A bicycle can get you from New York to LA, so will a jet plane. In one sense they are the exact same thing; in another they are nothing alike. In one sense we are working within traditional genres — mystery, fantasy, science fiction — and in another we are still teaching ourselves, laying out […]
19 hours ago
A bicycle can get you from New York to LA, so will a jet plane. In one sense they are the exact same thing; in another they are nothing alike. In one sense we are working within traditional genres — mystery, fantasy, science fiction — and in another we are still teaching ourselves, laying out the groundwork for what these things could be. For the most part, we are working without pioneers. In our own way we are like Louis L’Amour or Agatha Christie or Dashiell Hammett.
The Boston Computer Society (founded by Johnathan Rotenberg) has briefly shown up here in regard to Tim Quinlan, and the company Mad Hatter Software which had published the game Sleuth right before disappearing. Rotenberg himself describes the early days of the group as “a fairly obscure computer group” even up to 1982, when their membership was north of 4,000. While famous amongst computer insiders, enough so that Jobs offered Rotenberg a job in 1981 (he declined, wanting to finish college) that didn’t mean recognition amongst the general public. 1982 was when that would change.
Their big event of the year was Applefest, the East Coast equivalent to Applefest in California.
Picture of 1982 Boston Applefest, From Facebook. The balloon was attached to the ground but people could ride up a couple feet and get an Apple balloon pin.
1982 had Jobs and Wozniak themselves as keynote speakers. The BCS publication Computer Update quoted one attendee that
I kind of expected them to come out in white robes.
indicating religious fervor. The audience was standing-room only.
Software had a strong reception, with games especially doing well on Saturday when many children were in attendance. Sir-Tech, which had debuted Wizardry in 1980, had come back with the just-completed sequel Knight of Diamonds in tow.
This time, a feature landed in the Wall Street Journal in October, featuring the “whiz kid” Jonathan Rotenberg, and suddenly Boston Applefest was mainstream.
Somehow, I hit the “tipping point” in October and was besieged by press from all over the world…including BusinessWeek, People, Time, Sports Illustrated, CBS News, numerous magazines and talk shows, and even the National Enquirer (which threatened to “stake me out” if I didn’t cooperate with them).
Just like California Applefest was a source of backroom deals (leading to Al Lowe starting with Sierra, for instance) this could happen on the East Coast as well; this is where Marc Blank of Infocom and Michael Berlyn first met. This was before Zork III came out, so Infocom was still fresh off the thunderbolt of Deadline. Marc enjoyed the technical challenge, but he did the story as well, as it was simply standard that the entire work be done by one person; however, as he stated in a later interview, he “always loved the idea that someone who’s more talented than I am in writing could take this and do something that’s really much better than I could do.”
So the idea for me was really just experimenting with another style of telling, of having the story evolve, a different interface just to see where it would go. And to me that was more important than the story.
While Michael Berlyn’s novels were not considered Pulitzer-worthy or Hugo-worthy, he was a “real author” who also had adventure experience with his works Oo-Topos and Cyborg. Berlyn’s weak spot was his hand-written BASIC source code, so the Infocom’s parser and overarching world system would let him create a next-level product. The pair struck a deal; originally Michael intended to stay in Colorado, but the difficulty of working with ZIL remotely meant he and his wife Muffy moved to Boston a month later.
The mention of Muffy is important in that she already helped with Oo-topos and Cyborg and apparently contributed “significantly” to Suspended. (Eventually, the fact she couldn’t be hired officially — there was a policy against family member hires at Infocom — led to Michael Berlyn leaving, but that’s a bit farther along in the story.)
The structure of Deadline was a good place to start from, as Blank had already done hard work in establishing a complex system of NPCs, really more complex than any other product on the market at the time (The Hobbit would be an exception, except it wasn’t out yet). Berlyn had already experimented in Cyborg with having the player merged with a character in the world. Expanding the idea from Cyborg led to a game where the player awakens from cryofreeze and can only see, hear, and interact with the world via multiple robots. The object-oriented nature of Infocom’s ZIL system meant the Deadline NPCs could be adapted easily to become PCs for the player to jump into instead.
…it was his story and I did some of the tools, the technology that he needed to get all the robots moving around like they were on tracks.
My own copy of the game, from Michael Berlyn’s garage. This version’s on 8-inch disk for the NEC APC. I got it back in 1998 as a prize in IFComp.
Just like Starcross, the packaging is (in)famous amongst collecting circles for being highly elaborate with a facemask and a fold-open map with figures representing the locations of six robots. The map is extremely important as the game is wildly unusual for Infocom, or really, adventures as a whole: there is no standard exploration. You are given the entire map at the start, but without details as far as what you can find where, just names of places. The overall feel is akin to one of the strategy games from the time that came with a board where the player was intended to move pieces around based on the computer’s instructions. Compare with, for example, Chris Crawford’s Tanktics, originally developed on a KIM-1 with a six-character display (just like Kim-Venture).
There’s even multiple difficulty levels to add to the strategy game feel, but I would still call Suspended a full adventure at heart. (Although I wouldn’t object if The Wargaming Scribe tried the game out just for fun!)
Starting positions of five of the six main robots.
I incidentally found moving the real pieces on a real board (see picture above) to be a pain — again similar to a wargame setup, it requires a flat surface to be handy near your computer, which I don’t have — so I made a Figma page to work with instead. I may re-scan the map image later but it works for now.
My normal next step would be to collect and read all the documents that come with the game, but I hit one other curious snag. There’s a “memo” that’s in my version of the game I wasn’t finding elsewhere.
It mentions specifically that cables need to be changed with the syntax REPLACE (cable in groove) WITH (cable a robot is holding), and that erratic behavior may manifest itself in a “crash”. Does it mean a literal game crash? This feels out of character for Infocom, who I think are more likely to fix a bug rather than go through the effort of printing an entire extra piece of documentation to cover over a problem. The reference to the sixteen-inch cable being broken also seems more like a hint than a bug aspect.
I crowdsourced this over to Bluesky and Mastodon. Chris Kohler found a “facemask” version of the game on eBay had the memo; I had confirmation from Andrew Plotkin their early copy did not have the memo. I’ll need to investigate this further, but I’m playing a later release first (Release 8 / Serial number 840521) and then will check earlier release for bugs. Unfortunately I do not have a 8-inch disk drive in order to extract the data file I have so I can’t tell exactly which release it is.
It is the far future: the planet Contra has been terraformed with settlers from Earth. They have conquered their world and live in a highly controlled environment: perfect weather, perfect growing of food.
Rather like the story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, there is a dark side to this, in that the system running the planet needs a human in stasis. The human is “put under” for 500 years but some aspect of their brain is enough to support the systems for that long; if everything goes well, they are awoken after 500 years and the cycle is renewed, with a “recruit” gathered from a planetary lottery.
In Suspended, you have won the planetary lottery.
You should only awake in the case of an emergency, which the manual emphatically explains, won’t happen. This is despite a previous disaster involving “the Gregory Franklin incident”.
Gregory Franklin was awoken after 467 years, but there was no emergency, so he decided to create one:
Overriding the three Filtering Computers, he directed the transportation systems to kill whoever happened to be walking outside or riding on any of the glide ramps. Psychologists believe that he must have possessed a twisted sense of humor–to have people maimed, run over, chased by robot-taxis provided him with pleasure for the moment. However, he soon tired of this and decided to eliminate a larger section of the population in a far easier manner.
Ever since weather had been controlled, dwellings had not been designed to withstand snow and sleet. Franklin altered the pressure in the Weather Towers near the cities, setting off raging storms and creating freezing temperatures. Thousands perished from exposure; thousands more became popsicles.
The upshot is that anything that seems to go awry means that you might find yourself replaced with a “clone”.
FC ALERT! Planetside systems are deteriorating. FC imbalance detected. Emergency reviving systems completed. You are now in control of the complex.
SENSA INTERRUPT: Seismic aftershock detected ten meters north of Beta FC. Tremor intensity 9.7. Projected damage: connecting cables in Primary and Secondary Channels.
FC INTERRUPT: All Robots, report locations.
IRIS: In the Weather Monitors.
WALDO: In the Gamma Repair.
SENSA: In the Central Chamber.
AUDA: In the Entry Area.
POET: In the Central Chamber.
WHIZ: In the Advisory Peripheral.
This is from the game itself. The manual includes special commands…
REPORT LOCATION
ARR (all robots report)
ARL (all robots report locations)
QUERY ABOUT (used for)
ALL ROBOTS, (do something)
DRAG (robot) TO
BOTH (robot) and (robot), (do something)
…but for the most part, your command is in the format ROBOT, DO THING. If you are using a particular robot, you can skip the “ROBOT” preface.
Robots all have individual abilities. Iris, the “visual robot” who can see, starts out nonfunctional. I don’t know the exact boundaries but Iris cannot move about the whole facility.
>IRIS, GO WEST
FC: Cryolink already established to Iris.
Internal map reference — Main Supply Room
Visual function nonfunctional.
Auda is the robot that can hear, although it starts at the northern part of the map.
>w
Internal map reference — Decontamination Chamber
A small hissing can be detected overhead, as if a small port leaked a semi-liquid compound.
>w
Internal map reference — Sterilization Chamber
A loud whirring noise can be detected from the west.
A small plaque makes tinging noises here.
Notice that the plaque might say something, but since Auda can only hear we don’t know (yet) what it says.
Waldo is a “grasping robot” with six arms, sonar, and a well-developed sense of touch.
WALDO: Internal map reference — Gamma Repair
I have reached the south end of this area. The walkway ends here.
The walkway is not in motion.
A large object sits before me. Sonar indicates it is hollow, but not empty.
Whiz is a robot restricted to the “Central Core” that can make queries, and is sort of an encyclopedia. I haven’t tried searching through entries yet.
>whiz, look
FC: Cryolink established to Whiz.
WHIZ: Internal map reference — Advisory Peripheral
CLC tagged object indicates it is the Advisory pedestal before me.
>whiz, plug in
FC: Cryolink already established to Whiz.
It’s great to be home. Plugged in to the Advisory Pedestal. Ready to process queries.
Poet and Sensa start in the same place, the “Central Chamber” (right next to Aura). Poet is a “diagnostic robot” who can activate its sensor with the TOUCH command, but has a cryptic style of speaking.
>POET, WEST
FC: Cryolink established to Poet.
POET: Internal map reference — Weather Monitors
They puff and billow and strain a bit, roar then ebb with time.
In the room with me is Iris.
>TOUCH IRIS
Sensory pads detect no abnormal flow.
>EAST
Internal map reference — Central Chamber
It hops and skips and leaves a bit, and can’t decide if it should quit. It tells the world what it should know, but doesn’t know when it’s been shown.
In the room with me is Sensa.
Sensa has a mixture of operations and “can detect vibrational activity, photon emission sources and ionic discharges”; Sensa also has appendages like Waldo.
>SENSA, LOOK
FC: Cryolink established to Sensa.
SENSA: Internal map reference — Central Chamber
All around me charges flow, shaped by the very nature of this room. The electrons are being channeled into an electrical column, central to this environment.
In the room with me is Poet.
That’s six robots; there’s a seventh the manual mentions that was put out of service by Franklin (and will become important later).
I use the phrasing “and will” because: yes, I have played and beaten this game before. Like Zork III, it was quite a while ago, and I don’t remember much, but I do know where the seventh robot is and what I thought at the time was a highly unfair command to get to it. (Now that I have a full manual, I see it’s listed in the manual; I played the Lost Treasures of Infocom version which I’m pretty sure did not give this game’s “special commands”.) I remember that at some point humans arrive, presumably thinking another Franklin incident is happening; I also remember there’s an acid drip somewhere that’s a pain (that is, if you roll a robot through a particular room they’ll become disabled). Other than that I’m pretty memory-free, other than I enjoyed the game quite a lot.
I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. I’ll give the layout of the complex (as far as I can figure) in my next update. In the meantime for anyone who wants to skip ahead, you can check Jimmy Maher, Drew Cook, and Aaron Reed, all who have their own takes on the game. Also, thanks to Jonathan Rotenberg for sharing some documentation about Applefest 1982.
This article tells part of the story of Looking Glass Studios. There was some discussion about it: “Wow, gosh, it’d sure be nice if we were making more money and selling more copies so we could do crazy games of the type we want, as opposed to having to worry about how we’re going to […]
5 days ago
There was some discussion about it: “Wow, gosh, it’d sure be nice if we were making more money and selling more copies so we could do crazy games of the type we want, as opposed to having to worry about how we’re going to sell more.” Hey, I’d love it if the public was more into what I like to do and a little less into slightly more straightforward things. But I totally get that they’re into straightforward things. I don’t have any divine right to have someone hand me millions of dollars to make a game of whatever I want to do. At some fundamental level, everyone has a wallet, and they vote with it.
— Doug Church, Looking Glass Studios
Late in 1994, after their rather brilliant game System Shock had debuted to a reception most kindly described as constrained, the Boston-based studio Looking Glass Technologies sent their star producer Warren Spector down to Austin, Texas. There he was to visit the offices of Looking Glass’s publisher Origin Systems, whose lack of promotional enthusiasm they largely blamed for their latest game’s lukewarm commercial performance. Until recently, Spector had been directly employed by Origin. The thinking, then, was that he might still be able to pull some strings in Austin to move the games of Looking Glass a little higher up in the priority rankings. The upshot of his visit was not encouraging. “What do I have to do to get a hit around here?” Spector remembers pleading to his old colleagues. The answer was “very quiet, very calm: ‘Sign Mark Hamill to star in your game.‘ That was the thinking at the time.” But interactive movies were not at all what Looking Glass wanted to be doing, nor where they felt the long-term future of the games industry lay.
So, founders Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner decided to make some major changes in their business model in the hope of raising their studio’s profile. They accepted $3.8 million in venture capital and cut ties with Origin, announcing that henceforward Looking Glass would publish as well as create their games for themselves. Jerry Wolosenko, a new executive vice president whom they hired to help steer the company into its future of abundance, told The Boston Globe in May of 1995 that “we expect to do six original titles per year. We are just beginning.” This was an ambitious goal indeed for a studio that, in its five and a half years of existence to date, had managed to turn out just three original games alongside a handful of porting jobs.
Even more ambitious, if not brazen, was the product that Looking Glass thought would provide them with their entrée into the ranks of the big-time publishers. They intended to mount a head-on challenge to that noted tech monopolist Microsoft, whose venerable, archetypally entitled Flight Simulator was the last word — in fact, very nearly the only word — in civilian flight simulation. David-versus-Goliath contests in the business of media didn’t come much more pronounced than this one, but Looking Glass thought they had a strategy that might allow them to break at least this particular Microsoft monopoly.
Flight Unlimited was the brainchild of a high-energy physicist, glider pilot, and amateur jazz pianist named Seamus Blackley, who had arrived at Looking Glass by way of the legendary Fermi Laboratory. His guiding principle was that Microsoft’s Flight Simulator as it had evolved over the last decade and a half had become less a simulation of flight itself than a simulation of the humdrum routine of civil aviation — of takeoff permissions and holding patterns, of navigational transponders and instrument landing systems. He wanted to return the focus to the simple joy of soaring through the air in a flying machine, something that, for all the technological progress that had been made since the Wright brothers took off from Kitty Hawk, could still seem closer to magic than science. The emphasis would be on free-form aerobatics rather than getting from Airport A to Airport B. “I want people to see that flying is beautiful, exciting, and see the thrill you can get from six degrees of freedom when you control an airplane,” Blackley said. “That’s why we’ve focused on the experience of flying. There is no fuel gauge.”
The result really was oddly beautiful, being arguably as close to interactive art as a product that bills itself as a vehicular simulation can possibility get. Its only real concession to structure took the form of a 33-lesson flying course, which brought you from just being able to hold the airplane straight and level to executing gravity-denying Immelman rolls, Cuban eights, hammerheads, and inverted spins. Any time that your coursework became too intense, you always had the option to just bin the lesson plans and, you know, go out and fly, maybe to try some improvisational skywriting.
In one sense, Flight Unlimited was a dramatic departure from the two Ultima Underworld games and System Shock, all of which were embodied first-person, narrative-oriented designs that relied on 3D graphics of a very different stripe. In another sense, though, it was business as usual, another example of Looking Glass not only pushing boundaries of technology in a purist sense — the flight model of Flight Unlimited really was second to none — but using it in the service of a game that was equally aesthetically innovative, and just a little bit more thoughtful all the way around than was the norm.
Upon its release in May of 1995, Flight Unlimited garnered a rare five-stars-out-of-five review from Computer Gaming World magazine:
It’s just you, the sky, and a plane that does just about anything you ask it to. Anything aerobatic, that is. Flight Unlimited is missing many of the staple elements of flight simulations. There are no missiles, guns, or enemy aircraft. You can’t learn IFR navigation or practice for your cross-country solo. You can’t even land at a different airport than the one you took off from. But unless you’re just never happy without something to shoot at, you won’t care. You’ll be too busy choreographing aerial ballets, pulling off death-defying aerobatic stunts, or just enjoying a quiet soar down the ridge line to miss that stuff.
Flight Unlimited sold far better than System Shock: a third of a million copies, more even than Looking Glass’s previous best-seller Ultima Underworld, enough to put itself solidly in the black and justify a sequel. Still, it seems safe to say that it didn’t cause any sleepless nights for anyone at Microsoft. Over the years, Flight Simulator had become less a game than a whole cottage industry unto itself, filled with armchair pilots who often weren’t quite gamers in the conventional sense, who often played nothing else. It wasn’t all that easy to make inroads with a crowd such as that. Like a lot of Looking Glass’s games, Flight Unlimited was a fundamentally niche product to which was attached the burden of mainstream sales expectations.
That said, the fact remained that Flight Unlimited had made money for Looking Glass, which allowed them to continue to live the dream for a while longer. Neurath and Lerner sent a homesick Warren Spector back down to Austin to open a second branch there, to take advantage of an abundance of talent surrounding the University of Texas that the Wing Commander-addled Origin Systems was believed to be neglecting.
Then Looking Glass hit a wall. Its name was Terra Nova.
Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri had had the most protracted development cycle of any Looking Glass game, dating almost all the way back to the very beginning of the company and passing through dozens of hands before it finally came to fruition in the spring of 1996. At its heart, it was an ultra-tactical first-person shooter vaguely inspired by the old Robert Heinlein novel Starship Troopers, tasking you with leading teams of fellow soldiers through a series of missions, clad in your high-tech combat gear that turned you more than halfway into a sentient robot. But it was also as close as Looking Glass would ever come to their own stab at a Wing Commander: the story was advanced via filmed cutscenes featuring real human actors, and a lot of attention was paid to the goings-on back at the ranch when you weren’t dressed up in your robot suit. This sort of thing worked in Wing Commander, to whatever extent it did, because the gameplay that took place between the movie segments was fairly quick and simple. Terra Nova was not like that, which could make it feel like an even more awkward mélange of chocolate and peanut butter. It’s difficult to say whether Activision’s Mechwarrior 2, the biggest computer game of 1995, helped it or hurt it in the marketplace: on the one hand, that game showed that there was a strong appetite for tactical combat involving robots, but, on the other, said demand was already being fed by a glut of copycats. Terra Nova got lost in the shuffle. A game that had been expected to sell at least half a million copies didn’t reach one-fifth of that total.
Looking Glass’s next game didn’t do any better. Like Flight Unlimited, British Open Championship Golf cut against the dark, gritty, and violent stereotype that tended to hold sway when people thought of Looking Glass, or for that matter of the games industry writ large. It was another direct challenge to an established behemoth: in this case, Access Software’s Links franchise, which, like Flight Simulator, had its own unique customer base, being the only line of boxed computer games that sold better to middle-aged corporate executives than they did to high-school and university students. Looking Glass’s golf project was led by one Rex Bradford, whose own history with simulating the sport went all the way back to Mean 18, a hit for Accolade in 1986. This time around, though, the upstart challenger to the status quo never even got a sniff. By way of damning with faint praise, Computer Gaming World called British Open Championship Golf “solid,” but “somewhat unspectacular.” Looking Glass could only wish that its sales could have been described in the same way.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see all too clearly that Neurath and Lerner crossed the line that separates ambition from hubris when they decided to try to set Looking Glass up as a publisher. At the very time they were doing so, many another boutique publisher was doing the opposite, looking for a larger partner or purchaser to serve as shelter from the gale-force winds that were beginning to blow through the industry. More games were being made than ever, even as shelf space at retail wasn’t growing at anything like the same pace, and digital distribution for most types of games remained a nonstarter in an era in which almost everyone was still accessing the Internet via a slow, unstable dial-up connection. This turned the fight over retail space into a free-for-all worthy of the most ultra-violent beat-em-up. Sharp elbows alone weren’t enough to win at this game; you had to have deep pockets as well, had to either be a big publisher yourself or have one of them on your side. In deciding to strike out on their own, Neurath and Lerner may have been inspired by the story of Interplay Productions, a development studio which in 1988 had broken free of the grasp of Electronic Arts — now Origin System’s corporate parent, as it happened — and gone on to itself become one of the aforementioned big publishers who were increasingly dominating at retail. But 1988 had been a very different time in gaming.
In short, Neurath and Lerner had chosen just about the worst possible instant to try to seize full control of their own destiny. “Game distribution isn’t always based on quality,” noted Warren Spector at the end of 1996. Having thus stated the obvious, he elaborated:
The business has changed radically in the last year, and it’s depressing. The competition for shelf space is ridiculous and puts retailers in charge. If you don’t buy an end-cap from retailers for, say, $50,000 a month, they won’t buy many copies.
Products once had three to six months. The average life is now 30 days. If you’re not a hit in 30 days, you’re gone. This is predicated on your association with a publisher who gets your title on shelves. It’s a nightmare.
With just three games shipped in the last two and a half years — a long way off their projected pace of “six original titles per year” — and with the last two of them having flopped like a wet tuna on a gymnastics court, Looking Glass was now in dire straits. The only thing that had allowed them to keep the doors open this long had been a series of workaday porting jobs that Warren Spector had been relegated to supervising down in Austin, while he waited for the company to establish itself on a sound enough financial footing to support game development from whole cloth in both locations. Ten years on, after Looking Glass had been enshrined in gaming lore as one of the most forward-thinking studios of all time and Spector as the ultimate creative producer, the idea of them wasting their collective talents on anonymous console ports would seem surreal. But such was the reality circa 1997, when Looking Glass, having burnt through all of their venture capital, was left holding on by a thread. “I remember people walking into the office to take back the [rented] plants which the studio was no longer able to pay for,” says programmer and designer Randy Smith.
As for Neurath and Lerner, they had swallowed the hubris of 1995 and were now doing what the managers of all independent games studios do when they find themselves unable to pay the bills anymore: looking for a buyer who would be able to pay them instead. But because Looking Glass could never seem to do anything in the conventional way even when they tried to, the buyer they found was one of the strangest ever.
The Boston firm known as Intermetrics, Inc., was far from a household name, but it had a proud history that long predated the personal-computer era. Intermetrics had grown out of the fecund soil of Project Apollo, having been founded in March of 1969 by some of the engineers and programmers behind the Apollo Guidance Computer that would soon help to place astronauts on the Moon. After that epochal achievement, Intermetrics continued to do a lot of work for NASA, providing much of the software that was used to control the Space Shuttle. Other government and aerospace-industry contracts filled out most of the balance of its order sheets.
In August of 1995, however, a group of investors led by a television executive bought the firm for $28 million, with the intention of turning it into something altogether different. Michael Alexander came from the media conglomerate MCA, where he had been credited with turning around the fortunes of the cable-television channel USA. Witnessing the transformation that high-resolution graphics, high-quality sound, and the enormous storage capacity of CD-ROM were wreaking on personal computing, he had joined dozens of his peers in deciding that the future of mass-market entertainment and infotainment lay with interactive multimedia. Deeming most of the companies who were already in that space to be “overvalued,” and apparently assuming that one type of computer programming was more or less the same as any other, he bought Intermetrics, whose uniform of white shirts, ties, and crew cuts had changed little since the heyday of the Space Race, to ride the hottest wave in 1990s consumer electronics.
“This is a company that has the skills and expertise to be in the multimedia business, but is not perceived as being in that business,” he told a reporter from The Los Angeles Times. (It was not a question of perception; Intermetrics was not in the multimedia business prior to the acquisition.) “And that is its strength.” (He failed to elaborate on exactly why this should be the case.) Even the journalist to whom he spoke seemed skeptical. “Ponytailed, black-clad, twenty-something multimedia developers beware,” she wrote, almost palpably smirking between the lines. “Graying engineers with pocket protectors and a dozen years of experience are starting to compete.” Likewise, it is hard not to suspect Brian Fargo of Interplay of trolling the poor rube when he said that “I think it’s great that the defense guys are doing this. It’s where the job security is now. It used to be in defense. Now it’s in the videogame business.” (Through good times and bad, one thing the videogame business has never, ever been noted for is its job security.)
Alas, Michael Alexander was not just a bandwagon jumper; he was a late bandwagon jumper. By the time he bought Intermetrics, the multimedia bubble was already close to popping under the pressure of a more sustained Internet bubble that would end the era of the non-game multimedia CD-ROM almost before it had begun. As this harsh reality became clear in the months that followed, Alexander had no choice but to push Intermetrics more and more in the direction of games, the only kind of CD-ROM product that was making anyone any money. The culture clash that resulted was intractable, as pretty much anyone who knew anything about the various cultures of computing could have predicted. Among these someones was Mike Dornbrook, a games-industry stalwart who had gotten his start with Infocom in the early 1980s. Seeking his next gig after Boffo Games, a studio he had founded with his old Infocom colleague Steve Meretzky, went down in flames, Dornbrook briefly kicked the tires at Intermetrics, but quickly concluded that what he saw “made no sense whatsoever”: “They were mostly COBOL programmers in their fifties and sixties. I remember looking around and saying, ‘You’re going to turn these guys into game programmers? What in the world are you thinking?'” [1]Dornbrook wound up signing on with a tiny startup called Harmonix Music Systems, which in 2005, after years of diligent experimentation with the possibilities for combining music and games, altered the landscape of gaming forever with Guitar Hero.
Belatedly realizing that all types of programming were perhaps not quite so interchangeable as he had believed, Michael Alexander set out in search of youngsters to teach his old dogs some new tricks. The Intermetrics rank and file must have shuddered at the advertisements he started to run in gaming magazines. “We are rocket scientists!” the ads trumpeted. “Even our games are mission-critical!” When these efforts failed to surface a critical mass of game-development talent, Alexander reluctantly moved on to doing what he should have done back in 1995: looking for an extant studio that already knew how to make games. It so happened that Looking Glass was right there in Boston, and, thanks to its troubled circumstances, was not as “overvalued” as most of its peers. Any port in a storm, as they say.
On August 14, 1997, a joint press release was issued: “Intermetrics, Inc., a 28-year-old leading software developer, and Looking Glass Studios, one of the computer gaming industry’s foremost developers, today announce the merger of the two companies’ gaming operations to form Intermetrics/Looking Glass Studios, LLC. Through the shared strengths of the two entities, the new company is strategically positioned to be a major force in the computer-game, console and online-gaming industries.” Evidently on a quest to find out how much meaningless corporate-speak he could shoehorn into one document, Michael Alexander went on to add that “Looking Glass Studios immediately catapults Intermetrics into a leading position in the gaming industry by giving us additional credentials and assets to compete in the market. Our business plan is to maintain and grow our core contract-services business while at the same time leveraging our expertise and financial resources to be a major player in the booming interactive-entertainment industry.” The price paid by the rocket scientists for their second-stage booster has to my knowledge never been publicly revealed.
The acquiring party may have been weird as all get-out, but it could have worked out far worse for Looking Glass, all things considered. In addition to the obvious benefit of being able to keep the doors open, at least a couple of other really good things came directly out of the acquisition. One was a change in name, from Looking Glass Technologies to Looking Glass Studios, emphasizing the creative dimension of their work. Another was a distribution deal with Eidos, a British publisher that had serious retail clout in both North America and Europe. Riding high on the back of the massive international hit Tomb Raider, Eidos could ensure that Looking Glass’s games got prominent placement in stores. Meanwhile this idea of the Looking Glass people serving as mentors to those who were struggling to make games at Intermetrics proper — an excruciating proposition for both parties — would prove to mostly be a polite, face-saving fiction for Michael Alexander; in practice, the new parent company would prove largely content to leave its subsidiary alone to do its own thing. Now the folks at Looking Glass just needed to deliver a hit to firmly establish themselves in their new situation. That was always the sticky wicket for them.
The first game that Looking Glass released under their new ownership was Flight Unlimited II, which appeared just a few months after the big announcement. Created without the input of Seamus Blackley, who had left the company, Flight Unlimited II sought simultaneously to capitalize on the relative success of Looking Glass’s first flight simulator and to adjust that game’s priorities to better coincide with the real or perceived desires of the market. Looking Glass paired the extant flight model with an impressively detailed depiction of the geography of the San Francisco Bay Area. Then they added a lot more structure to the whole affair, in the form of a set of missions to fly after you finished your training. The biggest innovation, a first for any civilian flight simulator, was the addition of other aircraft, turning San Francisco International Airport into the same tangle of congested flight lanes it was in the real world. These changes moved the game away from being such a purist simulation of flight as an end unto itself. Still, there was a logic to the additions; one can easily imagine them making Flight Unlimited II more appealing to the sorts of gamers who don’t tend to thrive in goal-less sandboxes. Be that as it may, though, it didn’t show up in the sales figures. Flight Unlimited II sold better than Terra Nova or British Open Championship Golf, but not as well as its series predecessor, just barely managing to break even.
This disappointment put that much more pressure on Looking Glass’s next game to please the new boss and show that the studio could deliver a solid, unqualified hit. In a triumph of hope over experience, everyone had high expectations for The Dark Project, which had been described in the press release announcing the acquisition as “a next-generation fantasy role-playing game.” Such a description might have left gamers wondering if Looking Glass was returning to the territory of Ultima Underworld. As things worked out, the game that they would come to know as simply Thief would not be that at all, but would instead break new ground in a completely different way. It stands today alongside Ultima Underworld in another sense: as one of the three principal legs — the last one being System Shock, of course — that hold up Looking Glass’s towering modern-day reputation for relentless, high-concept innovation.
The off-kilter masterstroke that is Thief started with a new first-person 3D engine known as The Dark Engine. It could have powered a “low-brain shooter,” as the Looking Glass folks called the likes of the mega-hit Quake, with perfect equanimity. But they just couldn’t bring themselves to make one.
It took a goodly while for them to decide what they did want to do with The Dark Engine. Doug Church, the iconoclastic programmer and designer who had taken the leading role on System Shock, didn’t want to be out-front to the same extent on this project. The initial result of this lack of a strong authority figure was an awful lot of creative churn. There was talk of making a game called Better Red than Undead, mixing a Cold War-era spy caper with a zombie invasion. Almost as bizarre was Dark Camelot, an inverted Arthurian tale in which you played the Black Knight against King Arthur and his cronies, who were depicted as a bunch of insufferable holier-than-thou prigs. “Our marketing department wasn’t really into that one,” laughs Church.
Yet the core sensibility of that concept — of an amoral protagonist set against the corrupt establishment and all of its pretensions — is all over the game that did finally get made. Doug Church:
The missions [in Dark Camelot] that we had the best definition on and the best detail on were all breaking into Camelot, meeting up with someone, getting a clue, stealing something, whatever. As we did more work in that direction, and those continued to be the missions that we could explain best to other people, it just started going that way. Paul [Neurath] had been pushing for a while that the thief side of it was the really interesting part, and why not just do a thief game?
And as things got more chaotic and more stuff was going on and we were having more issues with how to market stuff, we just kept focusing on the thief part. We went through a bunch of different phases of reorganizing the project structure and a bunch of us got sucked into doing some other project work on Flight [Unlimited] and stuff, and there was all this chaos. We said, “Okay, well, we’ve got to get this going and really focus and make a plan.” So we put Greg [LoPiccolo] in charge of the project and we agreed we were going to call it Thief and we were going to focus much more. That’s when we went from lots of playing around and exploring to “let’s make this Thief game.”
It surely comes as no revelation to anyone reading this article that most game stories are power fantasies at bottom, in which you get to take on the identity of a larger-than-life protagonist who just keeps on growing stronger as you progress. Games which took a different approach were, although by no means unknown by the late 1990s, in the decided minority even outside of the testosterone-drenched ghetto of the first-person shooter. The most obvious exponents of the ordinary-mortal protagonist were to be found in the budding survival-horror genre, as pioneered by Alone in the Dark and its sequels on computers and Resident Evil on the consoles. But these games cast you as nearly powerless prey, being stalked through dark corridors by zombies and other things that go bump in the night. Thief makes you a stealthy predator, the unwanted visitor rifling through cupboards and striking without warning out of the darkness, yet most definitely not in any condition to mow down dozens of his enemies in full-frontal combat, Quake-style. If you’re indiscreet in your predations, you can become the cornered prey with head-snapping speed. This was something new at the time.
Or almost so. Coincidentally, two Japanese stealthy-predator games hit the Sony PlayStation in 1998, the same year as Thief’s release. Tenchu: Stealth Assassins cast you as a ninja, while Metal Gear Solid cast you as an agent of the American government on a top-secret commando mission. The latter in particular caused quite a stir, by combining its unusual gameplay style with the sort of operatically melodramatic storytelling that was more commonly associated with the JRPG genre. That said, Thief is a far more sophisticated affair than either of these games, in terms of both its gameplay and its fiction.
The titular thief and protagonist is a man known only as Garrett, who learned his trade on the streets of The City, a mixture of urban squalor and splendor that is best described as Renaissance Florence with magic — a welcome alternative to more typical fantasy settings. Over the course of a twelve-act campaign, Garrett is given a succession of increasingly daunting assignments, during which a larger plot that involves more than the acquisition of wealth by alternative methods does gradually take shape.
Although the mission tree is linear, nothing else about your experience in Thief is set in stone. It was extremely important to Looking Glass that Thief not turn into a puzzle game, a series of set-piece challenges with set-piece solutions. They wanted to offer up truly dynamic environments, environments that were in their own way every bit as much simulations as Flight Unlimited. They wanted to make you believe you were really in these spaces. Artist Daniel Thron speaks of the “deep sense of trust we had in the player. There isn’t a single solution to Thief. It’s up to you to figure out how to steal the thing. It’s letting you tell that story through gameplay. And that sense of ownership makes it unique. It becomes yours.” In the spirit of all that, the levels are big, with no clearly delineated through-line. These dynamic virtual spaces full of autonomous actors demand constant improvisation on your part even if you’ve explored them before.
Looking Glass understood that, in order for Thief to work as a vehicle for emergent narrative, all of the other actors on the stage have to respond believably to your actions. It’s a given that guards ought to hunt you down if you blatantly give away your presence to them. Thief distinguishes itself by the way it responds to more subtle stimuli. An ill-judged footstep on a creaky floor tile might cause a guard to stop and mutter to himself: “Wait! Did I just hear something?” Stand stock still and don’t make a sound, and maybe — maybe — he’ll shrug his shoulders and move on without bothering to investigate. If you do decide to take a shot at him with your trusty bow or blackjack, you best not miss, to steal a phrase from Omar Little. And you best hide the body carefully afterward, before one of his comrades comes wandering along the same corridor to stumble over it.
These types of situations and the split-second decisions they force upon you are the beating heart of Thief. Bringing them off was a massive technical challenge, one that made the creation of 3D-graphics engine itself seem like child’s play. The state of awareness of dozens of non-player characters had to be tracked, as did sound and proximity, light and shadow, to an extent that no shooter — no, not even Half-Life — had ever come close to doing before. Remarkably, Looking Glass largely pulled it off, whilst making sure that the more conventional parts of the engine worked equally well. Garrett’s three principal weapons — a blackjack for clubbing unsuspecting victims in the back of the head, a rapier for hand-to-hand combat, and a bow which can be used to shoot a variety of different types of arrows — are all immensely satisfying to use, having just the right feeling of weight in your virtual hands. The bow is a special delight: the arrows arc through the air exactly as one feels they ought to. You actually get to use your bow in all sorts of clever ways that go beyond killing, such as shooting water arrows to extinguish pesky torches — needless to say, darkness is your best friend and light your eternal enemy in this game — and firing rope arrows that serve Garrett as grappling hooks would a more conventional protagonist.
Looking Glass being Looking Glass, even the difficulty setting in Thief is more than it first appears to be. It’s wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that Thief is really three games in one, depending on whether you play it on Normal, Hard, or Expert. (Looking Glass apparently wasn’t interested in the sorts of players who might be tempted by an “easy” mode.) Not only do the harder settings require you to collect more loot to score a passing grade on each mission, but the environments themselves become substantially larger. Most strikingly, in a brave subversion of the standard shooter formula, each successive difficulty setting requires you to kill fewer rather than more people; at the Expert level, you’re not allowed to kill anyone at all.
Regardless of the difficulty setting you choose, Thief will provide a stiff challenge. Its commitment to verisimilitude extends to all of its facets. In lieu of a conventional auto-map, it provides you only with whatever scribbled paper map Garrett has been able to scrounge from his co-conspirators, or sometimes not even that much. If your innate sense of direction isn’t great — mine certainly isn’t — you can spend a long time just trying to find your way in these big, twisty, murky spaces.
When it’s at its best, Thief is as amazing as it is uncompromising. It oozes atmosphere and tension; it’s the sort of game that demands to be played in a dark room behind a big monitor, with the phone shut off and a pair of headphones planted firmly over the ears. Sadly, though, it isn’t always this best version of itself. In comparison to Ultima Underworld or System Shock, both of which I enjoyed from first to last, Thief strikes me as a lumpy creation, a game of soaring highs but also some noteworthy lows. I was all-in during the first mission, a heist taking place in the mansion of a decadent nobleman. Having recently read Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus and written quite a lot about Renaissance Florence, my receptors were well primed for this Neo-Renaissance setting. Then I came to the second mission, and suddenly I was being asked to fight my way through a bunch of zombies in an anonymous cave complex. Suddenly Thief felt like dozens of other first-person action games.
This odd schizophrenia persists throughout the game. The stealthy experience I’ve just been describing — the boldly innovative experience that everyone thinks of today when they think of Thief — is regularly interspersed with splatterfests against enemies who wouldn’t have been out of place in Quake: zombies, rat men, giant exploding frogs, for Pete’s sake. (Because these enemies aren’t human, they’re generally exempt from the prohibition against killing at the Expert level.) All told, it’s a jarring failure to stick to its guns from a studio that has gone down in gaming lore for refusing to sacrifice its artistic integrity, to its own great commercial detriment.
As happens so often in these cases, the reality behind the legend of Looking Glass is more nuanced. Almost to a person, the team who made Thief attribute the inconsistency in the level design to outside pressure, especially from their publisher Eidos, who had agreed to partially fund the project. “Eidos never believed in it and until the end told us to put in more monsters and have more fighting and exploring and less stealth, and I’m not sure there was ever a point [when] they got it,” claims Doug Church. “I mean, the trailers Eidos did for Thief were all scenes with people shooting fire arrows at people charging them. So you can derive from that how well they understood or believed in the idea.”
And yet one can make the ironic case that Eidos knew what they were doing when they pushed Looking Glass to play up the carnage a little more. Released in November of 1998, Thief finally garnered Looking Glass some sales figures that were almost commensurate with their positive reviews. (“If you’re tired of DOOM clones and hungry for challenge, give this fresh perspective a try,” said Computer Gaming World.) The game sold about half a million copies — not a huge hit by the standards of an id Software or Blizzard Entertainment, but by far the most copies Looking Glass had ever sold of anything. It gave them some much-needed positive cash flow, which allowed them to pay down some debts and to revel in some good vibes for a change when they looked at the bottom line. But most importantly for the people who had made Thief, its success gave them the runway they needed to make a sequel that would be more confident in its stealthy identity.
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Sources: The book Game Design Theory & Practice (2nd. ed.) by Richard Rouse III; Next Generation of March 1997 and June 1997; PC Zone of December 1998; Computer Gaming World of September 1995, June 1996, August 1997, April 1998, and March 1999; Retro Gamer 117, 177, and 260; Los Angeles Times of September 15 1995; Boston Globe of May 3 1995 and May 26 2000.
Where to Get Them:Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri and Thief Gold are available for digital purchase at GOG.com. The other Looking Glass games mentioned this article are unfortunately not.
Dornbrook wound up signing on with a tiny startup called Harmonix Music Systems, which in 2005, after years of diligent experimentation with the possibilities for combining music and games, altered the landscape of gaming forever with Guitar Hero.
Hosted Games has a new game for you to play! Five years after graduating high school, you and your old friends are drawn back together by a mysterious letter. Through it, you inherit a Gothic manor and a fortune beyond belief. There is only one condition: you must live in the manor together. Eldritch Tales: Inheritance is 33% off until October 9th! Dariel developed this game using ChoiceScript
6 days ago
Five years after graduating high school, you and your old friends are drawn back together by a mysterious letter. Through it, you inherit a Gothic manor and a fortune beyond belief. There is only one condition: you must live in the manor together.
Eldritch Tales: Inheritance is a 210,000-word interactive novel by Dariel Ivalyen that blends psychological, supernatural, and cosmic horror with drama, investigation, and romance. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
When you arrive at Blackthorn Manor, strange events begin to unfold. Shadows move on their own, nights grow unnaturally dark, and every corner hides a secret. And the more you uncover, the less you understand. As the atmosphere thickens, you will have to decide whether to trust your companions—or even yourself.
Play as male, female, or nonbinary.
Customize your appearance, personality, and sexuality.
Choose from six distinct backgrounds—Astronomer, Songwriter, Egyptologist, Gardener, Detective, or Librarian—each with a unique story path and an exclusive ending.
Forge friendships or romances with a wealthy playboy, a no-nonsense scientist, a protective ex-soldier, or a free-spirited artist.
Balance your sanity, health, and relationships—or suffer the consequences.
Explore hidden rooms, secret passages, and places beyond human imagination, and learn—or risk learning—the truth behind your inheritance.
Experience randomized events and discover multiple endings, ensuring no two playthroughs are alike.
What darkness lies within Blackthorn Manor? Will you turn away in time—or will you uncover truths that consume you forever?
Dariel 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.
I had a long talk recently with some nice folks at the DOS Game Club podcast. Our subject was one from the early days of this site, the Infocom game Planetfall. Maybe some of you will find it interesting. You can get it from the DOS Game Club homepage, or more than likely wherever you get […]
6 days ago
I had a long talk recently with some nice folks at the DOS Game Club podcast. Our subject was one from the early days of this site, the Infocom game Planetfall. Maybe some of you will find it interesting. You can get it from the DOS Game Club homepage, or more than likely wherever you get your other podcasts. My thanks to the hosts for their kind invitation, and to the other guests for their patience with my historical rambling! (I’m told that this is the longest episode of the podcast ever.)
The Steam Autumn Sale is On! Now through October 6th, you can get Choice of Games’ titles for up to 40% off on Steam as part of the Steam Autumn Sale. Hosted Games and Heart’s Choice titles are also participating in the Autumn Sale, so enjoy generous discounts on all three with this once a season sale! Last chance to get Specters of the Deep on sale! Our latest release, Specters of the
7 days ago
The Steam Autumn Sale is On!
Now through October 6th, you can get Choice of Games’ titles for up to 40% off on Steam as part of the Steam Autumn Sale. Hosted Games and Heart’s Choice titles are also participating in the Autumn Sale, so enjoy generous discounts on all three with this once a season sale!
Our latest release, Specters of the Deep is still on sale, 33% off until tomorrow! Tonight’s your last chance for an epic 1 million-word game on sale on all platforms for $7.99!
In life, you were a legendary hero. Now, you’ll rise from the grave as a ghost to defend your country in its hour of greatest need! Defy dragons, duel the dead, and face the nightmare at the bottom of the sea!
Specters of the Deep is an interactive epic fantasy novel by Abigail C. Trevor, author of Heroes of Myth and Stars Arisen. It’s entirely text-based, 1 million words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
Centuries ago, you were the finest warrior that the island nation of Galdrin had ever known. The realm was strong and prosperous, upheld by the might of the Eye of the Serpent, a magical artifact bonded to the monarch—and by your might, too. You protected the people and defended the crown; when the dragons emerged from their seclusion, you won the honor of being the king’s emissary to them and forged a powerful alliance.
Then, you fell in battle at the hands of your greatest rival, dead before your time.
But now you awake, called forth from your tomb to save the realm from even greater peril. With your new spectral form come new powers: the ability to pass through solid walls and float high above the earth, command over other ghosts, and the potential to strike fear into the hearts of the living. You will need every bit of that power in this new age of crisis. The royal family is shattered and divided, with the young king clinging to scraps of his former power while his connection to the Eye of the Serpent hangs in the balance. Anti-monarchist rebels shout in the streets and political rivals seek to extend their power across the sea. Galdrin’s neighboring nation lies beneath the waves, sunk by cataclysmic earthquakes. Worst of all, the mighty dragons are withdrawing from the alliance you built centuries ago, and you may be the only one who can win them back.
What’s more, you aren’t the only specter on Galdrin’s shores. There’s an army of ghosts crawling out of the water, tearing at the foundations of the castle. Sometimes, you can hear the voice that commands them. Something is waiting at the bottom of the ocean—and it wants you back.
If Galdrin is to survive, you must rise as its hero once more, and join an epic battle for the Eye of the Serpent, power over the ocean, and the realm itself.
Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, bisexual, monogamous, polyamorous, asexual, and/or aromantic
Battle enemies old and new as a ghost, commanding spectral armies and passing invisibly through walls, and inspiring dread in the hearts of your foes.
Romance a troubled king, a rebellious prince, a clever wizard, a daring dragon, or a strangely familiar ghost.
Restore the ancient arcane power of Galdrin’s monarchy, or embrace modernity and forge a new path forward for the realm.
Search for lost treasure and buried secrets in a sunken kingdom as you plunge to the depths of the ocean – and seek out the source of the monstrous voice you hear in your mind.
Build a new body and reclaim a place among the living, or embrace your spectral form to endure as a ghost.
Avenge your own death and find a way to set old enmities aside – or even rekindle old flames of love.
On Tuesday, September 30, 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. House of Dream of Moon (2007) by the […]
8 days ago
On Tuesday, September 30, 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.
House of Dream of Moon (2007) by the third IF Whispers team
In this ten-sectioned exquisite corpse, you play as Dave, and you’ve just bought a new house. Your furniture isn’t here yet, so it’s a good time to explore the nearby woods. But before you get that far, Leslie’s disembodied voice tells you you’re stuck in a simulation.
Tin Star (2025) by Garry Francis and Gianluca Girelli
In this western game, you play as Kenneth Johnson, the sheriff of Tucson. Bandits robbed the Bank, but when you pursued them, you fell into their trap. They tied you up and left you to die under the unforgiving summer sun. Free yourself, find water, then find those bandits and mete out justice.
This game is an entry in ParserComp 2025, placement to be determined. This game is an enhanced, text-only English port of the semi-graphic Italian adventure Kenneth Johnson: Tin Star that was written by Bonaventura Di Bello, using The Quill and Illustrator, and published in 1987. It is also the second part of a trilogy preceeded by Wild West and succeeded by Desperados.
In this western, you play as Kenneth Johnson, the sheriff of Tucson. Manolo Ramirez and his gang attacked a small community of settlers, kidnapped the girls and killed everyone else before returning to Mexico where the law can’t legally follow. So you left your tin star behind with your deputy and pursued them on your own. The hunt has taken days, but as you now approach a village ravaged by those murderers, you vow again to make them pay!
This game is an entry in ParserComp 2025, placement to be determined. This game is an enhanced, text-only English port of the semi-graphic Italian adventure Kenneth Johnson: Desperados that was written by Bonaventura Di Bello, using The Quill and Illustrator, and published in 1987. It is also the third part of a trilogy preceeded by Wild West and Tin Star.
In this game, you play as a wage slave playing hooky to participate in an online contest about abandoned buildings. Top prize goes to a photo of “something never meant to be seen”. You snuck into an old metro tunnel you read about on Reddit, but the way in locked behind you. So you also need to find a way out.
This game was an entry in IF Comp 2025, placement to be determined.
Here, in this mythic play, where fates entwine, You, Belinda, stand by Dido, Queen divine. Her sister loyal, in this game of old, A tale of love and treachery unfolds.
Aeneas, prince of Troy, his heart aflame, Proclaims his love, and calls upon her name. You urged her to accept, with joyful plea, This union blessed, for all eternity.
But hark! Dark whispers through the shadows creep, Foul plots now stir, as dangers rise so steep. Their happiness, their very lives, in peril lie, Now, Belinda’s task: to save them ere they die!
In this one-room game, you play as Kaylee Rivers, an eight year-old living in Talliston, Idaho. Your living room has a seriously creepy painting of an old fogey that you want to get rid of. Your parents ordered you to never ever touch it, but they’re not here, at least for the next fifteen minutes or so. Maybe this is your chance.
In this very incomplete demo, you play as someone who’s forgotten everything. An old man directs you to go into the dim forest. There, you must learn to ASSAULT animals with weapons if you want to get anywhere or earn any points. Um, but why?
The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Wednesday, August 28, 2025 over Zoom. JP Tuttle, Stephen Eric Jablonski, Mike Stage, zarf, anjchang, Josh, and Hugh, welcomed newcomer but long time IF player David J Hall. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just a log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories. We started off talking about exploring […
8 days ago
The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Wednesday, August 28, 2025 over Zoom. JP Tuttle, Stephen Eric Jablonski, Mike Stage, zarf, anjchang, Josh, and Hugh, welcomed newcomer but long time IF player David J Hall. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just a log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.
We started off talking about exploring Inform. Also reminiscing about other scripting languages like hypercard, lingo, Applescript, and natural language programming syntax. BTW, did you know you can use rot13.com to do rot13 encoding/decoding, or, you can make an Applescript shortcut on iOS.
Screenshot
Inform 7 Train by Josh
The highlight was Josh’s walkthrough of through his Inform 7 “Train“ code, showcasing the quirky and powerful nature of the language. The demo was a train that went through different stations, where the reader could hop on and off if they were at a stop. Play and tweak the walkthrough example here https://snippets.borogove.app/inform7/9ttc7m For followup and sharing remixes, we can email the google group or share with Josh directly. Thank you Josh for a illuminating time!
Doors and Naming
We discussed whether Inform 7 could create all the rooms with one sentence? You can sometimes create two things at once with the predicate syntax. e.g. The spoon is in the closet. But can you say “The kitchen and the dining room are rooms”? You can say “the kitchen is a room, the x is a room” in a long list. J.P. shared an amusing Inform 7 error message about room declarations like Problem. ‘”Here” and “There” and “Elsewhere” are rooms’ : And I am the King of Siam. ‘”Here”‘ is some text. Zarf riffed with a suggestion: “The Bathroom, the Closet, the Elsewhere are rooms.” JP shared a fun anecdote about computer camp servers named “Here,” “There,” and “Elsewhere,” tying into the room-naming discussion.
We discussed replacing the room entirely for a reader’s subsequent visits. Some examples exist of changing the room completely when player exits. Zarf notes you have to be careful to transfer all the items over. We talked about other mods that could happen, e.g. trains passing each other, or breaking down at different times.
The Boston IF meetup for September will be Monday, September 29, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will post the Google Meet link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.
13 days ago
The Boston IF meetup for September will be Monday, September 29, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will post the Google Meet link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.
We’re proud to announce that Specters of the Deep, 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 October 2nd! We’re also pleased to announce that both of Abigail Trevor’s other games, Stars Arisen and Heroes
13 days ago
We’re proud to announce that Specters of the Deep, 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 October 2nd!
We’re also pleased to announce that both of Abigail Trevor’s other games, Stars Arisen and Heroes of Myth, are on sale this week and that checkpoint saves have been added to both games in a recent update!
In life, you were a legendary hero. Now, you’ll rise from the grave as a ghost to defend your country in its hour of greatest need! Defy dragons, duel the dead, and face the nightmare at the bottom of the sea!
Specters of the Deep is an interactive epic fantasy novel by Abigail C. Trevor, author of Heroes of Myth and Stars Arisen. It’s entirely text-based, 1 million words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
Centuries ago, you were the finest warrior that the island nation of Galdrin had ever known. The realm was strong and prosperous, upheld by the might of the Eye of the Serpent, a magical artifact bonded to the monarch—and by your might, too. You protected the people and defended the crown; when the dragons emerged from their seclusion, you won the honor of being the king’s emissary to them and forged a powerful alliance.
Then, you fell in battle at the hands of your greatest rival, dead before your time.
But now you awake, called forth from your tomb to save the realm from even greater peril. With your new spectral form come new powers: the ability to pass through solid walls and float high above the earth, command over other ghosts, and the potential to strike fear into the hearts of the living. You will need every bit of that power in this new age of crisis. The royal family is shattered and divided, with the young king clinging to scraps of his former power while his connection to the Eye of the Serpent hangs in the balance. Anti-monarchist rebels shout in the streets and political rivals seek to extend their power across the sea. Galdrin’s neighboring nation lies beneath the waves, sunk by cataclysmic earthquakes. Worst of all, the mighty dragons are withdrawing from the alliance you built centuries ago, and you may be the only one who can win them back.
What’s more, you aren’t the only specter on Galdrin’s shores. There’s an army of ghosts crawling out of the water, tearing at the foundations of the castle. Sometimes, you can hear the voice that commands them. Something is waiting at the bottom of the ocean—and it wants you back.
If Galdrin is to survive, you must rise as its hero once more, and join an epic battle for the Eye of the Serpent, power over the ocean, and the realm itself.
Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, bisexual, monogamous, polyamorous, asexual, and/or aromantic
Battle enemies old and new as a ghost, commanding spectral armies and passing invisibly through walls, and inspiring dread in the hearts of your foes.
Romance a troubled king, a rebellious prince, a clever wizard, a daring dragon, or a strangely familiar ghost.
Restore the ancient arcane power of Galdrin’s monarchy, or embrace modernity and forge a new path forward for the realm.
Search for lost treasure and buried secrets in a sunken kingdom as you plunge to the depths of the ocean – and seek out the source of the monstrous voice you hear in your mind.
Build a new body and reclaim a place among the living, or embrace your spectral form to endure as a ghost.
Avenge your own death and find a way to set old enmities aside – or even rekindle old flames of love.
What nightmare lies in the deep?
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(Continued from my previous post.) The thing I’ve found most fascinating studying the various incarnations of Adventure is the almost philosophical difference in approaches to where the expansions go. With Woods’s own variation (Adventure 430) he essentially treated it as a “master quest” version of the game, adding secrets to the underground which otherwise could […]
17 days ago
The thing I’ve found most fascinating studying the various incarnations of Adventure is the almost philosophical difference in approaches to where the expansions go.
With Woods’s own variation (Adventure 430) he essentially treated it as a “master quest” version of the game, adding secrets to the underground which otherwise could be seemingly unchanged at first glance (with the only major addition being changing the starting forest into a large maze). With Adventure 448 (mostly from Brown) the new sections felt “segregated” off so that the authors had a region they could call their own. Adventure 501 (and the follow-up Adventure 751) felt like it expanded outward more than inward.
SVHA Adventure (or Adventure 360, based on the maximum score) instead seems to add interconnectivity: taking various dead ends, digging through farther, and connecting up some of the tunnels that come out as a result. There is very little interference with the “main game” (although a few rooms have tweaks) but rather there’s a new extension, as if the fictional universe the same cave system lasted for another 100 years (with dwarves, orcs and elves claiming more spaces) before the player arrived.
The upshot is this is hard to represent as a single map. I can give my original Adventure map as currently annotated. Please keep in mind I do not have all the rooms yet.
Let me explain the new isolated aspects first (although they might not stay that way) and then get into the interconnected section (where four distinct places in the cave all now link together).
The Hall of the Mountain King, as I mentioned in my last post, has the first difference someone is likely to see (“There is a barrel with a tap standing here.”) I still haven’t used the barrel anywhere yet. Going southwest, the rooms have some slight changes, with the path which normally leads directly to the dragon now with a “moist room”…
You’re in a corridor leading southwest/northeast, and rising slowly in the southwesterly direction. The walls are very moist, the reason being that mist from the northeast are condensing on the walls here.
…and while the secret canyon is there, it has the word “SINBAD” which is new.
You are in a secret canyon which here runs E/W. It crosses over a very tight canyon 15 feet below. If you go down you may not be able to get back up. The word “SINBAD” is hewn into the wall.
This place is also near the big interconnected zone, but let’s save that for now. In addition to SINBAD there is a related writing in the Oriental room now.
This is the oriental room. Ancient oriental cave drawings cover the walls. A gently sloping passage leads upward to the north, another passage leads SE, and a hands and knees crawl leads west. Among the drawings is scribbled “ALIBABA”.
There is a delicate, precious, Ming vase here!
Close to there — heading west to the Large Low Room, then north — is another new section.
This is an entirely self-contained puzzle, at first there is a room with a gate that can’t be lifted…
You are in a small room with a dirt floor. A gate is set on the way
south, and a way lead west. There is a low crawl going north.
The gate is down.
open gate
I’m not strong enough to do that, you know.
…but the text implies you just need to be stronger. A few steps away is a pantry…
n
You’re in narrow crawl space.
w
You are in a dusty pantry. There are shelves and cupboards. Nothing of
what you would expect in a pantry is to be seen. A crawl getting tighter
lead to the east.
An envelope stands on one of the dusty shelves.
…and the envelope contains a “small pill” that makes you feel stronger if you eat it. Heading back to the gate, you can then open it and go inside.
open gate
That pill surely made me strong!
s
You are in something that seems like a chapel or something. We’ll call this the sacred chamber. There are something like an altar on the south wall, and various things on the walls that suggest a religious place. To the north is an opening from the chamber, usually barred by a gate.
The gate is up.
There’s a ring of a curious shape on the altar. It looks magical.
I am unsure if the ring has any particular effect.
Finishing off the isolated areas, I’ve already mentioned the “leather satchel” found by going up from the clam area; as far as extra items go there’s a “parchment” in the volcano area that crumbles when I try to pick it up.
You are in a small chamber filled with large boulders. The walls are very warm, causing the air in the room to be almost stifling. The only exit is a crawl heading west, through which is coming a low rumbling.
Near the entrance lies an old withered parchment.
There are rare spices here!
get parchment
At your touch the parchment withers into dust. Something was written on it.
There’s also a new zone that I found off Witt’s End, the “maze” that just loops you around (and where the original way to escape is to not go east).
You’re at Witt’s end.
There are a few recent issues of “Spelunker Today” magazine here.
sw
You are at bottom of a long flight of steps leading south and up. A corridor leads north, but obviously curves a lot further on. There is a waist-high column in the middle of the floor. On the pillar is placed a crystal(?) stone about two feet in diameter. There are tiny flickers of light in the ball, it looks like pictures of rooms. This is obviously the great palantir of Osgiliath, which was lost in the kin-strife in Gondor in Third Age 1635 !!!!!!!!!
s
You pass fissures and cracks in the wall along the stairs. There’s a large one on the east, but it’s too small for you to worm through. The snake suddenly strikes from the fissure!! You’re bitten and pummeled and strangeled thoroughly. That must have been an irrated snake!
Oh dear, you seem to have gotten yourself killed. I might be able to help you out, but I’ve never really done this before. Do you want me to try to reincarnate you?
…but let me mention three points on the snake first:
1.) Is that the same snake as the one that got driven off by the bird? Do I need to take the bird with me, perhaps?
2.) The problem with the bird again being helpful is that this is an instant death — there isn’t an obstacle that you then react to. Original Crowther/Woods was quite good about avoiding instant death; it would have a beat along the lines of a dwarf appearing or it being dark before you hit inevitable doom. The instant death is much less fair (especially given that this game has no save game facility).
2b.) In order to cope with the lack of save games I have been saying “yes” to the resurrection question. In nearly every other Adventure variant I would say no and just restore my save game, but the combination of no-saved-games plus instant death makes it the only practical way to handle things.
3.) Perhaps it is possible to reach this spot before facing the snake, and it will be clear? That would represent the kind of softlock I associate more with the Cambridge games like Hezarin.
Now, on to the palantir. It gave me some trouble operating it; I eventually realized it was fishing for “look direction”.
LOOK EAST
The stone starts searching in that sector.
A room underneath a grate. The stone shows
plain nothing.
A cobble crawl. The stone shows
plain nothing.
The stone found nothing in that sector.
The odd sequence here indicates it is doing some sort of “step by step” search where it somehow has the map subdivided into “zones”. This will be important later.
LOOK NORTH
The stone starts searching in that sector.
A ledge in a rock wall. The stone shows
A brass vessel stands in a corner.
In a pit with ice walls. The stone shows
A ruby sparkles in the middle of the room.
LOOK SOUTH
The stone starts searching in that sector.
The stone found nothing in that sector.
West gets the most information
LOOK WEST
The stone starts searching in that sector.
In a throne room. The stone shows
plain nothing.
A corridor with fairyland carvings. The stone shows
plain nothing.
A brightly lit dancing hall. The stone shows
plain nothing.
A corridor with grotesque statuary. The stone shows
plain nothing.
The stone found nothing in that sector.
I wasn’t able to get any other results. Note the similarity with Adventure 366 (which also has a palantir) but also the difference (this one can’t be used to teleport … I think).
Time for the big interconnected section:
I have a hard time capturing this as they are drawn on my map in very different places, but it interconnects with
a.) the “wide canyon” south of the Bedquilt area which previously was a dead end
b.) the “crossover” near the two mazes which normally led north to a dead end, but now passes through
c.) the vending machine in the “all different” maze
d.) the Giant Room with the eggs
Let’s start with the “wide place” canyon, which has a hole that goes down:
You are in a narrow corridor going southeast-northwest. There is an awful smell. There is a hole in the ceiling, but you cannot reach it.
SE is a room with an even more awful smell, and NW is a dungeon.
You are in someone’s dungeon. There are cells on both sides of the corridor. Most of the doors are rusted, but small windows give you the opportunity to check out there is nothing of interest inside. There is one door that may be unlocked, however, and inside this cell you can see a form huddled on the ground. The corridor goes southeast-northwest.
The celldoor is locked.
I have yet to bring keys over to this room, but it is an obvious next step in my gameplay (I kept getting hit by dwarves, and also orcs which work more or less like the dwarves).
Another entrance to the same complex is the vending machine. That’s been a popular place to muck around, since the vending machine gives entirely optional batteries for lamp extension (in other words, in a walkthrough there’s no reason to go in the all different maze!) This version of the game adds a hole where the player finds out after (by seeing it in in a mirror) they are very dirty:
As you look behind the machine, you see a small hole in the floor. It is just big enough for you to get through. From what you can see, there is no chance of coming up this way if you go down.
D
You are at the bottom of a narrow shaft. You cannot climb up the shaft. A corridor leads to the north.
N
In a niche in the corridor there is bolted a highly polished steel mirror on the wall. The corridor goes north/south here. As you pass the mirror, you see a black and ominious figure there. After checking behind you, you find you have seen yourself. That shaft must have been a chimney!
(I have yet to get here with water — again, no save games, plus getting hit by axes. It does appear “clean” is a verb but just going nearby to a waterfall doesn’t work, you have to be carrying the bottle.)
N
You are in a well lit room. The walls are hung with fantastic draperies, (to heavy to carry), and there are rich carpets on the floor, (also to heavy to carry). At the opposite end of the room there is what appears to be a decorated throne. Beside the throne is a table covered with velvet. On your side of the room is also a table covered in velvet. There is an opening to the south, the throne is to the north.
A five-armed chandelier made of gold, furnished with strips of other precious metals, is standing on the table.
On the throne sits a lovely elven princess, clad in some green garments. She eyes you warily.
If you approach, she leaves through a curtain to the east, but trying to follow lands you outside.
You are at the throne in the throne room. The throne is of such magnificent splendour that it is hard to take your eyes away from it. Added to this you have the table beside it, covered in a kind of velvet that gives out its own soft light. To the south is an opening in the wall. The draperies to the east and west might also cover doors or openings. A scepter, wrought from mithril, inlaid with gold, and encrusted with diamonds almost as clear as silmarils, lays on the table.
E
There must have been magic at work. As you walk through the draperies and the opening behind it, you find yourself in free air. Behind you is a blank mountain wall, in the middle distance you can see the building from which you started. The building is to the northeast.
Heading west rather than east leads to a “rune room” with Viking runes, and more branches. You can meet back up with the dungeon by going east and the southeast; going northeast instead leads to a torture chamber.
You are at the branching of the corridor. One path leads southeast, one leads west and steeply up, and one northeast.
A graphnel with a suspicious rope coiled at the end lies in a corner.
NE
You are in what has obviously been a torture chamber. Chains hang on the wall, different “implements of the trade” are spread across the floor and shelves. A reek of blood still lingers in the air, and there is an oppressive gloom in the room. An exit leads south, another east. Hovering slightly above the floor, a whitish apparition emerges before you. A low, rasping moan is heard, the sound sends a chill all through your bones. You can, somewhat undistinctly, hear words. It sounds like: “Give back, give back, oh give back my body to me. Nobody will pass whom won’t do so, nobody will pass on this way …”
(I haven’t gotten any farther past this section.)
Turning back to the rune room and going west instead leads to a ballroom and another instant death. You can reach the same ballroom approaching from the south (which enters via the “crossover” route) so I’ll show that version off:
You are at a crossover of a high N/S passage and a low E/W one.
N
This seems to be the start of a finely hewn corridor, leading northwest. A narrow corridor goes to the south.
NW
You are in a corridor with finely chiseled steps. The corridor goes up and north, and down and south.
N
You are at the southern end of a brightly lit hall. Steps lead down to the floor, which is bare and obviously designed for dancing. To your right a balcony goes round the east side of the hall. The balcony entrance is northeast, the steps go north. To the south is an opening to a corridor. On the other side of the hall another staircase goes up. On the floor a merry band of elves are dancing, forming intricate patterns. They see you and beckon for you to come and join them. An orchestra with gleaming instruments is at the balcony, playing a lively tune.
NE
You stand at the balcony behind the orchestra. There is some unrest among the musicians. Suddenly, it turns out that both the dancing elves and the musicians are orcs. Those in the orchestra are small and delicate, they throw away their instruments and scurry out of the room. The others stand at the floor and throw knives at you. Their aiming turns out to be exceedingly accurate.
I think the solution here may be (as we’ve seen in other Adventure versions) to get two types of enemy together. If the dwarves are chasing us, and we walk into the ballroom (or balcony) with the dwarves in tow, I suspect they will fight each other and we can get away. Or maybe the death will just be more colorful.
c.) locked door at the dungeon (which I just haven’t brought the keys to yet, but I’m sure the thing inside will kill me)
d.) what to do at the torture room
e.) reading the parchment without it “withering away”
f.) applying SINBAD and ALI BABA (no, rubbing the lamp doesn’t work)
g.) the elf in the throne room and the magic exit
Some of these I have strong leads for, just I need to grit my teeth and boot up another game from the beginning in order to do a test. I think the dwarves are rather deadlier than in the original (they hit more often) and the previous game didn’t have orcs; while orcs work much the same as dwarves, it means there’s even more enemies to cope with and potentially be killed by.
There is a dangerous orc in the room with you!
One sharp nasty knife is thrown at you!
It misses!
You’re in slab room.
This means even though it seems like a simple thing to bring object X to place Y I have had multiple attempts in a row foiled by a stray thrown knife.
The problem with Bloom and Rage is that I never played Life is Strange. Or I played maybe one chapter of the first LiS, didn't get hooked, and put it aside. B&R isn't exactly a response to LiS. It's the devs of the first two LiS games stepping ...
22 days ago
The problem with Bloom and Rage is that I never played Life is Strange. Or I played maybe one chapter of the first LiS, didn't get hooked, and put it aside.
B&R isn't exactly a response to LiS. It's the devs of the first two LiS games stepping off that franchise to create an original title. Which means it's intentionally trying to attract an audience who knows what they want, and I don't know what that is. Of course they also want new players -- they want me to enjoy it from a standing start -- and I did. It's a great game. But I'm a bit disoriented trying to write about B&R. I don't know how it fits in. Or what it fits into.
Then again, B&R is about four teenagers who don't fit in, and then they find a hole in the universe. So maybe disorientation in the right frame of mind.
It took me a while to get into the characters. As a middle-aged guy, my response to being in a teenage girl's bedroom is "Eww, creeper mode." And I wasn't a teen in the 90s, or a girl, or rural. And I never had that "perfect summer" bonding experience.
I got on board though. These kids are engaging disasters. Autumn is passionate and unsure. Kat is reticent and vicious. Nora is punk and not as shocking as she thinks. Swann is hesitant and awkward and... the protagonist, so whatever direction you steer. Let's go with "impulsive". They're all stuck in backwoods Michigan and going out of their minds. They start a terrible punk band.
(What was I doing in the summer of 1995? Writing A Change in the Weather, I guess. Which was... a sentimental reflection on being an isolated teenager, and then you fall out of the world, plus maybe supernatural stuff, and it's thematically wrapped around the music I was listening to at the time... Oh wait goddammit.)
(80s folk, rather than 90s fempunk. But it's a way in.)
On top of that, the story is a split timeline: the kids meeting in 1995 and their adult selves reconnecting in 2022. For me, the adult viewpoint grounded the teen experience in my life. I hope some young people are playing who find that the teen viewpoint grounds the strange-and-distant grownups in theirs!
I am going to skip over the plot. It's strong, a rat-king knot of raw-burn emotion and cosmic horror/wonder -- but a recap won't get us anywhere. I want to think about how I played the game.
B&R is a narrative game. It's got the "she will remember this" bat-signal. You are openly invited to decide Swann's goals and choose the relationships she has with the other three girls.
Except -- messy teens. Swann is bad at relationships! She's...
I'm going to make a Disco Elysium comparison, sorry, hang tight. The point of Disco is that Harry is a loser. He has effed everything up. You have effed everything up. That means you have permission to fail some more. If you blow a skill check, or lots of them, repeatedly -- that's Harry's story. That's who he is.
In Bloom and Rage, you are going to say something hurtful and upset your friends. Because you're sixteen and you have no idea how to handle it and neither do they. That is okay. That is Swann's story. (Your adult selves have more chill but they're not great about it either. I relate.)
The problem is, the game doesn't exactly play that way. It tracks plenty of possible story branches and variations. Lots. But the main thing it tracks is a relationship score with each of the other three girls. The "she will remember that" marker explicitly signals whether the heart-score went up or down. At the end of the game, you get a chart for each relationship, graded from "okay" to "friend" to "BFF" to "crush".
In some sense, therefore, the canonical Swann is the girl who is always trying to make nice; she says the friend-iest thing in every situation. Which, sure, that is a possible Swann. Surely there are others? Can she be an opinionated hardass for a minute? If you stray from the sweet-and-supportive path, it feels like the game punishes you, or at least scolds you.
For some scenes, this makes sense. You want to get Kat's stuck-up older sister on your side. That's realpolitik. But the four protagonists are the core of the story. I wanted messy spectrums of resolution, not linear scales.
(I just flashed on Chris Crawford's original Balance of Power (1985) -- which apologized for jamming the world's international relations into a simplistic US-vs-USSR scale. Crawford later updated the game with a "multipolar" mode. I don't know how well it played. Point is, this design tussle has history.)
The other problem is the same one I have in every branching-relationship game, which is that dialogue menus suck for conveying intent. There's a moment (vague spoiler) where a plan has gone pear-shaped and you have to choose between saying "I'm responsible" and "This was all Kat's idea". I said it was Kat's idea -- which it was. Obviously this had consequences.
But the game does not model the difference between "I ducked the blame" and "I gave Kat the credit." Because, come on, it was an awesome plan. (If you're sixteen.) Everybody should know what Kat pulled off! Respect her power!
In a later scene, Kat is hurt and upset that I hung her out to dry. That makes total sense. I don't think I had an option to apologize. I definitely didn't have an option to explain what I was thinking. "I admire you too much to lie about you..." Maybe she wouldn't have bought it, but the idea never came up. That's not what the writers put on that binary choice.
Pretty sure that's why I never got to kiss Kat. Dammit. Speaking of linear relationship scales.
So I wound up with a relatively low-connection, lonely ending. And I am torn about it. On the one hand, it is my ending. And it made a great story. B&R isn't all dating sim, remember; it's in the Stranger-Things orbit of supernatural something going on, and that got wild at the end, and I am very satisfied with the choices I made.
And yet again, it was not "the good ending". I want to go back and max out some of those relationship meters. I want to do better by my friends. I want that kiss.
Relationship meters, sigh, what a silly way to play. But is it even possible to get past "crush" into "first love" without multiple runs and maybe a walkthrough?
Disco Elysium is about failing, but you get multiple tries at most tasks. The game loop is "raise your stats, try again". (Save-scum if you want; judge yourself.) B&R tries to do the messy-failure thing with one-shot consequences -- no do-overs. It's agonizing. Deliberately, to be sure.
It was Life is Strange which had the diegetic do-overs, right? I wonder how much the designers of B&R iterated on alternatives. Swann has a camcorder, which is thematically similar but not the same game at all. (Except one scene, which plays interestingly. But even then you have limited retries.)
But I think I will leave it there. Bloom and Rage is a tribute to being sixteen. It's achingly intense and also corny as heck. The band sucks. Don't laugh. I mean, yes, laugh -- remember how ridiculous things got? But also remember how important things were, and are.
Tangential footnotes that I couldn't fit in:
Is Bloom and Rage supernatural horror? No. Magic, if it is magic, is not the source of antagonism. (The story's bad guy is a mundane jackass.) Something is new and incomprehensible and terrifying about the world -- hey, that's puberty for you. The question is not how you will defeat the supernatural, but how you will build it into your lives.
Every time I play one of these growing-up games, I think about Gone Home. Which was set in the same year! Backwoods Oregon rather than the U.P., but B&R is certainly reaching back to Gone Home as a touchstone. And, you know... B&R mentions the idea of a road trip to Seattle. The story doesn't go there but certain elements of my ending... one can absolutely imagine the Sam and Lonnie and [spoiler] adventure.
(Quick AO3 check: nope, nobody's written it. I'll keep the idea in mind.)
(Open Roads is set in 2003, so adult Tess would be on the 2022 meetup end...)
Do I need to play Life is Strange after all? It's gotten to be a big series. Haven't decided.
Speaking of: Bloom and Rage is a great title (and a great band name), but I kinda wish the designers had gone the anagram route. Rages If Silent. Glean Its Fires. Salient Griefs. Regains Itself. They all work, seriously, it's amazing.
This post assumes some familiarity with the original Adventure; if you haven’t yet seen, my series on the Software Toolworks version (the only one that paid the authors Crowther and Woods) is a good place to start. Otherwise, onward– Recently, two articles dropped on spillhistorie.no, both by Robert Robichaud (the same Rob that frequents the […]
23 days ago
This post assumes some familiarity with the original Adventure; if you haven’t yet seen, my series on the Software Toolworks version (the only one that paid the authors Crowther and Woods) is a good place to start. Otherwise, onward–
Via Ronny Hansen, a setup for playing SVHA Adventure on ND-10 hardware.
Recently, two articles dropped on spillhistorie.no, both by Robert Robichaud (the same Rob that frequents the comments here). One was on the game Ringen, the Tolkien game in Norwegian that I’ve written about before. However, I had very little information to work with and was only able to play by going through a particular section preserved on VikingMUD, then making guesses about the game. The real Ringen (actually 1983, not 1979) has now been preserved and I am excited to play it. However, doing so requires playing in Norwegian so it will need some preparation time before I get there.
The other post was on a game written in English (later translated to Norwegian, but the translation is lost), so I can get to it right away. I’m going to summarize from the article and add some details, but you’re better off reading Rob’s article first and coming back here.
As a computer, the TX-0 was somewhat odd as it was built for a special purpose. It was, however, a truly programmable computer; it had a good directly driven CRT display, and – most important – its circuits were all transistorized. Moreover, it was available! I could sign up for time and then use it solely for my own purposes.
Yngvar Lundh, fresh from studies at MIT, went back to his home country of Norway to establish a computer presence there while working for the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment. He led the team on Norway’s first full-fledged computer, Lydia, a classified project used to analyze the sound of Russian submarines; this was followed with SAM (Simulation for Automatic Machinery) also intended for naval applications.
A group photo uploaded by Yngvar Lundh himself to Wikimedia, with members of the SAM team in 1962. Yngvar is on the far right. Note the similarities with the TX-0.
Per Bjørge (fifth from the left in the photo) went over for a year of study at MIT and returned in August 1966; after he returned, work on SAM-2 started, with Per Bjørge on the day team and Svein Strøm on the night team.
The computer was taken on “tour” to visit the institutes of Norway, and while on tour, Per Bjørge (another engineer who had spent a year at MIT), Rolf Skår (yet another) and Lars Monrad Krohn (who did a collaborative project with MIT) talked with a former-student-turned-entrepreneur who convinced them to form their own company. Hence: the start of Norsk Data, which not long after came out with the Nord-1, essentially a direct commercial conversion of the SAM technology.
They had early financial troubles, although through development of their own time-sharing system and the development of their Nord-10 minicomputer led to good sales to universities. (It also helped that they landed a contract at CERN; while the leaders of CERN first were more interested in getting a computer from the MIT-affiliated DEC, Norsk Data had DEC’s price sheets so were able to undercut them by 10%.)
From Wikimedia.
The important point in the story above is the cross-pollination from MIT. When ground zero for adventures happened there, it makes sense adventure would make their way over to Norway. Compare this with Italy where their first-known adventure came from an author who saw a variation of Crowther/Woods at a trade show rather than on some local mainframe.
With all that established, our story now turns to the Norwegian Institute of Technology. A group there calling themselves Studio-54 had a hobbyist/hacker culture and access to a ND-10 (via strong connections with Norsk Data; some members did work for them). One member of the group, Svein Hansen, discovered Crowther/Woods Adventure on a PDP minicomputer. While the minicomputer was intended for “serious” work at the school, he had access via Studio-54 to a ND-10, leading Svein to convert the source code in 1979. Once the port was made, there became the irresistible urge to add things to it, hence other members of the group (Nils-Morten Nilssen, Ragnar Z. Holm, Steinar Haug) piling in with new rooms, puzzles, and treasures. From the game’s own introduction:
This ADVENTURE is based on the ADVENTURE originally written by Don Woods and Willie Crowther, later expanded by Bob Supnik and Kent Blackett, and still later expanded by Nils-Morten Nilssen and Svein Hansen. In the present version some of the added features are taken from an article by Greg Hasset in Creative Computing, which added hitherto unknown parts of the cave. Many thanks to Greg!! This version is reprogrammed by Svein Hansen, and maintenance and extensions is presently handled by him. The program is written specially for NORD computers in NORD-FORTRAN 77. As Svein Hansen is responsible for this version, any inconsistencies and non-answers that might surface are best reported to him, either directly or through RSH, Norsk Data A/S, P.O. Box 25 Bogerud, OSLO 6, Norway. Personal message from Svein Hansen: Although I am responsible for this version, some of the added features are not my own. They are the lunatic and weird outcroppings from the minds of the Studio 54 Hobbies Group at the ND.10-54 community at NIT, Trondheim, Norway. Any nervous breakdowns, downbitten fingernails and suicides etc. resulting from these ideas ARE NOT MY RESPONSIBILITY !! Blame it on that sneaking, no good group that are ever trying to write more vile computer games.
This version of Adventure eventually made its way back to Norsk Data and was sold in a “games pack” compilation as SVHA Adventure.
Now, while the game has essentially been restored (after much suffering) with 70 new rooms and 20 new items/treasures, there’s a bug that means it is “impossible to escape” with two of the treasures (I don’t know yet what that means yet other than two can’t be deposited at the starting building). I’m just hoping the endgame is traditional and not something mind-blowing that we’re missing!
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.
Time to first change? A single turn. But not a major one this time.
You are inside a building, a well house for a large spring.
There is a set of keys here.
There is a shiny brass lamp nearby.
There is food here.
No bottle! That’s just outside, though. I don’t know why.
You’re at end of road again.
s
You are in a valley in the forest beside a stream tumbling along a rocky
bed.
s
At your feet all the water of the stream splashes into a 2-inch slit in the rock. Downstream the streambed is bare rock.
There is a bottle of water here.
I’m almost wondering if it was a hacker-experimenter type change rather than one meant to affect gameplay; that is, if you’re mucking about changing the code of Adventure for the first time, one of the easiest things to do is to take an object and try to move its starting room and see if it works. So there might not be a “reason” for the change in a traditional sense.
Going on in, the first change otherwise I’ve found happens at the Hall of the Mountain King, where there is a barrel with a tap.
You are in the hall of the Mountain King, with passages of in all directions.
There is a barrel with a tap standing here.
A huge green fierce snake bars the way!
In the area with the clam I found a path leading up to a knapsack, but that was otherwise just a dead end. The most significant change I found was starting at the “crossover” near the mazes (all alike, all different) where heading north is normally a dead end.
HOO-HAW!!
You are at a crossover of a high N/S passage and a low E/W one.
…ok, HOO-HAW? I don’t know.
n
This seems to be the start of a finely hewn corridor, leading northwest. A narrow corridor goes to the south.
The finely hewn corridor is new, as is everything after.
nw
You are in a corridor with finely chiseled steps. The corridor goes up
and north, and down and south.
n
You are at the southern end of a brightly lit hall. Steps lead down to the floor, which is bare and obviously designed for dancing. To your right a balcony goes round the east side of the hall. The balcony entrance is northeast, the steps go north. To the south is an opening to a corridor. On the other side of the hall another staircase goes up. On the floor a merry band of elves are dancing, forming intricate patterns. They see you and beckon for you to come and join them. An orchestra with gleaming instruments is at the balcony, playing a lively tune.
n
You go down to the dance hall floor. The elves turn suddenly out to be orcs, all of them shouting and reveling at the way they fooled you. They grab their knives and hurl them at you. You stand a fair chance of landing a job as a pin cushion.
Grisly! Unfortunately, the game lacks a save game function, so it’s been slow going checking where changes might be. I can cut-and-paste walkthrough sections, but that technique only works if the RNG is consistent (otherwise I end up getting walloped by a dwarf axe somewhere in the process). It took Rob a month to get through everything, so this might turn out more difficult than your typical Adventure expansion.
I’m especially looking forward to finding the Greg Hassett section mentioned in the instructions (apparently they just lifted the “theoretical” game from an article and turned into a real one) — hopefully next time!
Engine Failure is a type-in that first appeared in Personal Computer World (April 1983) and then in the spin-off Personal Computer Games, the same as Adventure in 1K. Personal Computer World was very business-oriented, so it is understandable they might have needed to scrabble from prior material to have enough to launch a games magazine. […]
3 days ago
Back to Scotland! It’s been a while.
Engine Failure is a type-in that first appeared in Personal Computer World (April 1983) and then in the spin-off Personal Computer Games, the same as Adventure in 1K.
Personal Computer World was very business-oriented, so it is understandable they might have needed to scrabble from prior material to have enough to launch a games magazine.
An ad from the same issue showing a typical example of content. Hilderbay made a previous appearance on this blog with the game Gold but otherwise was focused on business and utility software.
The author, Ian Watt, is yet another one of our teen-aged authors (born in 1967). He founded a ZX80/81 club out of Glasgow (“One of the club’s main aims is to encourage computer literacy”) that was a branch of Tim Hartnell’s extended group (see my writeup on The Citadel for more on how that got started). Of his five published games, one was only in magazines (this one), one is part of a book edited by Hartnell, and three are part of a book by Ian Watt with an introduction by Hartnell. Eyeballing dates, it looks like Engine Failure was the first to make print, which is why I’m starting here.
Engine Failure is “tiny” (two pages, along the lines of Arkenstone) but due to some cryptic object interactions took me a while to finish.
Our spaceship has had its engine fail near a planet, and the engine needs to be repaired before the spaceship is destroyed in the atmosphere.
Gameplay starts in a control room with cryptic buttons; pushing the red one right away causes the ship to blow up.
Even after finishing the game I’m unclear what the functions of the buttons are (that is, I know which ones to press to win, but I’m not sure what the user manual would say each one does in a real-world sense).
Just south of the starting control room is “living quarters” with “water” and a medical bay with a “pill”. The game lets you uneventfully drink the water and eat the pill although it isn’t clear what puzzles this solves, or if it even helps solve a puzzle (it does, I’ll mention it when it happens).
To the south are some “computer banks” with a floppy disk — I’ll deal with that later — and then heading eastward leads to a Cargo Hold (with pliers) and an empty Engine Servicing Room (where going any farther is death, due to a “pet origonk”).
The issue here conceptually is that the sparsity makes it unclear if this is just an adjoining room or something useful later; there’s no control panel or circuit board. Hence, for a while I kept trying to go west, but it turns out going west is impossible and always a death.
Heading back to the computer storage banks and west, there’s a shuttlebay, although entering the shuttle kills you with nerve gas.
It is unclear why the shuttle on your own ship would be filled with deadly gas. I assume there’s some unmentioned sabotage in the plot that happened on our last stop.
Going a bit farther west is a spacesuit; wearing it is the solution to the nerve gas. You can then find a screwdriver inside.
The screwdriver can be used to UNSCREW a panel at a room marked “Left Engine” (Right Engine has the creature and is impossible to reach). The panel has a lever, and pulling it activates a blue light.
It’s time to head back to the control room, but while heading back we should grab a “jewel-socket”, a “zappergun”, and that previously mentioned floppy disk along the way.
There is a blue light in the control room now, and you’d think that’d mean you just press the blue button, but that kills you. You need to press the yellow button, which turns the light yellow, and while the yellow light is on you press the blue button, which reveals a “pcb” that is “somewhere in the ship”. (Somewhere turns out to be that empty “servicing room”, but we’ll head back there later.)
While we’re at it, we should also INSERT FLOPPY (no description that there’s a place to put the floppy, I just tried INSERT FLOPPY in every single room until it worked). This causes a red light to turn on, and now we can go straight to the put and PRESS RED.
This will activate a “TELEPORT TERMINAL” just to the south and west of here. I spent a long time trying to operate the machine before checking the source code; it’s just the word TELEPORT by itself.
You are safe teleport if a.) you’ve drunk the water b.) eaten the pill and c.) are carrying the zappergun. The first two prevent a disease from killing you, while the zappergun prevents guards from killing you. (It’s very weird and passive, since the zappergun doesn’t get shown being used! You might go through all this and not realize there is any opposition at all.)
While holding both the ASTRAGEM and the JEWEL-SOCKET from earlier you can INSERT ASTRAGEM. Then, back where the PCB got revealed (next to the killer pet) you can INSERT JEWEL (as long as you are holding PLIERS) and a red light will turn on. Then to finish the game you just need to run back to the control room (where it starts getting very hot, the time limit is tight) and press the red button again.
Why does red either blow up the ship, activate the teleporter, or activate some kind of gem? Why does the lever causing a blue light mean you should not press the blue button, but the yellow button instead? I know the author was essentially trying to create an “experiment” type puzzle, but it diverged into the sort of messy and unintuitive interaction I associate more with fantasy games.
Incidentally, while trying to solve the above issues, I looked at the room structure data, and it’s very unusual. Most games have data along the lines of Room Name, 4, 5, 1, 0, which indicates a room, and the rooms (by ID) that go north, south, and east respectively. This game instead has a whole data line like this:
0 -1 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 -3 0 0 -2 0 0
These are all the north exits, and furthermore, they give information in a relative sense. That is, if you’re in room 2 (living quarters) and go north, you subtract one from the room ID to find where it goes (room 1, the control room at the start). I’ve never seen anything like this before; almost always the absolute room ID of the destination is given. I’m unclear why the author would use this method of expressing exits. Perhaps his book has some clue, but we’ll save that for a later time.
Bit of news on the historic preservation front. Cyan has posted the "Making of Myst" video from 1993, remastered in high-resolution from the original video files. Credit to Ted Sase for a fantastic job. This 13-minute video was included on the ...
5 days ago
Bit of news on the historic preservation front. Cyan has posted the "Making of Myst" video from 1993, remastered in high-resolution from the original video files. Credit to Ted Sase for a fantastic job.
This 13-minute video was included on the original 1993 Myst CD-ROM. Because CD-ROMs were enormous, and they had all this free space left over...! The original Quicktime movie data was a whopping 73 megabytes. It looked kinda like this:
The Making of Myst as viewed from the 1993 CD-ROM.
Okay, that's a Youtube rip, so it's probably worse than what I watched on my Mac Centris 610. But this was highly compressed video data. Also color grading hadn't been invented.
With that material available, Ted Sase was able to recover the original recordings and recreate the original video in 4K res. I'm pretty sure he redid all the titles, the transitions, the lot. In-game footage re-recorded from the game, of course. Ooh, is that a fixed aspect ratio? Nice.
There's a couple of brief shots that haven't improved. (See "Testing", 11:45.) I assume that footage was not found, so Sase couldn't do anything except color-correct the CD-ROM version. And of course the images filmed from CRTs have no more pixels than they did in 1993. (Although the monitor desync stripes have been cleaned up!)
But I'm just nitpicking to reassure the creator that his efforts have been appreciated. This is an amazing effort. My congratulations.
Congratulations to author Vance Chance, whose Hosted Game Dragon of Steelthorne has won third place in this year’s IntroComp. To celebrate, we’re putting it on sale this week: it’s 40% off on all our platforms until 10/09! Rule a mighty city, fight battles, and go on adventures as the Ardent or Ardessa of the city of Lake Steelthorne. Find love, power, and a secret that could chan
6 days ago
Congratulations to author Vance Chance, whose Hosted Game Dragon of Steelthorne has won third place in this year’s IntroComp.
To celebrate, we’re putting it on sale this week: it’s 40% off on all our platforms until 10/09!
Rule a mighty city, fight battles, and go on adventures as the Ardent or Ardessa of the city of Lake Steelthorne. Find love, power, and a secret that could change the world.
Vance 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.
Today’s post you could think of as a “bonus game”. It appears in the April 1983 edition of Personal Computer World, followed by the first issue of Personal Computer Games that summer (same publisher) and is directly next to the game I was going to be writing about next. To explain in context, when the […]
6 days ago
Today’s post you could think of as a “bonus game”. It appears in the April 1983 edition of Personal Computer World, followed by the first issue of Personal Computer Games that summer (same publisher) and is directly next to the game I was going to be writing about next.
To explain in context, when the Sinclair ZX80 (and ZX81) came out, they had only 1K worth of memory by default, an absolutely miniscule amount to do much of anything with. Companies still put out tapes and books intended for that target memory size, the most significant from this blog being from Alfred Milgrom (of The Hobbit) and the duo behind Pimania, who started their game publishing with experimental 1K games. Adventure in Murkle was in the same spirit but in a much more generous 4k.
Adventure in 1K is the only game, article, or product of any kind I can find by Ian Stansfield which will “run on any micro you care to name”. Instead of being like the games above, well, let’s just give a transcript–
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
E
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
W
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
S
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
E
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
E
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
Q
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
X
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
You get the idea. It’s simply printing the text, taking an input, and then looping, without even bothering to read what the player entered. As a courtesy, both BASIC and C source code are provided. (This is the first time I’ve ever seen source for a type-in given in C!)
“Hours of fun and entertainment for all the family.” So yes, this is a joke game, not just on adventures but on the concept of selling 1K games, but it’s the sort of meta-textual joke came I had thought (before embarking on my journey) would not show up until much later, as a Usenet joke from the 90s or an entry into the TWIFcomp (which asked competitors to fit an interactive fiction game into a tweet, 140 characters). However, by this point I’m not surprised, because we’ve had…
Crystal Cave include a “realistic” cave where the treasures break if you touch them and a park ranger throws you out
Stuga drop into a choice-game section involving the Muppets
Acheton put in the classic grate-opened-with-keys to start, but where entering immediately kills the player
House of Thirty Gables skewering multiple adventure game conventions all at once, including a troll you aren’t supposed to kill
…such that meta-textual play with the whole concept of the adventure happened almost immediately. It’s with this sort of metatextual play that you eventually get the “escape room” concept (where the entire game plays out in a single room, like Suveh Nux) or the “single turn” concept (where the game resets after a turn, allowing many stories, like Aisle) or even the “one puzzle” game where there’s no limit to moves but the only obstacle is a single puzzle (my own game More fits in that category).
So this is worth marking down as a historical footnote, at least. (We incidentally will see not just one but two serious “single room game” efforts in 1983.)
COMING UP: The actual type-in I meant to do, followed by Suspended.
(Continued from my previous posts.) I’m sorry, I’m going to have to pitch this for now. If there’s a future version with save games (or at least where the frequency of knife attacks is greatly reduced!) and perhaps less bugs I can take another swing. (ICL’s Quest which I also bailed on has had recent […]
7 days ago
I’m sorry, I’m going to have to pitch this for now. If there’s a future version with save games (or at least where the frequency of knife attacks is greatly reduced!) and perhaps less bugs I can take another swing. (ICL’s Quest which I also bailed on has had recent progress, so it isn’t impossible even given the circumstances of being on an unusual platform written in NORD-FORTRAN where we don’t have the source!)
Full setup for playing SVHA Adventure on real hardware, via Ronny Hansen.
Regarding bugs, I ran across some erratic text messages, including one that made me unsure if I was even doing the right thing or not. The snake that got chased off by the bird makes a reappearance in SVHA Adventure, and by scooping the bird back up again I was able to get past where the snake was lurking:
You’re at bottom of long flight of steps.
(This is right after getting out of Witt’s End by going southwest and reaching a new area.)
S
You pass fissures and cracks in the wall along the stairs. There’s a large one on the east, but it’s too small for you to worm through. You are on top of long flight of steps going down and north. There is a strong oak door leading south, with no handle or key hole on this side of the door.
S
You can’t go through that oak door.
You’re at top of long flight of steps.
OPEN SESAME
S
You can’t go through that oak door.
Note that OPEN SESAME (prompted by the hints about Aladdin, as suggested by bananathoroughly in the comments) gives an absolutely blank prompt, as opposed to any kind of feedback if you’ve done something right or wrong. Other words don’t have the same sort of response…
ABACADARA
I don’t understand that!
SHAZAM
Good try, but that is an old worn-out magic word.
…which makes me quite worried a bug is interfering with the act working. And if not, well, I have absolutely no idea how to get through, and getting back to the particular location is a slog; you have to keep randomly going directions in Witt’s End many times, enough times that the game prompts multiple times if you want a hint at getting out!
Incidentally, trying to leave after arriving at the door is death:
N
You pass fissures and cracks in the wall along the stairs. There’s a large one on the east, but it’s too small for you to worm through. The snake suddenly strikes from the fissure!! You’re bitten and pummeled and strangeled thoroughly. That must have been an irrated snake!
It might be that the only way the enter is via the other side, and the only reason I know that is yet another bug:
There is a dangerous orc in the room with you!
You’re in hall of mists.
Rough stone steps lead up the dome.
GET AXE
key hole on the other side. There is, however, a key hole on this side.
There is a dangerous orc in the room with you!
The “key hole on the other side” line seems to be randomly printing from somewhere else in the text. I’m extremely patient with jank and frustration in games, but when it might be combined with a bug it becomes too much. It potentially turns getting unstuck not just “figure out what the author intended” but also “make sure to avoid memory corruption”.
And as mentioned before, there’s the extra condition of “avoid getting killed by a knife”. Original Adventure always had a dwarf appear first and throw an axe that missed; you can get unlucky and meet an orc first, meaning you will have no weapon at all. Or you can get super unlucky and die immediately upon sight of an orc, although it doesn’t matter; either way you are essentially dead.
There is a dangerous orc in the room with you!
One sharp nasty knife is thrown at you!
It gets you!
Oh dear, you seem to have gotten yourself killed. I might be able to help you out, but I’ve never really done this before. Do you want me to try to reincarnate you?
One other bit of business, though: I accidentally missed an exit.
This is back where you find the ring; you can turn west to enter a Crypt, with a “vault” to the west. I wasn’t able to get any farther, though.
You are in something that seems like a chapel or something. We’ll call this the sacred chamber. There are something like an altar on the south wall, and various things on the walls that suggest a religious place. To the north is an opening from the chamber, usually barred by a gate.
The gate is up.
There’s a ring of a curious shape on the altar. It looks magical.
GET RING
OK
N
You are in small room with dirt floor.
The gate is up.
W
You are in a crypt. A coffin is standing in the middle of the room.
There seems to be a vault to the west. A passage leads east.
The vault door is closed.
The coffin is closed.
OPEN COFFIN
You don’t have the necessary piece of metal for doing that.
This area turns out to be the section taken from a Greg Hassett article in Creative Computing, July 1980 on how to write an adventure. If you’re not familiar with Greg Hassett (who at this time was 14), you can try my writeup of World’s Edge; in the article he mentions his games before that are (in order), The House of Seven Gables, King Tut’s Tomb, Sorcerer’s Castle, Voyage to Atlantis, Enchanted Island, and a machine-language version of the same game called Enchanted Island Plus.
This is not from any of Hassett’s games, but rather an imaginary game written purely for the article. The Studio-54 group turned it into a real game! Except there is some variation because holding the ring does not allow for opening the coffin (as suggested in the article) and while there’s a limited number of items to test I’ve spent a week struggling so I’m done.
I did at least get to test throwing the ring in the volcano (just in case of a Tolkien reference) but alas, nothing happens.
I’m afraid I’ve left things too incomplete to make any large conclusions, but I do want to emphasize the code is currently held together with duct tape and being run on an emulator. It is easily possible that some of the difficulties I mention are due to bugs or emulator issues and so aren’t “authentic”; this is especially possible with random number generators which are enormously finicky across platforms. (A concrete example: for a long time the Pokémon Red/Blue speedrun community banned all emulators except for a very specific one called gambatte-speedrun; every single one had different RNG than a real Gameboy, despite many being completely authentic otherwise and even allowed with other games. Now, there’s exactly two emulators allowed, and all others are banned.) Given the endgame isn’t even reachable with the current game’s state I don’t feel that bad about setting it aside.
COMING UP: A type-in, followed by the glorious return of Infocom.
The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday, September 29, 2025 over Zoom. Doug Orleans, zarf, David J Hall, Hugh, JP Tuttle, Josh Grams, anjchang, and Stephen Eric Jablonski welcomed special canine guest Milo (not pictured) Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just a log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories. [&
8 days ago
The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday, September 29, 2025 over Zoom. Doug Orleans, zarf,David J Hall, Hugh, JP Tuttle, Josh Grams, anjchang, and Stephen Eric Jablonski welcomed special canine guest Milo (not pictured) Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just a log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.
PRIF September participants were happy to welcome Milo (not pictured)
We had a great discussion about the finished comps, acknowledged they happened, and anticipated playing InfoComp and Ectocomp entries.The scent of Fall and Halloween was in the air, so we also talked about… murder, and solving murders. It was mentioned that many people don’t actually finish games due to lack of time, and lack of interest in grinding. In some cases, slice of life type games may fill a gap. We also discussed the importance of setting the time and place, and how people might just want to explore a particular time period, e.g. Edwardian or Victorian, Steampunk eras.
Shattered Dust a scenic demo by JP, made in Tweego. It’s an example of slice-of-life exploration, taking in the different settings and exploring. We appreciated the Blender rendering of the first image and attention to the use of ASCII in the headings.
The Wise-Woman’s Dog, Dialog-based game by Daniel Stelzer; you play a dog in the Hittite Empire with rich historical footnotes
Slice-of-Life IF Recommendations (thanks JP)
All Quiet on the Library Front
A Walk Around The Neighborhood
BOFH
School Days
Snack Time
Cultural References
Sherlock Holmes and the importance of time and setting. There was a story called Herlock Sholmes that used great detail to conveyed the setting in the Victorian era.
Continued from previous post. I finished all of these! Sometimes with hints. Strange Antiquities Daymare Town The House of Tesla Strange Antiquities by Bad Viking -- game site A worthy sequel to Strange Horticulture, packed with all the ...
9 days ago
Continued from previous post. I finished all of these! Sometimes with hints.
A worthy sequel to Strange Horticulture, packed with all the stuff I enjoy. Observation of a wide variety of evidence. Indirect logic, occult symbols, allusive clues, alchemical reference books, and secret panels. So many secret panels! And a cat.
The story is better integrated, a season-arc which you investigate -- or help other people investigate, really; you're just the shopkeeper. (Cozy!) But of course you get dragged in to resolve the crisis at the end.
Exploration is actively encouraged this time around. Horticulture more or less tied you to the shop, except for specific missions. Wandering the uncanny landscape at random just kicked your dread meter. In Antiquities, the map is tighter -- the town of Undermere. And wandering the town is fun! You probably don't want to intrude on private homes or the creepy woods, but there's no penalty for checking out libraries, museums, parks, and City Hall. Not to mention the plant shop from the first game. Useful surprises may await.
(Later the map is extended to more precarious locations, where you have to be more careful. You'll know 'em when you see 'em.)
My only nit is that the ending isn't much more than an extra-large mission, followed by a wrap-up scene. It's a perfectly satisfying ending to the story -- but it doesn't feel more satisfying than the rest of the game. Which is, to be sure, very satisfying to play. Go play it.
An apology: I previously referred to the setting as "European-ish medieval-ish". That was silly of me. Undermere is a spooky riff on Windermere, the English Lake District. The weird local cultists are very British cultists. And I feel like it's the 1800s; I bet someone can pin that down more precisely.
A remake of a series of Flash games from, I think, 2007-2013. According to the Kongregate page, anyhow. (Remember Kongregate?)
I have always loved Skutnik's style, ink-expressive and creepy and subtly surreal. Cyclopean cliffs and abysses. Floating rocks. Brick arches which crumble silently into the sky. I was happy to see the Submachine series reappear on modern platforms (as Submachine: Legacy), and Slice of Sea a couple of years before that.
Daymare Town has all of that, in spades and more. Maybe more than enough of it. I honestly don't remember what the original Flash games were like -- but in this one, exploring is intensely finicky. Layers and layers of rooms, alleys, and niches. Does this alley have nooks to the left and right as well as ahead? You'd better check and double-check, every time. The art style just doesn't try to convey it.
(The game has a "hard" mode in which objects are slightly less prominent. I didn't generally have a problem noticing objects; it's exits that are tricky. An "easy mode" for exits would have been a benefit, I think.)
Remember I said Neyyah's problem was balance? Everything Daymare Town does is familiar -- it's the same kind of gameplay as in Submachine. And I like that gameplay. I enjoy a good pixel hunt. But it felt like this time, I was grinding through the landscape. Traversing every room over and over, hoping to unearth that one last cog that will uncover one more orb that will unlock the next gate. By the last chapter, I was playing from a walkthrough.
The puzzles are generally lightweight use-this-on-that. It's only hard because, again, there's a lot of stuff scattered around a lot of landscape. By mid-game, experimentation means clicking thirty or forty inventory items. And in a surreal world, puzzles require a lot of experimentation. (Why a seashell? Why there?)
Nearly all of these items are peripheral to the main game -- there are many side interactions and achievements to discover. That's great; they add to the texture of the world; but you've still got this very bulky inventory to deal with.
The story... is barely a story. Something's up with the mist and the world going away, but don't expect extensive narration. It's all environment and weird little characters to interact with. This is Skutnik's forte (is there really a cohesive storyline to Submachine? Do we care?) so just roll with it. A running schtick takes the piss out of "___ will remember that", which made me chuckle every time.
No, play it for the artwork and the visual style. Also, this release includes the platformer-interlude originally published as Daymare Cat, in which you assemble an audio track by Cat Jahnke (as "Cat and the Menagerie"). Worth the price of admission on its own.
I said I wanted more The Room fan games, and here it is.
Tesla is a followup to the House of Da Vinci series, which was such a Room riff that it straight-up lifted its magic-lens idea. (Not a criticism -- the Riven remake borrowed it too. It's too good an idea to not borrow.) This time around, we swap the magic lens for a magic "see electrical flows" device. You can also use it to connect certain devices with wireless power. We did say this was Nikola Tesla's house, right?
All of these series tend to ramp up their size and ambition as they progress. House of Tesla drops the series format entirely; the entire intended progression is crammed into a single game. At least, that's what it looks like. If you divided Tesla into thirds, I think each part would be larger than the original House of Da Vinci release. Lotta game here, is what I'm saying.
Which is good and bad. These games were originally scaled to be played an hour or two at a time, on a handheld device, sitting in a comfy chair. Tesla still has the touchscreen-centric design: one-finger controls, free panning but no free movement. But the economics of mobile have forced it to a Steam-first release. And thus, forced me to my Big Gamer Chair, inhaling the game in marathon sessions until puzzles dripped out my ears. Overstuffed rather than cozy. Well, I still enjoy adventure games, and I'm happy to pay Steam prices for them.
(Perhaps the economics of Steam forced Tesla to the big-game-all-at-once model, rather than a spaced-out sequence of short games. I'm less sure of that. I'm plenty sure that mobile revenues suck.)
So, overstuffed with puzzles. How's that work out? Uneven, but very good overall. Like I say about Quern: if a game contains enough kinds of puzzles, it's bound to contain your least favorite. (Block-slider, cough.) Tesla sticks to mild versions of its puzzle ideas, though, rather than skull-crackers. So when you come across one that annoys you, it won't annoy you for too long.
To be sure, there were some puzzles that were under-clued, or which I didn't understand at all. I looked at the hints, cried "moon logic!" and hammered the hint button until an explicit answer came out. Or I unlocked the box by accident and couldn't figure out why it had worked. Or I did understand the puzzle but decided it was too annoying to solve, so hammer time again.
(The designers say they're working on a "skip this puzzle" button. Clearly a good idea.)
But the majority of the puzzles were solid fun. Even the familiar tropes had a bit of an original twist. The jumping-pegs puzzle won big points by permitting two-way moves, rather than the (much too) familiar "restart-from-scratch" button.
(One nitpick: a scene where you combine colors of fluorescent gases in tubes. Perfectly good puzzle, except that you combine cyan, magenta, and yellow to make red, green and blue. Yes, mixing magenta and yellow glowing gases produces glowing red. Yes, these gases are explicitly transparent when not electrified. I cannot express how painful I find this.)
The story, I'm afraid, was a lot of maundering about Tesla and Mark Twain and Aleister Crowley, of all people. Twain really was a friend of Tesla (things I learned!) but the game doesn't manage to make anything of this. And Crowley just shows up as a generic bugaboo, with bonus mysticism to contrast with Tesla's mad science. This is all extensively explored in flashbacks, but they're just an excuse for more puzzles. Which need no excuse!
The interesting antagonist is Tesla's indomitable ability to spend money faster than he could raise it. The game highlights this, but there's no satisfactory ending to that story, in the game or in real life.
So, a big old puzzle-fest and I enjoyed it. Will there be a House of Tesla 2? I'm sure they could go there if the sales justify it. Or maybe they're setting up for House of Crowley. I'd play that.
Not summer games, not fall games, but... something of both. (In betweens.) I let the review file accumulate for a few weeks and here we are. More reviews coming soon! A whole lot of adventure games dropped this month; I'm still in the middle ...
13 days ago
Not summer games, not fall games, but... something of both. (In betweens.) I let the review file accumulate for a few weeks and here we are.
More reviews coming soon! A whole lot of adventure games dropped this month; I'm still in the middle of a few.
I'm also did-not-finishing a few of these games, which is unusual for me. Some of this is general world stress. I am pretty distracted with all the terrible things. Some of it is just saying, hey, I'm not having fun with this part, I'm allowed to put it down. Doesn't necessarily mean the game is bad. Or even that I don't recommend it!
A modest adventure game of the "something happened on this space station" subgenre. You float around... well, you fly-mode around; your first-person view is curiously immaterial. Walls and furniture don't impede you but closed doors do, until you find the right keycard. Good thing keycards are material. For quite a while I thought that the developer just hadn't bothered with gravity or colliders. Turns out no, there's a story reason for it all, but you don't discover it until the end.
This has just a couple of kinds of repeated puzzles -- slidey circuit boards and a mathematical keycard system. Aside from that, most of the game is obsessive package-hunting. The sort where you check every drawer in every closet, and then look under every bed. And there's a lot of empty rooms to search. There's probably nothing in an empty room but you have to check the drawers just in case.
Admittedly the fly-mode makes this easier than it otherwise might be. Also the hint button, which gives you a rough location for any unfound objects in the room.
You are collecting keycards, fuses, hard drives, and a few other tools. The hard drives contain journal entries, which is where the story comes in. But it's not very connected to the gameplay. If you're cynical, you're just skimming the journal entries for the very occasional drop of a safe combo or keycard location hint. If you're into space station slice-of-life, you get an interestingly out-of-order narrative about a handful of people -- decent writing, just somewhat peripheral to what you're doing.
The ending is the best part. I won't spoil it, but it does a good job of contextualizing and doubling-down on the situation you've discovered.
Not a ground-breaking game, but I enjoyed spending some time on it.
Pet peeve: everybody uses that Interstellar black-hole rendering now. Fewer people know how it works. You can't just putt-putt around the bendy halo and see it from underneath! That's a visual distortion of a flat ring. Please.
Someone loved Riven very much and wanted to create an experience just like that.
You know how Tolkien created Middle-Earth because he wanted a place to fit all his language ideas? And then we got a decade of writers creating worlds to fit all their ideas about Middle-Earth. Completely different starting point.
Or, closer to home: Will Crowther was a caver who recreated a cave he'd explored. The kids at MIT were not cavers. When they made Zork, they were recreating a game that they'd played -- Crowther's game. Different approach, right?
None of this speaks to quality, one way or the other. Zork was better than Colossal Cave. (More imaginative, better puzzle sense, better parser.) Terry Brooks never rivalled Tolkien but he settled down to some readable stuff once he'd gotten the shameless riffs out of his system.
Neyyah... it's pretty and it's got lots of neat machines. It's not really recreating Riven though.
I think it's a problem of balance. Any particular puzzle machine in Neyyah is a reasonable idea. Each location is interesting. The pathways are appropriately convoluted. You can ride a minecart or a hoverpod. There's portals. (Lots of portals.) All neat stuff.
But it's all spread out over a lot of scenery. You spend days just exploring and exploring, collecting keys and clues and plugging power-cores into consoles. (Almost the first thing you find is a box of power-cores.) You don't have to actually engage with the game -- or the story -- because you're still filling in corners of the map. When I found a key or a clue, the hard part was remembering where its associated lock or puzzle was.
Just because a puzzle machine is neat doesn't mean it fits into the player experience. And if your volumes of carefully-worked-out lore aren't an active part of the story? Cut 'em.
(I have a post brewing called "Lore was a mistake." I mean, as a game-design concept.) (Yes, that includes those long journals in the Myst library. Riven avoided that problem! That's one of the reasons it was really good!)
When I scrubbed through the last of Neyyah's easily-reachable zones, I realized that I had completely lost track of my goals. I'd have to re-explore the world again -- this time taking map notes on where all the puzzles were. That was when I lost steam.
Like I said about the remake of Obsidian (1997): I now find slideshow-style adventure games tiring to play. Without free movement or even free panning, parsing the environment is more work than I want to put in. Squinting at the cursor to see whether I just turned 90 or 180 degrees: not fun.
Also not fun: lack of autosave. I don't care how retro your style is. Autosave is mandatory.
Enough griping. What does Neyyah do well?
The islands really are pretty. I love a baroque wrought-iron catwalk. (Remember Schizm?) The islands are in different time zones and the varying light is beautifully done. There's cute critters.
I complained about the world being too spread out, but navigation is actually speedy and responsive. You can click-click-click your way along the paths and walkways, and click through the elevator/portal/minecart animations as well. This is not your creaky DVD drive from the 90s.
Similarly, the journals are voluminous and somewhat repetitive. But you don't have to read them exhaustively. I'm pretty sure every important clue appears in at least two places. That's a good design principle.
The dialogue is cheese-tastic but the FMV actors have a great time delivering it.
I realize this is a lot of very qualified praise. Sorry! The creator of Neyyah has put an intense level of effort and attention into his game. I am genuinely impressed. I want more Riven / The Roomfangames. I will buy yours. (Playing House of Tesla now!) I just think I've played enough of this one.
Everybody's playing this month's metroidvania but I'm terrible at fighting. So I bought a different one.
The Siege and the Sandfox is a 2D stealther/platformer. It's a spiritual sequel-or-homage to the original Prince of Persia -- minus the combat. If a guard catches you, you die in one hit. So it's about the sneaking, plus a bit of whacking unsuspecting guards from behind. But mostly the climbing, jumping, and exploring to find new climbing-and-jumping skills.
There's a frame story (murdered king, duplicitous queen, you know the stuff), provided by a narrator. It's almost an audiobook: "The Sandfox knew that the key would be nearby..." Amelia Tyler (the narrator) has great fun with this, even doing voices for different characters. It's not just for story beats, either. The game generates contextual storylet lines as you move around and encounter different situations. It's really nicely done.
The first half of the game was very satisfying. Unfortunately, I got bogged down in the second half, as the map broadened out and required me to find more corners to explore. I think I know where I'm supposed to go next, but it's got a lot more guards than previous areas; progress got frustrating. Also the game is a bit buggy. So I put it aside. I don't regret the time I spent, though.
(If you want to know exactly how far: I got the wall-climbing and roof-shimmying gear before giving up.)
We’re excited to announce that Specters of the Deep is releasing this Thursday, September 25th! You can play the first three chapters for free today, and check out the author interview as well! And don’t forget to wishlist it on Steam! The more wishlists we get, the better the game will do on Steam on release day. Additionally, we’re happy to share that Abigail Trevor’s othe
15 days ago
We’re excited to announce that Specters of the Deep is releasing this Thursday, September 25th!
And don’t forget to wishlist it on Steam! The more wishlists we get, the better the game will do on Steam on release day. Additionally, we’re happy to share that Abigail Trevor’s other games, Stars Arisen and Heroes of Myth will also be on sale on all platforms during the Specters of the Deep release week. Plus, both Stars Arisen and Heroes of Myth have just been updated to included checkpoint saves!
In life, you were a legendary hero. Now, you’ll rise from the grave as a ghost to defend your country in its hour of greatest need! Defy dragons, duel the dead, and face the nightmare at the bottom of the sea!
Specters of the Deep is an interactive epic fantasy novel by Abigail C. Trevor, author of Heroes of Myth and Stars Arisen. It’s entirely text-based, 1 million words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
Centuries ago, you were the finest warrior that the island nation of Galdrin had ever known. The realm was strong and prosperous, upheld by the might of the Eye of the Serpent, a magical artifact bonded to the monarch—and by your might, too. You protected the people and defended the crown; when the dragons emerged from their seclusion, you won the honor of being the king’s emissary to them and forged a powerful alliance.
Then, you fell in battle at the hands of your greatest rival, dead before your time.
But now you awake, called forth from your tomb to save the realm from even greater peril. With your new spectral form come new powers: the ability to pass through solid walls and float high above the earth, command over other ghosts, and the potential to strike fear into the hearts of the living. You will need every bit of that power in this new age of crisis. The royal family is shattered and divided, with the young king clinging to scraps of his former power while his connection to the Eye of the Serpent hangs in the balance. Anti-monarchist rebels shout in the streets and political rivals seek to extend their power across the sea. Galdrin’s neighboring nation lies beneath the waves, sunk by cataclysmic earthquakes. Worst of all, the mighty dragons are withdrawing from the alliance you built centuries ago, and you may be the only one who can win them back.
What’s more, you aren’t the only specter on Galdrin’s shores. There’s an army of ghosts crawling out of the water, tearing at the foundations of the castle. Sometimes, you can hear the voice that commands them. Something is waiting at the bottom of the ocean—and it wants you back.
If Galdrin is to survive, you must rise as its hero once more, and join an epic battle for the Eye of the Serpent, power over the ocean, and the realm itself.
Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, bisexual, monogamous, polyamorous, asexual, and/or aromantic
Battle enemies old and new as a ghost, commanding spectral armies and passing invisibly through walls, and inspiring dread in the hearts of your foes.
Romance a troubled king, a rebellious prince, a clever wizard, a daring dragon, or a strangely familiar ghost.
Restore the ancient arcane power of Galdrin’s monarchy, or embrace modernity and forge a new path forward for the realm.
Search for lost treasure and buried secrets in a sunken kingdom as you plunge to the depths of the ocean – and seek out the source of the monstrous voice you hear in your mind.
Build a new body and reclaim a place among the living, or embrace your spectral form to endure as a ghost.
Avenge your own death and find a way to set old enmities aside – or even rekindle old flames of love.
As longtime readers of these histories know already, I’ve never been overly enamored with the so-called “French Touch” in vintage computer games, that blending of elevated aesthetic and thematic aspirations — some might prefer to use the word “pretensions” — with a, shall we say, less thoroughgoing commitment to the details of gameplay and mechanics. [̷
19 days ago
The Outcast box was styled to look like a movie poster. Riffing on the same theme, Infogrames’s head Bruno Bonnell called it “the first videogame that really tries to be an interactive movie,” leaving one to wonder whether he had somehow missed the first nine years of the 1990s, during which countless games tried desperately to be just that. Ironically, Outcast actually has very few of the characteristics that had become associated with the phrase: no rigidly linear plot, no digitized human actors, no out-of-engine cutscenes after the obligatory opening one. It’s a game rather than a movie through and through, and all the better for it.
As longtime readers of these histories know already, I’ve never been overly enamored with the so-called “French Touch” in vintage computer games, that blending of elevated aesthetic and thematic aspirations — some might prefer to use the word “pretensions” — with a, shall we say, less thoroughgoing commitment to the details of gameplay and mechanics. So, I approached Outcast, a 1999 game by the Francophone Belgian studio Appeal, with my prejudices held out in front of me like a shield. The descriptions I read of Outcast were full of things that set my spider sense tingling: a blending of wildly divergent, usually mutually exclusive gameplay genres (it’s hard enough to get one type of game right, much less multiple types); a relentlessly diegetic interface that embraces even such typically meta-activities as saving state (it’s hard enough to get an interface right without also trying to extend it into the world of the game); a fiendishly and seemingly needlessly convoluted premise (whereas bad Anglophone games make Donald Duck seem like Shakespeare, bad French ones all seem to be trying to be Victor Hugo and Marcel Proust rolled into one). In fact, I did my level best to avoid writing about Outcast at all, even though I knew it to be one of the better remembered cult classics of the millennial era. But when my reader Deckard asked me to cover it with “big pleading puss-in-boots eyes,” I felt like I owed it to him and all of you to at least give it a look.
Well, then, there’s no point in burying the lede any deeper than I already have: I did play Outcast. Much to my own surprise, I wound up playing it all the way through, and kind of loving it. By no means was I left without nitpicks and niggles, but on the whole it proved to be not just one of the more interesting games I’ve encountered recently but one of the more fun as well. It succeeds on most of the divergent vectors it dares to venture down, delivering a unique, evocative, even moving experience that I won’t soon forget. I owe Deckard a hearty thank you for giving me the push I needed. Read on to find out all the reasons I have to be grateful, plus a little something about where Outcast came from.
Yves Grolet, Yann Robert, and Franck Sauer.
At bottom, Outcast was a labor of love by three fast friends who had been working and playing together for years by the time they started to make it. One of the trio, named Franck Sauer, was a visual artist, sound designer, and rudimentary musician, while the other two, named Yves Grolet and Yann Robert, were accomplished programmers who specialized in high-performance graphics. When they were first coming up in the industry, the Commodore Amiga was still Europe’s premier gaming platform. They first made a reputation for themselves via two audiovisually innovative, mechanically rote shoot-em-ups of the sort that were a dime a dozen on the Amiga at the time: 1990’s Unreal (no, not that one) and 1992’s Agony. Each sold around 20,000 copies in a crowded market.
Worried about the Amiga’s long-term future as a platform — and justifiably so, as it would turn out — the friends then decided to look elsewhere. They applied and were approved for a business-development grant from the government of France — this was made possible by the fact that Yann Robert was a citizen of that country rather than Belgium — and embarked on an ambitious plan to make standup-arcade games, a branch of the industry that was enjoying its last flash of rude health before the unceasing evolution of digital technology for the home rendered it moot. Art & Magic, as they called their company, succeeded in shipping four such games during 1993 and 1994; the actual hardware was manufactured by a Belgian firm known as Deltatec. The first of their games, Ultimate Tennis, performed the best, with some 5000 cabinets sold. Those that followed did steadily less well, and soon the friends decided to jump ship from the softening arcade market just as they had from the Amiga.
Determined to continue making games despite the lukewarm financial rewards their efforts thus far had yielded, they started another company, which they called Appeal, and considered where to go next. With DOOM having recently swept the world, 3D graphics were all the rage in gaming circles. Unconvinced that they could compete head-on with John Carmack and the other talented programmers at id Software, who were already hard at work on Quake, Grolet and Robert opted to try something different on the same Intel-based personal computers that id was targeting. Instead of embracing polygonal 3D rendering, as id and everyone else were doing, they thought to make an engine powered by voxels: essentially, individual pixels that each came complete with an X, Y, and Z coordinate to place it in a 3D space independently, untethered to any polygons. The approach had its limitations — it was less efficient than polygonal graphics in many applications, and far less amenable to hardware acceleration — but it had some notable advantages as well. In particular, it ought to be good at rendering large, open, sun-drenched landscapes, something that the polygonal engines all struggled with. Whereas they favored symmetrical straight lines that were best suited for buildings and other human-made scenery, voxels could do a credible job of rendering the more chaotic, convex splendors of nature.
The friends made a trip to France to pitch the game they called Outcast to the two biggest publishers in Francophone gaming, the Paris-based Ubisoft and the Lyon-based Infogrames. The former turned them down flat; the latter agreed to buy a minority stake in Appeal and to fund the project after just a few days of talks. Grolet, Robert, and Sauer set up shop in the Belgian town of Namur and embarked upon what would turn into a four-year odyssey, alongside a development team that would grow to about twenty people at its peak.
Outcast was created in this nifty-looking building in Namur, above a ground floor of shops.
In the beginning, Outcast was a project driven almost exclusively by its graphics technology, just like everything else the friends had done prior to it. To whatever extent they thought about the gameplay and the fiction, it was as a way to showcase the potential of voxel graphics to best effect. That meant large outdoor spaces to set it apart from the DOOMs and Quakes of the world. The first draft of the plot took place in the jungles of South America, casting the player as a vigilante who goes to war with a gang of drug smugglers. But the friends soon concluded that an alien environment would be better, in that it would show off the visuals without drawing attention to the many ways they could fail to deliver an accurate rendering of the flora and fauna of our own planet; voxels were better at impressionism than photo-realism. Then someone had the idea that, if one outdoor environment would be good, a collection of them to hop among, each with its own aesthetic personality, would be even better. For a good two years, the fiction and the gameplay failed to advance much farther than that, while Appeal worked on their tech and built out the environments in which the game would take place.
There was a danger in letting any such technology-first project drag on for so long, in that consumer-computing hardware in the second half of the 1990s was very much a moving target. When work on Outcast began, most games were still running under MS-DOS, using unaccelerated VGA graphics running at a typical resolution of 320 X 200. The next few years would see Windows 95 and its DirectX libraries finally replace the MS-DOS command line that had been so familiar to gamers for so long, even as SVGA graphics running at a resolution of 640 X 480 or higher became the norm and 3D graphics accelerators became commonplace. Appeal had to reckon with and adjust to these sweeping changes as best they could. They made the switch to Windows, but their voxels were not able to make use of 3D-acceleration cards. In order to keep frame rates reasonable, they had to settle for the rather odd resolution of 512 X 384, a middle ground between the past and present of computer-game graphics.
Outcast’s graphics weren’t terribly impressive in the numeric terms by which such things were usually judged: resolution, texture density, etc. Yet they have an impressionistic beauty all their own. After living with the dark, rather sterile graphics that dominated at the time, booting up Outcast was like opening the curtains in a dark room to let in the light of a gorgeous summer day.
From about the halfway point in its development, Outcast began to expand its horizons, to become something much more than just another graphical showcase. This was accompanied by the arrival of some new characters from outside the somewhat insular world of French gaming. They would come to have an enormous impact on the finished product.
Alongside their French artiness, the core trio were possessed of a huge fondness for big-budget American action movies and their typically bombastic scores. Franck Sauer especially wanted Outcast to have a bold, striking soundtrack to accompany its unique visuals; he cited John Williams, Alan Silvestri, and Danny Elfman as appropriate points of departure. Knowing that such a feat of composition was well beyond his own modest musical talents, he placed an advertisement in some American film-industry magazines, and eventually settled on a Hollywood-based composer named Lennie Moore. Moore was given permission just to go for it. The music he came up with was sometimes wildly, almost comically over the top — he names the pull-out-all-the-stops operas of Richard Wagner as one of his most important influences — but it was like nothing else that had been heard in a game before.
Best of all, Moore happened to have a relationship with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. The peculiar economics of post-Soviet Russia, where institutions like the aforementioned orchestra had been cast adrift without the state patronage under which they had thrived in previous decades, meant that they were often willing to take on “low-culture” music like videogame scores that no similarly credentialed Western cultural standard bearer would have touched, for a price it would never have countenanced. So, Lennie Moore and Franck Sauer found themselves traveling to Moscow in the summer of 1997, to spend a week recording the soundtrack with an 81-piece orchestra and a 24-member vocal choir, conducted by another American named William Stromberg. Sitting in an empty auditorium listening to the music being performed for the benefit of the tape recorders, Sauer could hardly believe his ears; he still calls it “an experience of a lifetime.”
The Moscow Symphony Orchestra arrives to record the Outcast soundtrack.
Outcast was suddenly taking on a decidedly multinational personality. Indeed, Moore’s score made use of a variety of exotic instrumentation in addition to the orchestra and choir, such as an Armenian duduk, Indian tablas, and African congas. The choir sang passages from Virgil’s Aeneid in the original Latin.
Around the same time that Lennie Moore and William Stromberg came onboard, Appeal hired yet another American, a writer and game designer by the name of Douglas Freese who would spend the next two years with them in Belgium. His assignment was to come up with an overarching plot to join together the six disparate voxel-driven environments that had already been created, and then to write all of the dialog for the many characters the player would encounter there. For it had been decided that Outcast would be, despite its Francophone origins, an English-language production first and foremost, one that could then be localized back into French and other languages as necessary. Writing from my own selfish standpoint as a native English speaker who prefers to play games in that language, this strikes me as a pivotal decision. It means that the Outcast which I know isn’t afflicted with the layer of obfuscation that tends to make playing even well-translated games — to say nothing of the bad translations! — like peering at their worlds through a window coated with a thin rime of frost.
Is the story of Outcast a good story? That depends on how you look at it. In the broadest strokes, it’s both clichéd and convoluted. You play a former Navy SEAL by the name of Cutter Slade — has there ever been a more perfect action-hero name in the history of media? — who is part of the first team of Earthlings ever to use a newly invented piece of mad-scientist kit that enables one to visit a parallel universe. (The influence of Stargate SG-1, a very popular television show at the time, is strong with this one.) But this is no casual research trip for the team: a black hole has been created in our own dimension by an unmanned probe that was sent previously into the alternate one. The rift can be closed only by locating the probe and returning it to the dimension where it belongs.
Your alter ego Cutter Slade. While the backgrounds are rendered using voxels, foreground characters and objects are rendered using more traditional polygons. Even here, however, Appeal found a way to be innovative. The game was one of the first, if not the first, to use a texture-mapping technique called bump-mapping to render action-hero musculature.
Alas, something goes haywire on your trip between dimensions as well, and the four members of your team arrive on the world of Adelpha at widely scattered points in not just geography but also time, with their equipment — including Cutter Slade’s action-hero arsenal of advanced weaponry — likewise scattered hither and yon. And so the game proper begins. In the role of Cutter, all you really want to do is locate your three companions, locate the probe, and return along with them and it to your home dimension, but it turns out that in order to do that you have to defeat a dictator who has taken over Adelpha and is suppressing its alien inhabitants with standard dictatorial glee. This is the task to which you’ll find yourself devoting the vast majority of your time and energy.
As I already noted, this story is as contrived as any in the videogame space, not to mention riddled with plot holes bigger than the inter-dimensional rift itself. (If the probe is such a problem for the stability of the multiverse, why doesn’t the other Earth equipment that’s been scattered everywhere on Adelpha seem to be any cause for concern?) The saving grace is in the details. Cutter Slade at first seems like just another one of the musclebound onscreen ciphers in which Arnold Schwarzenegger once specialized, but, once you get to know him, he turns out to conform more to the Bruce Willis or Harrison Ford archetype. (The voice actor who plays Cutter in the French localization is actually the same one who dubbed over Willis’s voice in the French Die Hard.) He’s always quick with a quip, expressing appropriate exasperation every time he’s given Yet Another Fetch Quest to carry out by one of the huge number of characters who inhabit the six regions of Adelpha, but he’s a soft touch at heart. He proves to be good company for his player, thus fulfilling the first and most important requirement for any videogame avatar. He’s so likable that you really want to bring his story to a happy ending.
Cutter Slade is a fish out of water much but not all of the time on Adelpha: being a former Navy SEAL, he’s pretty good at swimming as well as running, crawling, hitting, and shooting. “As far as Cutter is concerned, I had an easy time with his dialog because we both were in alien lands — him Adelpha, me Belgium — and we both had something to accomplish,” says Douglas Freese.
You can move from one of the six wildly disparate regions of Adelpha to another one only via the teleportation portals you find scattered about. The first region is a small training area, but the others are sprawling open spaces that show off the capabilities of the voxel engine to maximum advantage. Your main goal in each is to find a MacGuffin called a “mon,” of which you need all five in order to liberate the planet. But getting each mon will require working your way through a whole matrix of puzzles and other, preliminary quests given to you by the local inhabitants, members of a humanoid species known as the Talan. Most of the quests are self-contained within each region, but every once in a while the game switches it up and demands that you do something in another region to meet a local challenge. The whole design is impressively nonlinear; you can go almost everywhere right from the start, can tackle the regions in any order you wish. A short time after you find a mon, the game fires off a larger plot event involving your search for your missing teammates and sends you scurrying off to put out a fire somewhere and learn some more about What Is Really Going On on Adelpha. In this way, Outcast manages to balance a high degree of player freedom with a more conventional plot, with a coherent beginning, middle, and end.
The Talan are the most shiftless bunch of aliens ever. Some of them explain that they’re pacifists who cannot possibly shed blood themselves, yet they’re perfectly okay with you doing the blood-shedding for them. (Certain parallels from the real world of 2025 inevitably leap to mind, but it’s probably best if I don’t point them out here.)
Solving the many and diverse problems afflicting Cutter and his new Talan friends often entails combat; this is where the other, less cerebral side of the game’s identity comes to the fore. You can fight either from a third-person, behind-the-back perspective, Tomb Raider style, or from a first-person perspective, Quake style. Either way, you have half a dozen different weapons to experiment with — assuming you can find them and keep them fed with ammunition — and always have your sturdy action-hero fists available as a fallback option.
I found the combat in Outcast to be a blast — literally so, in the case of one of my favorite weapons, a handheld grenade launcher that makes as enjoyable an explosion as I’ve ever encountered in a game. By no means is it entirely free of jank — I had a persistent issue with getting hung up behind the bodies of my fallen enemies, whom Cutter’s SEAL training has apparently not taught him to step over — yet it seldom failed to put a smile on my face. One of the most satisfying tactics is to forgo weapons and just run up and beat the snot out of the evil Talan soldiers, Three Stooges style — one hand holding your victim by the collar, the other whaling away on his face. (For extra fun, use the one you’re beating up as a meat shield against the ones who are shooting at you.) I have to give special props to the artificial intelligence of your opponents, who do a remarkably effective job of coordinating with one another in a firefight, who are even capable of luring you into deadly ambushes if you aren’t careful.
As most of you know, this style of gameplay isn’t usually in my wheelhouse. Yet I had more genuine fun with Outcast than with any action game I’ve played for these histories since Jedi Knight. Just as is the case with that game, Outcast is full of big explosions and flying bodies, but it never gets morbid about it: there’s no blood to be seen, and corpses simply disappear after a few minutes in a puff of energy. (There’s probably some in-story explanation for that, but who can be bothered to look it up?) Meanwhile the difficulty is pitched perfectly for me, occasionally challenging but never crazily punishing, rewarding smart tactics as much or more than fast reflexes.
The eternal videogame pleasure of making stuff go boom…
While it’s very easy for a review like this one to slip into talking about Outcast as a game of two halves, it doesn’t really feel that way in practice. One of its most amazing achievements is how seamless it is to play; one never gets the feeling of shifting from “adventure mode” to “shooter mode,” as one tends to do in so many cross-genre exercises. Everything takes place within the same interface, and everything you do is connected to everything else. There are plenty of dialog puzzles and object-oriented puzzles of the sort you might find in an adventure game, but there are also some physics-based puzzles that wouldn’t have been possible in a point-and-click engine: shoot a pendulum at just the right point in its sway to make it move faster and faster, drop a bomb perfectly into the bottom of a well. Solving a fetch quest might require you to fight or sneak your way past some soldiers to get what you need; then, in turn, the outcome of the quest might be to weaken the enemies you fight later by taking away some of their food supply or reducing the power of their weapons. Most of your enemies do not respawn. This means that, if you invest a lot of time and effort into cleaning up a region, it generally stays that way. Adelpha is a truly reactive world that allows for considerable variance in play styles. You can flat-out go to war on behalf of its oppressed peoples, or you can sneak around, resorting to violence only when absolutely necessary. It’s entirely up to you.
The commitment to verisimilitude in all things led the designers to attempt to provide diegetic explanations for even Outcast’s gamiest aspects. The fact that the Talan you meet are all males — presumably a byproduct of a limited voice-acting budget in the real world — is here the result of a segregated alien society, in which women and children live in a separate enclave except during mating season, when everyone comes together to get their grooves on. The fact that the Talan all know how to speak English is explained as… ah, that would be spoiling things. Moving back onto safer territory, it’s studiously related in the manual that Cutter Slade carries a “miniaturization backpack” around with him, thus explaining why it is that he can hold an infinite quantity of stuff in his inventory. The onscreen HUD as well is explained as merely the view through the “direct bio-neural interface” which Cutter wears at all times.
Of course, this sort of thing can quickly get silly: if the above hasn’t convinced you of that already, the in-game “Gaamsaav” (groan!) crystal that lets Cutter capture a snapshot in time surely will. On the other hand, even it is cleverer in design terms than it first appears. Cutter has to stand still for several seconds in order to use it, which makes it inadvisable to pull out in the middle of a firefight. In this way, Outcast deftly heads off the overuse of a save function which can rob all of the tension out of a game, without annoying and inconveniencing the player too unduly through more draconian remedies like fixed save points.
As this example illustrates, Outcast provides more than just an unusually reactive and thoughtfully realized world: it also succeeds really well as an exercise in playable game design. This is not to say that fomenting a revolution on Adelpha is easy; there is little hand-holding in this wide-open world beyond a useful if sometimes cryptic quest log. Yet the game is never unfair either. If you explore diligently and follow up on all of the information you’re given, it’s perfectly soluble. I got through it without a single hint, although it did take me a few weeks of evenings and weekend afternoons to do so. The mere fact that I was motivated enough to put in the time says a lot. I had the feeling throughout that this was a game that had been played by lots of people before it was released, that it earnestly wanted to be played and enjoyed by me now, that it was a game whose designers had thought deeply about the player’s experience. What might first seem like an aggressively uncompromising game proves to be full of thoughtful little affordances for the player who deigns to pay careful attention to what’s going on, such as the portable transporter devices that you can use to jump around to arbitrary points within a region and the handy lexicon of unfamiliar alien phrases that is automatically compiled for you as you talk to more and more Talan. It isn’t even necessary to finish all of the quests in order to finish Outcast; much of the content is optional.
Exploring Cutter’s inventory.
I’ve expended a fair number of words on Outcast by now, but I’m not sure I’ve succeeded in capturing the sui generis quality that makes it so memorable. Needless to say, no game arises in a vacuum, and we can definitely find precedents for and possible influences upon this one if we look for them. Most obviously, it can be slotted into the long and proud European tradition of open-world action-adventures, dating back to 1980s classics like Mercenary and Exile. Then, too, it’s not hard to detect a whiff of Tomb Raider’s influence in its behind-the-back perspective and its occasional jumping puzzles. Outcast’s unflagging commitment to verisimilitude and diegesis brings to mind Looking Glass’s brilliant System Shock. The fetch quests might have come out of an Ultima game, some of the puzzles out of Myst. Yet Outcast blends it all in such a seamless way that it ends up entirely its own thing. It is, if you’ll forgive the cliché, more than the sum of its incredibly disparate parts. It shouldn’t work, but it does. It’s interactive narrative at its purest, in which the gameplay exists to serve the story and the world rather than the other way around.
“Outcast is a game made with passion, with no constraints of being tied to a particular genre or to please a particular group of people,” says Franck Sauer. “We just did the game we wanted to make, and that was it.” The end result is as groundbreaking and inspiring an attempt to make an action game where the action feels like it matters as is Half-Life. Indeed, if we’re being honest, I had a heck of a lot more fun with Outcast than I ever did with Half-Life. Personally, I’ll take the chatty and funny Cutter Slade over Gordan Freeman the stoic cipher any day.
Despite all of Appeal’s efforts to give Outcast appeal across the Atlantic Ocean by making it an English-first production, and despite a significant Stateside advertising campaign, it proved a hard sell in an American market where successful games were by now largely confined to a handful of hard-and-fast genres. It sold only about 50,000 copies in the United States after its release in the summer of 1999. Thankfully, it did considerably better in Europe, where it sold 350,000 copies. Combined with a relatively low final production bill — Sauer estimates that Appeal brought the whole game in for about €1.5 million, even with the cost of hiring an entire symphony orchestra and choir for a week — this total was enough to place the game right on the bubble between commercial failure and success.
After dithering for a while, Infogrames agreed to fund a sequel, on the condition that Appeal would make a version for the Sony PlayStation 2 as well as for personal computers, with more action and less adventure. That project muddled along for a little over a year, only to be cancelled by the publisher in 2001 as part of a program of corporate retrenching. Appeal shut down soon after, and that seemed to be that for Outcast.
Yet the game retained a warm place in the hearts of the three friends who had originally conceived it, as it did in those of a small but committed cult of fans, some of whom discovered it on abandonware sites only years after its release. Franck Sauer, Yves Grolet, and Yann Robert were eventually able to win back the rights to the game from their old publisher. In 2014, they made a lightly remastered version called Outcast 1.1; in 2017, they made a full-fledged remake called Outcast: Second Contact; in 2024, there came the long-delayed sequel, Outcast: A New Beginning. Being stuck in the ludic past as I am, I haven’t played any of these, but all have been fairly well-received by reviewers. Kudos to the creators and the fans for refusing to let a very special game die.
As for me, I’ll try to keep Outcast in mind the next time I’m tempted to pass judgment on a game without giving it an honest try. For games, like people, deserve to be judged on their own merits, not on the basis of their peer group.
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Sources: The books Principals of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation (3rd ed.) by Michael O’Rourke and Outcast: Prima’s Official Strategy Guide by Joel Durham, Jr.; Computer Gaming World of November 1999; PC Format Gold of Winter 1997; PC Gamer of November 1997 and April 1998; Next Generation of January 1998; PC Games of December 1998.
Where to Get It: There are two versions of Outcast available for digital purchase: the remastered Outcast 1.1 and the remade Outcast: Second Contact. If you buy the former, you gain access to the original 1999 version of the game — the one that I played for this article — as a “bonus goodie.” Should you decide to play this version, do note that it’s afflicted by one ugly glitch on newer machines, involving the lighthouse in the region of Okasankaar. (Strictly speaking, you don’t absolutely have to solve this puzzle to finish the game, but doing so does make it easier.) Your best bet is to make momentary use of the cheat mode when you find yourself needing to repair the lighthouse in a way that Lara Croft might approve of. On my computer at least, every other part of the game worked fine, the occasional bit of random graphical jank excepted.
Hi all. This is just a short update regarding content I’ve published elsewhere. Both involve Bee by Emily Short, which is one of my all-time favorite works of interactive fiction. The first is a lengthy “let’s play” thread at the Interactive Fiction Community Forum. There, I discuss passages from Bee and draw conclusions regarding theme, […]
The post Elsewher
22 days ago
Hi all. This is just a short update regarding content I’ve published elsewhere. Both involve Bee by Emily Short, which is one of my all-time favorite works of interactive fiction.
The first is a lengthy “let’s play” thread at the Interactive Fiction Community Forum. There, I discuss passages from Bee and draw conclusions regarding theme, character, and story. It’s a long read, but I think people have enjoyed it.
Second: this is mentioned in the thread itself, but I’d like to call attention to a podcast episode, as well. Callie Smith returns! We had a good time with it, as Callie is a fan, too.
Thanks to the incredible generosity of our community, the 2025 Colossal Fund has already reached its $8,000 goal! We are deeply grateful to everyone who has contributed so far.
As always, 80% of Colossal Fund proceeds will be distributed among the top two-thirds of IFComp finishers. This year marked the second-highest number of entries in IFComp history! That means more authors will recei
25 days ago
Thanks to the incredible generosity of our community, the 2025 Colossal Fund has already reached its $8,000 goal! We are deeply grateful to everyone who has contributed so far.
As always, 80% of Colossal Fund proceeds will be distributed among the top two-thirds of IFComp finishers. This year marked the second-highest number of entries in IFComp history! That means more authors will receive a share of the cash prize pool, but with the funds spread across more recipients, each individual prize is a little smaller than we anticipated.
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