build and a soft face that resembles an anxious teddy bear in times of trouble – but had you ever noticed before how all those hours at the gym have built up Lex’s muscles to fill out the Bureau uniform?

When you reach the top of the conspiracy, which of them will be by your side?

• Play as male, female, or non-binary; gay, straight, or bi/pan.
• Choose your magical specialty: matter, energy, time/space, or antimagic.
• Enter the kaleidoscopic magical realm of the Fae to negotiate the delicate balance between their world as yours – or just dance the night away at a fabulous Fae masked ball!
• Play by the book and do your best to keep magic secret – or become a loose cannon and rebel against the Bureau’s restrictive policies, sharing magic with the world
• Navigate the arcane bureaucracy of an arcane Bureau, dealing with your boss, red tape – and worst of all, your smarmy arrogant rival
• Turn to the dark side and defy death!

All magic has a price. What will you pay in pursuit of the truth?

We hope you enjoy playing Eternal Affairs. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, 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.

We’re proud to announce that The Last Scion, 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 33% off until June 26th!

Take to the skies! You fell to Earth as the last remnant of a dying world – can you rise as the planet’s greatest hero and triumph as a beacon of justice? Shrug off bullets, smash buildings with your bare hands, and soar through the air as you battle diabolical supervillains!

The Last Scion is an interactive superhero novel by D. G. P. Rector. It’s entirely text-based, 200,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

You are the Scion, sole survivor of the distant planet Utopia. Scientists on your homeworld imbued you with phenomenal powers – flight, speed, intelligence, strength, and resilience beyond the reach of any ordinary human – and sent you to Earth, accompanied only by your AI companion, MENTOR. Your quest: to carry on the legacy of Utopia by embodying its ideals in your new home.

And Beacon City is in desperate need. The Torchbearers, heroic defenders of the city, are all gone: those who weren’t slain by the villainous Silent Order have gone into hiding. Only a few people remain to carry on their legacy, trying to bring justice back to Beacon City – and they want your help.

By day, do your best to blend in as an ordinary human working at the Beacon City Tribune. By night, soar the skies and fight the villains of the Silent Order: reptilian Gorgon, mischievous telepath Poppet, brilliant scientist Vector, and especially the mysterious leader, Conqueror.

Will you fulfill your homeworld’s dream of carrying Utopia’s ideals to the new planet? Or will you turn to villainy, and possibly achieve greater power than anyone on Utopia could ever conceive?

Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, or bi.
Choose a secret identity at the Beacon City Tribune: maintenance worker, IT specialist, or mild-mannered reporter!
Customize your super-suit, including the most crucial question that a hero can answer: capes, or no capes?
Romance a relentless vigilante, a dashing hero, an intrepid reporter, a hard-boiled detective, or a roguish villain!
Work with the Beacon City PD and stay on the right side of the Superhero Investigation Agency – or push them aside, and soar above the law.
Use subtlety and empathy to turn your enemies away from villainy, or fight them head-on with your super-strength – or join them in villainy!

We hope you enjoy playing The Last Scion. 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.

(Click here for my Mystery House II posts in order.)

First off, a brief correction: The PC-6001 version I’ve been playing (at least up to a certain point, for reasons I’ll get into) is on tape, not disk, but everything on one tape. The files, found if you CLOAD multiple times, are

AUTO 1
MYS1
AUTO 2
MYS2 2
MYS2 3

where the double-auto files (meant to load on boot) suggest to me that this is the same copy as the two-tape version I mentioned last time, just someone copied everything together.

As far as why there’s MYS2 2 and MYS2 3, that’s because there’s three volumes! Or rather, there’s two tapes (each called a volume) and three program parts (each also called a volume) at the same time. That is…

Volume 1: has volume 1 on it
Volume 2: has volume 2 on it
Volume 2: also has volume 3 on it

…and all this took a long time to detangle. (Implicit thanks everywhere to the Gaming Alexandria discord, which helped out enormously.) I regret to inform you it gets worse, but let’s see what happens in gameplay context.

Disk from the FM-7 version via Oh! FM-7. I do not have access to this version. The screenshots make it look like it’s based on the Sharp/NEC map. I don’t know how the multiple volumes are handled.

Last time I left off with a cryptic message from a stairway about finding the entrance to the basement. Someone with eagle eyes might have spotted what to do next here, but in this case it was Kazuma Satou from the comments realizing that there was a map/hint page on Mobygames.

The basement and third floor are not shown.

The room in the lower left of 1F — where I found the book hiding the memo — also has a CARPET.

That double black line along the wall.

Some noodling about led me to MOVE CARPET, revealing a locked trapdoor.

This still isn’t enough to finish! You also need to USE HAMMER to bust open the door. Then you completely ignore the door for now and can leave up the stairs.

Trying to go down kills you, and I spent a while trying to survive going down before checking the stairs again.

That’s the end of Volume 1! Volume 2 is an entirely different program on an entirely different tape and doesn’t even carry any variables over. The game requests you reset the computer to move on.

The sequence in volume 1 was intended to get you to bust open a trapdoor before moving on. The reason this is important is that in volume 3 you return to the same room from below and the game assumes you’ve already busted the trapdoor (in a different kind of game, this might have a softlock because you didn’t prepare the trapdoor beforehand).

I want to re-iterate how completely odd and bizarre this is. I’ve never seen a game work this way; the closest I can think of is Savage Island (Part 1, Part 2) where there was an item you might be holding at the end of Part 1, and if you are holding the item you get one password, and if you are not holding the item you get a different password. Since the item is required to make progress in Part 2 early you can get softlocked from the previous game.

Earlier I mentioned “it gets worse” as far as the multi-part situation goes. You see, that NEC PC-6001 file? … is also corrupted. While the 3rd part of the game loads (you have found the jewel and are back on the first floor, now escape), there are damaged lines in part 2. In other words, to keep playing I had to switch computer systems over to the Sharp MZ-2000, where I have the second tape but not the first one. You start with no inventory, so the game assumes you’ve used CAST on the hammer or any other objects from the first floor.

(The Volume 1/2/3 situation still has yet another twist but let’s save that for the end.)

At least this version is likely adapted directly from the MZ-80B original.

The controls now go with the original “type verb and noun separate” system. It’s not as bad as I experienced with Mystery House 1 because there’s no screen swapping, although I quickly found reading memos and taking inventory to be cryptic until I got some source code assistance.

15230 IF D$=”ﾓﾁﾓﾉ”THEN12000

This line in the source code (which is protected from LIST and required shenanigans to break open) is the one that jumps to taking inventory. “ﾓﾁﾓﾉ” is Japanese for, essentially “belongings”, and makes a decent synonym for “inventory”, but is the only command in the game delivered in Japanese rather than in English. There is, fortunately, a function key (F3) which will type the same thing.

This screen will show objects on top (except the player isn’t holding any right now) but also is the only screen you can read memos from. You have to hit F4, which types out READ MEMO (as a whole command, not split!) and then pick the number of the memo. F5 types “RETURN” which will exit from this screen.

Now, a map:

I’ll save the elevator for last. Rotating west, going forward, and entering the door to the south, you get to a room with a picture. The picture has a memo.

The memo says the clock needs to be set to 1 o’clock for the door to open. (Remember back in Volume 1 of the NEC version of the game it said 3 o’clock. More on all that later.)

Going back to the starting position and north leads to a room with a fireplace. Searching the fireplace yields a match.

In the same “room” (it’s another 2 by 1 setup where you see across the long room) there’s a “RACK” partly underneath a “HATCH”. You can MOVE RACK so it now is fully underneath the hatch, then OPEN HATCH to get access to the third floor.

The third floor has what the game calls a SCOOP lying on the ground (shovel) and also windows that mysteriously open to reveal a number.

Just to be clear with a map:

To the north of where the shovel is there’s a rectangle on the wall that looks like it should have a door, but it isn’t. After a bit of struggle I came up with PUSH WALL which opens the passage.

The next room has a clock. This is where the first memo (set to 1 o’clock) comes into play, as you can ADJUST CLOCK and then say you want it at 1. This opens yet another secret passage, this time through the tiny door in the clock.

The next room (and last room of floor 3) has a computer, specifically an MZ-2000 in this version of the game.

RUN MZ2000 will print a memo that you can then take.

マイクロキャビン マーク カラ W ニ 2:S ニ 1

This indicates you’re supposed to start at the Microcabin logo and go west by 2 and south by 1. We’ll need this shortly. Let’s go outside by heading to the elevator.

The mechanics here are weird. You need to press and hold W to leave, or press and hold E to approach the buttons. No other keys work; you aren’t typing on a parser prompt. Wild inconsistency is the most consistent thing about this game.

There’s 3 buttons; the second one kills you, the other two are helpful.

One of them takes you to a garden outside. You need to specify DIG GROUND, at which point the game will ask you for how many steps west and south; this is where the memo comes into play.

The inventory limit of 2 still applies, so you need to cast off one of your items after doing this in order to get the BOX, or TRUNK.

If you try to then saunter through the exit — and you can go down the stairs, you just can’t walk around the first floor otherwise — you’ll find it is locked. You also need a key, which is where the other button on the elevator comes into play.

This leads to darkness, which you can dispel with LIGHT MATCH. (According to the source code, the amount of time the match is lit is tracked in real time. This is very rare for a turn based game but we’ve seen it once in a while, like in how Devil’s Island you needed to wait in real time for a guard to show up.)

The safe lets you enter the 7474 from the window (rather, ADJUST / SAFE, 7, 4, 7, 4) revealing a key inside.

Again you might need to worry about your inventory limit. If you got the BOX first you’re in trouble because you can’t discard the match! The best order is to do the key first and then get the box.

With the key and box in and (with possibly some trouble as mentioned in the caption) you can now officially saunter outside to a win.

With scrolling text.

Now, you may be wondering — hey, Mr. Blog Author, didn’t you say something about needing to bash open a hatch with a hammer in volume 1, how did that come into play? And what about the hole with the rope? Yes indeed: it turns out the MZ version of the game only has two volumes and whatever happened in volume 1 must be different from the NEC version, despite it looking like the same game from the video. I could technically try starting in volume 3 of the NEC version and beating it from there, but I am honestly fine passing for now. (The good folks at Gaming Alexandria are still trying to work out how to rescue the data from the tape for NEC volume 2. I’ll keep everyone posted. My theory is a divergence at the very end allowing for the third volume.)

The start of Volume 3.

I think the multi-volume gameplay mess demonstrates a case of “flying too close to the sun” that many of our authors have suffered, where they need to follow-up their previous game with something more ambitious. (As touted in the ad, “the program size has now doubled, making the adventure even more exciting.”) Still, I found it interesting how reasonable the MZ (volume 2) version of the game was relative to everything else I’ve seen: the only hard part is realizing, for example, you’re looking at a HATCH on the screen and need to apply the parser accordingly. I also got stuck a while figuring out how to work the elevator given it doesn’t even use the parser! So our original author-dentist seems to have kept to reasonable ambitions (apart from the volume-splitting) but the later people who made ports started to get unreasonable, like with the carpet puzzle on NEC or the confusing design elements of the MSX version.

NarraScope is an event that supports interactive narrative, adventure games, and interactive fiction by bringing together writers, developers, and players. The Rosebush is happy to be an, admittedly very minor, sponsor of the Narrascope 2025 conference. From June 20 to June 22, narrative games – including interactive fiction – will be put in the spotlight in a series of workshops and talks at Drexel University in Philadelphia, USA. Although in-person attendance is sold out, it is still possible to register for online attendance! Online registration is open until June 18, 2025.

If you’re on the fence, be sure to check out the full schedule. And of course, if you’re giving a talk or workshop at the conference and would like to write up your ideas later in the form of an article; or if attending NarraScope sparks new ideas in you that other people ought to know about – you know where to send your pitches!

A wild regex appears!

Mainframe Blues

From a presentation and interface point of view, Inform games emerged from the rarefied world of terminal applications. While terminals might support varied character sets, they are designed to print, one line at a time, unadorned text. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s how Inform games do things, and this is an Inform blog. But if you’re a new author struggling to reach players on itch.io, you might think: “I wish I could post nicer-looking screenshots.”

You’re not alone! The mainframe terminal aesthetic might be a hard sell, excepting ironic, faux retro works. How can we spice things up? We can start by thinking about layout. Because of Inform’s line feed output, it doesn’t really “get” the concepts of tab stops. Earlier versions of Inform permitted the use of separate “windows” for storing different types of content but Inform 10 has no extensions for these presentation elements. I’m not qualified to say why this is, but we have reason to believe that Inform 11 will be much better in this regard.

Since there has been no release date announced for Inform 11, some of us might try to handle things ourselves.

table + faux = tableau?

Let’s try to come up with a way to print something that looks like a table. Every column should like up equally for a uniform look. How can we do it? We can try typing it out. Let’s say a column is, oh, eight characters or spaces wide. To keep a column looking tidy:

1. type our word
2. figure out the number of spaces needed to reach our column link (8 minus the number of letters in our word.
3. add in the spaces.
4. type a new word, repeat as needed.

By default, that should look like this.

apple fruit yes
car vehicle no
goat animal yes

That’s not it, is it? By default, Inform (and almost everything else) uses variable letter spacing. These proportional fonts have different letter widths based on the width of the letter. This means that the lower case “i” takes up less space than a capital case “Z”. Because of this difference, we can never get our letters to line up unless we switch a monospaced font. We can change these formatting options easily, by the way:

to say some monospaced code:
	say "[fixed letter spacing]Some monospaced text.";

[or]

	say fixed letter spacing;
	say "Some monospaced code.";

We can just as easily change it back:

	say "[variable letter spacing]Some proportional text."

These are long phrases. We can save ourselves some time by substituting abbreviations.

to say fls:
	say fixed letter spacing.

[then we can say]

	say "[fls]Some monospaced text.";

Backc to our earlier example: f we change our output type and count our spaces, we can get something better.

apple   fruit   yes
car     vehicle no
goat    animal  yes

Better, yes? So we want to do a combination of counted spaces and monospaced text. There’s a problem, though. What if we have a lot of text to print, or if we are printing it automatically? We might be repeating through a table or list, for instance. Or values. We’d have no way to count our spaces manually. Instead, we’d have to get Inform to do it for us.

space counter 2025

How could we do it? How could Inform count our spaces for us? It won’t be easy, and in fact it’s pretty rich for beginners like us. I’ve tried to put together an example that can be copy/pasted into a project without too much challenge. You know the old saying, “fake it ’til you make it?” Copy the code and use it until it makes sense! Or, if it makes sense right away, make it better if you like. Here we go.

First, let’s get a table. I’ll copy it from my current WIP.

table of aphoses					
aphosis	active	description	alternate command	shortcut	count
FLEGECORS	FALSE	insect curse	PLAGUE	P	0
HYLUAL	FALSE	mountainfall	ROCKFALL	R	0
SLIMUAL	FALSE	slimefall	SLIME	SL	0

Sorry this looks so bad! Let’s see what we can do. The longest word in the first column, “FLEGECORS”, has nine characters. What would be a good column length? Let’s try 12.

OK, a 12 character column. Here’s the path I think we should take.

1. Inform determines the number of characters in a word.
2. Inform figures out the amount of empty spaces needed to line up the next column.
3. Inform prints the text, then the spaces, then moves on to the next column.

This will combine things we’ve done before with new tricks. I’ll explain everything as we go.

Let’s make a what’s called a “phrase to decide”. In these decisions, we are telling Inform how to calculate or determine something on the fly. Here’s my phrase:

to decide which text is the tabbed presentation of (t - a text) with (C - a number) spaces:

By saying “which text,” we are asking Inform to come up with a text for us. We can use that text anywhere. It will be like any other substitution. If you thought that Inform could only do this kind of thing with numbers and values, you’re not alone! It took me a while to get here.

We have two variables to work with: (t – a text) and (C – a number). When we ask Inform to make this decision for us, we have to provide it with the text we want it to evaluate. N will represent the column width. We can change this as needed when we make our rules.

The next thing we want to do is figure out the number of spaces needed:

to decide which text is the tabbed presentation of (t - a text) with (C - a number) spaces:
	now C is C minus the number of characters in t;

Since C is the column width, we’ll figure out the amount of space needed by subtracting the number of letters in the word from C. If we are sticking with 12 for a column width, “frob” (4 characters) would leave room for eight spaces. How do we get there? There are a number of ways, actually, but I’m going to do something weird. Bear with me, OK.

Let’s set up a constant. Constants are just what they sound like: they never change. We can make a constant and fill it with spaces.

void is always "                    ";

Void is just a text made of twenty space characters. Using our calculation, we can take/copy spaces from it as needed.

	if void matches the regular expression "/s{1,[C]}":

Whew! That’s a lot to look at, isn’t it? Regular expressions are a powerful tool for finding patterns in text. Think of it as a very advanced form of “control-f” finding on a web page or word processing document. Let’s unpack this phrase.

“if void matches the regular expression” simply means that we are looking for a text that may or may not be in our “void” constant. Now, since void consists only of spaces, there isn’t a lot to look for. In fact, we just want to count out our spaces and get out. That’s what the next part does. The quoted part contains our parameters. This is the hard part of doing regular expressions. The different characters can be intimidating and confusing. But don’t worry! I’ve written this for easy copy/pasting.

“\s{1,[CC]}”

Bit by bit:

• The the “\s” indicates that we are looking for a space character. Since void is filled with them, we are bound to find some!
• The curved brackets {} are used to find a specific number of characters. This is how we will count out our line spaces.
• The numbers indicate a range of spaces. In this case, we want the highest number ranging from 1 to our C (the number of spaces needed to fill our column).

In other words: this regular expression is searching for the line space characters we need from void, based on the column width we have specified.

What’s next?

    let V be "[text matching regular expression]";
    decide on the substituted form of "[t][V]";

“Text matching regular expression” is just what it sounds like. It’s the text we found in our search: a number of line spaces based on our parameters in this case.

We can call that text “V” and print it together with our original text as “the substituted form of ‘[t][V]'”. A substituted form sounds tricky, but it’s just a way to say we are updating a text on the fly.

The “decide on” phrase means that the story has reached a decision. Without having to revisit the regular expression, we can use simple phrases like this in our code.

	say the tabbed presentation of "jump" with eight spaces;

Here’s a working project to play with. Try adding this “to decide” definition to your own project and experimenting a bit!

lab is a room.

void is always "                    ";

instead of jumping:
	say fixed letter spacing;
	say the tabbed presentation of "jump" with eight spaces;
	say "Wow!";
	say the tabbed presentation of "listen" with eight spaces;
	say "Neat."

to decide which text is the tabbed presentation of (t - a text) with (C - a number) spaces:
	now C is C minus the number of characters in t;
	if void matches the regular expression "/s{1,[C]}":
		let V be "[text matching regular expression]";
		decide on the substituted form of "[t][V]";

Output:

>jump
jump    Wow!
listen  Neat.

A strange journey, but that’s that. But wait, we haven’t even discussed automated printout from tables and such. Let’s do that next time, OK? We have a lot to think about already. Here’s a preview of what we’ll make next:

     APHOSIS     |   DESCRIPTION     |   GRAMMAR     |   SHORTCUT
     ------------------------------------------------------------
     FLEGECORS   |   insect curse    |   PLAGUE      |   P
     HYLUAL      |   mountainfall    |   ROCKFALL    |   R
     SLIMUAL     |   slimefall       |   SLIME       |   SL

More info re: Regular Expressions:

See my Portrait with Wolf code (see below) for regex with comments
Inform Dcumentation (might be hard to follow)
regex101: build, test, and debug regex
regex tutorial (intended to sell classes, but the first one is free)

p.s.

My spring thing games are out. I’ve written about my process for making them here! The source code is available, too.

Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight
Portrait with Wolf

You can read my post-project essay here:

Animal Games: Spring Thing 2025

How do I feel about my games? I’m very proud of the progress I’ve made with Inform. I’ve worked hard to get better, and I think it’s paying off. I’m a little disappointed in the reception, though. The games didn’t take off in terms of player count or discussion. I think there are a handful of reasons for that. Maybe we can get into that someday, but not now. Let’s keep making IF!

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Reunite with familiar faces, forge new bonds, and continue growing into the legend you are meant to become. The Soul Stone War 3 is the thrilling 260,000-word sequel to the interactive fantasy novel The Soul Stone War 2 by Morgan Vane. 

The Soul Stone War 3 is 30% off until June 19th! And you can get The Soul Stone War and The Soul Stone War 2 for 40% off as well!

You stand triumphant. After successfully infiltrating Cnamh Briste, you have freed your captured companion and dealt a blow the Lord of All won’t soon forget.

The power of the Soul Stones is growing. Now free from Manerkol’s influence, you align yourself with an unexpected force: The Resistance. Together, you will uncover long-buried secrets, unravel Manerkol’s true ambitions, unite a fractured land—and decide the fate of Dragonkind itself.

The war for the fate of the Soul Stones now rages in full swing. The time to retreat back into obscurity lies far behind you. Every action you now take will impact the fate of all. Rise or fall, Soul Stone Wielder,  your name will be written in legend.

• Play as female, male, or nonbinary—with options to be straight, gay, bisexual, or aromantic.
• Continue your romance or try to find love in two new, unexpected places.
• Forge your relationship with the Dragon God inhabiting your thoughts.
• Discover one of the best-kept secrets of the Dragons.
• Figure out the purpose behind Manerkol’s machinations.
• Nurture the bonds of kinship among your group and grow into a power to rival the Lord of All.
• Find new and epic ways to tackle problems, utilizing the new powers granted to you by the Soul Stones.
• Immerse yourself in a rich world full of magic, sacrifice, and love where every choice has unexpected consequences for everyone.

Will you rise to the challenge and shape the course of history, or will you be swept away by the tides of fate? 

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

When Apple shipped the first ARM ("Apple Silicon") Macs, they came with Rosetta 2: a tool which allowed existing Intel apps to run on ARM.

One day, Rosetta 2 will go away, and Intel apps will die. (Just like 32-bit apps died in 2019.) When?

This is a boring question. You don't need to read this post. I'm only writing it because I've put together this chart at least twice. Maybe three times. Next time I wonder, I'll just re-read this post.

TLDR: The answer is probably 2028 or 2029.

The common rag is that Apple doesn't do backwards compatibility, but that's wrong. They do backwards compatibility. They just consider it a time-limited phenomenon. They're surprisingly consistent about it.

Here's what I mean. I was most active in iOS development in the early years -- iOS 3 to 10-ish. That's when iOS was changing most rapidly. (Particularly the big UI redesign of iOS 7.) It was notable that Apple kept old apps working, with the old UI, when you upgraded iOS on a device.

Once you recompiled the app (with the latest Xcode), you were in the new world. That was the time to redesign your app UI to match the new OS.

Yes, that was extra work for developers. But I'm making a point: Apple put in a lot of work to ensure that OS upgrades didn't break apps for users. Not even visually. (It goes without saying that Apple considers visual design part of an app's functionality.) The toolkit continued to support old APIs, and it also secretly retained the old UI style for every widget.

But, as I said, this was a time-limited thing. After a few years, Apple started to drop the old UI style from the toolkit. Old apps got weird mis-sized buttons and so on. I particularly noticed this with My Secret Hideout, which I never recompiled beyond iOS 5. When iOS 10 came around, Apple started to drop old apps from the store (including Hideout) because they looked like ass. You can debate whether booting them was a good policy, but my app did look like ass. I hadn't touched the code in five or six years.

Five years is, as it turns out, Apple's unspoken time limit.

Here's Apple's first architecture transition:

• Last 68k Mac discontinued: 1996 (PowerBook 190, Performa 630)
• OS support for 68k Macs discontinued: 1998 (MacOS 8.5)

In other words, you might have bought a 68040 PowerBook in 1996. It got two years of OS support; then it was orphaned in 1998. That's way under the five-year limit I mentioned. Early days.

(EDIT: I originally wrote "discontinued in 1999", but it turns out it was 1998.)

On the other hand, the software support lasted longer:

• First PPC Macs: 1994
• 68k emulator discontinued: 2001 (MacOS X 10.0)

Developers started building apps with PPC support in 1994. (Those were the CodeWarrior years.) But non-updated 68k apps were supported via an emulator. That was retained through the Classic MacOS era; it was dropped when OSX hit. So seven years of backwards support.

(EDIT: I am corrected; the "Classic environment" kept supporting 68k Classic apps through MacOS 10.4 "Tiger", at least for PPC hardware. So more like twelve years.)

Moving on to Intel, the window is exactly five years:

• Last PPC Mac discontinued: 2006 (Power Mac G5)
• Xcode support for building PPC apps discontinued: 2011 (Xcode 4)
• Rosetta discontinued: 2011 (MacOS 10.7 "Lion")

What about the 32-bit software cutoff? That's the one everybody screamed about (in 2019). It's a bit difficult to nail down how long the transition was, though. 32-bit Mac hardware was only sold for a couple of years: 2005-2007, the "Core Solo" and "Core Duo" processors. After 2007, all Macs sold had 64-bit CPUs. Thus:

• Xcode support for building 64-bit Mac software added: 2006 (Xcode 2.4)
• Last 32-bit Mac discontinued: 2007 (2006 Mac Mini)
• Xcode support for building 32-bit Mac software discontinued: 2018 (Xcode 10)
• 32-bit Mac software support discontinued: 2019 (MacOS 10.15 "Catalina")

Twelve years! That's longer than Microsoft supported Windows 7.

Looking at it, I'm surprised that there still was 32-bit-only software out there. I don't mean "software left over from 2006"; obviously there was some but you knew it was ancient. I mean developers who had just kept on building 32-bit versions of their apps -- never shifting to "fat" (32/64) builds.

You can get into a deep well of reasons why adding 64-bit support was hard. Most of them boil down to dependencies: old libraries, frameworks, game engines. (I'm not even getting into the Carbon-Cocoa business.) I guess the real question is why this transition was slower than the PPC-to-Intel transition, which was nailed down in five years.

Some of that was Apple's own transition, which itself took a few years. The MacOS kernel jumped from 32-bit to 64-bit around 2010. Then there was the Finder, iTunes, and other Mac first-party apps. If Apple is behind, they can't really put pressure on third-party developers.

I suppose there was a lot written on the subject circa 2012 or so. I don't recall any specific articles, though, so I'll let it go.

I'm not providing much support for my "exactly five years" claim, am I? Sorry! It's easier to see in the year-to-year OS updates.

• I buy a 21-inch iMac (Intel Core i5): 2011
  • MacOS 10.13 "High Sierra" is the last OS that supports it: 2017
• I buy a first-gen iPad Pro: 2015
  • iPadOS 16 is the last OS that supports it: 2022
• I buy a 13-inch MacBook Pro (Intel Core i5): 2016
  • MacOS 12 "Monterey" is the last OS that supports it: 2021

I'm cherry-picking devices that I owned, because I kept a list. But the general pattern is consistent: five to seven years.

I don't think Apple is arbitrarily applying a five-year cutoff. (If they did, it would be exactly five years!) I feel like there's generally a hardware requirement, whether that's RAM or a GPU feature or some other motherboard element. But since Apple doesn't advertise hardware details, you have to dig into third-party sites to draw a complete chart. I'm not doing that.

The point is: Apple does the compatibility work for a five-year horizon. Maybe that winds up covering a six- or seven-year-old model; if so, great. If not, oh well.

Thus we can return to the original question:

• Last Intel Mac discontinued: 2023 (2018 Mac Mini, Mac Pro)
• Rosetta 2 discontinued: probably 2028 or 2029

They'll announce the deprecation at a WWDC in May (2028 or '29), then ship the de-Rosetta'd MacOS in the fall. Don't wait for the news, of course. Get your ARM builds in gear right now if you haven't.

Footnote: Obviously this post assumes "business as usual" over the next five years, which is, you know, a hell of an assumption. If Apple stops making computers in three months because there are no more CPUs, forget this whole post.

UPDATE, June 10th

The whistle has been blown! News from WWDC, reported on arstechnica:

macOS Tahoe will be the last new macOS release to support any Intel Macs. All new releases starting with macOS 27 will require an Apple Silicon Mac.

(Necessary footnote: Tahoe is "MacOS 26", releasing this fall. "MacOS 27" will appear in the fall of 2026. This will be confusing forever.)

Rosetta will continue to work as a general-purpose app translation tool in both macOS 26 and macOS 27. [...]

A shorter window than I predicted above; Rosetta will stop working in "MacOS 28", meaning the fall of 2027. Also we're getting more advance warning than I expected. I guess Apple realized everybody was doing the same math as me!

But wait, there's a footnote...

[After 2027], Rosetta will be pared back and will only be available to a limited subset of apps — specifically, older games that rely on Intel-specific libraries but are no longer being actively maintained by their developers.

That's a weird footnote. (Michael Tsai agrees.) Why only old games? How will the OS know what a game is? If the Rosetta framework is still installed, can we chivvy it into working on any old app?

...Is this some sort of regulatory requirement? The "Stop Killing Games" idea is popular among gamers. It doesn't have any legal force, though, as far as I know. And while I have some sympathy, I wish even more for developers to stop killing editors and development tools.

(Limited sympathy, I'm afraid. A lot of this boils down to gamers wanting other people's labor for free. Sorry. It's an ongoing thing.)

By investing equally in man and woman protagonists, Leather Goddesses of Phobos neither exploits nor objectifies.

Leisure Suit Larry and the Graphical Gaze

The history of games containing sexual content has interested critics greatly. Jimmy Maher’s writeup on Leather Goddesses of Phobos is prefaced by several paragraphs about games like Softporn Adventure, Dirty Old Man, and Farmer’s Daughter. What makes these games so interesting? I think the answer will vary critic to critic, that that answer will likely be “a lot” or “nothing.” I’ll qualify my answer: they are interesting as important evolutionary building blocks that contribute to the foundation of narrative gaming. They are not, in my opinion, very interesting to play.

Smart people can disagree, of course. I hope we can agree on that! I never liked Seirra’s Leisure Suit Larry games by Al Lowe, for instance, but many people did and do. The LSL series began as an in-universe follow up to Chuck Benton’s Softporn Adventure and featured graphical production values that small or individual authors could not easily replicate. This was a corporate and mainstream product offering laughs via sexual innuendo and satire of the 1970s-style male “ladies’ man.”

What makes these games so interesting? I think the answer will vary critic to critic, that that answer will likely be “a lot” or “nothing.”

Recalling previous discussions here, I assert that both Leather Goddesses of Phobos and Leisure Suit Larry set out to create joy rather than arousal. Isn’t that what laughter signifies within a comedic context? Joy? This important similarity aside, though, these games differ significantly in terms of gameplay, presentation, and, ultimately, in the way they offer up their “sexual” content. How so? let’s begin with the wrong answer, which I recently retrieved from Wikipedia:

Larry aimed for laughs rather than pure titillation, setting it apart in a landscape populated by titles like Strip Poker, Sex Vixens from Space, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, MacPlaymate and Cobra Mission.

People who have played Leather Goddesses of Phobos, must, I’m sure, feel differently. In fact, and this is ultimately what separates Leather Goddesses of Phobos from the rest of the erotic and/or sex comedy oeuvre: there is no essentially male perspective or cultural baggage weighing down the humor of Meretzky’s work. Rather, sex is a source of comic mischief. Leather Goddesses of Phobos is about the joy of harmless transgression. Its protagonists do not go to bars where women characters are essentially locked doors or chests concealing sexual treasure.

Leather Goddesses of Phobos is rather unique among 1980s games with sexual content in that its problems are not problems of conquest. As a final observation regarding Leisure Suit Larry, consider this quote from the MacWorld’s Keith McCandless:

On the reference card supplied with Leisure Suit Larry, under Talking to Women, it says: “Women can be loads of fun…. Women are also fickle. Do not take ‘no’ for an answer.”

…

And while there are numerous (usually sophomoric) traditional-male laughs, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards could have been funnier and somewhat more contemporary if Larry encountered (humorously rendered) women of the eighties. If the fun here suffers in comparison with the raunchy and humorous Leather Goddesses of Phobos or Space Quest games, it is mostly because of the retrograde subject matter.

There are two very important elements of the erotic adventure game that are missing in Leather Goddesses of Phobos. The first is the “gaze,” in which a subject is reduced to sexual object. Leather Goddesses of Phobos never objectifies. There are no exhaustive descriptions of body parts or sexual acts. Characterization of bodies–even sexual partners–typically ape the language of pulp science fiction. They are, in other words, parody. The second missing element, already mentioned above, is the design trope of reducing a human character to sexual treasure object or “prize.”

In fact, and this is ultimately what separates Leather Goddesses of Phobos from the rest of the erotic and/or sex comedy oeuvre: there is no essentially male perspective or cultural baggage weighing down the humor of Meretzky’s work here.

These differentiations are reached via more than one path, but the most important method is Meretzky’s artful use of gender selection. I’ve already written about the significance of gender choice in Jeffrey O’Neill’s Ballyhoo, where I called the choice primarily an “existential” one. That is, very little changes about the game, regardless of the player’s choice. Some critics have said that gender choice in Leather Goddesses of Phobos has similarly little impact. I cannot agree, because a chief effect of incorporating both man and woman protagonists is that the treatment of sex emphasizes pulp mischief over simulation or visual representation. Rather than emphasize quote-unqote “transgressive” behavior, Mertetzky creates a world and tone that celebrates transgressiveness generally. A chief pleasure of Leather Goddesses of Phobos is naughtiness for its own sake, and it doesn’t need CGA images of blonde women in bars to get us there.

Wow, Cool Future

I do not wish to overemphasize comments I’ve already made regarding Steve Meretzky’s post-Infocom graphical games, not only Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X!, but also the Spellcasting 101 series published by Legend Entertainment. It is inevitable that some or many of my readers might enjoy them. So be it! I am not the enjoyment police. However, I believe it is worth considering what, if anything, Leather Goddesses of Phobos possesses that those later games lack. The most obvious answer is already provided: the visual elements of these games can foment an objectifying gaze–even if that is not intended (it’s hard to imagine that the Spellcasting 101 series presents a case of accidental objectification).

These differences are hard to miss. Consider the cover art, for instance.

While I will not busy up the page with it, here is a link to a print ad for LGOP 2. It features a woman in lingerie. Please note that I have no moral objection this sort of box art or promotional artwork. I am hopefully demonstrating that the rhetorical position of the later Meretzky games is different: radically different, in fact.

Ultimately, this is another case in which a text adventure game can only reach the heights it has reached because it is a parser game. In Leather Goddesses of Phobos, the author has complete control over that which is or is not visualized. They can imply that which an image would render explicit. They can drive a wedge between the protagonist’s perception of the beautiful and erotic and our own real-life ideas about what is and what is not attractive. The protagonist, likewise, is freed from the burden of appealing to some other’s gaze. Leather Goddesses of Phobos is ultimately about joy for its own sake, about laughter and pleasure without exploitation or harm or consumption. Now that is a real fantasy! I’m reminded of that Kurt Vonnegut quote: “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”

That’s not all: given its penchant for surrealism, Leather Goddesses of Phobos is really, really suited for the text game medium. Consider the odd names for the docks, or the mouse, or rabbit, the hole at the south pole, or, of course, the famous tee remover. The bottomless dust at the mall. This is a world of wordplay, half figurative and half real. What other medium could realize it? I think many critics and players misunderstand the significance of the tee remover. As I recently wrote, yes, it ultimately turns up–sort of–in that beloved Emily Short game Counterfeit Monkey, but I find it equally significant that LGOP is a game in which the tee remover can exist at all.

I’m reminded of that Kurt Vonnegut quote: “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”

That is, it occupies a world so pleasantly surreal that many of us are willing to follow wherever things go. Leather Goddesses of Phobos is a game in which a word is, in fact, the essence of the thing it describes. An angle, which has no physical manifestation, is made real by the power of language alone. We players control the world with words, and words alone can make it turn.

That is another joy on display here: the joy of written language.

Afterword

As delightful and effective as Leather Goddesses of Phobos‘s use of gender choice is, we should acknowledge that it narrowly construes gender and attraction in a way that is both a) innovative and forward-looking for its time and b) not in any sense inclusive or representative for all.

I say this as a fan.

Next

Over at the Interactive Fiction Community Forum, I’ll soon be doing a playthrough of Emily Short’s classic storylet game, Bee. I’ll follow that up with a podcast summary! Please look forward to it. I’ll be sure and link the thread on Bluesky and Mastodon, so follow me if you want news about upcoming criticism and game writing projects. If you’re a member at intfiction, please consider joining the discussion!

Hope to see some of you there.

The post Leather Goddesses of Phobos 3/3: Joy and Mischief appeared first on Gold Machine.

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

You can get ten Choice of Games titles and five titles from our Heart’s Choice romance imprint for up to 40% off until June 12th! Or get them all in the Choice of Games Pride Bundle and the Heart’s Choice Pride Bundle, both on sale now on Steam!

• Drag Star! — Slay the catwalk on TV’s hottest drag competition!
• The Eagle’s Heir — Defend the heir of Napoleon’s steampunk France!
• Heart of the House — Chase ghosts from the heart of a haunted manor!
• Heroes Rise: The Prodigy — Become the ultimate celebrity Powered hero!
• Hollywood Visionary — Make the movie of your dreams in 1950s Hollywood!
• Honor Bound — Guard students and secrets at an elite school!
• The Luminous Underground — Blast spirits out of a haunted subway system!
• An Odyssey: Echoes of War — Fight Poseidon’s wrath to reclaim the throne!
• The Sea Eternal — What will you sacrifice for immortality?
• SLAMMED! — Turn scripted wrestling matches into real fights!

• All-World Pro Wrestling — Gay pro wrestling has never been this sexy!
• Freshman Magic: Spellbooks and Tangled Sheets — A magical mystery brimming with gay sex!
• If It Please the Court — Seduce and surveil as a sexy royal spy!
• A Player’s Heart — Romance and politics at the all-woman Opera!
• These Thieving Hearts — What’s hotter: the goods or the guys?