Planet Interactive Fiction Last Update: Friday, 28. March 2025 22:01

If you'd looked at me in 2000, you would have said "Andrew Plotkin is a young author of award-winning interactive fiction. He has a long IF-writing career ahead of him." And I would have agreed! I might have had a notion of branching out -- my IF career had made almost zero money, so maybe I should take my experience into the game industry in other ways. But really I wasn't thinking along those lines. I had a tolerable day job; writing IF was a rewarding hobby.

But this picture of me as "prolific IF author" was already yellowing around the edges. Sure, I wrote lots of games in the 21st century. I did Dreamhold, which was big and deliberately retro, but after that I didn't really have an idea for a big game. I entered Delightful Wallpaper in the 2006 IFComp; but after that it felt weird to enter IFComp, even anonymously. (I entered again in 2011 but that was a collaborative project.) I wrote a few short games for jams and showcases.

It just felt like I was pushing myself. Looking for reasons to get myself off my ass and write a game. Because if I wasn't writing games, what kind of game writer was I?

Nothing screams "writing accountability" like a Kickstarter, right? There's Hadean Lands in a nutshell. "It'll take a year," I said, blithely extrapolating from my previous games. (Dreamhold and S&W were of similar scale. I landed each of those in under a year, holding down day jobs.)

Hadean Lands took four years. A year of which, I admit, I spent avoiding Hadean Lands. When I finally buckled down to implementing the game, I still procrastinated on writing the story. If the four main characters you encounter feel somewhat sketchy and peripheral to the game, that's because I had a terrible time focusing on them.

I guess I was pushing myself there, too. My games have never been big on NPC interaction -- S&W is the honorable but eccentric exception. In HL I put four character roles up on the whiteboard and told myself, "Now you have to do character writing!" Oy. Yeah, I did it; I don't hate it; but it's not what people talk about when they talk about Hadean Lands.

What kind of a writer am I?

In a story -- see, this is character writing -- a grizzled Beat poet in a flammable hat would have leaped out of a bush, grabbed my lapels, and shouted "Wrong question, dumbass!" And then set his hat on fire and danced off down the street singing the Marseillaise, or possibly "Pianoman", I haven't decided which.

That did not happen. Instead, I got together with some folks and started the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation.

That hardly sounds like an answer to "What kind of writer are you?" But that's the point, right? I leaped into being an IF community organizer. A couple of years later I was launching a conference. It was great. It was a natural growth of my long-time role in the IF community. I had cred; I could use it to make good things happen. I could make games too if I felt like it.

I am skimming the sore spots here, of course. I still wanted to be a person who made games. I still felt blocked on writing. I just had other work which was satisfying in a different way. The true sage would have painted landscapes and chopped wood, but knowing that doesn't help.

Last month I stepped down as an IFTF officer. I'm still a conference volunteer (did we mention registration is open?) but I'm not the showrunner. I am actively resisting show-running decisions. This is harder than it sounds.

What kind of community organizer am I? At least this time I can call myself a dumbass and set my own hat on fire.

So anyway, I played Wanderstop.

...Comic timing demands I should end this post right there. Sorry! I really do have a couple of things to say about Wanderstop.

But first, the disclosure: I worked on Wanderstop! A little bit, four years ago. You can catch me in the credits as "Tools Programming Consultant".

The truth is that I didn't work on the game at all. I gave the developers some guidance on the dialogue scripting tool they were hammering together. As I recall, I added some features to make their editing loop easier.

I played the 2021 prototype for a few minutes. I saw a version of the protagonist; I made tea with the Big Wacky Tea Machine. I glanced at the pages of dialogue that existed then, but I was thinking about the script format, not the content.

So I am writing this review as a player, not a developer. Or this review-like object, or whatever it is I do when I write about games.

(What kind of a game reviewer am I?)

So anyway, I played Wanderstop. A game about "change and tea", the press kit says. A game that Davey Wreden poured "[his] absolute heart and soul into", Wreden says. A game about a championship sword fighter who is stuck in a tea-shop time-management sim and it is pissing her off. That is Wanderstop.

Nobody's surprised that the Beginner's Guide guy has written another intensely personal game. The question is how it hits for people, and that's hard to answer because how it hits is also intensely personal. Which is why I just wrote a thousand-word essay on my life 25 years after Shade.

I don't know. I am up for a game about burnout, exhaustion, and feeling blocked. I am up for a game about the pen being too heavy to lift. But Alta, Wanderstop's fighter, is not me. Alta talks about control, about working harder than anybody else. Alta sees herself as being the best. She can't deal with losing a fight because she has no other identity. (This isn't a spoiler, it's the intro narration.) She can't tell any other story about herself than "I am the best" or "I will use this setback to come back even better."

I never wanted to be the best. Oh, it's nice to be on top. I felt a sting when Shade placed tenth in IFComp. But that's not definitional, it's not my story. I guess the story I tell is about impressing people, surprising people, doing something nobody thought of before. Making games people talk about. (Shade was that!)

"My next project must be even more impressive and surprising than my last one." That's the pen-shaped boulder I have trouble carrying. Of course when I put it that baldly, it's just a flaming hat. Why do I do this to myself? Why can't Alta just relax and make some tea? This is a tea-making game.

But Alta, or Wreden, is carrying a different sword-shaped rock.

It's interesting, isn't it? The Beginner's Guide felt universal -- we all got it. Not all fans are like that; most fans aren't like that; but there's always that one fan. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for the unreliable narrator.

Wanderstop is expressive and personal, but it's not universal. Alta tells me her obsessions but I don't feel them myself. I can make the tea with her, I can drink the tea with her, but I can't carry her sword. I mean, I can't fail to carry her sword.

There's one bit where you go to sweep up some leaves -- this is an optional time-management task -- and Alta goes martial-arts ham on the sweeping. Because fighter reflexes. In that moment, I felt myself in her skin. But it's a tiny thing.

Really, half the game's character work comes out in animation and body language. The moments when Alta levers herself up off the bench and heads down to the shop: I could feel that in my thighs, every time.

(The lead animator mentions that in one prototype, the intro scene was playable and you could do sword slashes. But: "I’m very glad we cut this, I think it would have set very incorrect expectations for players." I agree! But the contrast would have said something. Wandersong, no relation, started with exactly this sword-then-no-sword intro -- it really set the scene.)

I suspect that some percentage of players will walk out of Wanderstop saying "Yes, exactly that, that's exactly how it is!" Others, like me, will come out saying "Huh. I guess that's how it is for some people."

Here's what I didn't come out saying: "I didn't know how it was for you, but now I get it." Well, maybe you don't get my story either.

I called this a review. Well, no, I didn't; that's what you called it. But I'll go along.

A review would start by saying that Wanderstop is sharp and funny and chill and easy to get drawn into. Alta is a great character, which is good, because her character is the whole of the game. She sits and drinks tea and tells you stories about her life. (Whenever you decide she should, which is up to you.) The stories are solid; they're a life.

Boro, I dunno about. He's a tea monk. (Yes, Wanderstop was in progress before A Psalm for the Wild-Built was published.) He offers an alternative to everything you're going through: it is "make a cup of tea". He gives you space, literally. It's good that he's around but I don't think I'll miss him.

The other game characters are, well, not so much characters. They're questions directed at Alta. Precise jabs at her world-view, from every direction. Exactly what Boro isn't. They're fun to interact with, but for how you react to them, not for themselves.

(I'll grant the kid as an exception, but that's the last chapter, so no spoilers.)

It's a beautiful tea shop in a beautiful clearing. Then the light changes -- time passes, though not seasons -- and it's beautiful in a different way. This goes on. I will miss that, now that it's over.

I wanted the gardening and tea-brewing mechanics to have more surprises. But I didn't go looking for surprises, so that's my own damn fault. The game is perfectly clear that everything, up to and including the tea, is optional. I followed the notebook carefully so I got a game with notebook recipes. I'm positive there's more to find, both in the gardens and the tea machine.

And then all the stuff I said above, about how I don't think the story will hit with everybody. One ambivalent paragraph at the end after all the enthusiastic good stuff. If you just want to know whether to play Wanderstop, please pretend I did that!

What kind of a person am I? I don't think Alta ever asks that question. Her character note is "I don't want to be that person!" Very different.

I write these blog posts. I'm proud of that. I do open-source work for the IF community. That's a whole other story with its own hangups, but I do it. I help run a conference. I do not, at present, have much of a job. (A bit of contract work; could use more; DM me.)

I have twenty years' worth of notes for "Hey, a game could work like this. That would be surprising and impressive and people would talk about it." Mostly they haven't turned into games. I could close this editor window, push this post out, and go straight to writing chapter one of the tea game.

Will I? Maybe after lunch.

(Yes, my latest notes file is titled tea-game. It's not this tea game, nor is it Universe For Sale, nor any of the other tea/coffee/brewing games out there. I can write a tea game if I want to. Just gotta pick up that pen--)

On Thursday, March 27, 2025, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of interactive fiction at Patreon and Ko-fi.

A Train to Piccadilly (2024) by Marco Innocenti

It’s 1987. You play as Maksim Gromov, a revolutionist. The war has not broken you. You learn the Boys from the East discovered a space-time where the Soviets didn’t conquer Europe after the Reich fell. Other Gromovs, searching for the Boys, found a Pop Swatch watch, a Eurythmics vinyl record, and a boxed copy of Trinity. Use them well and restore this world.

This was an entry in PunyComp 2024 where it took 2nd place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Hinterlands: Delivered! (2023) by Cody Gaisser

You have only one more package to deliver before clocking out for the weekend, but your spacecraft’s tank is almost empty. Your Spacer’s Atlas says there’s a fueling station on a little planet called Fruppa IX (you’ve never heard of it). No need to worry, though – nothing could possibly go wrong here!

This game was an entry in the Classic division of ParserComp 2023 where it took 5th place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Words of Power (2002) by Stark Springs

In this fantasy game, you play as Thea Armstrong, a physics major who touched the wrong lever and got herself transported to the Kingdom of Ard in another world. You soon learn about magical Words of Power, about Gatestones, and that Dr. John Baxter, who mysteriously vanished two years ago, is known here as Gion the Earthling.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Inhumane (1985) by Andrew Plotkin (writing as “Infobom”)

In this parody of Infocom’s Infidel, you play as a hapless adventurer who wants to pillage a pyramid. But the voice of the pharaoh has a better idea: if you can die in all of his death-traps, he’ll let you take his gold coffin.

The author wrote the original version of this game in BASIC for the Apple II when he was fourteen going on fifteen, so don’t expect this game to be up to his usual standards. It is what it is.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Anolelona (2025) by Caleb Wilson

In this fantasy game, you play as Lohihm Tung, a temporary factotum of Lozengy while Anolelona is away. It’s your duty to assist new residents on their way to Choirmount, but Anolelona said that’s a dead end. They’re trying to find somewhere else to go.

This game was a participant in Shufflecomp 2024.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Pizza Delivery (2018) by Brendan Fong

In this absurdly simple bare-bones slice-of-life game, you play as a delivery boy. You need to deliver a pizza from Patti’s Pizzeria to someone on 1000 Mansell.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Sand-Dancer (2010) by Aaron Reed and Alexei Othenin-Girard

In this game, you play as Nakaibito “Knock” Morales. You just drove your pickup truck deep into the desert and crashed into a saguaro. What were you thinking? Were you thinking at all? Grandma said you have three animal guardians who watch over you. Tonight, you could really use their help.

It’s an example game for Aaron Reed’s book Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7. At the 2010 XYZZY Awards, it won the Best Supplemental Materials award.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Tableaux (2025) by Dissolved

This surreal story, inspired by songs, begins with you, a lonely woman, attending a very fancy party. But after you enter, the golden door vanishes behind you. The wondrous ballroom and its crowd are curiously grey and indistinct. Something’s not right.

Content warnings: implied depression, implied gore, suicide/loss of identity, debt slavery.

This story was an entry in ShuffleComp 2024 where it took 16th place overall and was awarded Best Use of Songs.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

I am delighted to pass the word that NarraScope 2025 has posted its schedule and its registration link. Come see us in Philadelphia on June 20-22!

We've also announced our keynote speakers -- yes, this year we have two of them:

Vision Keynote: Hidetaka “SWERY” Suehiro

Saturday’s keynote will be delivered by SWERY, the internationally-acclaimed designer of cult favorite Deadly Premonition, the surreal horror-adventure that earned a Guinness World Record for its polarizing reception.

Local Hero Keynote: Dain Saint

Sunday’s Local Hero keynote will be delivered by Dain Saint (he/they), a Philadelphia-based storyteller and artist who has produced games through Cipher Prime Studios, interactive theatre with Obvious Agency, and journalism with the Philadelphia Inquirer.

(I'm quoting from our announcement mailing list. The keynote news went out last night.)

And of course the schedule has, what is it, about 75 other speakers listed? We've scaled up the conference this year. More rooms, more talks, more kinds of talks -- there's going to be some papers from the academic side of things. So we're aiming to scale up attendance as well.

The usual Friday workshops will happen, although that schedule isn't set yet. We will also have an on-site NarraScope Showcase event on Friday afternoon. So if you can make it to Philadelphia, please consider making it a three-day weekend.

If you can't make it to Philadelphia, you can register to attend online. We're keenly aware of the current economic and political issues, particularly for people travelling from outside the US. Rest assured that our hybrid model is still in full swing. All Sat/Sun talks will be livestreamed.

(For those of you waiting for the 2024 talk videos: we are very grateful for your patience. Now that reg is open, Matt has promised to spend some time this week plowing through the video backlog.)

Earlybird registration prices run through April 11. There's also info for conference hotel rates, which have various cutoff dates and availability limits. So plan early.

As always, I look forward to seeing you at NarraScope. Since I'm not running the show this year, I'll even have time to sit in on the talks and chat with people. Excitement!

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Tuesday, Feb 24, 2025 over Zoom. Andrew Stephens,, anjchang,  Stephen Eric Jablonski,  Mike Stage,  Matt Griffin,  Josh Grams,  Hugh,, Michael Hilborn, Doug Orleans, and zarf welcomed newcomers Abby and Ender Minyard. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.

The original 2009/2010 PR-IF members Hilborn, Zarf, and Doug were present. Zarf has passed on running the PR-IF meetings to Mike Stage. The current plan is to front-load some discussion topics from a thread off the google group. Today’s meeting will have two discussion topics. After the discussion topics, we’ll plan on a more freestyle discussion. The proposed format is still in flux, and we might alternate pre-planned topics with freestyle meetings as well.

Matt Griffin, Narrascope, organizer shared updates on the conference. Matt also just published an interview with Jordan Magnuss in the latest ChoiceBeat Zine 13.

Andrew shared that last year’s spring thing game, Launch of The Marigold, won awards for bunch of categories in the IFDB Best of 2024 Awards. Congratulations Andrew on winning Audience Awards for the Best Sci-Fi, Best Adventure, and Best Artwork! Go play it if you haven’t!

Doug shared that Ryan Veeder released his patreon game for beta testing a real-time game.

Josh read Jordan’s Game Poems book (it’s free) and it seemed like he had some fairly concrete ideas to talk about, and we’ll try to talk about it next time.

Josh showed a quick overview of Sunless Sea (wiki)and StoryNexus’s arrangement and point out a couple patterns in the visualizer https://joshgrams.com/visualizer/ We looked at the storylets and how the different choices are analyzed in the story. Discussion about which things are encoded in/gated by the story engine versus the gameplay of where the locations are placed that and enemies, that can be observed with the visualizer. StoryNexus Reference Guide. https://sunlesssea.fandom.com/wiki/Map#Map_Generation

Hugh talked about the unification of parser and choice. He showed a cool demo of the experience where the objects afford reactions, and the player can make choices to interact with the objects within the text and also in a choice menu at the bottom.

We discussed ways of reducing the number choices when there are a lot of things that could potentially be acted on. Hugh showed a demo that offered a middleground between the tradeoff of choices in parser games ( there’s the opportunity to interact with many items) vs in choice-based games ( there is often only a limited selection). Very cool demo! Mentioned for having many choices: Slay the Princess

Frontloading is a topic in itself. For “rogue-like” IF with frequent death, the start of the game had better be interesting. For more “plot-based” IF that is designed to be played once, you can ease into the story.

There are a few chat questions we didn’t get to that might be good topics for future meetings or the google group:

• We discussed what to do when people take offense at the subject matter of your IF game? Has that ever happened to anyone here? It can be discouraging to authors. One of the chat answers “I know there’s been a bunch of back-and-forth in fandom communities about what kinds of stories people “should” write. Another answer “write whatever you think needs writing”
• Potential for a chatbot for https://rez-lang.com coded with AI?
• What is the story arc / plot structure (if such a thing exists) of a storylet? One reference — storylets are more an implementation detail that’s separate from the story structure- see Emily Short’s Pacing Storylet Structures recommended for reference.

This morning, Cyan updated Myst (the 2020 release) to include the Age of Rime. This is a free update on Steam (Mac/Win) and Quest; the Xbox update is in progress.

Do I need to say more than that? Sure, why not. Context is life.

Rime originally appeared as a bonus Age in RealMyst (2000), the 3D-engine remake of Myst (1993). Rime was meant to provide some connective tissue between the stories of Myst and Riven. The Rime journals revealed a bit of Atrus and Catherine's backstory. They also alluded to the book-enhancing geodes which had appeared in Riven. Solving Rime's crystal-matching puzzle gave a glimpse of Riven as a reward.

(The crystal puzzle was then reiterated in Myst 4 (2004), providing even more series continuity. Yay continuity.)

For all that, the big draw of Rime was its beauty: an Age of ice, stars, and colorful auroras. We all hoped for a visit to Rime in the snazzed-up Unreal-based Myst 2020. Sadly, it wasn't there. Cyan mentioned it in 2022 and 2023, but without any real news of progress. Riven came and went; still no Rime.

But! A week ago Cyan dropped a tantalizing post on their social media:

The quoted link no longer exists, but for a few days it led to an ARG-style web-hacking game. The fans went nuts.

Cyan likes to drop these mini-ARGs occasionally as treats for their hardcore fans. They never contain serious announcements, and they never get much notice outside the Cyan Discord. (If you are on the Discord, check out the #🤔-ciphers channel for exhaustive discussion.) The endpoint was a bunch of glitched images -- I think this link is still viewable -- which alluded to the Rime journals.

Fun times, but, as I said, not a serious announcement. That came Tuesday in the form of a press release and social post.

[...] Fans can look forward to exploring Rime when the new Age becomes available for the Meta Quest platform as well as Windows and Mac systems this Thursday, March 20th at 10am Pacific, with an update for the Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S versions of the game to follow.

Only one problem: I'm at GDC this week. I had the extra fun of downloading eight gigabytes of Myst app to my laptop over hotel wifi. And then a four-megabyte update today. I fully expect to see a room-service charge for bandwidth when I check out.

Context, schmontext. How was the Age?

It's gorgeous! Ice! Stars! Auroras! I am satisfied. No spoilers beyond that.

The puzzles, journals, and geography have all been expanded a bit. Just as with Riven, it's the Rime you remember, but rethought and with added detail.

I admit that I was hoping for a bit of connective tissue between the Myst series and Cyan's next project. This is a "new game in the D'ni-verse", unconnected to the Atrus family saga. That's all they've said about it.

(Except that one of Cyan's recent merch pages contains "PREFALL" as an acrostic. As in, before the fall of the D'ni civilization. The fans went nuts, I tell you.)

Anyway, sneaking some clues into this Rime release would have been structurally apt. But they didn't do it. Or if they did, it was too subtle for me. Ah well.

I guess we'll have to wait for Mysterium. Check back in August!

My previous post is needed for context.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the game but the panel is cool. From Doctor Who Magazine.

I’ve observed before that sci-fi has often fared better than fantasy when it comes to early adventure games (the opposite is true of CRPGs). Fantasy objects tend to be designed without any kind of rules, meaning that the magic pendant that needs to be waved somewhere needs to be waved everywhere since there’s no method to work out what’s going on. Science fiction tends to be better-behaved in that respect, and even with interdimensional teleportation etc. the authors seem to feel more obliged to make it clear how various gizmos operate.

That’s not the case here.

To continue where I left off, I had a locked door I couldn’t get by and a box I couldn’t open. It turns out the lake (that I filled the flask from) was the culprit.

I had tried a number of ways to “dive” into the lake with no joy. I tried taking the heavy gold brick and jumping in the lake while holding it before using it on the wall (there’s a puzzle like this in Sunset over Savannah). I thought maybe that’d have an effect since jumping into water with the powder causes them to explode so maybe this was tracked as well? … but no, that wasn’t it. Despite the game insisting repeatedly it doesn’t know the word DOWN, it does, in that exact spot: you can SWIM DOWN.

The silver key is sufficient to both open the box (crystals full of energy) and unlock the door.

To the east here is a Store Room with a lever where I struggled for a while trying to push or pull it, when you’re just supposed to TAKE it. I don’t know what it does; I carried it the rest of the game, and I assume it got used passively somewhere. The note will be useful shortly, but the next leap is to realize that the beam of light is not some sort of functional thing you’re supposed to interrupt to cause an effect; instead it means there’s another exit you can take, that is, GO BEAM.

Typing INSERT CRYSTALS will cause THE WHIRR OF MACHINES SOMEWHERE. Somewhere is just back in the storage room (with the mysterious lever) where an opening appeared; past that is a wire fence.

CUT FENCE (or SNIP FENCE) works here — it turns out SNIFF was really SNIP, which I think is a new one. Then there’s a room with a safe, and the safe has a dial that turns from 01 to 20. 0519 backwards can’t be 9-1-5-0 (there’s no 0 on the dial) so the appropriate way to read it is DIAL 19 followed by DIAL 05:

That’s essentially it except for one last parser struggle. Taking the key all the way back to the HOLE at the start, I tried INSERT KEY, PUT KEY, etc. with no luck; it turns out I needed REPLACE KEY.

I have no idea what the lever was for, or what the button on the bracelet that we’d been toting around the entire game was for. The whole romp was only loosely connected and only made sense as some sort of challenge delivered by an Evil Entity (maybe Human Resources thought we’d been slacking on the whole Time Warden job thing).

This almost could have been a satisfying game still, but the time I spent with parser troubles — especially the game deceptively claiming it didn’t know the word DOWN — really knocked it out of proportion. I can ignore parser issues if they’re light as a percentage of gameplay; say I spend only 2% of my time thinking about the parser (maybe it’s a long game, so there’s still somewhere I get stuck a while, but it doesn’t linger as the main gameplay). Here, the overarching puzzles were simple enough that the majority of my time was spent on parser trouble.

The biggest issue is the violation of trust: the first time the parser does a horrible hiccup, I start to have my doubts about if patience is worthwhile: should I treat the puzzles as puzzles, or is the next one I get stuck on going to be equally more the fault of the game than myself?

Still, this game was unpublished; would some of these elements have been tweaked on their way to market? At the very least the bottom bar would have been changed to read BUG-BYTE (like The Scepter did); maybe the person responsible for checking if the tape loaded correctly would have fixed a typo or two while they were at it. Since Bug-Byte rejected the game outright it’s impossible to know. One certainly gets the impression of the cheaper-end cassettes of this period that the goal was to do as little testing as possible.

If nothing else, when we see Wadsworth again he’ll be with an entirely different company on an entirely different computer. Certainly his later games feel like much slicker productions, so maybe the technical freedom helped.

Wadsworth had already hopped over to Artic by the end of 1982 as they published his game Invasion Force for ZX Spectrum. This is essentially a variant of the “boss fight” stage in the arcade game Phoenix. Screenshot via Mobygames.

10 days ago

After he wrote and published The Scepter with Bug-Byte, Simon Wadsworth went on to write a second game (today’s selection) and sent it in.

From Personal Computer World, November 1982.

Time Warden never was published:

It was written using the same source code structure [as The Scepter]. I’d forgotten all about this game until sorting through a pile of old cassette tapes looking for my copy of The Scepter.

In this adventure you play the Time Warden. While you have been away on vacation and the Key of Time has been lost on the planet Syrius 5. You have 250 turns to recover the key before the end of the Universe.

Wadsworth went on after this to publish with Artic (Adventure E: The Golden Apple and Adventure F: The Eye of Bain), taking over the series from Charles Cecil, so this game has some historical importance despite falling into the author’s own memory hole.

DVD cover of the last of the Key to Time serials, via IMDB.

The Key of Time reference makes it clear this is an offshoot of the Dr. Who universe. There is such a thing as a Time Warden in Dr. Who lore but you have to jump up to 1988 and the comics to see it; the Warden shows up in the same comic as one of the foes of the Transformers (Death’s Head) so is only roughly canonical.

From Doctor Who Magazine 135. That’s Death’s Head holding the Seventh Doctor. Death’s Head later had a run-in with the Fantastic Four.

While Time Warden doesn’t stick to canon like Dr. Who Adventure (at least so far, I’m not done yet), “Syrius 5” is a reference, as Sirius IV showed up in the television show during Frontier in Space (Third Doctor, 1973).

Prison Governor: I’m releasing you into the custody of this commissioner. He will fly you back to Sirius IV to stand trial.
Dr. Who: And may I ask what I am supposed to have done there?
The Master: Defrauding the Sirius IV Dominion Bank, evasion of planetary income tax, assault and battery committed on the person of a Sirius IV police commissioner, taking a spaceship without authority, and piloting said spaceship without payment of tax and insurance. Landing said spaceship on an unauthorized area on Sirius III, need I go on?
Dr. Who: I seem to be quite the master criminal, don’t I? You don’t really say the you believe all this nonsense do you, Governor? Whatever credentials he’s shown you are forged.
The Master: Oh come Doctor, you know the game’s up. Why not admit defeat? You know, this man always works with an accomplice. A girl. I’ve got her under lock and key in my ship. Well Doctor, are you coming quietly?

You start, as the author already indicated, returning from a “vacation” finding things have gone horribly wrong. You’d think there’d be a special line for this sort of thing, but I guess we were out-of-dimension.

The “STABALISER” has a small hole where I assume the key is suppose to go. If you try to drop an item here the game says “NOT HERE” as “VIBRATIONS ARE NOT GOOD FOR TIME STABALISERS.”

I did get to inadvertently test out the time limit early because the very start is easy to get stuck in. There’s the “wardens room”, a “grand room” with a “teleporter”, and the teleporter itself, which has a control panel that needs an I.D. CARD which we don’t have. All we start the game with is a BRACELET that has a button on it (I have yet to get the button to do anything).

I ended up having to go into Patience Mode and dutifully made my verb list; fortunately, the game is quite clear about if a verb is understood or not.

The parser only understands the first three letters of each word, so SWING is actually SWITCH and UNLIGHT is really just UNLOCK. I’m unclear if SNIFF is really that word or something else (surely SMELL would be more likely if that was important?)

In the process of doing all that and starting to apply every verb on every item, the countdown to doom started to close in so I waited for the axe to fall.

After enough brute force I realized that you can MOVE TELEPORTER. I was clearly visualizing it wrong.

The PASSAGEWAY is then revealed. Behind it is a store room with a shovel and ID card.

(Even with the “bigger on the inside” aspect, is the TARDIS really the sort of thing that can be shoved around? And if it isn’t the TARDIS — and the Dr. Who references are very approximate so that’s fair — wouldn’t a smaller version not be able to hide a passage?)

No reason to linger more, I suppose; using INSERT CARD while in the teleporter causes an “odd feeling” and upon leaving you find yourself somewhere else.

The planet consists (so far) of a mostly linear set of puzzles. To the south there are some bricks on a road, and if you LOOK you find a GOLD one.

Given this is probably a Wizard of Oz reference, I can again assert the author was just not worrying about canon. Mind you, the extended Dr. Who canon technically has the Time Lord in the same universe as Star Trek and the Transformers.

Going a bit farther south there is an unfinished wall. My verb list helpfully had BUILD on it so I tried BUILD WALL, finding out the gold brick was too heavy and caused the whole thing to fall over. This made a hole, allowing entrance to a swamp.

The swamp forms a very minor maze of sorts (not really, but I still had to drop objects to map it); the important thing is that you can DIG in two spots to reveal some BLUE POWDER and YELLOW POWDER.

Taking the prizes and heading back to the road, there’s a branch leading to a field. The field has a lake and also has a branch going up to a mountain with a cave.

Jumping into the lake with the powder is deadly:

This is intended as a hint, rather than as a punishment to the player.

The cave has a flask and a boulder. The boulder is described as having something behind it but MOVE is ineffective.

This is where the powder comes into play. You need to

a.) drop both powders off — you can do it right at the boulder
b.) go back to the lake and FILL FLASK
c.) return with the full flask and EMPTY FLASK (again, the verb list was helpful in making it so I didn’t have to hunt for the right syntax)

As long as both powders are in place an explosion will destroy the boulder and you can go in further. (If only one of the powders is there, it will just dissolve.)

The box does not want to OPEN (“I CANT DO THAT…YET.”) and going farther south leads to a locked door.

I am now stuck here, with no key (time-linked or otherwise). I assume I missed something with the bracelet/button combo possibly? Or I forgot to dig in a spot. Given the opening with moving the teleporter I don’t want to assume it will be easy to make progress, but I certainly don’t want hints yet.

(My previous posts on this game are needed for context.)

I’m hovering near the ending, but I think it will be better for me to finish before I give all the discoveries. I wanted here to focus on something I found relatively late — so late I suspect I might only have one or two puzzles to go — and it ended up being a uniquely horrendous parser moment that’s worth close attention.

Title screen from the Commodore 64 version of the game.

This goes back to the above-ground part of the game around the mansion. I had by then discovered a few secrets inside, but I had already discarded the shed outside as being a mere container of objects and not of secrets. This is for good reason:

The only thing that seemed somewhat suspicious, the FLOOR BOARDS, did not even exist as a noun.

Here’s the issue: while the game does not let you refer to BOARDS or FLOOR BOARDS (following the exact spelling of the game), it does let you refer to FLOORBOARDS.

The “nothing under” is already pretty deceptive but at least the noun her is acknowledged (note this problem wouldn’t have occurred had it been a five-letter parser rather than a six-letter parser!) But wait, there’s more! … if you try to LIFT FLOORBOARDS the game simply says

YOU CAN’T DO THAT.

which the game normally does anyway for any other use of the verb! However, if you happen to also be holding the crowbar from underground, the game passively uses the crowbar and you can get inside (using either LIFT or PRY).

To recap, this is spectacularly bad in multiple layers:

a.) first off, the noun conveyed in the text is not the same spelling as what the parser is required

b.) even if you have the right spelling, the verb LOOK UNDER acts as if it doesn’t hide anything

c.) even if you have the right action, if you aren’t holding the crowbar you get a deceptive message

I’ve seen instances of each of these three (noun mismatch, deceptive response to a descriptive action, deceptive response to an action the game doesn’t consider valid) but I’m failing to remember a case where I had all three at once.

I needed a walkthrough. If this was one of a restricted number of rooms I might have persisted a bit longer with at least my noun troubles, but keep in mind this is one location of many, and in many cases room description elements are just there for color.

The only thing that saves the moment slightly is the roaring sound. That’s supposed to indicate that this is very close a lava flow river that is below. Heading north leads to…

YOU ARE NOW IN A TREMENDOUS UNDERGROUND CHAMBER THROUGH WHICH A RAGING LAVA RIVER FLOWS. THE RIVER ORIGINATES FROM A LARGE CRACK IN THE EASTERN WALL OF THE CHAMBER ANO DISAPPEARS INTO A LARGE ABYSS IN THE FLOOR TO THE WEST. TO THE NORTH, A RICKETY WOODEN FOOTBRIDGE SPANS THE LAVA RIVER ABOUT 10′ ABOVE ITS SURFACE. STEAM RISES FROM THE RIVER ANO FILLS THE CHAMBER. A PATH LEADS SOUTH.

…which is vivid but wasn’t quite worth it.

Past the bridge is a maze. At least stalling on the “floor boards” puzzle gave me enough time I already had this printout from another puzzle by the time I arrived at the maze.

Likely my finale in my next post!

This continues from my previous post.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure games.

I’ve revealed enough of the map that it is time for an update. Last time I left off on entering the mansion depicted on the title screen.

Unlike, say, Windmere Estate, there’s not many rooms at the house itself; the underground is where most of the rooms are. The game also seems to keep up a fairly high room-to-important-object number, and I have to add the “seems to” because there’s details in the room description that the parser technically recognizes. That doesn’t mean anything will happen with them, though!

Just to illustrate the inherent issue, here’s me attempting to get something to happen in the hallway with stairs and a statue:

On the map I marked a chandelier in a drawing room just because it was the only item in the room of importance, and in the parlor I zeroed in on the picture (GET PICTURE: “I CAN’T REACH IT”) but I’m just guessing here. This is the inherent problem with having a game where manipulatable objects fall in the room description; because the parser isn’t going to handle any of the “non-working” objects with more than default messages the amount of effort it takes to find a secret gets multiplied.

Also, there’s a burger in the abandoned kitchen full of cobwebs. It is safe to eat (“THANK YOU! IT WAS DELICIOUS!”) although it might need to be used on an obstacle.

Upstairs there’s a “small bedroom” (SLEEP BED: “I HOPE YOU’RE RESTED NOW!”) and a study with a ladder that can be climbed.

The ladder leads to a trap door with rusted hinges; the oil can from out in the shed can be used to OIL HINGES and go inside.

The cupola is where the treasures go. Once again we have a scenario with a “Treasure Hunt” where it feels more like the player is redecorating rather than scarfing for profit. (The type-in Spelunker from 1979 remains the only case I’ve come across that does actual currency conversion even though treasure gets hawked in CRPGs all the time.)

In order to get underground you need to visit that suspicious stump outside I mentioned last time, but first, an attempt at using the parachute, back at that elaborately-described chasm.

I don’t know if we’re intended to fix the parachute — no verbs I tried had any effect — or if this is all a big red herring. (Or, alternately, there’s a place later where the parachute will open properly.) While I’m at it, here’s the verb list as I have it so far:

DIG, CLIMB, READ, BREAK, OPEN, DRINK, EAT, LIGHT, UNLOCK, LOCK, SIT, FEED, JUMP, PRESS, PUT, PUSH, PULL, TURN, ROTATE, MOVE, SLEEP, CLOSE, EXAMINE, LEAVE, KICK, KNOCK, STAND, PLAY, ENTER, PICK, LIFT, EMPTY, MELT, PRY

Noteworthy, KICK but no other method of hitting things (no SMASH or KILL or ATTACK), both SIT and STAND, LIFT (which is often its own isolated thing to find secrets), and MELT. None of these suggest repairing a parachute even with the right items.

Back in the forest there was a stump that didn’t react to any of my commands, but I hadn’t tried it on the shovel yet. DIG does not work on its own; it needs a target. It also isn’t a single-use item because I’ve already used it twice more, so I’m now keeping constant lookout for sandy and/or unstable ground.

The underground is designed along the lines of long tunnels rather than dense interconnections. Starting from the bottom of a long hole, headed north there is an intersection, and essentially three different routes:

a.) east past some GOLD TOOTHPICKS to a Quarry. The quarry has a pickaxe (which I haven’t put to use yet) and a large boulder, but it is possible to push the boulder out of the way…

…revealing another room with treasure (a small chamber with a necklace) which appears to be a dead-end.

b.) down to a place with many passages where you are invited to “choose at random”; this does the Crowther/Woods trick of sometimes having an exit loop you back to the room you’re in rather than a secondary destination.

From here, one side passage just leads to a “cubbyhole” with a rare painting, but three others are or seem to relate to puzzles.

To the northwest, there is a compass on the floor. With it in hand, you see it start spinning as you get closer to an electric generator and a computer. The HARD DRIVE found outdoors is suggestive but I haven’t been able to find any verbs that use the two together.

To the southwest, there’s a furnace with a red dial. I have not found any way of interacting with the dial.

To the west, there’s a venus flytrap. Not much to say here; I probably need to feed it.

Backtracking to the junction near the start, going north isn’t a full-fledged route because of some quicksand in the way. It could be a puzzle but there’s a room later that might just be the other side. I’ll still keep it in mind if any obvious traversal methods arise.

c.) Going west from the starting junction first passes through a “frozen ice” room with a giant icicle (I’m guessing MELT comes into player there followed by a “jade ring” and a long hall of ugly art.

Is this purely for atmosphere? I have found no way to refer to the body of the artist.

Heading farther in, there’s a bearskin rug in a “fur trapper” room, and two curious rooms dedicated to a “music student”.

The piano can be played (“IT IS VERY OUT OF TUNE”) but I haven’t otherwise been able to interact with either room past picking up the platinum record (a treasure). The iron panel to the northwest is particularly curious as it seems like it ought to be hiding another exit but again none of my verbs have been much use. Out of anywhere I’ve seen so far here I’d expect it to be a magical effect (playing some sort of instrument? … but not the piano, which can’t be moved).

Also near this route is a “white sand” room which can be dug into using the shovel, revealing a magazine. The magazine’s description is esoteric enough I think it might be intended to mirror the magazine in Crowther/Woods (which was intended for use with the “last lousy point”).

Moving on to the last area I’ve explored:

The most memorable room here (for me, in terms of description) is of a dead explorer in a corner with a crowbar. I have yet to find a use for the crowbar although PRY is a verb.

This is followed by a mostly linear sequence of rooms, although off one branch is a “wall of lava” which may or may not be traversable, and there’s two more fissures where you can jump to your death if you feel so inclined.

Following all the way down there’s a dead end and a pit. You can dig into the pit and find a tusk, which counts as another treasure.

I think this is the end of the line here.

That was a big chunk, so to summarize:

I have, gathering from above and below-ground, a CAN OF OIL, RUSTY SHOVEL, BRASS LAMP, HARD DISK, RUSTED PLIERS, SMALL PARACHUTE, SMALL METAL CROWBAR, and COMPASS. I now have a variety of treasures (including some GOLD DOUBLOONS in a CHEST I neglected to mention) and none seem like the sort of item to be used a puzzle; I should still test them for magical effects. (However, there’s no WAVE or other verb that would naturally seem to apply! Maybe everything is “realistic” barring the giant Venus flytrap.) As far as obstacles or at least rooms of interest go, there’s the just-mentioned Venus flytrap, the computer with generator, the furnace, a weirdly decorated corridor, some quicksand, a cold room with an icicle, and a couple places that can be jumped into (currently resulting in doom, but I need to test the parachute out more). I also should do another pass on the mansion as surely something like the picture will shake loose a secret.

The game’s manual implies this is a game about finding hidden things, perhaps more than overcoming outright blatant obstacles.

CRYSTAL CAVERNS is subtle, complex, and devious. Imagination and persistence are your most valuable tools. Pick up anything that looks vaguely useful. Move, dig under or open anything that appears suspicious…or rattles.

We are thrilled to announce that The Ghost and the Golem, by Benjamin Rosenbaum, and Restore, Reflect, Retry by Natalia Theodoridou are finalists for Best Game Writing in the 60th Annual Nebula Awards, and both games are on sale for 40% off until March 20th!

The Ghost and the Golem is a 450,000 word historical fantasy novel by Benjamin Rosenbaum. Can your magic amulet save your Jewish village from destruction? Uncover the truth and forge alliances with soldiers, bandits, anarchists, and demons!

Restore, Reflect, Retry is a 90,000 word interactive horror novel by Natalia Theodoridou. You’ve played this game before. It’s a haunted game about a haunted game. You may not remember, but the game remembers you. I remember you.

To celebrate, we are also putting every previous Nebula Finalist game on sale:

The Bread Must Rise
Vampire: The Masquerade—Sins of the Sires
The Luminous Underground
The Road to Canterbury
The Magician’s Workshop
Rent-A-Vice
The Martian Job

Check out our Nebula Finalists bundle on Steam for an even bigger discount!

This is the seventh year that there has been a Nebula award for game writing—and the sixth year that Choice of Games authors have been finalists. Past Choice of Games Nebula finalists are: James Beamon and Stewart C. Baker for The Bread Must Rise, Natalia Theodoridou for Vampire: The Masquerade—Sins of the Sires and Rent-A-Vice, Phoebe Barton for The Luminous Underground, Kate Heartfield for The Road to Canterbury and The Magician’s Workshop, and M. Darusha Wehm for The Martian Job.

We also want to congratulate Choice of Games authors Stewart C. Baker, Phoebe Barton, James Beamon, Kate Heartfield, Naca Rat, Natalia Theodoridou, and M. Darusha Wehm for being finalists this year for their writing on the game A Death in Hyperspace.

Since 1965, the Nebula Awards have been given annually to the best works of science fiction and fantasy published that year, as voted on by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). The 60th Annual Nebula Awards ceremony will be streamed live during the 2025 Nebula Conference, June 7, 2025. Stay tuned for more!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is an example of a memory usage readout:

          (Top:  $013F44)

+-----------------+---------------+

| Text bank       | $001054 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

| Dictionary      |   $0B60 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

| Special words   |   $0080 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

| Array space     |   $0CE0 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

| Event table     |   $0010 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

| Property table  |   $0680 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

| Object table    |   $0700 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

| Executable code | $00FB60 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

| Grammar table   |   $0D00 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

| Header          |   $0040 bytes |

+-----------------+---------------+

        (Bottom:  $000000)  

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

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

Back when I’ve discussed “bawdy games”, one of the issues that has come up multiple times is the difficulty in advertising. Chuck Benton of Softporn Adventure had the good fortune of being discovered by Ken Williams of (Sierra) On-Line. Some games advertised instead in The Dirty Book, but that book itself had trouble advertising in other outlets.

Interface Age does not feel that the submitted advertisement conforms with the magazine’s standards.

Another option was simply to go via public domain, like with Porno Adventure and Drive-In. Today’s games, however, did not go that route.

(The obligatory not safe for certain work environments warning applies to anything after this point. Also, there’s a somewhat rude word for a drunk person.)

Kettering near Dayton, location of today’s company.

I’m not sure how Bob Krotts of the Softcore Software Company managed, but all the way through 1982 and part of the way through 1983 he put a significant number of ads out for his adventure game products, Misadventures 1 through 7. (The first six came out in ’82, and the seventh came early in ’83.)

As far as why the ads got through, my guess is a combination of

a.) chutzpah on the part of Krotts; notice in the ad below he tried to sell the game in Tandy’s book (this was a book collecting what essentially was ads for third-party software) and bragged about it not getting in. (As further evidence, albeit from later in life, one might consider he later became known as “Dirty” Bob Knotts, ran an adult video store, and is current co-chair of the X-Rated Critics Association.)

Via 80-U.S., April 1982.

b.) chutzpah on the part of the magazines, which were TRS-80 specific ones like 80 Micro, H & E Computronics, and 80-U.S. While one could quantitatively prove this by counting ads or the like, my qualitative sense upon reading these magazines is that they had a more hobbyist bent to them and didn’t try as much to be family oriented.

The situation is complex in 80-U.S in particular, which printed an upset letter to the editors in their August 1982 issue…

Gentlemen,

…may I mention that I have three young teenagers who read your magazine and I find the ad from The Softcore Software Co. offensive.

It seems that people involved with personal computers should be above this “tacky” behavior. Adult book stores and X-rated movie houses are available to those with sexual hangups. Why degrade your magazine for the relatively small amount of revenue from this advertising?

…and following that, I haven’t found any reprints of the ad in the same publication, although I might be missing something. So at the very least there was actual pushback. On the other hand, one of the columns had an extended riff in their November 1983 issue on the first Softcore adventure (Madame Rosa’s Massage Parlor) making a fictional story. The true interpretation might be that the author simply decided to send his ad budget elsewhere.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History. Clearly the same label was used for every printing.

I’m taking down the first three games (Madam Rosa’s Massage Parlor, Wet T-Shirt Contest, Sewers of Moscow) in order. I’ll handle the other three from 1982 in a separate post.

Misadventure 1: Madam Rosa’s Massage Parlor

Our task is to “discover the hidden photographs of the politician’s beautiful daughter” while looking for a speakeasy at the wharves, avoiding “deadly alleys”, “the bouncer” and “other characters of questionable reputation”.

The game follows the standard Scott Adams-style split window, but without any of the advantages and all of the drawbacks. There’s no object or direction list; there’s just the room description on top, and you have to test exits in every room to figure out which directions you can go. This really would go better with a standard scrolling window.

The parser is one of those which ends up chastising the player most of the time (and not in a fun way). I got “TRY SOMETHING ELSE” and “WRONG” many times in an attempt to do actions.

For example, the response here to SEARCH TRASH is TRY SOMETHING ELSE.

The map is one of those with lots of repetition; south of the locations just mentioned are three that just state “THE ROAD GOES NORTH AND SOUTH.”

This is followed by more rooms that are either “ROAD”, “WHARF”, “ALLEY”, or “DEAD-END” in some variety.

At the far south end is a door with a peep-hole. You can knock, and a bouncer asks if you are old enough, then requests your I.D.

I had no I.D., or even method of checking what my character’s inventory was. On a hunch, I checked the manual of Misadventure #5 (which I had from the earlier link) and found it mentioned the command EXAM. Not EXAMINE (which doesn’t work), but EXAM. I took it back to the pile of trash at the start:

EXAM WINO leads to finding out the wino has some money and and I.D. card. Taking the card back to the door, I was able to break into the speakeasy.

WELCOME TO MADAM ROSA’S SPEAKEASY BAR & GRILL! THE PLACE IS FILLED WITH PEOPLE, MUSIC, AND LAUGHTER! AN OPEN DOOR IS EAST. AN ELONGATED BAR IS FILLED WITH DRINKERS AND BOOZE.

To the east is a poker room with an open seat. You can sit down but this leads to death:

AFTER PLAYING FOR AWHILE, YOU NOTICE A MAN ACROSS FROM YOU WHO IS CHEATING! YOU ACCUSE HIM!!! HE PULLS A GUN AND SHOOTS YOU BETWEEN THE EYES – YOU ARE DEAD!!!

There are seemingly no other exits, but you can go back to the bar and BUY DRINK, whereupon the bartender will ask if you would like to meet some “WILD WOMEN”. Saying “YES”:

A LARGE BOUNCER BLOCKS THE HALL!

I used BRIBE BOUNCER and was able to proceed on.

THE STEPS LED TO A DIMLY-LIT ROOM. THE WALLS ARE ALL OF PLUSH CRUSHED VELVET. A SMILING SCANTILY-CLAD LADY AT A DESK INVITES YOU TO ENTER THE OPEN NORTH DOOR.

Heading north leads to an intersection where a naked lady is running away from some scene to the west. Checking in, there is an “OLD MAN” who is dead but “MUST BE HAPPY – HE IS SMILING!!!”

There’s another scene with an “UGLY” woman with an “OLD WOMAN”, a “LOCKED DOOR” with “MUFFLED BREATHING”, and a room with “OLD MEN” in raincoats looking through peepholes.

Bypassing all this, there’s a door that leads to a stairway up to a new floor.

To the north is a room with trapezes:

THIS APPEARS TO BE A ROOM FOR VERY AGILE PEOPLE! THERE ARE MANY TRAPEZES HANGING FROM THE HIGH CEILING. HMMMM..

You can SWING TRAPEZE but it will cause the bar to collapse; for some reason, EXAM BAR will now reveal the photos.

You can’t go back directly to the previously floor; exploring around leads to a series of rooms with scenes of varying level of questionable-ness (like THE MAYOR OF THE CITY in a hot tub who is PLAYING WITH A RUBBER DUCKY while a girl is in the tub with scuba gear) although the one you want has a book case; TAKE BOOK opens a secret passage to the last section.

The final challenge is a hallway where some of the exits are traps where a bouncer finds you (see above); I didn’t test if you could get the photos back by repeating the trapeze scene. Finally I came across a room with a window that seemed promising:

THE PASSAGE DEAD ENDS IN A CORNER ROOM. AN OPEN WINDOW IS NEXT TO AN OLD BED. YOU ARE SIX FLOORS UP!

A rope is visible through the window and you can climb down and escape:

Well, that was awkward. Before moving on to the next game, I should point out absolutely everything is bespoke. There is no way to take inventory because there is no inventory (if you take the card from the wino, that sets a flag, but it doesn’t have any special world-model attached). The way special commands are given is by room; in the window room at the end, EXAM WINDOW is special-coded to work there:

18174 IFWW$=”N”GOTO1991
18176 IFWW$=”EXAM WINDOW”GOTO2030

That means other than directions, the entire game is waiting for exact phrases in exact rooms. It is a wonder it hangs together at all.

Misadventure 2: Wet T-Shirt Contest

We are in trouble with a crime boss and need money fast. The logical solution: winning a wet t-shirt contest. Sure?

IT IS ALMOST DUSK. YOU ARE SITTING ALONE IN YOUR HOTEL ROOM.

THERE IS A LOUD KNOCK AT THE DOOR!!!

(after OPEN DOOR)

3 TOUGH THUGS ENTER THE ROOM. THEY BEAT THE CRAP OUT OF YOU!

YOU ARE INFORMED THAT – IF YOU DON’T PAY THE BOSS THE HUNDRED DOLLARS YOU OWE BY TOMORROW – YOUR ASS IS GRASS! THEY LEAVE THROUGH THE EAST DOOR.

Stepping outside, there’s some trash near the hall with a fish wrapped in a newspaper, doing EXAM PAPER (yes, it’s doing the EXAM thing again):

From here, the city is yours to explore, or mostly wander empty roads in:

The important places are marked: the club where the contest happens (yellow), a science building (blue), an arcade (brown), and a coin (green). You can try visiting a bank and getting a loan (they make fun of you and escort you out) or visiting the IRS (they arrest you for tax evasion).

It doesn’t look terrible but the “skips” in various spots led me to get lost; I was hoping I didn’t have to map, but the coin in particular turned out to be fairly elusive, and it turns out you need to find it first. With the coin in hand, you have enough money to play a game:

The game explodes, leaving only a screen, which you need to take. (Remember, there’s no real “inventory” in a general sense, just a variable flag.)

With the screen in hand, the next stop is by the science building, with an elevator of DEATH.

The elevator has 21 floors, and there’s no information on the game which floor is helpful; you just need to test them all. Keep in mind this is a game with no saved game feature! (Normally, I used save states.) Here’s a full table:

21 – stuck in 3×3 area
20 – electrocuted
19 – electrocuted
18 – killed by dogs
17 – electrocuted
16 – scientist / secret door
15 – stuck in 3×3 area
14 – stuck in 3×3 area
13 – no 13th floor
12 – electrocuted
11 – alarm
10 – killed by dogs
9 – killed by women
8 – electrocuted
7 – scientist’s lab
6 – electrocuted
5 – killed by dogs
4 – stuck in 3×3 area
3 – scientist / secret door
2 – electrocuted
1 – lobby

The “3×3 area” is just a small set of rooms that do nothing and the only thing to do is to leave. The “scientist / secret door” involves a scene with a scientist leaving through a secret door and farting. The “killed by women” is, um, kind of like a scene from Softporn Adventure but a bit darker.

KNOCK-OUT GAS COMES OUT OF THE VENTS…
YOU AWAKE TIED TO A BED. YOU ARE NAKED!
5 BEAUTIFUL WOMEN ENTER AND RAVISH YOUR BODY!!! WOW!
UH, OH…YOU CAN’T TAKE IT! YOUR HEART GIVES OUT!

Maybe you’re the “old man” from the first game. The floor that you actually need is 7 (lab) although it too is extremely deadly. There’s a series of hall intersections where if you choose wrong you will die: lots of killer dogs plus a trap floor.

THE FLOOR GIVES WAY! YOU FALL TO YOUR DEATH!

The correct sequence (w w n n w n w door s s w) can only be found by trial and error.

I first came across this scene before even finding the coin (I was still hopeful I could avoid making a city map); if you do the coin-screen sequence first, you can GIVE SCREEN in order to progress the scene forward:

The whole gimmick is that you can then push a button to switch to the body of the woman.

YOU ARE IN THE BEAUTIFUL WOMAN’S BODY!
THE PROFESSOR SAYS THAT YOU WILL REMAIN THIS WAY FOR 1 HOUR!
YOU ARE NOW ALONE IN THE ROOM (EXCEPT FOR YOUR BODY IN THE CHAIR). THE SCIENTIST HAS LEFT.

The rest of the game is pretty straightforward as far as actions go, if a bit icky plot-wise. You need to follow the same steps it took to arrive at the lab, just backwards, then hoof it back to the club near the start of the game.

You win due to your (the other person’s) “transparent” shirt. With $200 in hand you can hike it back to the lab, where you’ll transfer back and win the game.

I guess you could think of this as a degenerate’s version of Savage Island Part 2. Technically speaking there was a lot more death than bawdiness to the game. Let’s jump ahead now to….

Misadventure 3: Sewers of Moscow

We’re now a superspy, meant to stop some catastrophe or another gallivanting around Moscow. What we’re stopping is unclear because we’ve lost our memory. The ad copy still the obligatory low-key mention of smut…

THE BEAUTIFUL SPY YOU FIND TIED SPREAD-EAGLED TO A BED HOLDS THE KEY TO THIS MISADVENTURE. BUT BE VERY CAREFUL WHAT YOU DO TO HER.

…but to start with, we awake with our memory gone, and:

?FC ERROR AT 70

These lines seem to be causing the game issues:

70 FORMM=1TO40:X=USR(MM):NEXT:RETURN
72 FORLM=40TO1STEP-1:X=USR(LM):NEXT:RETURN
74 FORLM=1TO6:X=USR(LM):NEXT:RETURN

I just changed them to RETURN and the game was able to play all the way through. Maybe they’re for the sound shenanigans the game’s title screen mentions it has.

You start in a forest having an unfortunate parachute accident, and once again, the parser is bespoke in an almost unique way.

The key here is to CLIMB TREES — ok, that part’s not too bad — finding yourself in tree branches. The key phrase then is CLIMB N.

Not swing, or just movement, or even CLIMB NORTH; it has to be specifically CLIMB followed by the abbreviation N. I suspect this is the kind of game the author only tested themselves. (Unlike Softporn Adventure!)

Past that, there’s a set of very plain rooms with descriptions like “CLEARING”, “NOTHING”, and a “NOTHING” where you also need to “BEWARE OF THE ANTEATERS!”

Sadly, no anteaters appear in the game.

There’s a few death-exits in this area, but it isn’t death-at-every-step like the science building in Misadventure 2 (that’ll happen later). The key to moving on is to go to a VERY DARK VALLEY and type the word FEEL alone. Just the word FEEL.

Just to be clear, yes, I checked the source code for the CLIMB N and FEEL-word-by-itself parts.

With the shovel in hand, you can go over to a NOTHING where the floor is DAMP and DIG. This drops you into a maze with a mean trick.

It’s a “normal” maze with no loops, but going east leads to a whole section which is all dead ends, whereas going west is a very short trip to the exit. It’s essentially the maze equivalent of a shaggy dog joke.

There’s also this elongated description in every room.

Past that obstacle, you can climb some stairs to find a mysterious door, where a “SHORT MAN WEARING A GREY OVERCOAT AND HAT” ushers you in a room and points out a panel. Pressing a button in the panel triggers a message:

After this enlightenment returns:

YOUR MEMORY HAS RETURNED!
YOU REMEMBER THAT:
YOU ARE AN AGENT OF THE U.N.
YOUR MISSION – ONCE DROPPED DEEP INTO SOVIET TERRITORY – IS TO ELIMINATE THE POSSIBILITY OF WW III.

You are supposed to enter the number just received into a phone. Unfortunately, this is a “suicide mission” and you’ll die in the process of ambiguously stopping WWIII.

This is followed by a “death building” fairly similar to the science building…

…except going the wrong direction gets you gunned down by secret police:

A LOYAL MEMBER OF THE MOSCOW SECRET POLICE SPOTS YOU, PANICS, AND SHOOTS! BETTER DEATH THAN TORTURE…

Eventually one route leads to a locked door; to get through the locked door, you need to pass through a dark area and finally reach the hinted-at smut.

If you examine the gag, you’ll find a key; if you free the spy (UNTIE ROPES) she kills you.

FOOL – I AM REALLY A DOUBLE AGENT!!!
SHE REACHES UNDER A BED, GRABS A KNIFE, AND STABS YOU IN THE HEART – YOU DIE!!!

With the key in hand you can go back to the locked door and find the promised room with the phone. I think the code is randomly generated — mine was 196 — and typing CALL 196 triggered the end of the game.

So despite the advertising, Misadventure 3 really had no smut whatsoever, as well as a grim fatalist ending. Not even stopping WWIII, just delaying it!

Brief Introspection

We’ve seen a fair number of authors “cheat” with specific moments of bespoke parser use; it is very rare to essentially make that an overarching coding style, up to and including making it so there isn’t even really an inventory to speak of. To make a comparison I have to go back to something like 1979’s Jungle Island:

400 PRINT”THE VINE BREAKS!! YOU HEAR WARRIORS APPROACHING!”
401 INPUT V$
410 IF V$”RUN” GOTO 220
420 PRINT”YOU’RE RUNNING AS FAST AS YOU CAN!”
430 INPUT T$
440 IF T$”N”,”S”,”E”,”W” GOTO 310
450 PRINT”IT IS NOT ADVISABLE TO RUN THROUGH THE JUNGLE”

The cases here aren’t quite as bad as that game; the Misadventures have a centralized “hub” of commands in each area, and that perhaps informed the author’s style of making big tangly maps for everything. This all has the odd effect that unexpectedly, I thought the bawdiest of the games (Misadventure 1) was the strongest. There’s not really anything going for this author in terms of puzzles, and certainly the parser can’t handle anything stressful, so all that’s left is exploration; at the very least the sequence of naughty scenes showed some variety (…and creative use of margarine). With Misadventure 3, the most interesting room was one literally called NOTHING with a side reference to anteaters.

We’ll visit the other Misadventures soon and see if this trend of non-naughty naughty games continues (the ones available; Misadventure 4: Casino of Pleasure is lost) but for now, coming up: two Britgames, and the very last regular graphical Apple II game of 1982. We are getting close to the end!

Shhhhh! It’s our super secret special sale!

Thanks to a very scientific poll conducted on our forums, we’re proud to announce that our “most underrated” games, aka the Hidden Gems, are on sale on our website!

Pick them up for discounts up to 40% off until April 3rd on choiceofgames.com!

Nikola Tesla: War of the Currents, Cliffhanger: Challenger of Tomorrow, Broadsides: HMS Foraker, The Play’s the Thing, and A Squire’s Tale are all on sale now on the web.

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Wednesday, Feb 5, 2025 over zoom. Kirill, Hugh,  Mike Stage, anjchang, Josh Grams, Michael Hilborn, Pinkunz, Matt Griffin, and Stephen attended. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.

Narrascope conference discussion — Matt gave an update on deadlines. Narrasccope Talk proposal deadline extended to Feb. 21st
Narrascope showcase announced curated games showcase
Prospective attendee brought up that they are not sure if they can travel to give a talk (visa and politics). Narrascope will attempt to preference in-person talks, but there will be some that will have to be remote. There will be two phases this year, a review with a smaller group, and the first round is blind and the second is anonymous.

Matt reading Game Poems book
https://www.gamepoemsbook.com/

Last month we had trouble with the zoom account. Potential for zoom account that is sponsored by IFTF?

On the topic of other groups… there’s a Seattle/Tacoma group that meets monthly online: just a few people – they meet on their Discord voice/video chat usually on a Sunday 2-4 PM Pacific:

https://intfiction.org/t/seattle-tacoma-if-meetup-february-2025/73463

We talked about Zarf’s Visible Zorker project

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2025/01/the-visible-zorker

Looking for something to play? The  2018 XYZZY Awards Innovation winner, IAG Alpha Game was mentioned and recommended
https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=erj212utudi2kltv.

Other resources for newcomers that are useful

https://planet-if.com/ A one-stop resource for IF

https://elo25.org/ Electronic Literature Organization

By 1892, the Dalton Gang — only formed a year before — had gotten a reputation for outrunning the law while performing a string of train robberies.

Of the founders Bob and Emmett Dalton, Bob previously had filled his father’s shoes becoming a lawman, and was familiar with the issues in Oklahoma: a fragmented group of sheriff services with only the U.S. Marshals having jurisdiction over the whole. They recruited a group based mostly on people they grew up with, and the gang ended up having a rotating roster with the brothers at the core. The two other brothers, Bill and Grat Dalton, were imprisoned at the time but Grat later managed to escape and join the group and Bill was acquitted.

Their exploits included a near-miss at Red Rock. The gang was eight strong at the time and they planned a heist on June 1 at the arrival of the Santa Fe, with the train scheduled for 10:00.

A train did arrive, but the lights were out. The station agent went inside and Bob sensed something was off, telling the gang to hold off and wait. Indeed there was a trap, as deputy marshals awaited inside. The plan of the heist had been learned of, but Bob’s sense of danger meant the gang waited for the first train to leave and the next train — the expected one — to arrive. The haul ended up not being much for the size of crew (at most around $10,000) but that’s because the first train was carrying the majority of the money, at 6 times that amount.

The famous end of the Dalton Gang came upon an attempt in October (with Bill Powers, Bob Dalton, Grat Dalton, Dick Broadwell, and Emmett Dalton) to enter the history books by robbing two Kansas banks simultaneously in daylight. This is the event most dramatized in media, not only for the wild gunfight with marshals and the citizens of Coffeyville, but because Emmett Dalton (the only survivor) survived to write two books and spread the mythos about the group, re-painting them in a Robin Hood light.

Today’s game is essentially a revised version of that pitched battle, where you fight against the brothers solo, although the “slippery between the hands of the law” aspect that the brothers held comes into play.

Softside Magazine, November 1982.

Peter Kirsch returns! No prologue this time like The Deadly Game: you’re got 0 DOLLARS OF CASH and a SIX-SHOOTER to your name, you’re on a street, and there’s a sign telling you about a vacant job as sheriff.

As usual with Softside, there are Atari, Apple II, and TRS-80 versions of the game. I picked TRS-80 straight off the bat this time given my experience with The Deadly Game. Yet again that’s no guarantee it is the best version, and for reasons I’ll get into later there are some advantages and disadvantages to the Atari version.

However, by random chance, I started exploring the opposite way, forestalling the encounter. The town is laid out roughly west-east with a turn in the middle, and the mayor is on the far west side.

To speed things along, though, let’s imagine I followed the author’s script and went to the mayor first (even though there’s no way of knowing the mayor is there until you map out and find the office).

The $200 on a “PERFORMANCE BASIS” turns out to be a huge pain for me later.

With a STAR in hand I wandered and checked out the rest of the town. The sheriff’s office has a cell but no keys; you’re supposed to apply your six-shooter to the desk and shoot out a lock, revealing the keys (they won’t get used until later).

I guess this makes it feel more like a Western.

Adjacent is a saloon (we’ll save that for later) and a general store that is closed (which we’ll also save for later).

Yet further is a stable with a BLACK STALLION (ours, but it needs a saddle) followed by a newspaper office.

I immediately guessed (correctly) this was a clue to a maze.

Next along the row is a rain barrel (empty) followed by a bank (also nothing there for the moment); at the end of the line is a “golden rattler” blocking the way.

You can try to shoot the rattler but you’ll get stopped by an Indian.

I wandered a bit in this state, also finding a path leading to a “creek” going to the west side, before I finally went to visit the saloon last (I had already seen it once before becoming law enforcement).

Kirsch is essentially combining an open style with triggered events, like his game Robin Hood. This is a location-and-condition trigger; you have to be the sheriff and have entered the saloon for the bank robbery to start. Sometimes this works well, but for my game it was awkward to explore a town all the way over twice before anything kicked off.

Heading back to the bank…

…the robbery has ended but there is a shootout. (Your gun, by default, is holstered, so you need to either TAKE GUN or DRAW GUN; be sure to holster it again before entering a store or they’ll kick you out.) Waiting too long here is lethal; Emmett and Bob aren’t in shooting range. The one Dalton that you can get a bead on is Grat.

Back to the west a little there’s a rope ladder leading to the roof of the newspaper office. You can backtrack and climb up to get a different angle on the scene:

If you head back to the Mayor’s Office, the clerk reports to you the mayor has been kidnapped. I did not find out this way — more on that later.

After the shootout, the general store is now open:

The mayor gave us $200 to spend (remember another $200 comes later). You cannot buy everything at once; I had to reload my game multiple times to figure things out, and while there are technically multiple options, you at least need to get the CANTEEN and the SADDLE. (AMMUNITION is good too. The six-shooter needs reloading after 6 bullets.)

The food and pouch of tobacco, incidentally, go to the east side of town where there’s the GOLDEN RATTLER. You can give the food to make the snake happy, and then past that there is an Indian with a pipe. Trading the tobacco:

According to Dale Dobson there’s some part of the code that indicates it works as a dowsing rod, but the water in the game is quite easy to find and I was never able to get the stick to work. Neither puzzle gives any points.

(I should mention, as an aside, there are 8 points total in the game revealed by typing SCORE. Taking down the first two Dalton brothers led to 1 point each. This will be important later.)

With the saddle you can put it on the STALLION and ride it around (just using normal directions, you don’t have to RIDE SOUTH every time or whatnot).

The horse doesn’t make you go “faster” and you have to get off every time you go in a building (DROP HORSE). I still found it gratifying to ride around in an atmospheric sense.

I was stuck from here for a while before I realized back at the CREEK on the far west side of town it was possible to GO CREEK, moving past to a new area. (It is unclear why there wouldn’t be a compass direction for that.)

Just past the creek. As the message implies, you can’t go farther from here without using the horse.

Past the creek is a pasture (see above) and then a desert.

The desert is a maze but the “SEEN NEWS” message from the newspaper office is intended to indicate directions. While in the desert, you start getting thirsty quite quickly (be sure to GET WATER from the creek before entering the desert; this is why the canteen is the other necessary purchase) and there are rattlesnakes that randomly appear.

You need your gun out and loaded, and you can shoot the rattlesnakes as they appear. Following the SEENNEWS route and using the gun several times on the way, a “dusty trail” comes up next.

This is where the Daltons are hiding, but once again I didn’t quite do things in the right order; first I went south and found a “dusty trail” with a “hill” and a “mine”. Alert because of my creek issue, I treated both as possible directions, and tried GO HILL first:

This is how I found out the mayor was the extra person the Daltons was getting away with (never mind the mayor was all the way on the other side of town at the time of the bank robbery). I also realized I was softlocked and needed to bring the ladder in for a rescue; this got me a point, for 3 points out of 8.

There’s a “secret” path that loops back directly to the mayor’s office so you don’t have to do the desert route back.

The “mines” are a maze, this time not one with a gimmick.

I thought Kirsch had shaken off doing such things, but alas.

The only room of interest had a wooden floor:

The game decide to be annoyingly resistant to my attempts to refer to any of the nouns described, so I decided to move on. Instead of heading to the hill/mine area, I went northwest to a CABIN; this is where the Daltons lurk.

Oops! So, if you hang out at the cabin for long enough, or go in some bushes to hide (which requires dismounting the horse) the Daltons spot you and gun you down. The visible horse here is the problem. (According to Dale Dobson’s walkthrough I checked later, in the Atari version you can ride the horse into the bushes; that doesn’t work here.) You might think to go elsewhere, ditch the horse, and then walk over to the cabin, but the horse will take off if you leave it somewhere and it happens to resurface right at the cabin. (There is no explanation why the cabin serves as, er, horse catnip. What’s a thing that attracts a horse?)

To the south of the cabin is a small tree. The idea is you can dismount here without the horse taking off right away (for some reason) which gives you time to TIE HORSE. Given the other non-cabin locations have the horse make a bolt for it, this was tricky but not impossible to figure out.

With the horse tied away — presumably not making suspicious horse noises outside the cabin causing the outlaws to notice — you can head back to the cabin and hide in the bushes.

No matter which brother you aim for, they both scatter to different locations. Emmett goes to town and Bob goes to the mines. The cabin itself is completely undescribed on the inside other than it has a crowbar you can pick up.

Taking down Bob first, he’s lurking at the room with the wooden floor.

Occasionally Bob would fire a shot; my shots back always missed. I realized — upon needing to reload — that I might be able to heed the words of Dirty Harry.

“I know what you’re thinking. ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ To tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I lost track myself.

“But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

Bob did not fire every turn, but I waited (rather, typed LOOK) until Bob had fired exactly six shots, then dived in the room safely. With a clear shot, SHOOT BOB worked, and then the crowbar worked (after many attempts) via the command GET BOARDS. (Note for Atari version: it uses GET BOARD, singular, instead.)

The sack of cash is able to go back to the bank for another single point, bringing the score to 4. Shooting Bob did not give any points (ominous music).

Emmett turns out to be out back in town hanging by the bank. If you just try to walk (or ride) down the street to him he’ll take off.

The key here is the second paycheck from the Mayor. I admit I was baffled for a while discovering this, but it turns out that the moment where the Daltons scatter from the cabin is also the moment the powers that be decide you can get an extra $200. Curious how that works.

The extra money is enough to buy all the remaining items from the general store, including the disguise kit (which normally was too expensive after buying just the saddle and canteen). If you dump your lawman badge and wear the disguise, you’ll be able to safely make it up to Emmett without him getting spooked.

You can then shoot him dead, and I admit this is where I started to think something was fishy. I was able to get return the bank’s cash but I was otherwise stuck with nothing to do and two dead bodies — the Dalton gang are taken care of, where are the fireworks? I had incidentally tried ARREST and was not understood, and I didn’t have any handcuff-items either, so I still assumed that violence was the answer, but no: you can GET EMMETT. I guess the player is holding rope in their inventory that doesn’t get mentioned? (Atari version again: ARREST actually works as a verb.)

You can cart each Dalton back over to the jail, and use the keys from the gun-blasted desk to lock them in (if you don’t lock the door they won’t stay). Each Dalton captured is 2 points.

In my “winning run” — I had to restart to fix the softlock — I ended up dealing with the mayor last, meaning the game ended while still in a pit:

Once again I find myself appreciating what kind of ambition Kirsch had in exploring all the genres — and different iterations of event-based gameplay — while being frustrated by technical limitations. The game anticipates more than you might expect, with the horse mechanics and is-your-gun-holstered check, but I still had moments like applying the crowbar which give a reminder this is still a monthly series of games rapidly cranked out in BASIC.

I also appreciated the alternate routes in terms of either shooting arresting the last two Dalton brothers, even given the unfair implementation. I would very much have preferred some extra indication the game goes to an unwinnable state if either brother is a corpse!

(For books, I used Daltons! The Raid on Coffeyville, Kansas by Robert Barr Smith via University of Oklahoma Press, and Into the Sunset: Emmett Dalton and the End of the Dalton Gang by Ian Shaw via the University Press of Kansas. The former aims to dispel the Robin Hood mythos and expose the Daltons as gang mostly interested in stealing and giving the money to themselves; the latter establishes a little sympathy or at least understanding to their situation.)

As we learned in the earlier articles in this series, Interplay celebrated the Christmas of 1997 with two new CRPGs. One of them, the striking post-apocalyptic exercise called Fallout, was greeted with largely rave reviews. The other, of course, was the far less well-received licensed Dungeons & Dragons game called Descent to Undermountain. The company intended to repeat the pattern in 1998, with another Fallout and another Dungeons & Dragons game. This time, however, the public’s reception of the two efforts would be nearly the polar opposite of last time.

It’s perhaps indicative of the muddled nature of the project that Interplay couldn’t come up with any plot-relevant subtitle for Fallout 2. It’s just another “Post-Nuclear Role-Playing Game.”

Tim Cain claims that he never gave much of a thought to any sequels to Fallout during the three and a half years he spent working on the first game. Brian Fargo, on the other hand, started to think “franchise” as soon as he woke up to Fallout’s commercial potential circa the summer of 1997. Fallout 2 was added to Interplay’s list of active projects a couple of months before the original game even shipped.

Interplay’s sorry shape as a business made the idea of a quick sequel even more appealing than it might otherwise have been. For it should be possible to do it relatively cheaply; the engine and the core rules were already built. It would just be a matter of generating a new story and design, ones that would reuse as many audiovisual assets as possible.

Yet Fargo was not pleased by the initial design proposals that reached his desk. So, just days after Fallout 1 had shipped, he asked Tim Cain to get together with his principal partners Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson and come up with a proposal of their own for the sequel. The three were dismayed by this request; exhausted as they were by months of crunch on Fallout 1, they had anticipated enjoying a relaxing holiday season, not jumping right back into the fray on Fallout 2. Their proposal reflected their mental exhaustion. It spring-boarded off of a joking aside in the original game’s manual, a satirical advertisement which Jason Anderson had drawn up in an afternoon when he was told by Interplay’s printer that there would be an unsightly blank page in the booklet as matters currently stood. The result was the “Garden of Eden Creation Kit”: “When all clear sounds on your radio, you don’t want to be caught without one!” Elaborating on this thin shred of a premise, the sequel would cast you as a descendant of the star of the first game, sent out into the dangerous wastelands to recover one of these Garden of Eden Kits in lieu of a water chip. This apple did not fall far from the tree.

But as it turned out, that suited Brian Fargo just fine. Within a month of Fallout 1′s release, Cain, Boyarsky, and Anderson had been officially assigned to the Fallout 2 project. None of them was terribly happy about it; what all three of them really wanted were a break, a bonus check, and the chance to work on something else, roughly in that order of priority. In January of 1998, feeling under-appreciated and physically incapable of withstanding the solid ten months of crunch that he knew lay before him, Cain turned in his resignation. Boyarsky and Anderson quit the same day in a show of solidarity. (The three would go on to found Troika Studios, whose games we will be meeting in future articles on this site, God willing and the creek don’t rise.)

Following their exodus, Fallout 2 fell to Feargus Urquhart and the rest of his new Black Isle CRPG division to turn into a finished product. Actually, to use the word “division” is to badly overstate Black Isle’s degree of separation from the rest of Interplay. Black Isle was more a marketing label and a polite fiction than a lived reality; the boundaries between it and the mother ship were, shall we say, rather porous. Employees tended to drift back and forth across the border without anyone much noticing.

This was certainly the case for most of those who worked on Fallout 2, a group which came to encompass about a third of the company at one time or another. Returning to the development approach that had yielded Wasteland a decade earlier, Fargo and Urquhart parceled the game out to whoever they thought might have the time to contribute a piece of it. Designer and writer Chris Avellone, who was drafted onto the Fallout 2 team for a few months while he was supposed to be working on another forthcoming CRPG called Planescape: Torment, has little positive to say about the experience: “I do feel like the heart of the team had gone. And all that was left were a bunch of developers working on different aspects of the game like a big patchwork beast. But there wasn’t a good spine or heart to the game. We were just making content as fast as we could. Fallout 2 was a slapdash product without a lot of oversight.”

Still, the programmers did fix some of what annoyed me about Fallout 1, by cleaning up some of the countless little niggles in the interface. Companions were reworked, such that they now behave more or less as you’d expect: they’re no longer so likely to shoot you in the back, are happy to trade items with you, and don’t force you to kill them just to get around them in narrow spaces. Although the game as a whole still strikes me as more clunky and cumbersome than it needs to be — the turn-based combat system is as molasses-slow as ever — the developers clearly did make an effort to unkink as many bottlenecks as they could in the time they had.

But sadly, Fallout 2 is a case of one step forward, one step back: although it’s a modestly smoother-playing game, it lacks its predecessor’s thematic clarity and unified aesthetic vision. Its world is one of disparate parts, slapped together with no rhyme, reason, or editorial oversight. It wants to be funny — always the last resort of a game that lacks the courage of its fictional convictions — but it doesn’t have any surfeit of true wit to hand. It tries to make up for the deficit the same way as many a game of this era, by transgressing boundaries of taste and throwing out lazy references to other pop culture as a substitute for making up its own jokes. This game is very nerdy male, very adolescent-to-twenty-something, and very late 1990s — so much so that anyone who didn’t live through that period as part of the same clique will have trouble figuring out what it’s on about much of the time. I do understand most of the spaghetti it throws at the walls — lucky me! — but that doesn’t keep me from finding it fairly insufferable.

Fallout 2 shipped in October of 1998, just when it was supposed to. But its reception in the gaming press was noticeably more muted than that of its predecessor. Reviewers found it hard to overlook the bugs and glitches that were everywhere, the inevitable result of its rushed and chaotic development cycle, even as the more discerning among them made note of the jarring change in tone and the lack of overall cohesion to the story and design. The game under-performed expectations commercially as well, spending only one week in the American top ten. In the aftermath, Brian Fargo’s would-be CRPG franchise looked like it had already run its course; no serious plans for a Fallout 3 would be mooted at Interplay for quite some time to come.

Yet Fallout 2 did do Interplay’s other big CRPG for that Christmas an ironic service. When BioWare told Fargo that they would like a couple of extra months to finish Baldur’s Gate up properly, the prospect of another Interplay CRPG on store shelves that October made it easier for him to grant their request. So, instead of taking full advantage of the Christmas buying season, Baldur’s Gate didn’t finally ship until a scant four days before the holiday. Never mind: the decision not to ship it before its time paid dividends that some quantity of ephemeral Christmas sales could never have matched. Plenty of gamers proved ready to hand over their holiday cash and gift cards in the days right after Christmas for the most hotly anticipated Dungeons & Dragons computer game since Pool of Radiance. Baldur’s Gate sold 175,000 units before 1998 was over. (Just to put that figure in perspective, this was more copies than Fallout 1 had sold in fifteen months.) Its sales figures would go on to top 1 million units in less than a year, making it the bestselling CRPG to date that wasn’t named Diablo. The cover provided by Fallout 2 helped to ensure that Dr. Muzyka and Dr. Zeschuk would never have to see another patient again.

I’m not someone who places a great deal of sentimental value on physical things. But despite my lack of pack-rattery, some bits of flotsam from my early years have managed to follow me through countless changes of address on both sides of a very big ocean. Playing Baldur’s Gate prompted me to rummage around in the storage room until I came up with one of them. It goes by the name of In Search of Adventure. This rather generically titled little book is, as it says on the front cover, a “campaign adventure” for tabletop Dungeons & Dragons. Note the absence of the “Advanced” prefix; this adventure is for the non-advanced version of the game, the one that was sold in those iconic red and blue boxes that conquered the cafeteria lunch tables of Middle America during the first few years of the 1980s, when TSR dared to dream that their flagship game might become the next Monopoly. If we’re being honest, I always preferred to play this version of the game even after its heyday passed away. It seemed to me more easy-going, more fun-focused, less stuffily, pedantically Gygaxian.

Anyway, the campaign adventure in question came out in 1987, well after my preferred version of Dungeons & Dragons had become the weak sister to its advanced, hardcore sibling — unsurprisingly so, given that pretty much the only people still playing the game by that point were hardcore by definition.

In Search of Adventure is actually a compilation of nine earlier adventure modules that TSR published for beginning-level characters, crammed together into one book with a new stub of a plot to serve as a connecting tissue. I dug it out of storage and have proceeded to talk about it here because it reminds me inordinately of Baldur’s Gate, which works on exactly the same set of principles. There’s an overarching story to it, sure, but it too is mostly just a big grab bag of geography to explore and monsters to fight, in whatever order you prefer. In this sense and many others, it’s defiantly traditionalist. It has more to do with Dungeons & Dragons as it was played around those aforementioned school lunch tables than it does with the avant-garde posturings of TSR’s latter days. As I noted in my last article, the Forgotten Realms in which Baldur’s Gate is set — and in which In Search of Adventure might as well be set, for all that it matters — is so appealing to players precisely because it’s so uninterested in challenging them. The Forgotten Realms is the archetypal place to play Dungeons & Dragons. Likewise, Baldur’s Gate is an archetypal Dungeons & Dragons computer game, the essence of the “a group of adventurers meet in a bar…” school of role-playing. (You really do meet some of your most important companions in Baldur’s Gate in a bar…)

Luke Kristjanson, the BioWare writer responsible for most of the dialog in Baldur’s Gate, says that he never saw the computer game as “a simulation of a fully-realized Medieval world”: “It was a simulation of playing [tabletop] Dungeons & Dragons.” This statement is, I think, the key to understanding where BioWare was coming from and what still makes their game so appealing today, more than a quarter-century on.

Opening with a Nietzsche quote leads one to fear that Baldur’s Gate is going to try to punch way, way above its weight. Thankfully, it gets the pretentiousness out of its system early and settles down to meat-and-potatoes fare. BioWare’s intention was never, says Luke Kristjanson, to make “a serious fantasy for serious people.” Thank God for that!

But here’s the brilliant twist: in order to conjure up the spirit of those cafeteria gatherings of yore, Baldur’s Gate uses every affordance of late-1990s computer technology that it can lay its hands on. It wants to give you that 1980s vibe, but it wants to do it better — more painlessly, more intuitively, more prettily — than any computer of that decade could possibly have managed. Call it neoclassical digital Dungeons & Dragons.

The game begins in a walled cloister known as Candlekeep, which has a bit of a Name of the Rose vibe, being full of monks who have dedicated their lives to gathering and preserving the world’s knowledge. The character you play is an orphan who has grown up in Candlekeep as the ward of a kindly mage named Gorion. This bucolic opening act gives you the opportunity to learn the ropes, via a tutorial and a few simple, low-stakes quests. But soon enough, a fearsome figure in armor shatters the peace of the cloister, killing Gorion and forcing you to take to the road in search of adventure (to coin a phrase). The game does suggest at the outset that you visit a certain tavern where you might find some useful companions, but it never insists that you do this or anything else. Instead you’re allowed to go wherever you want and to do exactly that thing which pleases you most once you get there. When you do achieve milestones in the main plot, whether deliberately or inadvertently, they’re heralded with onscreen chapter breaks which demonstrate that the story is progressing, because of or despite your antics. In this way, the game tries to create a balance between player freedom and the equally bracing sense of being caught up in an epic plot, one in which you will come to play the pivotal role — being, as you eventually learn, the “Chosen One” who has been marked by destiny. Have I mentioned that Baldur’s Gate is not a game that shirks from fantasy clichés?

The inclusion of a tutorial heralds the dawning of a more user-friendly era of the CRPG.

Of course, there’s an unavoidable tension between the set-piece plot of the chapter-based structure and the open-world aspect of the game — a tension which we’ve encountered in other games I’ve written about. The main plot is constantly urging you forward, insisting that the fate of the world is at stake and time is of the essence. Meanwhile the many side quests are asking you to rescue a lost housecat or collect wolf pelts for a merchant. If you take the game at its word and rush forward with a sense of urgency, you’ll not only come to the climax under-leveled but will have missed most of the fun. All of which is to say that Baldur’s Gate is best approached like that In Search of Adventure module: just start walking around. Go see what is to be found in those parts of your map that are still blank. Sooner or later, you’ll trigger the next chunk of the main plot anyway.

It’s amazing how enduring some of what is to be found in those blank spaces has proved. My wife likes to read graphic novels. I was surprised recently to see that she’d started on a Dungeons & Dragons-branded one called Days of Endless Adventure, with a copyright date of 2021. I was even more surprised when I flipped it open idly and came face to face with the simple-minded ranger Minsc and his precious pet hamster Boo, both of whom were introduced to the world in Baldur’s Gate.

A congenital visual blurriness dogs this game, the result of a little bit too much detail being crammed into a relatively low resolution of 640 X 480, combined with a subdued, brown- and gray-heavy color palette. My middle-aged eyes weren’t always so happy about it, especially when I played on a television in the living room.

As it happened, I had had quite a time with Minsc when I played the game. He joined my party fairly early on, on the condition that we would try to rescue his friend, a magic user named Dynaheir who was being imprisoned in a gnoll stronghold. Unfortunately, I applied the same logic to his principal desire that I did to the main quest line; I’d get to it when I got to it. I maintained this attitude even as he nagged me about it with increasing urgency. One day the dude just flipped out on me, went nuts and started to attack me and my other companions. What’s a person to do in such a situation? Reader, I killed him and his pet hamster.

I was playing a ranger myself, so I didn’t think losing his services would be any big problem. I didn’t notice until days later that killing him — even though, I rush to stipulate again, he attacked me first — had turned me into a “fallen ranger.” I’m told by people who know about such things that this is far from ideal, because it means that you’ve essentially been reduced to the status of a vanilla fighter, albeit one who craves a lot more experience points than usual to advance a level. Oh, well. I didn’t feel like going back so many hours, and I was in more of a “roll with the punches” than a “try and try again” frame of mind anyway. (I’m also told that there will be a way to reverse my fallen condition when I get around to playing Baldur’s Gate II with the same party. So that’s something to look forward to, I guess.) By way of completing the black comedy, I later did rescue Dynaheir and took her into my party. But I was careful not to mention that I had ever met her mysteriously vanished friend…

“Minsc? Uh, no, never heard the name. Shall we talk about something else?”

Any given play-through of Baldur’s Gate is guaranteed to generate dozens of such anecdotes, which combine to make its story your story, even if the text of the chapter breaks is the same for everyone. You don’t have to walk on eggshells, afraid that you’re going to break some necessary piece of plot machinery. Again, it’s you who gets to choose where you go, what you do there, and who travels with you on your quest. Any mistake you make along the way that doesn’t get you and all your friends killed can generally be recovered from or at least lived with, as I did my fallen-ranger status. Tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, says Luke Kristjanson, is about “[being with] your friends [and] doing something fun. And occasionally one’s a jackass and does something weird and you roll with it.” It does seem to me that rolling with it is the only good way to play this second-order simulation of that social experience.

The first companion to join you will probably be Imoen, a spunky female thief. The personalities of your companions are all firmly archetypal, but most of them are likeable enough that it’s hard to complain. Sometimes fantasy comfort food goes down just fine.

Baldur’s Gate’s specific methods of presenting its world of freedom and opportunity have proved as influential as the design philosophies that undergird it. The Infinity Engine provided the presentational blueprint for a whole school of CRPGs that are still with us to this day. You look down on the environment and the characters in it from a free-scrolling isometric point of view. You can move the “camera” anywhere you like in the current area, independent of the locations of your characters. That said, a fog-of-war is implemented: places your characters have not yet seen are completely blacked out, and you can’t know what other people or monsters are getting up to if they’re out of your characters’ line of sight.

The interface proper surrounds this view on three sides. Portraits of the members of your party — up to five of them, in addition to the character you create and embody from the outset — run down the right side of the screen. Command icons — some pertaining to the individual party members and some to the group as a whole or to the computer on which you’re running the game — stretch across the left side and bottom of the screen. An area just above the bottom line of icons can expand to display text, of which there is an awful lot in this game, mostly in the form of menu-driven conversations. (In 1998, we were still far from the era when it would be practical and cost-effective to have full voice-acting in a game with this much yammering. Instead just the occasional line of dialog is voiced, to establish personalities and set tones.) The interface is perhaps a bit more obscure and initially daunting than it might be in a modern game, but the contrast with the old keyboard-driven SSI Gold Box games could hardly be more stark. And thankfully, unlike Fallout’s, Baldur’s Gate’s interface doesn’t make the mistake of prioritizing aesthetics over utility.

In short, Baldur’s Gate tries really, really hard to be approachable in the way that modern players have come to expect, even if it doesn’t always make it all the way there. Take, for instance, its journal, an exhaustive chronicle of the personal story that you are generating as you play. That’s great. But what’s less great is that it can be inordinately difficult to sift through the huge mass of text to find the details of a quest you’re pretty sure you accepted sometime last week. Most of us would love to have a simple bullet list of quests to go along with the verbose diary, however much that may cause the hardcore immersion-seekers to howl in protest at the gameyness of it all. Later Infinity Engine games corrected oversights like this one.

The most oft-discussed and controversial aspect of the Infinity Engine, back in the day and to some extent even today, is its implementation of combat. As we’ve learned, makers of CRPGs in the late 1990s faced a real conundrum when it came to combat. They wanted to preserve a measure of tactical complexity, but they also had to reckon with the reality of a marketplace that showed a clear preference for fast-paced, fluid gameplay over turn-based models. Fallout tried to square that circle by running in real-time until a fight began, at which point it forced you back into a turn-based framework; Might and Magic VI did a little better in my opinion by letting you decide when you wanted to go turn-based. In a way, BioWare was even more constrained than the designers of either of those two games, because they were explicitly making a digital implementation of a turn-based set of tabletop rules.

Their solution to the conundrum was real-time-with-pause, in which the computer automatically acts out the combat, adhering to the rules of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons but, critically, without advertising the breaks between rounds and turns. The player can assert her will at any point in the proceedings by tapping the space bar to pause the action, issuing new commands to her charges, and then tapping it again to let the battle resume.

Clever though the scheme is, not everyone loves it. And, to be sure, there are valid complaints to levy against it. Big fights can all too quickly degenerate into a blob of intersecting sprites, with spells going off everywhere and everyone screaming at once; it’s like watching twenty Tasmanian Devils — the Looney Tunes version, that is — in a fur-flying free-for-all. Yet there are ways to alleviate the confusion by making judicious use of the option to “auto-pause,” a hugely important capability that is mentioned only in oblique passing in the game’s 160-page manual, presumably because that document was sent to the printing press before the software it described had been finalized. Auto-pause will let you stop the action automatically whenever certain conditions of your choice are met — or even at the end of every single action taken by every single member of your party, if you choose to go that far. Doing so lets you effectively turn Baldur’s Gate into a purely turn-based game, if that’s your preference. Or you can go fully turn-based only for the really big fights that you know will require careful micro-management. This is what I do. The rest of the time, I just use a few judicious break points — a character is critically wounded, a spell caster has finished casting a spell, etc. — and otherwise rely on the good old space bar.

Another option — the best one for those most determined to turn the game into a simulation of playing tabletop Dungeons & Dragons with your mates — is to turn on artificial intelligence for every member of your party but the one you created. Then you just let them all do their things while you do yours. You may find yourself less enamored with this approach, however, after you become part of the collateral damage of one of Dynaheir’s Fireball spells for the first time. (Shades of the stone-stupid and deadly companions in Fallout…)

Baldur’s Gate’s combat definitely isn’t perfect, but in its day it was a good-faith attempt to deliver an experience that was recognizably Dungeons & Dragons while also catering to the demands of the contemporary marketplace. I think it holds up okay today, especially when placed in the context of the rest of the game that houses it, which has ambitions for its world and its fiction that transcend the tactical-combat simulations that the latter-day Gold Box games especially lapsed into. It is true that your companions’ artificial intelligence could be better, as it is true that it’s sometimes harder than it ought to be to figure out what’s really going on, a byproduct of graphics that are somewhat muddy even at the best of times and of having way too many character sprites in way too small a space. But your fighters, who don’t usually require too much micro-management, are the most affected by this latter problem, while your spell casters ought to be standing well back from the fray anyway, if they know what’s good for them. Another not-terrible approach, then, is to control your spell casters yourself, since they’re the ones who can most easily ruin their companions’ day, and leave your fighters to their own devices. But you’ll doubtless figure out what works best for you within the first few hours.

Indeed, Baldur’s Gate feels disarmingly modern in the way that it bends over backward to adjust itself to your preferred style of play. This encompasses not only the myriad of auto-pause and artificial-intelligence options but an adjustable global difficulty slider for combat. All of this allows you to breeze through the fights with minimal effort or hunker down for a long series of intricate tactical struggles, just as you choose. Giving your player as many ways to play as possible is seldom a bad choice in commercial game design. Not everyone had yet figured that out in the late 1990s.

If you want the ultimate simulation of playing tabletop Dungeons & Dragons with your friends, you can turn on an option to watch the actual die rolls scrolling past during combat.

BioWare and Interplay released an expansion pack to Baldur’s Gate called Tales of the Sword Coast just six months after the base game. Rather than serving as a sequel to the main plot, it’s content merely to add some new ancillary areas to explore betwixt and between fulfilling your destiny as The Chosen One. Given that I definitely don’t consider the main plot the most interesting part of Baldur’s Gate, I have no problem with this approach in theory. Nevertheless, the expansion pack strikes me as underwhelming and kind of superfluous — like a collection of all the leftover bits that failed to make the cut the first time around, which I suspect is exactly what it is. The biggest addition is an elaborate dungeon known as Durlag’s Tower, created to partially address one of the principal ironies of the base game: the fact that it contains surprisingly little in the way of dungeons and no dragons whatsoever. The latter failing would have to wait for the proper sequel to be corrected, but BioWare did try to shore up the former aspect by presenting an old-school, tactically complex dungeon crawl of the sort that Gary Gygax would have loved, a maze rife not only with tough monsters but with secret doors, illusions, traps, and all manner of other subtle trickery. Personally, I tend to find this sort of thing more tedious than exciting at this stage of my life, at least when it’s implemented in this particular game engine. I decided pretty quickly after venturing inside to let old Durlag keep his tower, since he seemed to be having a much better time there than I was.

Durlag’s Tower. The Infinity Engine doesn’t do so well in such narrow, trap-filled spaces. It’s hard to keep your characters from blundering into places that they shouldn’t.

While your reaction to the über-dungeon may be a matter of taste, a more objective ground for concern is all of the new sources of experience points the expansion adds, whilst raising the experience and level caps on your characters only modestly. As a result, it becomes that much easier to max out your characters before you finish the game, a state of affairs which is no fun at all. In my eyes, then, Baldur’s Gate is a better, tighter game without the expansion. For better or for worse, though, Tales of the Sword Coast has become impossible to extricate from the base game, being automatically incorporated into all of the modern downloadable editions. So, I’ll content myself with telling you to feel free to skip Durlag’s Tower and/or any of the other additional content if it’s not your thing. There’s nothing essential to the rest of the game to be found there.

Whatever its infelicities and niggles, it’s almost impossible to overstate the importance and influence of Baldur’s Gate in the broader context of gaming history. Forget the comparisons I’ve been making again and again in these articles to Pool of Radiance: one can actually make a case for Baldur’s Gate as the most important single-player CRPG released between 1981, the landmark year of the first Wizardry and Ultima, and the date of this very article that you’re reading.

Baldur’s Gate’s unprecedented level of commercial success transformed the intersection between tabletop Dungeons & Dragons and its digital incarnations from a one-way avenue into a two-way street; all of the future editions of the tabletop rules that would emerge under Wizards of the Coast’s watch would be explicitly crafted with an eye to what worked on the computer as well. At the same time, Baldur’s Gate cemented one of the more enduring abstract design templates in digital gaming history; witness the extraordinary success of 2023’s belated Baldur’s Gate 3. The CRPGs that more immediately followed Baldur’s Gate I, both those that were powered by the Infinity Engine and those that only borrowed some of its ideas, found ways to improve on the template in countless granular details, but they were all equally the heirs to this very first Infinity Engine game. Yes, Fallout got there first, and in some respects did it even better, with a less clichéd, more striking setting and an even deeper-seated commitment to acknowledging and responding to its player’s choices. And there’s more than a little something to be said for the role played by the goofy, janky, uninhibited Monty Haul fun of Might and Magic VI in the rehabilitation of the CRPG genre as well. Yet the fact remains that it was Baldur’s Gate that truly led the big, meaty CRPG out of the wilderness and back into the mainstream.

Then again, gaming history is not a zero-sum game. The note on which I’d prefer to end this series of articles is simply that the CRPG genre was back by 1999. Increasingly, it would be the computer games that drove sales of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons rather than the other way around. Meanwhile a whole lot of other CRPGs, including some of the most interesting ones of all, would be given permission to blaze their own trails without benefit of a license. I look forward to visiting or revisiting some of them with you in the years to come, as we explore this genre’s second golden age.

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

Sources: For Baldur’s Gate, see my last article, with the addition of the book BioWare: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development, which commenter Infinitron was kind enough to tell me about.

For Fallout 2: the book Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs by David L. Craddock. Computer Gaming World of February 1999; Retro Gamer 72 and 188. Also Chris Avellone’s appearance on Soren Johnson’s Designer Notes podcast and Tim Cain’s YouTube channel.

Where to Get Them: Fallout 2 and Baldur’s Gate are both available as digital purchases at GOG.com, the latter in an “enhanced edition” that sports some welcome quality-of-life improvements alongside some additional characters and quests that don’t sit as well with everyone. Note that it buying it does give you access to the original game as well.

A few weeks ago someone quietly posted a link to Invisiclues.org, a new Infocom fan archive.

The site is dedicated to (1) archiving historical Infocom-related artifacts -- InvisiClues, of course, but also magazine articles, marketing material, packaging, artwork, literature, and the games themselves -- and (2) making the archives available in an enjoyable format.

-- About Invisiclues.org

The Net has a lot of Infocom fan archives (including my own, of course). And the Infocom Invisiclues themselves are well-preserved.

Where this new site excels, though, is its collection of articles about Infocom. These are gathered from contemporary game magazines (Softline, Computer Gaming World, ...), general computing magazines (Byte, Softalk, Compute!, ...), and mainstream sources (Time, NYT, ...). There were 250 articles when the Invisiclues site launched, and it's over 300 now.

This collection way, way outstrips our existing collection of Infocom articles at the IF Archive. I imagine that the material is mostly filtered from Archive.org. But it represents an intense curatorial effort, and I'm happy to see it show up. My congratulations and gratitude to the site maintainer.

(As to the "enjoyable" part, check out the working status line in the top right corner. Cute!)

The Boston IF meetup for March will be Tuesday, March 25, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting. 

I’ve finished the game, and my previous posts are needed for context.

Via the Internet Archive. The “Back-Up Program Certificate” is intended for getting one (1) copy for back-up use in case the original disk gets busted.

It’s hard to give a “narrative” of everything that happened because I had found most of the map already; progressing to the end involved finding the extra hidden pieces, plus one extra annoyance at the end which we’ll get to.

Let’s talk about the mansion (or at the game sometimes switches to, house) first. The new rooms are marked in red:

I spent a significant amount of time eye-balling the verb list I had made and trying every action I thought was reasonable on every object I thought was reasonable.

DIG, CLIMB, READ, BREAK, OPEN, DRINK, EAT, LIGHT, UNLOCK, LOCK, SIT, FEED, JUMP, PRESS, PUT, PUSH, PULL, TURN, ROTATE, MOVE, SLEEP, CLOSE, EXAMINE, LEAVE, KICK, KNOCK, STAND, PLAY, ENTER, PICK, LIFT, EMPTY, MELT, PRY

For example, upstairs there is a globe, and I realized I hadn’t tried to ROTATE it, which seems a reasonable thing to apply to a globe.

You can BREAK GLOBE (putting a “SMALL HOLE” in the bottom) and then do ROTATE GLOBE again to get a RUBY to fall out, yielding one of the glorious treasures.

Downstairs, at the statue I was having trouble with, I had tried PUSH but apparently not PULL:

This opens a secret room with a bracelet (more treasure) plus a stool. I already knew the picture in the study had been described as out of reach, so I decided to try to drop it there and STAND ON STOOL. While the picture still can’t be taken, I went back to the verb list and hit paydirt with MOVE.

This yields a SILVER CANDLEABRA and is the last treasure just lying about the house where things get stored.

Up next comes the parachute. I had theorized two posts ago that while the parachute is fatal from the opening chasm, it might still work elsewhere, but I hadn’t systematically tried it out yet. The parachute was next to message about “following in my footsteps” and I realized a cave near a fissure had footsteps leading to it, so it was a very good candidate to try:

Oho! The area this lands in includes a bottle of rare wine (treasure) a message (“hot or cold, warm or cool, the sapphires free if you can find the tool”) which is supposed to be a hint. You go via one-way exit back up to the “random exits” room.

I say “supposed to” be a hint because it led me astray for a while. I did realize where they were: you see them if you examine the icicle in the ice room. However, I thought the hint meant I just need to apply the right tool directly to the icicle (or rather, because tools sometimes get used passively, apply all the possible verbs while holding as many tools as possible).

I was looking in the wrong direction. I needed to go back to the furnace, with a dial I had attempted to TURN but was denied. Just like the FLOOR BOARDS, this was a case with a deceptive parser message; TURN DIAL is right, it just can only be done while holding the PLIERS (which I thought I was holding but I had apparently juggled them to my storage pile while testing other things).

With this done, you can go back to where the icicle was and nab the treasure.

The melting ice also reveals an exit to the north, leading to yet another treasure (a goblet). I did not catch this at first because I had already thoroughly done mapping via testing exits, and that route didn’t occur to me as a “future exit” that I should mark down.

Back at where the furnace was, another path led up to a Venus flytrap. As Matt W. guessed in the comments, the burger back at the house works to satiate it; it drops a rare stamp when you do so and opens a path by.

Before showing what is just past, I should highlight an item I’ve mentioned already but given no detail on: a magazine you can find by digging into some sand. The contents seem cryptic and I originally thought they could be an Easter egg style reference akin to the magazine in Crowther/Woods.

Just past the flytrap is a computer room (the door is locked, but the key that unlocked the main gate also unlocks this door). While this game is “modern” so it doesn’t feel comparatively jarring, I’m still reminded of Microsoft Adventure tossing a hacker’s den in the game for some reason.

I also got stumped for a very strange reason. Here was my initial conception of the map:

To be clear, this is WRONG.

Take a look at the room description and see if you can spot my mistake:

My brain, zeroing in on “the only exit lies to the north”, assumed the other directional references (“disk drive” to the east, “printer” to the west, “computer” to the south) were positional references and not actual directions that you can take. I’m going to blame myself for this one, mostly — except the parser’s non-responsiveness was such that I could refer to the printer and computer and disk drive in such a way it wasn’t obvious they were far away!

With the extra rooms filled in, the computer wasn’t difficult to get started. First, the disk from outdoors needs to go into a drive that has two buttons (push red button to start, blue button to open, PUT DISK IN DRIVE, blue button to close). Then the computer has a LOAD button that must be pressed, and three prompts must be given responses based on the magazine buried in the sand:

Without the magazine this would be a hassle, since there wasn’t a way to realize where to hunt for the missing information.

The printer then gives a PRINTOUT which I showed in my last post: a map of a maze.

Let’s jump ahead to that — remember from last time you need to pry the FLOOR BOARDS / FLOORBOARDS, causing you to fall down into a new area. Heading north goes past a bridge over lava and into a maze.

Inside the maze is a violin and a power pack. (I never used the power pack. I assume it recharges the lamp, but I never got low enough during normal play to worry; I only had it start to flicker when I was first making my map and testing every single exit in every single room to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Ha. Ha ha.)

Leaving then goes through the iron panel I was puzzled about:

As I suspected, I was essentially done with everything here. I had in fact found all the treasures:

I was short some points, and completely baffled as to why. I went through the walkthrough on CASA and combed through “drop” messages looking for the list of treasures, double-confirming I wasn’t missing anything. I eventually resorted to just restarting the game and running through the walkthrough wholesale, before realizing I had missed passing over the quicksand.

GET BOULDER and the like (which tried before) failed. I might assume PICK here means “apply pickaxe” except this action works even if you aren’t holding the pickaxe. I have no idea how to visualize what is happening.

I bestow the title of Second Worst Spot in the Game. Passing through is otherwise completely optional since there’s another way around.

I think, based on what Roger Durrant was alluding to in my comments, if you are short the points here but then take care of the boulder, you win the game right on the spot. This feels rather more unsatisfying than dropping off the final treasures, but since I was just repeating the walkthrough I took it all the way to the end.

Despite the hiccups already mentioned I did enjoy myself overall; there was a sense of combing for clues that other Treasure Hunt crawlers from this era tend not to have (with notable exception: some of the additions made to Crowther/Woods, like in Adventure 430, but most of those aren’t consistent with the rest of the game). I could see leaning in the direction of Mansion Adventure and making a Columbo Goes on a Dungeon Crawl game with lots of backtracking and cross-checking details.

Other than the obvious follow-up of Crime Stopper, I don’t see a clear link with the rest of Dan Kitchen’s output. Garry’s reverse engineering eventually led to him getting hired by Activision; Dan Kitchen went to Activision as well. Dan did still work on some Apple II games, most notably on the ports of Little Computer People and (Activision’s) Gamemaker.

I’ve combed over Dan Kitchen’s credits and the closest he gets to another adventure game is much later in life where he is the designer on a 2010 “casual” adventure titled Romancing the Seven Wonders: Taj Mahal (think hidden object puzzles, tangrams, etc.)

Via Mobygames.

At least in a business sense, the fact Garry and Dan founded a company early is important; it granted the independence to outlast Activision imploding after its transformation into Mediagenic, such that Dan’s credits are given to over 150 games, and he still remains active in the industry, with a recent release of a new Atari 2600 game, Casey’s Gold.

Coming up: Dr. Who, followed by a Western, followed by some naughty games courtesy a company in Ohio (with ads saucy enough to kick up an angry letter to a magazine editor).

I’m delighted that after more than four years of work by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and myself — we’re co-editors of this book — the MIT Press and Counterpath have jointly published

Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023

Book launch events are posted here and will be updated as new ones are scheduled!

This anthology spans seven decades of computer-generated text, beginning before the term “artificial intelligence” was even coined. While not restricted to poetry, fiction, and other creative projects, it reveals the rich work that has been done by artists, poets, and other sorts of writers who have taken computing and code into their own hands. The anthology includes examples of powerful and principled rhetorical generation along with story generation systems based on cognitive research. There are examples of “real news” generation that has already been informing us — along with hoaxes and humor.

It’s all contextualized by brief introductions to each excerpt, longer introductions to each fine-grained genre of text generation, and an overall introduction that Lillian-Yvonne and I wrote. There are 200 selections in the 500-page book, which we hope will be a valuable sourcebook for academics and students — but also a way for general readers to learn about innovations in computing and writing.

You can buy Output now from several sources. I suggest your favorite independent bookseller! If you’re in the Boston area, stop by the MIT Press Bookstore which as of this writing, has 21 on hand as of actually publishing this post, has 14 copies!

Upcoming Book Launches, Talks, and Events

March 17 (Monday) Montréal book launch with Erín Mouré, Darren Wershler, Bill Kennedy, and Sofian Audry. Free & open to the public. Book sales thanks to Argo Bookshop. Concordia University, 1515, Saint-Catherine St. W, EV 11.705, 4pm-6pm.

March 25 (Tuesday) New School book launch for both Output and All the Way for the Win. CaLC (Code at Lang Colloquium) series. Free & open to the public, registration required. Hirshon Suite, 55 W 13th St, Floor 2, 5-6:30pm.

March 29 (Saturday) AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference, on the panel “Making a Literary Future with Artificial Intelligence,” Concourse Hall 151, 1:45pm–3pm.

April 5 (Saturday) Both co-editors on a panel about the anthology at Baltimore’s CityLit Festival, Lord Baltimore Hotel, Hanover Suite A Mezzanine, 11:30am-12:30pm.

Previous Events

November 11 (Monday): Both editors spoke at the University of Virginia 5 Bryan Hall, Faculty Lounge, Floor 2. Free & open to the public. 5pm.

November 20 (Wednesday): Online book launch for Output, hosted by the University of Maryland. Both editors in conversation with Matt Kirschenbaum. Free, register on Zoom. 12noon Eastern Time.

November 21 (Thursday) Book launch at WordHack with me, David Gissen, Sasha Stiles, Andrew Yoon, and open mic presenters. Wonderville, 1186 Broadway, Brooklyn, 7pm. $15. Book sales.

December 6 (Friday) Output will be available for sale and I’ll be at the Bad Quarto / Nick Montfort table at Center for Book Arts Winter Market, 28 W 27th St Floor 3, 4pm–8pm.

December 9 (Monday) Book launch at Book Club Bar with the editors, Charles Bernstein, Robin Hill, Stephanie Strickland, and Leonard Richardson. 197 E 3rd St (at Ave B), New York City’s East Village. Free, RSVP required. 8pm. Book sales thanks to Book Club.

December 13 (Friday) European book launch with the editors, Scott Rettberg, and Tegan Pyke. University of Bergen’s Center for Digital Narrative, Langesgaten 1-2, 3:30pm. Free & open to the public, book sales thanks to Akedemika. This event was streamed & recorded and is available to view on YouTube.

January 13 (Monday) “The Output Anthology at Computer-Generated Text’s Cultural Crux”, a talk of mine at the UCSC Computational Media Colloquium, Engineering 2 Room 280, 12:30pm–1:30pm. Free & open to the public.

January 20 (Monday) Toronto book launch with me, Matt Nish-Lapidus, & Kavi Duvvoori, at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Culture & Technology (previously Marshall McLuhan’s seminar room), 6pm–7:30pm.

February 24 (Monday) Carnegie Mellon University workshop “Ars Combinatoria: A Generative Poetics” with the editors, CFA 215, 2pm–4pm. Registration required, limited to 15.

February 24 (Monday) Carnegie Mellon University book launch with the editors, CFA, STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (CFA 111), 5:30pm–7pm. Free & open to the public, please RSVP.

March 11 (Tuesday) Massachusetts Institute of Technology book launch with the editors, MIT’s Room 32-155, 5pm-6:30pm. Free & open to the public. Book sales thanks to the MIT Press Bookstore.

The Steam Spring Sale is here, and you can find all of our games discounted until March 20th, including the Nebula finalist games!

Daniel Kitchen published two adventure games in 1982 through Hayden Books. One of them, Crime Stopper (written with Barry Marx), I’ve already covered here. While I’ve discussed Hayden before, I haven’t really talked about Dan Kitchen himself. To do things properly I should discuss the whole trio of Kitchen brothers: Steve, Garry, and Dan. So before we start looking for caverns, let’s go back to the late 60s–

The Kitchen brothers lived in New Jersey with a father who loved electronics; enough supplies were lying around that Steve (the oldest) built a home-made computer from parts in the basement. Steve went on to work for Wickstead Design, an electronics design firm; Garry (the next oldest) followed. Garry had inclination more as an artist and

I had no engineering experience so I joined the company as low man on the totem pole, getting lunch for people, running errands and learning how to solder and build electronic prototypes.

He started attending college the same time with a major in art, but became engrossed enough in the electronics side he switched to electronics engineering in his sophomore year.

Wickstead as a company became interested in electronic games in 1977 due to the release of the mega-hit Mattel Football.

Via eBay, $1499.99 or Best Offer.

Wickstead bid on — and won — a project from Parker Brothers to develop the product Wildfire, an electronic pinball game. Wildfire was originally invented by Bob and Holly Doyle using a microcomputer but the Wickstead’s commission was to turn it into an inexpensive toy going for $7. While the Wickstead had software expertise they didn’t have hardware, so they hired a contractor for the code:

The engineers started working on the hardware while the software consultant (who had a full-time job) wrote code on paper by hand, dropping it off at our office in the evening. My task was to type his code into the microprocessor development system. As the deadline approached, we still did not have running software, though the contractor assured us that the program was almost complete. Finally, he came to our office one night announcing that he had the last hand-written sheets, which he gave them to me to type in the system. We programmed a chip with the program, plugged it into our circuit board and nothing happened. No lights, no sound, no flippers, no ball. He pronounced that he knew what was wrong (Eureka!), changed a few lines of code, and we tried again. Still nothing. This went on for hours and hours and then days and days and we began to wonder if this guy had any idea how to write software.

Garry ended up having to step in and learn how to code and Wildfire managed to be finished on schedule.

Dan followed his brothers to the company in 1979, and was also there while Garry designed his next product (Bank Shot), an electronic pool game which seemed like the next logical step after pinball.

Around this time the oldest brother (Steve) left for California, and Garry obtained an interest in the Atari 2600. He reverse-engineered the system, and using an Apple II, made the game Space Jockey as a test in 1980. (This game was eventually published in 1982, but that’s ahead of our story.)

A few months later, in the basement of Garry’s home, Dan and Garry founded a company: Imaginative Systems Software. They wanted to focus on the Apple II, but their first paying job (through Hayden) was a port of Reversal (an Othello clone) to the Atari 400. This led to a more lucrative contract after for six Apple II games, which ended up being Crystal Caverns, Crime Stopper, Laser Bounce, Bellhop, Shuttle Intercept and Kamikaze.

Dan had gotten an Apple II the same year he joined Wickstead (1979) and was able to help crank out the games in assembly language. He was a “big fan of Microsoft Adventure and all of Scott Adams’ games”, hence the text adventures. Crystal Caverns earned him $6000, and one of Garry’s friends (Barry Marx) came up with the concept and story for the follow-up game, Crime Stopper.

Softalk, November 1982.

Crystal Caverns is more of a classical Crowther/Woods style romp. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; while the originality of Crime Stopper was refreshing, the complex series of events ended up breaking and not only was I unable to finish the game, the walkthrough I was using (via The Book of Adventure Games) only was able to trigger the ending on two out of six tries. A classical Treasure Hunt (find the valuable objects, drop them in the right room) is less likely to break.

CRYSTAL CAVERNS is an adventure game for the sleuth with an appetite for mystery, danger and buried treasure. Somewhere buried in a deserted old mansion lie treasures of priceless value. But to find them you must embark on a perilous journey riddled with pitfalls, dead ends, and deadly surprises.

In order to complete the adventure you must seek out the treasures hidden throughout the mansion and caverns below and stash them in just the right spot in the mansion.

While the Kitchen original was for Apple II a port was eventually made for Commodore 64. I am sticking with the original.

While the very original Apple II had only a very tiny amount of memory (4k) it tended to be expanded to 48k, that is, 3 times the capacity of a TRS-80. So while Dan Kitchen liked both Scott Adams and Adventure, the capabilities of the Apple meant he didn’t have to stick with super-minimalism, and in fact the start of the game has a bunch of rooms just for scenery which revels in long descriptions.

For example, heading straight north from the starting point leads to a vivid room description which could represent a hint of sorts but mostly is an opportunity to drop some long prose along the lines of the volcano room in Adventure.

It’s a nice contrast after playing a VIC-20 game! The starting outdoors map is the sort where the author is loathe to have some exits get blocked off (because why would they be blocked off outdoors?) but the general effect is a lot of confusing one-way exits:

I’m keeping my map with these in case the exits become important later (for optimizing moves, maybe) but here’s a simplified version:

The only important parts (so far) are a room with a “hard disk”, a parachute in a room with a message…

…and a path ending at an “odd shaped key”.

The stump in the screenshot looks like it might be important, but it has rebuffed my attempts to interact with it.

The key can then be taken to the front gate to unlock in, revealing the inner area by the mansion.

Most of this seems to be just meant to build atmosphere. In the environs you can scoop up a busted pair of pliers, as well as a can of oil and shovel from a shed.

The boarded up back door has a carving; I don’t know if it is intended to be busted through later (if so, probably from the other side).

The hint indicates you can knock at the front door.

From here the map gets fairly expansive so this is a good place to pause until I’ve got the lay of the land. Despite bog-standard gameplay I’m enjoying myself a little more than Crime Stoppers so far; I’m not being paranoid about a time limit or softlocking my game early and there’s no need to wait for a subway to pass. It’s less of a “regular story” but pure exploration still can hold my interest in games that put effort into their atmosphere.

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