This is a sequel to a game that I covered 6 years ago, so let’s take things fresh–

The People’s Computer Company is an organization important to the history of early computing and adventure games. They were established as a non-profit center where everyone — especially even young children — could come use computers and learn. Given their launch in 1972 was before personal computers (mostly) this was a strong deviation from the norm, and indeed they talked about their mission as one of empowering the people and taking technology from the hands of the government.

Children at the PCC with an Odyssey game console in the May 1973 issue of the newsletter.

They had one of the earliest computer newsletters/magazines that went through multiple names: first simply named after themselves, People’s Computer Company, turning into People’s Computers when it became more magazine-like (1977) and transforming into Recreational Computing by 1979.

A Spanish translation of the classic game Kingdom, found in the Feb. 1979 issue of Recreational Computing.

In their very early years, they printed both Caves and Wumpus, hence their connection with early adventures. July/August 1980 was a particularly important issue as it was “Fantasy Games” themed and included Wizard’s Castle (as recently covered here discussing HOBBIT), an article by Donald Brown on the Eamon series, and a speculative article by Dennis Allison on future fantasy games. It also contains the adventure game Nellan is Thirsty, by the mathematician Dr. Furman H. Smith.

Dr. Smith, as shown in the article.

The article describes a system he calls “The Enchanted House” for writing a “CFS” or “computerized fantasy simulation” intended for children. I won’t go through Nellan is Thirsty again (you can read my previous post here) but to summarize: it has extremely friendly and clear text in terms of what items are needed to get by certain obstacles, and it includes a mini-map (enabled by the game being oriented on a grid). The mini-map in particular is quite unusual for the time and essentially an addition specifically because of the child-oriented nature of the system. In a writeup made much later, Dr. Furman explains the map was the suggestion of a colleague, Craig Wood.

There was a magic map — magic because it had the magic feature of updating itself as we explored; that is, a room appeared on the map if and only if we had visited that room. The program had graphics both for the Tandy Radio Shack and the Zenith/Heath computer — when using computer system X you could comment out the graphics code (all contained in one place) for computer Y.

Furman writes in his 1980 article that drawing a map was “beyond the capabilities of many children who would otherwise be able to enjoy and benefit from the game.” That is, the now-quite-standard innovation came directly from trying to accommodate children.

The same article promised a follow-up which appeared in the July/August 1981 issue of Recreational Computing. I do not have this magazine, although I do know what the cover looks like…

Via Tumblr.

…and I also have the game itself, because Geoff Draper (who did the modern port of Nellan is Thirsty) made a version of the 1981 game, Deliver the Cake. As Draper explains, this was more an attempt at a straight port to DOS, and by inspection it looks like there are minimal changes in order to have the game playable.

You are about to be placed (let’s pretend) in an Enchanted House.

It is always raining in one of the rooms in this house (the Rain Room). You cannot enter the Rain Room without an UMBRELLA, but you have to find the UMBRELLA first.

You should use short messages to tell me what you want to do. Typical messages are: TIPTOE NORTH, GET UMBRELLA, TAKE THE OLD BRASS KEY, UNLOCK THE DOOR, GO EAST, DROP THE MAP, W (‘W’ is the same as ‘GO WEST’ or ‘WEST’)

Your mission is to find the CAKE and deliver it to the Party Room.

When you are in the house, you can type <help> for more information.
You are about to be placed in a room called the Foyer.

Some interesting details with the instructions:

• The “let’s pretend” line is there to emphasize it is not really “you” but rather you are pretending to be in the place.
• An immediate hint is given about the main obstacle. (If the rain wasn’t there, you could immediately win in 4 moves; it’s still a short game.
• The sample commands include “THE” which often is removed. Likely it was considered more natural for beginners, but it also may be given that way to reinforce good grammar.
• The task given is very explicit about an item and destination, rather than speaking generally of treasures, or defeating a particular enemy without specifics.
• Before gameplay starts it announces the player starts in the Foyer (rather than just having the initial room immediately appear).

There’s sometimes language for adults in this direction, especially in the very early articles explaining what an adventure was (“I did not lie down on the cavern floor and go to sleep. I merely turned off my home computer.”) but this is leaning very heavily to make sure the player knows they are “pretending” they are elsewhere, then announcing where that elsewhere will be.

You are in a room called the Foyer. There is a small doorway to the EAST and a large doorway to the NORTH.

The game is even simpler than Nellan, with the entirety of the action in a 3 by 3 grid where the player starts in the lower left. To the east it is dark…

This room is so dark that it is called the Dark Room. You can see light coming from the WEST doorway.
It is too dark to see anything else in here.

…and to the north is the cake of the title.

You are in the Seating Room of an auditorium. You can see the Stage to the NORTH, a doorway to the SOUTH, and a doorway to the EAST. You notice that it is raining in the room to the EAST.
Ah, here is the CAKE which you are to deliver to the Party Room.

The game already mentioned requiring an umbrella to get into the rainy room, but in case you forgot, going east gets the explicit response:

No one can enter the Rain Room without an open UMBRELLA.

This means north is the only option.

You are now on the Stage. The Seating Room is to the SOUTH. There is a door to the EAST.
There is a GLOBE in the center of the room and it is softly glowing.

The door is locked (and rather than leaving it to chance, the text says you need a KEY to get through the locked DOOR) so picking up the globe is the only option. With the globe in hand you can go back to the dark room to find a closed UMBRELLA.

This room is so dark that it is called the Dark Room. You can see light coming from the WEST doorway.
There is a closed UMBRELLA in the corner.

Now you can open the umbrella, but unfortunately you can’t bring the cake through the Rain Room (even with the umbrella) because it will get soggy. So the player will need to remember to come back.

The ceiling of this room really needs fixing. Rain is falling through the ceiling and running through a tiny hole in the floor. There are doorways to the EAST and WEST.

You can close the umbrella while in the room with no ill consequence. East is the Party Room, the end goal of the game.

Welcome to the Party Room. There are doorways to the NORTH and WEST. The east wall has a giant picture of an elephant. The south wall has a small curtain made out of bright green beads.
There is an old gum WRAPPER in this room.

North and the west is a Pantry, and finally, the MAP.

The “magic” aspect doesn’t seem to happen; if you haven’t gone into the southeast corner it still shows on the map. However, you can’t find the map until you’ve already visited almost every room anyway, so it’s just a one-room difference. (I likely would, playing armchair designer, just move the MAP near to right the beginning, with or without the magic part. It seems roughly pointless at the end.)

To get to that office you need to go south of the party room (the “small curtain made out of bright green beads” which violates the condition that the room exit is specified in ALL CAPS). No hint is obtained by moving the beads around:

What do you intend to do now? pull beads
The beads is hard to pull.

What do you intend to do now? move beads
The beads is hard to move.

What do you intend to do now? push beads
The beads is hard to push.

Instead, you just plow ahead with SOUTH.

Crouching low, you push your way through the curtain of beads…
…And find yourself in an old dusty Office!
There is an old brass KEY on the floor.

With the key, you can unlock the locked door from earlier, and take the cake through, bypassing the rain room. After DROP CAKE:

Ok; done.
Y O U W O N ! Congratulations.

I did appreciate the subtle touches for simplicity; this is a game intended genuinely for very young children who would not be able to make a map yet. Furman had it tested on his daughter’s fourth grade class:

It took my daughter’s fourth grade class about twenty minutes to solve this CFS.

Furman was intended to return with a third game, Deposit the Chair, but the magazine was liquidated before it could reach the next year’s issue.

I still think a more compelling story might be possible with the same game-feel though? We’ve already had here the more action-packed Dragon Adventure and in my next post I will return with another children’s game to see a different take on the genre.

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

It’s 38% off until Oct 30th!

Will you spill the tea about the secret, cozy magical cafe on the college campus? Brew potions and romance on coffee dates with your new friends!

Witch’s Brew: Love and Lattes is an interactive cozy romance novel by Cay Macres. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, 426,000 words, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

After years of hiding your magical powers, you’ve been accepted into Peridot Pines University—as well as its secret society of magicians! Better still, you’ve got a sweet job as a barista at Witch’s Brew, the cafe where Hecate Society meetings take place. The catch? Witch’s Brew is struggling: even on a college campus, it’s hard to keep a coffee shop open. They need all the help they can get to keep it open—especially yours. The other catch? Magic is supposed to be secret—and the new university chancellor suspects that something is up.

Can you make the grade in both your mundane and magical classes, while still putting your best effort towards making your customers happy at the coffee shop? What will you do when specters start appearing all over campus? Or when spells go awry and the chancellor gets suspicious, how will you cover it up: with quick-talking persuasion, more magic, or with the combined effort of all of your friends?

Or, maybe you’re starting to fall for one of those friends? Pierced, punk, red-headed Rowan has hard-to-control magic that crackles with electricity—but when that same magic leaves a trail of daisies behind, it shows that Rowan has a softer side, too. Alchemist Mel’s mother runs the coffee shop, so Mel always has an energy potion on hand for those late-night study sessions, and creative ideas for how to boost the shop’s sales—not to mention, the softest brown curly hair and dreamy brown eyes. Then there’s whimsical Tomi, who has a sweet sense of humor, sparkling hazel eyes, and an endless collection of academic-looking sweatervests. Every time you run into this journalism major, it feels like something out of a romcom. But Tomi is a non-magical mundane! Can you keep your biggest secret from someone who’s becoming so important to you?

Or…maybe you don’t want to keep the secret anymore? Maybe the world—or at least Peridot Pines University—is ready to hear about magic.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, or bi.
• Romance a barista who spikes their coffee with potions, a hot-headed elemental magician, or a non-magical journalism student who asks a lot of questions.
• Choose a type of magic to concentrate in—alchemy, divination, transmutation, or elemental magic—and learn arcane secrets from your knowledgeable professors.
• Bond with your childhood best friend, or build new relationships with your college classmates.
• Figure out a way to keep your struggling cafe from being closed. Potions to match the customers’ moods? Gimmicky sales? Appealing to the university community? Or just excellent service?
• Explore mysterious ruins, have a relaxing day at the beach, and cheer for your favorite team in an intramural game of Divination Dodge!
• Adopt the world’s snarkiest cat as your familiar. Or maybe you’re the cat’s familiar? The cat certainly thinks so.

Order’s up! Cappuccino, with a dash of magic.

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

(Continued from my previous post. And fair warning, lots of bloody Apple II graphics upcoming.)

Before getting into today’s bout with puzzles and mayhem, a brief comparison of two pictures, one from the Wizardry 1 manual and one from the Crypt of Medea manual.

The image above is from the cartoonist Will McLean, famous for drawing cartoons in the Dragon Master’s Guide of Dungeons and Dragons; his art in the Wizardry manual gave it a general aura of D&D. Rick Austin, as I mentioned in my last post, did the iconic dragon cover, which is even used in the modern Steam port.

Now, an image from the Crypt of Medea manual (this represents the starting room, and what I assume is the player character):

The manual art was done by Rick Austin, not McLean. Austin clearly has a different approach to the character, but the way the background wall line meanders clearly invokes the cartoony style of McLean. So it’s as if McLean established a “house style” connecting D&D to Wizardry that was subsequently used here. (I might follow with “even though it doesn’t have anything to do with D&D”, but the game’s score is given as “experience points”. While I’ve played adventures with experience points before I’ve never played one that was a traditional adventure that just used it as a substitute for “score”.)

Getting back into the gameplay…

The lab we left off on, with an empty vial and table.

…I’ve got a strong feel at least the general pattern, which isn’t exactly a “deathtrap maze” like Cauchemard-House but pretty close. You have access to a small set of rooms with lots of ways to die, but one of the ways to die has a solution, opening up a new place / getting a new item that will allow reckoning with another place that normally is fatal, and so on. I’m not far enough in to know if the pattern holds the whole game.

From here, you can allegedly exit west (back to the mausoleum with the glass case we still haven’t opened), south, or east. East is an arbitrary deathtrap:

Spikes pop out of the walls of the room you have entered. The walls begin to squeeze shut…
The spikes begin to pierce your body. They penetrate the temples of your head and enter your brain. You are dead.

There’s no warning: the whole idea is to spring the trap first, then use that foreknowledge on your next life. For now, let’s go south instead.

That’s a “corpse”, a “severed head”, and also an “orange button” which we’ll get to shortly. I ran here into an issue I neatly evaded recently with Leopard Lord but faceplanted into here. Namely: EXAMINE and SEARCH are considered different verbs. If you “examine” the corpse you find out it “has been badly mangled”; if you do the same on the head you’ll find it is skewered through a steel rod and there’s an ID card underneath.

Remember, the game is still updating graphics every time something changes; by finding the ID card it is now listed in the room and you can pick it up.

It was rather a bit later I tried to see if SEARCH was different and I found the body had something too, a vial with a sweet smell.

The passage continues south but first let me show off a side room you can open by pressing the orange button.

It has a light from above (which will later be important), a blue button, and a violet button. The blue button does nothing (for now) and the violet button fills the room with blood and you choke and die.

The wall slides closed behind you and warm blood spurts from small holes in the floor. The blood travels slowly up your body.
You choke to death on warm blood!

Going back to the land of the living (relatively speaking) and heading south, there’s a tape player and a dead dog…

…and the dead dog has germs that will leap up and kill you if you approach; you can take the tape player safely, though.

East then is a web blocking further passage:

Trying to cut the web (with that butterknife from earlier) predictably kills you. I was stumped a while until I fixed my SEARCH problem earlier at the corpse and found the vial. This is where the vial goes:

Moving farther east is a dead end with a “tape” and a “jellied mass”. Do I even need to explain what happens if you touch the mass?

If you put the tape player and tape together and play:

A click is heard in a distance room… then another click.

This is a softlock. You need to rewind to play the tape again, but the rewind button breaks when you try to push it. You need to find the right room to use the player in, and there’s no logic; you’re just supposed to SAVE/RESTORE and try every room. Not so onerous on an emulator, probably a pain on real hardware.

The room it’s supposed to go in is the lab. Playing the tape opens a small slot. You can then put the ID in the slot, which opens a “small cache” revealing a diamond.

Diamonds have a pretty standard use in adventures (especially when there’s no treasure-tracking): cutting things. You can go back to the glass case at the start and cut it open, revealing a “breathing apparatus”.

I immediately remembered the blood choking and tried it out in the “warm blood” room. It turns out you want to leave the candle in the room adjacent; the blood puts out the candle, and while the box of matches appears like you ought to be able to use more, the remaining matches are duds (so when the candle goes out, the game softlocks).

If you press the violet button and survive, you can go east, swimming through blood, and find a new room.

There’s a long rod, a yellow button, and an orange button. The yellow button makes a noise as if something distant opened; the orange button opens the “blood elevator” back up. You can use the previously non-working blue button to return to the top, with a very nasty dry cleaning budget.

The yellow button opens up a “testing room” next to the lab. There’s a tank with a humanoid figure, black and white buttons, and a rope attached to the ceiling. Pulling the rope, predictably, brings the ceiling down on you; I can’t cut the rope either (the butterknife is too dull, and that’s not really a diamond-cutting job).

The interior of the tank has a key, and trying to get the key gives a hint you need to USE XXXX; I assume it’s the rope, just I need to get it first. In the meantime, you can get yourself killed by pushing either the black or white button twice (in any combination).

That long rod from the bloody room also helps with the spikes, and will automatically jam up the trap if you’re holding it.

Further east is a ravine, although I’m stopped here for now. I figured it was a good moment to report in.

I’ll take creative ideas from the peanut gallery on the figure with the electricity, although that may just be a trap that needs to be ignored. Otherwise I’m still fine without hints (the manual comes with some, anyway, should I truly get stuck).

Please take a moment to fill out this brief questionnaire.

Pardon Me, but Have You Heard of the Interactive Fiction Competition?

My readers come from varied backgrounds and and have different reasons for following Gold Machine. Some are digital humanists, interested in the history of interactive media. Others are new media types, who enjoy interpreting games games along multiple axes. A lot of people are here for nostalgia’s sake. Some participate in a small DIY arts scene often referred to as the “interactive fiction community.” There are many overlaps among the groups. I write from all of these perspectives, and many readers likely read from them, too. These aren’t camps or sides, they are lenses or points of view.

The interactive fiction community, or scene, makes and plays games that it collectively (with some detractors) considers “interactive fiction.” Defining the term is a bit of a time waster. People generally agree that interactive fiction involves interaction and text, but there are so many edge cases that going further can provoke fights. In reality, despite this lack of clarity, it is very rare for any specific work to provoke a disagreement.

A lot of what goes on is based on vibes, and I mean that in a good way. A community is, among other things, a vibe or series of vibes.

There’s a lot that goes on to maintain a scene that exists to make and play games. There are people who maintain the systems authors use to produce their work. I work with the programming language Inform, for instance, and a number of people do hard work to keep that going. Still others–and some of the same people, too–maintain systems for executing game files. Discussion spaces must be maintained and operated.

It takes a lot to keep this interactive fiction thing rolling. There are also competition and jam events held the year round, where authors can showcase their works and sometimes compete for clout or prizes. These events all have their own special character. Spring Thing, for instance, is known for welcoming experimental work from varied and diverse perspectives. Ectocomp is the “spooky”-themed event held every October.

The largest and oldest of these events is the Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (IF Comp). Founded in 1995, IF Comp has its own character too: it is big and important. This importance is borne out, materially, in terms of entry counts, review counts, and rating counts. So many more people rate and review IF Comp games than they do works released elsewhere that it might be fair to say that authors pay an “IF Comp tax” for releasing their works in other events.

People who presumably do not play or talk about interactive fiction for most of the year return, a sort of migratory species, for IF Comp. The event sometimes garners attention from creators and media types who do not otherwise engage with interactive fiction. For some people, all that they know of interactive fiction is what they see during the competition.

IF Comp is run by the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF), a non-profit organization responsible for, most visibly, the Narrascope conference. There is a committee responsible for running the competition, which features ten members. Additionally, persons without committee status perform various volunteer functions. It is a big operation. I’m grateful for the services of all who contribute to the operation of these events.

For the past two years, works created using large language model technologies have been accepted as entrants in the competition. There is, naturally, an affirming normalization to their inclusion. After all, this is the big, important event, so important that it might be a person’s only window into the state of the community. The controversy surrounding generative AI robs IF Comp of much of its conversational oxygen. LLM-generated content has adversely affected outside perceptions of the competition. It is my position that its presence disrespects authors, players, and reviewers. It disrespects the competition itself.

This year’s competition has ended, and a post-event survey is available. I am told that, unless a sufficient number of people comment on LLM content, well, anything could happen. We could have an all-LLM event, including LLM judges and reviewers. The committee might even ask LLMs to complete next year’s survey. Even though it’s a bit like telling someone to quit smoking cigarettes, I suppose there is nothing else for it: please take a moment to complete this brief questionnaire. After all, your opinion is important to us.

Luddites vs. the Environment-Destroying Plagarism Bot

Look, it’s a waste of time to relitigate what LLM content is and why it’s bad. My experience is that people who advocate for LLM technology already know what’s wrong with it; they just aren’t moved by those concerns. Let’s speedrun through the bullet points.

• LLM technology is bad for the environment. It just is, OK? LLM-housing, water-and-electricity-guzzling data centers are so large as to defy imagination. MIT, which sees potential in the technologies involved, recognizes the concerns. They have become a Mortonion hyperobject, something like “all the styrofoam in the world.” A common argument against the environmental case is that people who commute to work use more energy as individuals than they might using LLMs. Yes, working to eat and live is exactly as important as using LLM technology to extrude bad cover art for a middling, fantasy-themed text game.

• LLM is a plagarism machine that runs on the work of uncompensated and often uncredited human beings. This is how the technology works. LLMs do not have “ideas.” They are not creative. Instead, they are the world’s largest sausage grinders, transforming human endeavor into extruded substance. This is what it does. Displacing humanity is its defining feature. The persons who feed it receive no material rewards, despite the billions of dollars that have gone into creating the technology. To value what is generated is to devalue what is made.

• LLM is not a fun toy for you to make games with, it’s a billionaire-backed tool that will obsolesce knowledge work and enforce ideological consistency in the content it generates.

Let’s Be Honest; Ethics Aside, This Stuff Is not Worth Looking at Anyway

I guess it takes all kinds, but I’ve never seen generative AI produce good craft prose. I’ve never seen it produce a good image. Everything is middling at best, and some of it is far worse than that. This has been discussed at length. I’ve sympathized with critics who have tried to engage with these works in good faith, detailing what they perceive as weaknesses and strengths, but I think it’s time to take another tack. I do not want to read these reviews any more than I want to play the games. Even if we ignore the ethical issues–it must be easier than it looks–we are ignoring them for the sake of mediocre sludge that wastes the time of players, organizers, and critics.

Since player attention ultimately is a zero-sum game–there are only so many hours in the day, after all–these works deprive human creators and their works the attention of critics and players. In fact, the mere presence of LLM-generated work in a space can completely take over the discourse, forcing supernaturally polite persons to repeat the same valid concerns regarding generative AI again and again while enlightened centrists are, as the expression goes, “just asking questions.” Why are we still doing this? It’s a waste of time and transforms the nature of the event in negative ways.

Consider the situation on the Interactive Community Forum, a small space within the IF community. In the midst of the Annual Interactive Fiction Completion–the big, important one–the busiest and active thread isn’t about games. It doesn’t contain reviews. It’s about generative AI in the competition. The technology is a spoiler in so many senses. It is genuinely off-putting to see the characteristically unremarkable LLM-generated artworks listed among the competition entries. It is off-putting to see the discourse commandeered by the subject. It’s exhausting to explain again and again to people who don’t care.

I know I’m breaking my own rule here, and I hopefully this won’t again be needed. But please stop reviewing LLM content in events. Stop playing them. Stop making threads about them.

Stop entering your own work in events that platform LLM technology. Stop playing games in events that platform LLM technology. Stop reviewing games that share a platform with LLM technology.

Just stop. All of it.

Please Enter Your Comments in this Field, and Leave Your Survey in this Survey Collection Box

I know, I know. A lot of these convesations have happened at the Interactive Community Forum. It’s maintained by the IFTF, just like IFComp is. Some of the Competition Committee members are regulars there. Those conversations will not be considered regarding future LLM-related decisions. I’m not sure if forum members on the committee must recuse themselves from the decision process, or how that’s supposed to work, but the overwhelming amount of public acrimony toward LLM-generated content has no bearing on whether or not the public feels acrimony toward LLM-generated content. You must leave your comments here, in this form.

Don’t forget! Your comments must go on this form! This one, here!

You may think you’ve talked this thing to death, but it’s time to slug it out one last time.

Your Opinion Is Important to Us

It is down to us! Only we have the power, should we choose to use it, to respect authors, players, reviewers, and events. Why it is down to us is an interesting philosophical question that lies beyond the scope of this helpful reminder.

Please complete this brief survey.

Next

Moonmist.

The post Your Opinion Matters to Us appeared first on Gold Machine.

2025 IFComp Results & Survey

The 31st Interactive Fiction Competition is now history! Results will go live on the IFComp Website at 7pm Eastern.

If you missed the awards livestream, it will be available for a few days on Twitch and will be permanently archived over on YouTube shortly.

Of course, we are already planning for the ‘26 Comp. Please provide your feedback on what went well, what could have gone better, what we should do more of, and what we should consider changing or leaving behind, by filling the Post-Competition Survey. 

This year’s survey is a little more important than usual, as we’re seeking thoughts on the future of how we address the UK Online Safety Act, how much generative artificial intelligence should be allowed in the competition, whether or not you’d like us to continue the awards livestream, and highlighting some important new volunteer roles for those who are interested. Please check it out!

Really? I'm going to blog about a movie which will shortly be known only as Jared Leto's last stop before oblivion?

(I wrote that before checking wikipedia. Apparently Leto has been cast as Skeletor in 2026. Good for him. Rock that bonehead.)

Tron is back. I am big fan and cannot deny. When the Tron: Legacy trailer dropped in 2009, I blogged it. I've written up two recent Tron games, Identity and Catalyst. Both games exist because Disney wanted to keep the franchise awake. They let indie studio Bithell Games run with that ball; to good effect, I thought. But the movies are the tentpole, and what the heck, I have a few thoughts.

(SPOILER warning. Surely you care.)

Tron: Ares is not a good movie, to be sure. Tron: Legacy wasn't a very good movie. The original Tron was a terrible movie. We don't watch these things for the plot. We watch them for the graphical pizzazz and the gimmick, which is "imagine little people inside your computer". It's Thomas the Tank Engine for a specific cohort of nerdy twelve-year-olds that I am smack in the middle of.

When I saw the trailer for Ares, I was sure they'd ruined the whole thing. Bring the little people out of the computer and you've got what? A guy in a Tron costume. (No offense to Tron Guy and my other brothers of the Glowing Garb.) You can fly a Recognizer around San Francisco -- or whatever city it is, they don't specify -- that's just generic alien invasion movie #152.

In fact, though, the movie is quite a bit better than the trailer implies. They spend plenty of quality time inside computers. When they haul stuff out into the real world, it's, I dunno, it's not gratuitous. It's specific hardware which has a role in the story. ...Okay, it's gratuitous within bounds.

There's a story. It's not going to blow your socks off but it hangs together. It's got action beats and character beats. Eve Kim (Greta Lee) comes in from nowhere, canon-wise, to pretty much hold the movie together. She's the one who sells emotional connections to everybody else on-screen. Even Jared Leto. Also, they let her be funny.

(Shoutout to Gillian Anderson, who is far, far better than the role she was given. Man, her face on the line "everything we've built." A good movie would have stabbed the kid and let Mom carry the third act.)

The action stuff is mostly fine. The boat chase business was cramped and overstuffed and I had trouble following it. Once they get into the real world, for whatever reason, the camerawork is cleaner. No complaints.

The script tries to be Current and Relevant about AI issues. We get a quick news squib of Eve Kim pushing back against AI skeptics. It would come off as a wholehearted defense of ChatGPT, except that's ridiculous, because nothing about this movie is 2025. The narrative register hasn't shifted an inch since 1982. LLMs do not exist. It's a story about people; they're played by actors; nothing in the movie even pretends to question their reality.

(In 1992, Melissa Scott wrote a book called Dreamships, in which the sensitive, seductive AI character turns out to be... a fake. Non-sentient. Interactive pattern-matching. Built specifically to fool credulous AI-rights activists. Nobody has had the balls to use this plot since.)

I seriously wonder if the original Ares script proposal included the idea of digitally recreating Tess Kim, Eve's dead sister. And then pulling her out of a particle laser. That would be a 2025 Tron story idea. The script just barely gestures in that direction: Ares absorbs Eve's dense digital footprint to learn what she's like as a person. But Tess is never connected with that; she doesn't really exist in the story except as backstory and unclear motivation for Eve. Obvious gap there! Oh well, they probably took it out to make room for another light-jet race.

(This is, I am sure, exactly what happened with Tron: Legacy. An entire thematic layer contrasting Quorra's drive with Flynn's Buddhist philosophy of inaction is glaringly visible by its absence. Oh, gods, give me Tron movies made by eccentric philosophical navel-gazers instead of Disney!) (This is why I play the games.)

Other random snickers:

The nerds on the film set continue to sneak delightfully plausible bits onto the computer screens. People use real shell commands. When someone's trying to stop a program from doing a thing, he types sudo killall.

I think Sark (from the 1982 movie) is here glossed as "Systems Analysis Reconstruction Kernel". I might have misread those words, it was just a quick flash. Nice touch.

Every object "printed" in reality appears in a giant pile of support struts, which is almost plausible, except the director doesn't seem to know what support struts do. They go underneath your print! I know, they're justifying their little dramatic reveals, but I laughed every time.

Another problem with the "Recognizer in real life" plot is that it breaks the idea that this is real life. I mean, our world. In 2010, you could just about pretend that Encom was a real, biggish-but-not-Google tech company; that the neon consensual hallucination was happening in the actual Internet. Now you have to pretend that an alien spacecraft crashing into a building didn't make headlines. Also, Encom cures world hunger 'n stuff in the epilogue. We're into a cinematic universe now. I have regrets.

The assault on Encom (red spies attacking blue fortress) was a good concept, but they cheaped out on the animated swarms of attackers and defenders. I know every movie mob-horde is CGI, going back to the LOTR movies at least -- but when they're skinned as videogame characters, it just looks like a videogame. A cheap one.

My nostalgia does not extend to getting gooshy over the original 1982 Grid graphics. However, quoting Wendy Carlos's score was a righteous moment.

Speaking of which: Yes, I bought the soundtrack. I am not a NIN fan but I'll keep this on my playlist. That said, I think the soundtrack from Tron: Uprising (the 2013 animated TV show) is my favorite of the bunch.

For all my snark, I don't regret seeing the movie. It wasn't a chore. It's cheerful and entertaining and easy to follow without thinking too hard. (Thinking too hard is counterindicated, really. See snark above.)

I might even go back to see it in 3D. Never have another chance, right? By all accounts, Tron: Ares has already died on the shelves. Nobody's gonna "morb" it back into the theaters, either. Disney's spreadsheet-churners will write off Tron for another generation.

Maybe we'll still get weird little indie Tron videogames. I hope so.

other ways to repeat through things.

refresher.

Last time, we talked about repeating through objects and values. In this rather dull example, we ask Inform to list every possible color when color is “a kind of value.”

lab is a room.

color is a kind of value.
the colors are red, green, and blue.

instead of jumping:
	let n be zero;
	repeat with hue running through colors:
		increment n;
		say "color number [n]: [hue][line break]";

We can just as easily run through objects, specifying kinds or properties along the way.

lab is a room.

a hat is a kind of wearable thing.

a cap is a hat.
a derby is a hat.
a beenie is a hat.

instead of smelling:
	let n be zero;
	repeat with covering running through hats:
		unless covering is worn:
			increment n;
			say "unworn hat number [n]: [covering][line break]";

While these tools have many uses, I most often find myself using them to bulk move things around or apply properties to many things at once.

But wait… there’s more!

repeating through tables.

It’s often useful to check every entry in a table. Tables are very flexible; they can hold values, objects, and even actions. We might be using table to store texts, or track actions performed. They might be part of a custom scoring system. In my own game Portrait with Wolf, almost every bit of printed text is pulled from tables (you can view the source code here).

Let’s say, as a sort of silly example, that we want to keep track of everything the player EATs. Now, the EATING action is included in the Standard Rules, so let’s have a look there. As you can see, we have a few CHECK rules, a silent CARRY OUT rule, and a REPORT rule. Let’s define our food of choice—fruits sound fine, so let’s run with that—then think about where we can intervene.

a fruit is a kind of thing.
a fruit is edible.
			
an apple is a kind of fruit.
there are 2 apples in lab.
there is 1 apple  nowhere.
the description of apple is "A sweet honeycrisp, gold and red."

grape is a fruit in lab.
the description of grape is "Green and of perfect firmness."

orange is a fruit in lab.
the description of orange is "Delightfully tart and pleasantly sweet."

We’ll start with a kind, making members of that kind “edible.” Edible is built into the Standard rules, so we don’t have to get involved there. The CHECK rules aren’t necessarily of interest to us. They prevent the player from EATING inedible things; we have that covered. If the player wears something edible (!), Inform will attempt to remove it before EATING it. If the player does not carry the edible thing, Inform will attempt TAKING it.

Notice that “apple” is handled differently, being described as a “kind” with a number (2). This is in place so that we can try having the player eat more than one of the same kind of fruit. We’ll have a go at that below.

Inform will prevent the player from EATING food held by other characters as well.

That all seems fine, so we’ll leave it alone. The CARRY OUT rule banishes the eaten item (presuming it makes it through these CHECKs) to nowhere. That leaves us with a generic REPORT response. Let’s let the CARRY OUT rule run. Eaten foods should be gone, after all. We want to intervene between the CARRY OUT rule and the report. We can achieve that with an AFTER rule.

Before writing out some rules, though, let’s design the table. I want something very simple: just the fruit’s name, the fruit’s description, and a count of times eaten.

table of consumed items
fruit	text	count
(a text)	(a text)	(a number)
with 10 blank rows

Easy enough! If we manage to include 10 unique fruits in our project, we’ll need to add more blank rows. If you are wondering why we are using the printed name instead of the noun itself (Inform tables handle nouns just fine), it’s because we are dealing with duplicates. More on this below.

after eating a fruit:

Next, let’s set up a simple truth state for our rule to track whether something has been eaten before. This will keep us from having duplicate entries if the player has eaten the same kind of fruit more than once.

	let previously eaten be false;

OK. We have a code and a truth state. Let’s check the table after every action (that isn’t stopped by INSTEAD and the like):

	repeat through the table of consumed items:
		say line break;
		if fruit entry is the printed name of the noun:
			increment count entry;
			now previously eaten is true;

If the player eats an apple when they have previously eaten one, we will discover it when our code repeats through the table. Repeating through a table asks Inform to evaluate every filled row in a table, starting from the top.

In our code, if there is already an Apple in our table, the “count” entry will go up one. Additionally, “previously eaten” will switch from false to true. Inform will use this value to determine whether a new entry should be added to the table.

	if previously eaten is false:
		choose a blank row in the table of consumed items;
		now fruit entry is the printed name of noun;
		now text entry is the description of the noun;
		now count entry is one;
		say "Ah, such a delicious [noun]!";

After performing its check through the table, Inform will, if relevant, add a new fruit to an empty row. We can additionally add text for description and set the count to one.

Note that, by default, AFTER rules end the action processing sequence, preventing the generic REPORT rule from running. We’ve instead added our own simple feedback response.

That’s all well and good, but how do we get the information out? That’s down to another repeat loop. Let’s make an action first.

Since we’re not going to be typing this a lot, there’s no harm in using a verbose action name that we can read easily.

reviewing our fruit history is an action out of world applying to nothing.
understand "history" as reviewing our fruit history.

I always use “actions out of world” for this kind of information checking. On principle, I don’t think they should advance the turn count.

We’ll handle two cases here. First, one for an empty table:

carry out reviewing our fruit history when the number of filled rows in the table of consumed items is zero:
	say "Sadly, you have yet to consume any fruit.";

And one more for a filled table.

carry out reviewing our fruit history when the number of filled rows in the table of consumed items is greater than zero:
	repeat through the table of consumed items:
		say "[fruit entry in sentence case]: '[text entry]' ([count entry])[line break]";

Expected output:

Welcome
An Interactive Fiction
Release 1 / Serial number 251016 / Inform 7 v10.1.2 / D

lab
You can see two apples, grape and orange here.

>eat apple
(first taking the apple)
Ah, such a delicious apple!

>eat grape
(first taking grape)
Ah, such a delicious grape!

>eat orange
(first taking orange)
Ah, such a delicious orange!

>eat apple
(first taking the apple)
Ah, such a delicious apple!

>history
Apple: "A sweet honeycrisp, gold and red." (2)
Grape: "Green and of perfect firmness." (1)
Orange: "Delightfully tart and pleasantly sweet." (1)

And, finally, a borogove link for anyone interested in the complete project.

https://snippets.borogove.app/inform7/bx8ffw

next.

That’s not all! As a last bit of excitement, we’ll have a look at repeating with counters and lists.

This is the follow-up to Herrick Venture #1: Escape.

Unfortunately, I have not found any more historical material since last time, so I generally just have to hope Richard E. Herrick Jr. is alive and tries to Google himself sometime (which has happened before with other authors!) Unlike the first game, this only has a BASIC source version, and while Escape slightly broke the 16k limit (18337 bytes) Land of Odysseys busts it entirely, at 25859 bytes. The game is still stylized around Scott Adams; Adams went with his particular style for technical reasons, but even with more memory space the author is choosing to stick with it. (This sort of “legacy started for technical reasons but held after even when those reasons went away” applies elsewhere in game design history, like pixel art, although 32K still isn’t that generous.)

Source.

Escape involved getting out of a house alive. This game clings back hard to the roots of Scott Adams and Adventureland, with the goal of collecting treasures and returning them to a starting location.

The temple has a mirror which hints at “Alice”, indicating it can be entered, Through-the-Looking-Glass style.

I AM IN A SECRET ROOM. VISIBLE ITEMS:

LARGE MIRROR. VIAL FILLED WITH A WEIRD POTION. *MAGIC WAND*

The vial is another Alice in Wonderland reference, which we’ll see payoff in a moment.

Going just outside the temple lands you in a “forest” with a “large rock”. Looking at the rock and then moving it reveals a DARK HOLE.

The dark hole has a *PEARL NECKLACE* (the second treasure, after the magic wand) and a piece of paper which reads “trolls are afraid of magic”.

Heading west of the forest leads to a tiny door with a DRINK ME sound, and you do the predictable thing:

Predictable, but still enjoyable enough. The game does get harder later.

Inside the door is a “small room” that has a troll, a book of magic words, and a golden medallion (treasure 3). Oddly, the troll’s fear of magic extends to the book that is in his lurking place, and trying to pick the book up is enough to scare it away.

The book mentions “hocus-pocus”, “open-sesame”, “abracadabra”, and “presto”, all which will show use in a little while. This is like getting the book of spells in Enchanter but you have to randomly guess what each one does. The game is tight enough it isn’t that frustrating but — let’s get to their use in context.

First off, you may notice the small room has no exits.

>SAY HOCUS

OK

HOCUS

******PUFF!******

This teleports the player out back to the path, where they can pick back up all their stuff like their magic wand which maintained normal size as they were shrunk down.

To the east of the temple/forest is a “swamp” with strange gas and a pool of oil; I haven’t used the oil for anything but the gas will come in handy later (you can GET GAS while holding the vial that used to have potion in it). From there you can exit north and south, both which represent magic word puzzles:

North is simply quicksand you can get out of by using the PRESTO word. There’s a *BAG OF RUBIES* there to add to the collection.

South is a log cabin guarded by snakes. For whatever reason — in practice, just experiment with all four magic words whenever there’s a puzzle — ABRACADABRA is effective against snakes.

The log cabin has a “piece of steel” and a “shovel”. The shovel can be used to dig up a random room (between the starting forest and the tiny door) which has “flintrock”; these can then be used to LIGHT the LAMP found in the starting room.

Speaking of the lamp, you can also — taking a cue from Adventureland — RUB it to get another treasure. Unlike Adventureland you can’t rub it twice to get a second treasure.

The room above incidentally has the first thing in the game I have not resolved yet: the winged horse. You can untie it from the tree, and sit on it, but none of the words I’ve tried or actions I’ve attempted have gotten the horse to take off. There are puzzles not resolved by just using magic words!

Or maybe I just haven’t found the right magic word yet.

East of everything is a mountain with a suspicious crack. OPEN SESAME reveals a cave (ever since King’s Quest V I’ve been paranoid that this leads to a timed puzzle where the cave will close behind me, but the cave seems to be permanent).

On to the cave, where I’ve got three open obstacles.

To the north is a sign that says “DRAGON SLEEP” which is a hint for dealing with the actual dragon to the south. Suspicious, I went back to the gas out in the swamp and did SNIFF GAS, which worked (!) and let me know it made me feel slightly sleepy. Since I had some gas in my vial, I could throw it:

Unfortunately, trying to walk by wakes the dragon up briefly and it inadvertently fries you. I’m not sure if the goal is to tiptoe softer or if there’s a method of doing away with the dragon for good.

Heading back to the cave entrance and going due east, there’s a chasm blocking the way, easily resolved by doing WAVE WAND (I’d been carting the wand around this whole time waiting for it to get applied somewhere).

Further east are some corpses and a shiny chalice. Taking the chalice does not go well.

I was hoping maybe I could get the dragon together with the zombies and have them cancel each other out, but no dice yet.

The third unresolved obstacle is a minotaur, in a “labyrinth” to the north.

In the rooms marked Labyrinth they include all exits N/S/E/W/U/D and any not on the map are just loops. It’s like one of the old Greg Hassett mazes.

The minotaur doesn’t kill the player right away but they can chase. I have yet to get anything good to come out of that but I also have yet to experiment; I felt it was a good time to come in and report.

The minotaur is guarding a Persian rug, but I have to deal with this problem first.

So to summarize, I have a winged horse, dragon, minotaur, and set of zombies to deal with. I need to re-check my magic words (I used them, but maybe I mis-spelled them or need to use a different timing) and then get more creative from there.

I will say I’m finding this more pleasant than Herrick Venture 1, despite that game being more strictly mechanical (not fantasy puzzles). The general implied narrative of Herrick Venture 2 has been more colorful and I’ve found it more interesting — at least from the author’s minimalist style — to get surrounded by zombies or chased down by a minotaur than run over by a car.

Great Yarmouth, by the sea.

Bedrooms all over the country were becoming overwhelmed by battered boxes of early computer equipment, bought under the dubious auspices of “helping with our homework” before being turned over full-time to the more pressing task of completing 3D Monster Maze before morning registration.

— Bob Fischer

Upon the release of the ZX80 and ZX81 computers, in addition to software, companies popped up to provide hardware. The two obvious gaps to fill were memory (1K in the original) and the keyboard (called “one of the worst keyboards ever”).

dk’tronics was started out of David Heeley’s bedroom “just prior to the launch of the ZX81” based on his “interest in electronics” with a 16k memory expansion; when the ZX81 came out he went full-time, still using his house as his base of operations through 1981:

The business was all mail-order then but I was getting a very good response. I had to do everything myself — manufacturing, packaging, selling and posting — and I was working in my bedroom, my garage, my shed.

He had four employees (and had moved out of his house) by the end of the year, with their keyboard being one of their best-known products.

Heeley in 1984. Source.

They got into software as well at the same time (before eventually falling back entirely on hardware once the market started to get flooded), with some of their early work by none other than Jeff Minter, who eventually became famous enough to have a modern collection based on his company, Llamasoft. The dk’tronics work came before Llamasoft. As Minter notes in an interview:

The first machine I actually owned was the ZX80, and in fact I did a few pre-Llamasoft games for the ZX80/ZX81 for an outfit called dk’tronics in the U.K. However, they treated me spectacularly badly, and so the founding of Llamasoft coincided with my getting my hands on the VIC. Games were just something I did in my spare time before that.

It’s worth watching a little of his game Space Invaders, as it sets up a point of history I’m about to make.

The invaders look hi-res compared to regular ZX81 games. That’s because the game is using custom hardware: specifically, the dk’tronics graphics rom, which changes the character display to show game sprites as “text”. (In other words, the mechanism that might normally display the letter R is modified to show part of a spaceship.)

From a May 1982 dk’tronics ad in Your Computer.

All that setup helps explain the existence of the company Kayde Electronics, another ZX81 hardware manufacturer. In addition to a keyboard and memory packs, Kayde also sold a graphics rom almost exactly identical to the one from dk’tronics. It only has one bank changed (modified to make Pac-man graphics). Both companies were even situated in the same city. It’s unclear if the graphics rom was under license or if they ripped dk’tronics off. (It’s not even an approximation, they’re exactly the same sprites. Given the documentation that came with the dk’tronics edition it would be easy to make a copy.)

From A Kayde catalog.

Another data point to add is the game The Valley. This was a type-in RPG printed in Computing Today, April 1982; the very same issue had a version you could buy from ASP Ltd. The CRPGAddict played it back in 2014, noting everything was an enterprise of Argus Press.

Kayde started publishing it themselves…

…and it was essentially identical to the type-in (see El Explorador de RPG for more on this). Kayde eventually changed the game’s name to “The Swamp”, likely because of it being blatantly stolen.

All these shenanigans might be part of the reason why the company went into receivership in 1983 (a year after its founding) and disappeared entirely shortly after; during 1983 they put out a series of five text adventures (maybe six or seven) hence the company’s appearance here. Based on the inlay for one of the company’s other games, I think the order goes

1. Leopard Lord
2. Terror from the Deep
3. Ace in the H.O.L.E.
4. Horror Atoll
5. Arcane Quest
6. The Roundsby Incident
7. Picnic Adventure

where 6 may not exist (despite having cover art in ads) and 7 probably doesn’t exist (it was advertised with “temp” art). At the very least, all we have access to are games 1-5.

Leopard Lord is the first in a new range of adventure games from Kayde which all have been written by a science fiction writer.

The statement above is from the tape’s inlay, although no specific credit is given so it is unclear if “science fiction writer” refers to someone who published a short story once, or a teenager with a zine, or something more respectable. Based on the text of the introduction I think something from the first two categories is more likely, although from the company’s other behavior I can’t discount a.) a real author made an off-hand comment which was used as the author “writing the game” b.) the content was stolen from elsewhere and/or c.) the ad copy was simply lying.

The introduction drips “AD&D dungeon master” to me so I decided to drag the microphone out and do something I hadn’t done in a while: a dramatic reading!

You are Prollen the Mercenary.

The people of or Yarm have offered you 1000 gold coins if you will rid them of Fordel, the evil wizard.

Fordel is the leader of a vicious clan. He is known as the elite Leopard Lord. He is totally evil and will let nothing stand in the path of his ultimate ambition, to control the world, by bringing forth a demon from the nether pits.

At first you are reluctant to help.

The reward is raised to 1500 gold coins, a veritable king’s ransom, but still you hesitate.

Then you find that Fordel is holding your friend, Braneth, somewhere in the hall of the elite Leopard Lord.

Fordel will use Braneth’s heart torn from his living body to summon the demon.

The ceremony is to take place tonight.

With all this wind-up pointing to a hack job I had a bit of dread going in, but oddly, I enjoyed myself. This follows my general mantra that a simplistic parser works out as long as the actions demanded of the player also stay simple. It certainly helped I did my “verb list search”, so I didn’t have to struggle later:

CLIMB, READ, BREAK, OPEN, KILL, LIGHT, THROW, SEARCH, GIVE, EXAMINE, INSERT

SEARCH and EXAMINE in particular set off my warning bells. If you go north from the forest in the start you’re in, er, more forest, but there’s also a HEDGEROW. I did SEARCH and found a BLUE KEY…

…but before moving on, I restarted and went and tried EXAMINE instead, informing me that I see nothing special. That means SEARCH and EXAMINE are treated differently, which can be a very nasty trick with this kind of reduced parser (where, intuitively, it doesn’t seem like verbs should have any subtlety).

To the east of the hedgerow is a leopard and the game’s first combat. The game clearly has D&D in mind (later there’s a water weird, which is D&D-only) but there’s no obvious puzzle here, just the command KILL LEOPARD.

What seems to be going on behind the scenes is that the game is checking if you are holding a set of particular objects; if you are, you win the battle, otherwise you die. The game starts you with a SWORD, DAGGER, and TINDERBOX. If you drop the SWORD before the combat, you still win. If you drop the DAGGER, you still win. If you drop the SWORD and the DAGGER, you lose.

IT KILLS YOU
YOU HAVE FAILED. TRY AGAIN YOU ARE OUR ONLY CHANCE

In some cases the game is looking for a specific item, in others it seems to be simply looking for a combination. Because there’s no description when you win — every weapon is used “passively” — I didn’t stop to diagram out the possibilities, although it did give me trouble later.

North of the leopard is the entrance; you use the blue key to open the door, and you can also find a torch hidden in the thicket. (There’s no command for lighting or unlighting; I assume the game has a flag somewhere that checks if you have the torch and tinderbox; I never found where it was and ended up dropping the two items later as the inventory limit is tight.)

Right at the entrance is a book which encourages you to check out the next game, Terror from the Deep (I wonder if this will be like the Scott Morgan games where each game references the next one). Just north is a snake (the default sword & dagger still work) followed by a harpy guarding a box (ditto).

The box has a red key which gets used on a red door. It’s so helpful when the villains color-code everything.

There’s a “small room” with a sarcophagus where the passive check-your-weapons combat system comes into play. If you open the sarcophagus there’s a mummy, and trying to fight it kills you. The room also has writing that says

THIS COULD BE TRAGIC IF YOU DON’T USE MAGIC

which indicates the standard sword and dagger won’t work.

Two rooms away there’s a glowing axe :– holding it is sufficient to defeat the mummy. Defeating the mummy gets the player absolutely nothing. I think again we’ve got D&D influence creeping in, where a “side monster” is a perfectly good encounter to beef up to the next “level”, but because that infrastructure has been ripped out by being a Pure Adventure, the author wasn’t sure what to do so put the side encounter in anyway.

Mummy from the AD&D Monster Manual.

Around the same area there’s a trapdoor that leads down.

In this area, there’s a leopard guarding a pendant. (Again a wimp, funny for a game titled Leopard Lord that the leopards are the easy kills.) Along the same hall there’s a STATUE, where if you EXAMINE it (not SEARCH) you see a HOLE, and then can INSERT PENDANT to open a secret passage.

This would have been so much more irritating without the verb list. I already knew INSERT was going to apply somewhere.

The secret area has a TUNIC and MIRROR, both essential items for later.

Heading back up to the main floor, there’s a long hallway flanked on the south by a troll.

The troll is, like the mummy, completely optional. Even the GLOWING AXE doesn’t help here. I got a shield later and came back and managed to win.

Nearby there’s also a “room painted in red” where you can find a coin and rod in a cupboard (rod useless, coin helpful). Oddly, there’s a wall with a warning about not breaking it, but no puzzle: you’re simply supposed to obey the sign. There’s no way to survive breaking the wall and no secret obtained by doing so.

I guess this is meant as another D&D encounter-for-color, perhaps?

The north end of the hall has a chimney going up to the last part of the game.

North has a single guard, whereas south has two; you need to fight the guard to the north first and obtain the SHIELD there, then you can fight the guards to the south.

The cupboard has the green key needed for the green door that’s just right there. In a D&D campaign I could see it working to find the item to open the next door after a combat, but in adventure format it comes off as silly.

Past the guards to the south is “Fordel’s Private Quarters” where you can find a throwing axe. Heading north instead, there’s a pool with a water weird to one side (I never killed it, there may be no way) and a medusa on the other (strangely, the mirror is not needed at all).

Maybe the shield helped? I didn’t find it worth the time to check every single combat.

Further north is an “OLDMAN” who is peaceful. (KILL doesn’t even work to get yourself stabbed by the secret ancient kung-fu master or whatever.) Pulling out my verb list again…

CLIMB, READ, BREAK, OPEN, KILL, LIGHT, THROW, SEARCH, GIVE, EXAMINE, INSERT

…there’s no TALK command, and the only one that seems relevant then is GIVE. I went through my objects and decided COIN was the most likely gift.

The OLDMAN says: to win we need a MIRROR, AXE, and MIRROR. That is a typo and I eventually realized that ARMOUR (which we’ll pick up in a moment) is the real third item. The AXE here is not the glowing axe but the throwing axe back at Fordel’s bedroom.

Heading west, since we don’t have the armour yet, we just die:

We can instead go north past the OLDMAN, nearly get hit by an arrow…

I’d been assuming the TUNIC was helping in fights and keeping it in inventory. There’s no WEAR command and it may only be useful at this spot.

…and find the ARMOUR the OLDMAN didn’t speak of because the author didn’t bother to check for typos of essential information.

With the three items in hand, entering the ceremonial chamber is now safe, and we can THROW THROWING AXE to end the game in victory.

I realize, laid all out like that, this doesn’t sound like a good game at all. And to be honest, it isn’t! But I did find it weirdly playable and charming mainly because I didn’t get stuck that long; even the ARMOUR typo didn’t stop me for long because I logicked out that there’d be no reason to put the ARMOUR past a trap unless it got used somewhere. It felt like I had fallen into some teenager’s after-school D&D campaign and the minimalist setting didn’t bother me that much, because it was delivered with passion.

Mind you, no idea where the science-fiction writer mentioned in the ad copy comes into this. I half-suspected this may have been adopted off a real printed campaign, but I couldn’t find any good hits. There’s a Leopard Lord in the “Oriental Adventures” campaign Ochimo: The Spirit Warrior but that didn’t come out until 1987.

Part of the map of the 1987 campaign, from the Internet Archive.

However, I do have some D&D experts lurking the wings, so if someone has a suspicion they want to throw into the comments, feel free.

Brian Rushton is a 2023 IFTF Grant recipient who has recently completed his project, and we are delighted to share his success with you!

The annual Interactive Fiction Competition and XYZZY Awards have a history stretching back decades, and these events have been integral to developing and celebrating the art of interactive storytelling. Brian Rushton, a prolific IF reviewer and chronicler of community history, received a IFTF microgrant to revise and extend his year-by-year writeups of these key community events, helping to preserve this history for decades to come. You can access Brian’s project directly by clicking here.

We had an opportunity to speak with Brian on completion of his book, where we discussed the lessons and discoveries made in the course of his process.

“It gave me more of a sense for more modern games. I had spent so much time in the past playing old IFComp games that I had the top 3 games memorized for many years. But I had trouble even remembering winners from recent years. So this really helped me see new games from a new viewpoint. My overall sense is that skill and polish are at a higher level now than ever before.”

Brian also shared in the challenges he faced while working on the project:

“Citations were hard! I wanted to add them for two reasons: one, out of hopes that people would discover new games or old forum conversations that could help them. The other was to ensure that I was quoting people correctly. But it was so hard to track them all down; I ended up having to write Python programs and learn more about regex and api to automate most of the citations. There ended up being over 900!”

The funds from the grant made it possible for Brian to leave a part-time job to focus on the project, which included adding 13 more articles, including seven more IFComp history articles and six more XYZZY Best Game award articles, as well as updating Spring Thing’s history to the present day. Brian also added almost a thousand citations as well as implementing hyperlinks, an epub version, and an index.

“One feature of my grant is that the book would be free forever. It’s something I’d like to add to, and I imagine keeping it updated at the IFArchive. If it were useful in an academic setting, I’d be happy to have a version of it published as well, but I intentionally kept the style more chatty and conversational, so it lacks some of the rigor that is more popular in academia. So my current plan is to keep it on the IFArchive, Github, and similar hosting sites!”

We’re all so excited to see this book come to fruition, and so appreciative of the love and care Brian has put into this living document.

“This book simply wouldn’t exist without the IFTF’s help. I did the fun parts years ago, and all that remained was a lot of hard work, and I didn’t have much time. The funding from the IFTF gave me both the time to work and the accountability to get it finished. I definitely appreciate the fund and hope that it helps others as well!”

There are so many fantastic ways we’ve seen people in this community engage with what they love, and the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation wants to help in whatever way we can to bring these things into the world. If you know of an IF-related project that may be in need of some help getting to the finish line, then stay tuned to this blog for updates on this year’s grant application period!

Dannii Willis has been the main developer of the open source tool Parchment for a very long time (has it been 15 years already?). Parchment is a very cool interpreter for parser games, allowing anyone to play the games directly in the browser. Dannii applied in 2023 for an IFTF microgrant, asking the organization to cover the price of acquiring a used iOS device; this would allow him to test the Parchment interpreter on real hardware himself, which would lend itself to faster iterations. Dannii was also in particular very interested to test the compatibility of Parchment on iOS with UserVoice, and try to push the envelope around accessibility features for blind or low-vision players.

We just received his report, which has great detail on the project and the work he accomplished using the iOS device he was able to acquire with our support — work for Parchment, but also on other cool projects! Hope you enjoy reading this!

Thanks to the IFTF grant I was able to purchase a refurbished iPhone 13, which has allowed me to test and resolve some significant issues with Parchment.

First, some virtual keyboard improvements: mobile phones and tablets are commonly used via virtual keyboards. While on most websites these work smoothly, they pose a problem for an app like Parchment which wants to adjust itself to fit perfectly in the remaining visible screen space, so that the status window etc will still be visible. Unfortunately browsers don’t act the same way with their virtual keyboards, so keeping a consistent user interface for both iOS and Android is difficult. In late 2022 Chrome introduced a meta tag for specifying which behaviour an app wants. Firefox added support for it in 2024, but Safari still doesn’t support it. In addition, while Safari does support the VirtualViewport API, which allows you to be notified when the virtual keyboard is opened or closed, its resize events are quite delayed, up to 700ms, which feels very sluggish. With my iOS testing device I was able to find solutions for these problems, so that Parchment now has a very smooth and responsive interface on all browsers.

The next two projects haven’t been added to the stable version of Parchment yet, but have been shared for testing. As part of a major comprehensive update to Parchment, I have developed a new file system and dialog. Similarly to the general virtual keyboard updates, it needed a little bit of special care to get working in iOS. Second, I have finally added sound support to Parchment! The Glk API that Parchment is built upon supports three sound formats, AIFF, Ogg/Vorbis, and MOD. Unfortunately Chrome doesn’t support AIFF, and Safari doesn’t support Ogg/Vorbis! (None of them support MOD, though MOD files are also rarely used, so for now I’m not intending to support them in Parchment.) I have added a small audio decoding library into Parchment so that AIFF and Ogg/Vorbis can be supported in all browsers.

And I have also used the iOS device for a bonus project: Infocom Frotz! This isn’t part of Parchment, but seeing as I used my iOS test device to work on it, I’ll mention it too: this year I ported Frotz to the web, finally allowing Infocom’s multimedia (sound/graphics) games to be played online. Infocom’s version 6 of the Z-Machine was a big departure from its earlier versions, and so even today it is only supported by some Z-Machine interpreters. Its window model is not compatible with the Glk model that most interpreters now use, and so playing Infocom’s Z6 games has required a stand-alone Z-Machine interpreter rather than the multi-interpreters the community usually recommends (Gargoyle, Lectrote, Spatterlight, or Parchment). But just because the Z6 model doesn’t fit our modern Glk model doesn’t mean that interpreters like Frotz aren’t high quality. Frotz already has an SDL version, and Emscripten, which I’ve been using for years to port the Glk interpreters for Parchment, also supports SDL. So it didn’t take a lot of effort to build Frotz with Emscripten, thereby allowing the Z6 model to finally be supported on the web. It still needed some extra polishing, most notably that Emscripten’s version of SDL doesn’t support mobile virtual keyboards. But I have a lot of experience with that! And of course, there were more viewport issues in iOS.

The test iOS test device helped me accomplish a lot this year that I couldn’t have effectively tested otherwise. Even though the year is over I of course won’t be getting rid of the phone. So you can expect at least one more end of year report from me. Will Safari finally add support for the interactive-widget viewport meta tag? I can only hope so. See you then!

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the second round of IFTF microgrants, after a successful pilot in 2024.

The grants program exists to disburse small-value grants to peer-reviewed projects that benefit a community of interactive fiction makers, players, researchers, or educators. An independent committee of Grant Advisors review each submission and provide recommendations for funding to the Grants Committee, who this year have selected four projects to fund.

We saw great diversity again this year in the projects submitted, including a higher number of submissions compared to our pilot year. Thanks to everyone who submitted proposals! Here are the list of grant recipients for 2025.

Critical Essays On Interactive Fiction - Grace Benfell Grace is a co-editor of The Imaginary Engine Review, an online games criticism journal. Grace will receive $500 to commission three articles for the journal on significant interactive fictions written in the 2010s, exploring how these works continue the medium’s tradition of experimentation and introducing modern IF to a broader gaming audience.

No-code IF platform for web using Ink - Mark Davis Mark Davis is developing a web-based tool for interactive fiction builders that allows creators without coding experience to create interactive stories incorporating images and animations, using Ink scripts under the hood. Mark will receive $600 for hosting and branding assets for the in-development platform, crucial steps towards opening it up to outside testers on its road to launch.

Interactive Fiction Workshop for London Games Week - Katy Naylor Katy will receive $716 to host a series of IF writing workshops and Twine mini-jams at the 2025 London Games Festival Fringe, and present resultant works online in a special edition of voidspace zine. The workshops are aimed at people interested in games or interactive writing but who have not coded or designed a piece of IF before, hoping to bring new voices into the community.

Atrament, an Ink-based IF engine - Serhii Serhii is working on an IF engine that combines Ink scripting with Javascript as an alternative to Inky, creating a more full-featured release platform for Ink stories comparable to the mature web deployments for languages like Twine and ChoiceScript. The core of the engine is already complete: Serhii will receive $1000 to fund dev time writing documentation, testing and debugging the engine, and adding improvements focused on easier development and deployment workflows for authors.

We’re thrilled to see so much passion for expanding the audience of IF writers and readers in this year’s awardees. We want to thank all applicants, as well as our Grant Advisors, who volunteered their time to review the projects and formulate a recommendation for IFTF: thank you very much to Grim Baccaris, Kate Compton, Emilia Lazer-Walker, Juhana Leinonen, Colin Post, and Kaitlin Tremblay.

Congrats again to this year’s grant recipients! Check back in the fall for information about next year’s grant cycle. An announcement of the 2024 grant recipients is also available.

And lastly: if you like the grants program and want to see it continue, please consider donating to IFTF! Our Paypal page allows you to specify the program you’d like to see your money fund - you can select the grants program in the dropdown menu if you are so inclined. Thank you to everyone who has been donating to IFTF and allowing us to continue furthering our mission!

I’ve finished the game, and the ending is truly unusual. My previous posts are needed for context.

Last time I had reached but was stuck at a ravine (see screenshot above). I had available a flask, a breathing apparatus, a shovel, and glass from the glass case where I got the breathing apparatus from. I also was unable to pick up a dog head (due to germs) and in a “Testing Room” there was a rope from a ceiling I couldn’t get and two buttons that awakened a figure in a tank (with a key inside)

You can use the piece of glass to cut the rope. (This is a slight bit of visualization — I imagined the glass piece would be a little less jagged and cut-worthy, but we did cut it with a diamond.) You can then take the rope and THROW ROPE to get it attached to the ceiling at the ravine…

…followed by SWING ROPE.

The inventory limit switches from 6 to 3. (Note: dropping the glass while inventory juggling will cause it to break.) On the other side of the ravine is a room with a locked door to the south (the key is still back at the tank) and a “mutant” blocking the way north.

The being has a dog head so I went back and tried to get the other dog head but it still kept killing me with germs. I experimented with the electricity some more (it turns out the white/black buttons are red herrings, but it’s impossible to know that until the end of the game). I finally went back and tried THROW on random things, and found that the mutant caught them and gobbled them up. I tried everything I had (ferrying over items in small loads over the ravine) but nothing had an effect.

Perhaps you’ve already spotted it: it’s something I even consciously thought about as soon as I noticed the game was heavy on softlocks. Specifically, while puzzle-solving you need to check not only the items that are currently accessible, but the items that were accessible in the past.

I had forgotten I had broken the glass but I didn’t have to!

With that out of the way, it’s possible to go north and find a magnet. It was immediately clear to me what the magnet was for.

With the key, a new area opens up.

Things kick off with … more blood! Blood! It’s horror, it needs buckets of blood, or at least a vat in this case.

To the west are some surgical gloves, and to the south is a progression of rooms leading to a room that is so mossy any items you drop are swallowed up. The room has a GREEN SCUM and I don’t know what it is other than an amorphous blob.

Tiny evil Christmas tree, perhaps?

Using the same strategy as before, I tried throwing things at the “scum” and seeing if anything would cause indigestion. While nothing worked, I realized as I was going that the gloves might help with picking up the dog with the germs, and indeed they did, so I got to type one of the oddest parser commands that I’ve used in a while.

>THROW DOG AT SCUM
Okay, you throw a dog corpse at a green scum.
He rips open the dog and begins to gorge on the entrails. He dies from eating the infected body of the dog.

This clears out the scum but with no obvious result. I kept throwing out various “search” command possibilities until I hit EXAMINE MOSS, revealing a valve.

Turning the valve results in a “gurgling sound from the west wall” so I went back to the vat and found it empty. EXAMINE VAT mentions a drain opens a new exit going down (for a while I was trying GO DRAIN and didn’t notice the change) and down in the resulting hole is a hypodermic needle.

That eliminated everything in the area, so I was stuck considering anything left unsolved on the west side of the ravine. I still had the tank with the electro-buttons but I was starting to guess (correctly) those should just be ignored; I realized there was still a “jellied mass” in one of the rooms that previously just served as a trap.

The end result is a trapdoor you can pull open.

Going down is a one-way trip (remember, the game is not shy about softlocks) and you end up needing to take five specific items (and there’s no way of knowing ahead of time). I managed to guess reasonably well and got four out of five.

Creating a save game where I consolidate all the items at the top of the trapdoor.

You need the candle, flask, butterknife, shovel, and gloves. The flask and butterknife have still not been used; the gloves were used to pick up the dog but they are needed again for another purpose. The first time through I missed the gloves.

This lands you on a railway track system. At the landing point is a bunsen burner, to the west are some timbers and a blocked-off passage, and to the east is a torch and a giant dirt pile. The dirt pile is supposed to signal the use of the shovel.

I didn’t use any logic here. I just had been trying to dig in every room since the start of the game.

The passage leads down to a small area where there’s a barrel (with gunpowder) and a deathly high scream that kills you. We’ll come back here later.

The tracks also have an old switch. Pulling them causes a door to open to the west (where the timbers were) and you have to immediately plunge ahead to go inside before the door closes. On top of all this, a gust of wind blows out your candle if that’s what you are still using, so you need to have done LIGHT TORCH and swapped to that as a light source.

Or as I found out later, drop the candle somewhere safe and do all this in the dark. Except you have to know what’s here first!

This traps the player in a very small area with a fuse (the item that’s the reason to go in) and no apparent way out, although there’s a button that electrocutes you. You’re supposed to be wearing the surgical gloves to survive the electricity, and I admit I had to look that up. (Apparently surgical gloves can resist electricity but it is not entirely safe. However, it isn’t like anything else in the crypt has been safety approved!)

Heading back to the railway, and going south where the junction switch was, there’s a curious scene involving a “lard cake” and a dial. The dial is rusted and won’t move. The lard cake can’t be picked up.

I know this has been continuous through the whole game in terms of resources (and is so normal for adventures it’s like fretting over the realism of moments people start singing in a musical) but I was thrown for a “there’s no way that would have been just left there” moment with the lard cake. This might actually be a “it’s really a test” plot kind of like Zork III but let’s save discussing that for the ending.

Short on items, I eventually landed on CUT CAKE WITH KNIFE (the butterknife) resulting in a SLICE OF LARD CAKE. I then lit the bunsen burner lying around randomly on the tracks, put the slice of lard in the flask, and melted the slice. The parser struggled a bit but at least the steps came intuitively.

This finally results in the flask being filled with GREASE, and after struggling with PUT GREASE ON DIAL, POUR GREASE ON DIAL, etc. I came across GREASE DIAL as what the parser was fishing for. This causes the dial to spin and opens the passage up to the last part of the game.

Ahead and to the south there is a “trench”.

YOU ARE AT THE NORTH END OF A LONG DIRT ROOM. AN EVIL-SMELLING MUD TRENCH LIES IN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM. PUDDLES OF BLOOD LIE ON THE GROUND HERE.

Weirdly, the game doesn’t let you try to jump the trench or enter the mud, I was expecting a colorful death. It just doesn’t recognize any of the words used in the description as nouns for the parser. With this condition (and my eye on a verb list from the manual) I realized while holding the timbers I could BUILD BRIDGE.

This leads to a dead-end with a dead mole and earplugs. I don’t know why the mole is there other than for gross-out factor; it almost feels like the authors were running out of ways to describe blood and gore so they just tossed it in there.

The earplugs go to the screaming room, so you can get the barrel of gunpowder. There’s also an inscription but examining it kills you.

Note the comment about being not “worthy”.

Trying to get the fuse and barrel together was again a bit of a struggle but MAKE BOMB works; to repeat a point I’ve made whenever a lot of BUILD commands come up, it is always tricky to come up with a noun that doesn’t get mentioned in the text. (Maybe you’ll think of it as an “explosive”? I personally never thought of it as “making” something, just rigging the gunpowder barrel to explode without dying immediately, I didn’t have a name for that until the parser forced me to.)

Going back to where the bridge was, and heading west, there’s an axe. North there’s a steel door.

BODIES OF MEN ARE SMEARED PAPER-THIN AGAINST THE WALLS.

The problem is the bomb kept exploding right when I lit it, but I couldn’t find any way to extend the fuse, so I had to check for hints again. It turns out this section happens in real time (nothing else in the game does). So you LIGHT BOMB, DROP BOMB, GO SOUTH as fast as you can with the emulator speed set on “normal” rather than “maximum”.

There’s a wooden door after, but given the axe nearby is the only unused item, CHOP DOOR USE AXE came to me quickly.

And we can escape! Kind of. Finally we meet Medea in person.

If you say no, “Medea kills you for your stupidity.” If you say yes, you “have successfully escaped. Your game is now over.”

Weirdly, you’re still in the shallow grave, but I think this is an error along the lines of Mission: Asteroid having the asteroid still crash after you destroy it.

— so we escaped? By giving up our soul? Is that really escape?

I suppose if you’re cool with the “murdering her children because of her cheating husband” thing. And also all the dead people and deathtraps. 1887 painting of Medea by Germán Hernández Amores.

It does make for a twist I appreciated more than just battling Medea in combat. Perhaps horror as a genre lends itself to the “ambiguous ending” which makes it easier to have something that feels satisfyingly narrative-appropriate without having to do a denouement sequence like A Mind Forever Voyaging.

Despite the wobbly parser, I enjoyed myself in general. The structure lent itself to focus on one or two puzzles at a time without feeling too linear. The “horror” aspect was over the top in a teenager-writes-gore sense, none of the prose approached the kind from a serious author, and the art was mid-range for an Apple II game, but the whole package still felt satisfyingly “professional” in a way that many games of this time fumbled.

Two missing points to cover:

1.) This game has sound, which I haven’t discussed: especially unusual is it supports the Mockingboard hardware and you can flip an option to have the game read all text out loud. This video demonstrates the feature in action:

As far as I know this is the first adventure we’ve reached with an option to have this done with the text in general. (As opposed to having small voice clips in assorted spots.)

2.) Arthur Britto has a credit on Wizardry III: Legacy of Llylgamyn.

Title Page Digitized by: Arthur Britto.

It came out the same year as Crypt of Medea. While he does not have credits for Sir-Tech in years after, I do wonder if he did some more of their copy protection. (I can confirm that the broken aspect to early Crypt of Medea dumps was purely due to a faulty break of copy protection. 4am’s version is correct.) It probably would be possible to compare the Medea protection with other Sir-Tech games and see if there’s any similarity in code, indicating Britto was still working for them as an independent contractor, just uncredited (which would not be unusual for this kind of work).

Coming up: two games for children — seems like a good contrast from gore — followed by a game that I’d previously marked as “lost” which I now have a copy of.

Coming Thursday is our latest Heart’s Choice game, Witch’s Brew: Love and Lattes! You can try the first three chapters for free today, check out the author interview, and don’t forget to wishlist it on Steam!

IFComp 2025 has wrapped, and the results are posted! Congratulations to Detritus (Ben Jackson) and all the other entrants that did well.

Now let's talk survey.

The post-Comp feedback survey is live. (As linked from this official post.) Jacqueline, our organizer, writes:

This year’s survey is a little more important than usual, as we’re seeking thoughts on the future of how we address the UK Online Safety Act, how much generative artificial intelligence should be allowed in the competition, whether or not you’d like us to continue the awards livestream, and highlighting some important new volunteer roles for those who are interested. Please check it out! We need all of your thoughts in one place, so even if you’ve expressed opinions [on the forum], or in Discord, or emailed us, we will look for your thoughts in that survey.

"A little more important" is a bit of an understatement. Discussion about generative AI (LLMs and art generators) got contentious this year. See this forum thread, which hit 283 posts in seven days flat.

Let me back up. For the past couple of years, IFComp has permitted entries that use AI tools, as long as that usage is declared up front. Looks like eleven of this year's entries (out of 85) made the declaration -- some for game text, some for game art or cover art, some for both.

(Footnote: the AI usage labels have disappeared from the site now that voting is over. I think this is an oversight; I'm checking with the web team now. Refer to the wayback snapshot for how this looked during voting.)

There was some discussion about AI usage last year, but that didn't translate to a lot of feedback in the 2024 post-Comp survey. See this note from September:

It would be good if this year's contentious discussion got converted to a lot of survey feedback. Otherwise, it is likely that the same policy will be once again kept for 2026.

Why does it have to be survey feedback? See the note above: "We need all of your thoughts in one place." It's just not possible to go through a 283-post thread and figure out what the community thinks. Some people post twenty times; some people post once and then duck out; some people see the thread counter smoking its bearings and mutter "I ain't going near that thing." Some people don't read the forum regularly at all. (Note that the thread was locked after seven days, so it was perfectly possible to miss the whole thing.)

And, come on, you've met the Internet. It's not hard for a few people to push a point of view by being persistent and noisy about it. I'm not saying that's happened here -- but the way you tell the difference is by doing a comprehensive survey. Trying to parse quantitative results out of a forum discussion is a fool's errand.

In case you're wondering: I am listed on the IFComp committee. My role is entirely advisory at this point. I'll be looped in on the discussion on "what we gonna do next year", but the final decision is the chair's.

I have thoughts about AI use in IFComp, but I'm not including them in this post.

There's also the whole issue of the UK Online Safety Act, which sucks but we have to follow it. Yes, we asked our lawyer.

TLDR: Here's the survey. Go for it.

But as far as I was concerned, computers were business machines. They weren’t fun machines. You do things with them that you need. I certainly did not realize that there is such a relatively large segment of the population that has the computer only or mostly for pleasure.

— Fred Sirotech, president of Sir-Tech

Sir-Tech’s story is now well covered in many sources; I recommend Jimmy Maher’s essay or the transcript of They Create Worlds Episode 114 for anyone who wants the details going back to the Sirotecks fleeing from Communist Czechoslovakia. I’m going to give a briefer version as I have a focus different from the usual (the Wizardry series which would revolutionize gaming in both the US and Japan).

By the 1970s, Fred Sirotek was in multiple businesses in Canada, including manufacturing collectible spoons; he ended up investing with Janice Woodhead in New York, who had a resin company (the main components of said spoons).

Janice had a son (Robert Woodhead) who had a fascination with programming kicked off by a chance copy of Ahl’s 101 Basic Computer Games, but he had no computer at the time (nor access to time-sharing) so did “paper programming” using a device called the CARDIAC.

From Brian Stuart.

He eventually got access to the Dartmouth Time Sharing system, and finally went to college at Cornell which had access to the PLATO system, allowing him to leap from text-only games into graphics. The PLATO system was addicting enough he spent many more hours playing than studying, to the detriment of his grades. Simultaneously, he was working at a Computer Land to help pay tuition, which sold Apple IIs which he admired but were far past his price point.

That was when they were 4K. I remember a customer who had 12K in his machine and we all thought he was nuts. He could actually run hi-res graphics. We looked at them and said, ‘Enh, so what, good grief, lo-res is much better; more colors.’ We couldn’t see what you could do with hi-res. We weren’t ready for the potential of the machine.

He ended up going to a Radio Shack to obtain a TRS-80 instead, which directly led to him being fired by the Computer Land (as now he was using the hardware of a “competitor”).

Fred Sirotek and Janice Woodhead had the issue that the price for the raw materials involved kept changing price every week and constantly needed recalculation. Robert was asked to make a program to help; Fred bought one of the very expensive Apple IIs that Robert had been pining after to do production on. The program was eventually polished into Info-Tree and first showcased at the Trenton Computer Festival, April 1979.

Scenes from Trenton, via Creative Computing.

Norman Sirotek drove Robert up to the event, and ended up interested enough in the computers at the show that he suggested working together as business partners. They founded a new company, Siro-tech, with capital provided by Fred. Norman at first worked on the weekends before becoming the director of finance and administration full-time. Norman’s brother, Robert Sirotek, joined not long after with a focus on marketing.

Robert Woodhead started work in 1979 on Galactic Attack, copying ideas from the PLATO game Empire. Empire has a lot of name-clashes, so to be clear, this one is a multi-player game by John Daleske and Silas Warner involving Romulans, Kazari, Federation, and Orions doing battle in a manner similar to the mainframe game Star Trek; the first version was from 1973, and multiple variations through the 70s added features, so it was up to Empire IV by the time Woodhead started work.

There was the catch that Woodhead wrote the game in Apple Pascal, and by the time Robert finished the game in 1980 a promised method (via Apple) of running Pascal on standard 48K Apple IIs had not yet surfaced; an extra memory expansion would have been needed, meaning it needed temporarily to be put on ice. Robert embarked then on another game called Paladin (also in Pascal) based again on a PLATO system game, this time the first-person RPG Oubliette.

At the same time as this, another Cornell student, Andrew Greenberg, was working on his own Apple II game. Greenberg was an administrator for the PLATO system, so had the job of booting pesky students off the system who were playing games when they were supposed to be using it for serious purposes (but had experience playing said games himself). Greenberg had been playing (in-person) D&D but was getting tired of playing with the group and ended up starting work on his own first-person game, Wizardry; his initial versions were in BASIC.

The pair of Robert and Andrew were connected up where they joined forces (settling on Pascal, Robert’s computer language, and Wizardry, Andrew’s title). They sold a “release beta” at the Boston Computer Society conference in 1981, followed by the full release of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord in the same year.

As I’ve already indicated, Wizardry has had its story well-told elsewhere, so I want to jump to 1982, when Wizardry was wildly successful, and the sequel Knight of Diamonds had just finished and was being shown off at the same conference in Boston.

Boston Phoenix, May 11, 1982. I mentioned this ad recently while talking about Suspended.

In addition to Galactic Attack (their first game product) and Starmaze (designed by Robert Woodhead, programmed by Gordon Eastman over ten months on weekends) the company was now soliciting games from outside authors.

Authors … looking for recognition? We are eager to explain job opportunities and/or market your software masterpiece. For details, please ask for Robert Sirotek.

This resulted in new games, the first being Police Artist by Elizabeth Levin. She worked with Sesame Workshop and a year later released her own file system for children under the name Lizzycorp, so had no affiliation with Sir-Tech otherwise. This was the start of Sir-Tech as a pure publisher; despite the early “internal” work by Woodhead, they started to rely on outside developers.

In the November 1983 of Softalk, a whole page of Softalk was dedicated to Sir-Tech’s “other games”:

Rescue Raiders is notable: it has credits of Arthur Britto II and Gregory Hale and was played by both The Wargaming Scribe and Data-Driven Gamer; it’s one of the contenders for “first real-time strategy game”. (It’s Choplifter-esque where you can summon units by spending resources.) However, this is All the Adventures, so we’re instead focused on Crypt of Medea, with Arthur Britto II (again) and Allan Lamb.

Allan Lamb is the less famous of the two, so let’s do him first. Other than this program he’s credited with programming for a much later adventure game, Questmaster 1 (see here and here); that was meant to be the first of a series where experience points from the main character carry on to later iterations (kind of like Quest for Glory) but only one of the games came out. He contributed a Nibble article once but I otherwise haven’t been able to find any other instances that are definitely the same person.

Arthur Britto II is famous enough that some people probably arrived at this post looking for him. Out of the various cryptocurrencies, the most popular is Bitcoin, followed by Ethereum, followed by XRP. The three founders of XRP — starting from a 2011 forum discussion about “Bitcoin without mining” — are David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto. It was a (successful) attempt to make a more-energy efficient version of Bitcoin without the need for power-guzzling mining sites. Arthur Britto famously is reclusive (like Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of Bitcoin) and there has been speculation he isn’t even real, although he recently tweeted a single emoji on an account that had been around since 2011 with no messages. The upshot for a historian is that there have been crypto-enthusiasts combing the Internet already for his presence and the very real possibility some information was intentionally scrubbed.

For our purposes: through the 80s, at least, he remained an Apple tech maven, producing the Apple II version of Strategic Conquest and being one of the independent contractors producing software copy protection for companies.

Did you have any interaction (e.g. to compare methods, share code, etc) with other people (e.g. Mark Duchaineau from Sierra On-line) who were developing protections? What can you tell us about this?

Nope, it seems that copy protection was very secretive back then. I didn’t even know who else did copy protection, I was on my own! Only later did I talk to others who produced copy protection, mainly a guy by the name of Arthur Britto. If I’m not mistaken, he was the one that gave me some ideas regarding how to better control the stepper motor for the drive head.

— From an interview with Roland Gustafsson on software cracking

A later patent he is named on (2007) entitled “Storing chunks within a file system” has some resemblance to file-protection methods, and while this isn’t the venue to do it in, it looks like XRP itself may have drawn some inspiration from old-school Apple II programming.

From Mobygames.

The pair produced an Apple II horror-themed adventure which Sir-Tech published in 1983, using the Penguin Software graphical tools. I am incidentally playing 4am’s dump as is usual, but I need to be alert to the fact that the game may be broken as-is as one of the earlier dumped copies was unfinishable; there’s a patch based on that version. I’m not clear if the bug was due to buggy copy protection removal or something “authentic” to the game, but I’m going to assume the former for the moment and stay ready to swap if something goes awry.

Rick Austin was the local high school art teacher; he also made the iconic dragon cover art of Wizardry.

As you drive along the narrow and tortuous road, you feel an eerie sense of uneasiness. There is something about this night that just does not seem right, but you find it hard to put your finger on it. The sky is clear and cloudless, stars upon stars fill the sky, the moon glows with a mysterious aura, yet strangely enough, it is very, very dark. As a matter of fact, it’s so dark you find it increasingly difficult to see the road.

The plot, as the manual narrates, has you driving a car where “something terrible, shimmering grotesquely” appears in the road. You crash the car, go unconscious, and find yourself awake in a “crypt or mausoleum”.

WELCOME TO THE CRYPT OF MEDEA …

WE’VE BEEN EXPECTING YOU .. .

Your goal is escape.

This takes a different tack than our other graphical adventures so far; even our games with a graphical screen/text screen split like Saigon: The Final Days and Caves of Olympus have had some text on the graphical screens, but this seems to be a complete split. Graphics screens only have graphics on them, and you can press CTRL-P at any time to turn the graphics on or off. If the graphic screen changes you’ll get an update. For instance, the starting room has “six tombstones”, a “glass case”, and a “candle”; if you GET CANDLE the graphics will re-display with the candle removed:

You can try to OPEN TOMBSTONE and the game will tell you to try PULL; PULL TOMBSTONE will reveal a “crypt”.

>LOOK CRYPT

THOUSANDS OF MAGGOTS FEAST UPON THE REMAINS OF A BODY INSIDE THE CRYPT.

YOU FIND SOME MATCHES!

With the matches I tried lighting the candle and looking at the case — no dice — the item inside was “dark”. OPEN CASE doesn’t work, and for good measure I tried PULL CASE:

TRY PUSH….

Fine, PUSH:

MOVING IT REVEALS A PASSAGE DOWN!

The passage leads down to a “dirt tunnel”, dead-ending where there is a “severed hand” and a “shovel”.

Getting the hand is fatal.

THE HAND GRABS YOUR WRIST AND SLOWLY CLIMBS YOUR ARM. IT REACHES YOUR NECK AND RIPS A LARGE PIECE OF YOUR THROAT AWAY. YOU ARE DEAD.

The same thing happens if you try to get the shovel instead.

>BURN HAND

WITH WHAT? (TRY BURN XXXX WITH XXXX)

>BURN HAND WITH CANDLE

THE HAND BEGINS TO BUBBLE AND BLISTER.
THE HAND BURNS AND DISINTEGRATES!

This lets you grab the shovel and DIG. While digging underground does nothing, going back to the starting room and digging reveals a secret knob (how is it we know where in the entire room to dig?!?) Pulling the knob then opens a new passageway, with a BUTTERKNIFE along the way (that must be referred to as a KNIFE) followed by a secret laboratory.

YOU ARE IN A BLOODY LABORATORY. A TRAIL OF FRESH BLOOD LEADS SOUTH. SOUNDS EMANATE FROM BEHIND THE WALLS.

VISIBLE OBJECTS: A LAB TABLE, A FLASK

VISIBLE EXITS: SOUTH, EAST, WEST

This seems like a good place to stop, as this passes through an area which is explained in the manual complete with a map.

Next time: probably lots of deathtraps!

To explain today’s game we need to go back to 1982 and a company from the London area, Rabbit Software, which I’ve written about before. To recap: they were a mail order company that spun off from a computer shop early in 1982, quite quickly filling their catalog with solicited content. They had some drama trying to distribute the games of Bruce Robinson culminating in Alan Savage (one of the founders) dumping 4000 faulty tapes on a street, and even more drama in 1984 when Alan Savage died. The other co-founder, Heather Lamont, “vowed” the company would continue but it ended up being liquidated the same year, bought by Virgin Software.

Box art and gameplay screen of a Rabbit Software game, via Mobygames.

Early in the lifespan of that company, one of the sales managers, Mike Barton, had obtained a VIC-20, and

… his interest in games software soon grew as did his frustration with the products on the market at that time and his disillusion with his employers.

This led to his leaving the company, planning to launch his own (Romik Software) at the Personal Computer World Show in September, along with friend (and business expert) Gerry Rose and a programmer, Steve Clark.

From June 1982 Personal Computer World.

The trio spent several weeks preparing by creating some programs to sell along with literature and packaging. They decided — unlike many UK companies stepping into the field — to go directly to having a dealership network at stores as opposed to using mail-order.

Source. Brind was an “assistant” described as “busy putting inlays into cassette boxes and packing the boxes into cardboard cases.”

Barton emphasized an “honest” approach to software, which extended to drawing the pictures on tapes based on actual graphics in the game rather than having an artist do a more fanciful rendition.

A “real action shot” from The Centre for Computing History. Compare with the Pakacuda shot at the top of this post.

For their adventure games, which came out starting somewhere in the last half of 1983 (compare this ad with this ad) there was a little more difficulty in selling an all-text screen; the cover still makes very clear that the buyer is looking at an artist’s rendition.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History. Note this is for expanded VIC but still only 8K, so half a TRS-80.

Before getting into the game itself, I should mention that other than setting a firm price of 9.99 pounds on all products and insisting that they be written in machine code, the company emphasized having tapes that work.

Romik insists on no more than a 0.01 per cent failure rate from the tape duplicating company it uses: “with the state of the country at the moment, if you demand something, you’ll get it”. The key to good quality reproduction, Mike says, is to produce a good master tape in the first place; the master for their programs is made at the tape manufacturers’, under strictly controlled conditions.

I emphasize this because it sounds like Barton had familiarity with the disaster of the Robinson tapes, and hence had familiarity with that author’s adventure style. This is written in machine code rather than BASIC but at least cribs off those games (like Jack and the Beanstalk) in a conceptual way. (Incidentally, the “honest approach” led to an acrimonious split between the lead founders where Gerry Rose went off to form his own company only a year later, but we’ll save all that for another time.)

There are three authors listed: Simon Clark, Richard Sleep, and Chris Whitehouse. The only one who has a second credit is Richard Sleep, who has another VIC-20 adventure to his name (Animal Magic, 1984); otherwise none of three have made their mark elsewhere I can find.

The rock has some writing that says a poison and its cure are opposites.

The map is extremely tiny, in a way that we’ve only really seen with Robinson games.

The golden apples are visible right away, if you go east with a “tall apple tree”, “GOLDEN APPLES”, and a “large dog” (as depicted on the cover). The first order of business is getting some herbs in the glade to the west, which cause “madness”.

This just makes all the text display backwards; to cure this, go to a forest to the south (which has an axe you can nab along the way)), then climb a tree.

Now heading north, there is a field where a man is putting sowing “salt” and needs to be cured; the herb works in reverse and cures him:

With the staff, you can move the rock at the start, revealing a trapdoor. You cannot go through the trapdoor or open it (it is unclear why) but with the axe from the forest you can CHOP DOOR.

Going in the hole left behind gets the response that you need to wait until the next adventure (which might give a hint which Romik game is next in sequence, at the moment I don’t know).

With the hint from ENDYMION it is now possible to get the apples, although one more caveat: you need to get rid of the dog first. Since the dog does not have madness, giving the herb induces madness:

SAY ZEUS and then SHAKE TREE win the game.

I’m not sure how I would have felt had I spent 10 pounds. It was certainly “polished”. There are lengthy instructions where almost none of them even apply. This was genuinely tight for a “tiny game” in a modern sense — I could see giving it a positive review without caveats — but was so short I likely would have felt like I’d get more my money’s worth with a couple budget titles instead. On the other hand, this gives promise that the other Romik titles we have for 1983 (Fool’s Gold, Quest for the Ancient Tome of Aliard, Sword of Hrakel, Tombs of Xeiops) won’t be as dodgy as their VIC-20 origins might suggest.

Coming up: Finally, Apple II. No more hints other than I have a theme going.

Coming out of 1998, the folks at Looking Glass Studios believed they had pretty good reason to feel optimistic about their future. With Thief, they had delivered not just their first profitable original game since 1995’s Flight Unlimited but their biggest single commercial success ever. They had no fewer than four more games slated for release within the next fifteen months, a positively blistering pace for them. Yes, all of said games were sequels and iterations on existing brands, but that was just the nature of the industry by now, wasn’t it? As long-running franchises like Ultima had first begun to demonstrate fifteen years ago, there was no reason you couldn’t continue to innovate under a well-known and -loved banner headline. Looking Glass closed their Austin office that had done so much to pay the bills in the past by taking on porting contracts. In the wake of Thief, they felt ready to concentrate entirely on their own games.

Then, just as they thought they had finally found their footing, the ground started to shift beneath Looking Glass once again. Less than a year and a half after the high point of Thief’s strong reviews and almost equally strong sales, Paul Neurath would be forced to shutter his studio forever.

We can date the beginning of the cascading series of difficulties that ultimately undid Looking Glass to March of 1999, when their current corporate parent decided to divest from games, which in turn meant divesting from them. Intermetrics had been on a roller-coaster ride of its own since being purchased by Michael Alexander in 1995. In 1998, the former television executive belatedly recognized the truth of what Mike Dornbrook had tried to tell him some time ago: that his dreams and schemes for turning Intermetrics into a games or multimedia studio made no sense whatsoever. He deigned to allow the company to return to its core competencies — indeed, to double-down on them. Late in the year, Intermetrics merged with Pacer InfoTec, another perennial recipient of government and military contracts. The new entity took the name of AverStar. When one looked through its collection of active endeavors — making an “Enterprise Information Portal” for the Army Chief of Staff; developing drainage-modeling software for the U.S. Geological Survey; providing “testing and quality-support services” for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts; writing and maintaining software for the Space Shuttle and other NASA vehicles — the games of Looking Glass stood out as decidedly unlike the others. Michael Alexander and his reconstituted team of managers, most of them grizzled veterans of the Beltway military-industrial complex, saw no point in continuing to dabble in games. In the words of Looking Glass programmer Mark LeBlanc, “AverStar threw us back into the sea.”

Just as is the case with Intermetrics’s acquisition of Looking Glass barely a year and a half earlier, the precise terms under which Alexander threw his once-prized catch back have never surfaced to my knowledge. It’s clear enough, however, that Looking Glass’s immediate financial position at this juncture was not quite so dire as it had been, thanks to the success of Thief if nothing else. Still, none of the systemic problems of being a small fish in the big pond of the games industry had been solved. Their recent success notwithstanding, without a deeper-pocketed parent or partner to negotiate for them, Looking Glass was destined to have a harder time getting their games into stores and selling them on their own terms.

The next unfortunate event — unfortunate for Looking Glass, but deeply tragic for some others — came about a month later. On April 20, 1999, two deeply troubled, DOOM-loving teenagers walked into their high school in the town of Columbine, Colorado, carrying multiple firearms each, and proceeded to kill thirteen of their fellow students and teachers and wound or terrorize hundreds more before turning their guns on themselves. This act of mass murder, occurring as it did before the American public had been somewhat desensitized to such massacres by the sheer numbing power of repetition, placed the subject of violence in videogames under the mass-media spotlight in a way it hadn’t been since Joseph Lieberman’s Senate hearings of 1993. Now Lieberman, a politician with mounting presidential ambitions, was back to point the finger more accusingly than ever.

This is not the place to attempt to address the fraught subject of what actual links there might be between violence in games and violence in the real world, links which hundreds of sociological and psychological studies have never managed to conclusively prove or disprove. Suffice to say that attributing direct causality to any human behavior outside the controlled setting of a laboratory is really, really hard, even before one factors in the distortions that can arise from motivated reasoning when the subject being studied is as charged as this one. Setting all of that aside, however, this was not a form of attention to which your average gaming executive of 1999 had any wish to expose himself. First-person action games that looked even vaguely like DOOM — such as most of the games of Looking Glass — were cancelled, delayed, or de-prioritized in an effort to avoid seeming completely insensitive to tragedy. De-prioritization rather than something worse was the fate of Looking Glass’s System Shock 2, but that would prove plenty bad enough for a studio with little margin for error.

The story of System Shock 2′s creation is yet another of those “only at Looking Glass” tales. In 1994, a 27-year-old Boston-area computer consultant named Ken Levine played System Shock 1 and was bowled over by the experience. A year or so later, he saw a want ad from the maker of his favorite game in a magazine. He applied and was hired. He contributed a great deal to Thief during that project’s formative period of groping in the dark — he is credited in the finished game for “initial design and story concepts” — and then was given a plum role indeed. Looking Glass had just won a contract to make an adventure game based on the popular new television series Star Trek: Voyager, and Levine was placed in charge of it.

Alas, that project fell apart within a year or so, when Viacom, the media conglomerate that owned the property, took note of the lackluster commercial performance of another recent Star Trek adventure game — and of recent adventure games in general — and pulled the plug. Understandably enough, Levine was devastated at having thus wasted a year of his life. Somewhat less understandably, he blamed the management of Looking Glass as much as Viacom for the fiasco. He left to start his own studio, taking with him two other Looking Glass employees, by the names of Jon Chey and Rob Fermier.

This is where the story gets weird, in an oh, so Looking Glass sort of way. Once they were out on their own, trading under the name of Irrational Games, the trio found that contracts and capital were not as easy to come by as they had believed they would be. At his wit’s end, facing the prospect of a return to his former life as an ordinary computer consultant, Levine came crawling back to his old boss Paul Neurath. But rather than ask for his old job back, he asked that Irrational be allowed to make a game in partnership with Looking Glass, using the same Dark Engine that was to power Thief. Most bosses would have laughed in the face of someone who had poached two of their people in a bid to show them up and show them how it was done, only to get his comeuppance in such deserving fashion. But not Neurath. He agreed to help Levine and his friends make a game in the spirit of System Shock, Levine’s whole reason for joining the industry in the first place. In fact, he even let them move back into Looking Glass’s offices for a while in order to do it. Neurath soon succeeded in capturing the interest of Electronic Arts, the corporate parent of Origin Systems and thus the owner of the System Shock brand. Just like that, Levine’s homage became a direct sequel, an officially anointed System Shock 2.

The ironic capstone to this tale is that Warren Spector had recently left Looking Glass because he had been unable to secure permission to do exactly what the unproven and questionably loyal young Ken Levine was now going to get to do: to make a spiritual heir to System Shock. Spector ended up at Ion Storm, a new studio founded by John Romero of DOOM fame, where he set to work on what would become Deus Ex.

In the course of making System Shock 2, the Irrational staff grew to about fifteen people, who did eventually move into their own office. Nonetheless, the line separating their contributions from those of Looking Glass proper remained murky at best. As a postmortem written by Jon Chey would later put it, “the project was a collaborative effort between two companies based on a contract that only loosely defined the responsibilities of each organization.” It’s for this reason that I’ll be talking about System Shock 2 from here on like I might any other Looking Glass game.

The sequel isn’t shy about embracing its heritage. Once again, it casts you into an outer-space complex gone badly, horrifyingly haywire; this time you find yourself in humanity’s first faster-than-light starship instead of a mere space station. Once again, the game begins with you waking up disoriented, not knowing how you got here, forced to rely on narrations of the backstory that may or may not be reliable. Once again, your first and most obvious antagonists are the zombified corpses of the people who used to crew the ship. Once again, you slowly learn what really went down here through the emails and logbooks you stumble across. Once again, you have a variety of cybernetic hardware to help you stay alive, presented via a relentlessly diegetic interface. Once again, you meet SHODAN, the disembodied, deliciously evil artificial intelligence who was arguably the most memorable single aspect of the very memorable first game. And once again, she is brought to iconic life by the voice of Terri Brosius. In these ways and countless others, this apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

But even as it embraces its heritage in the broad strokes, System Shock 2 isn’t averse to tinkering with the formula, through both subtraction and addition. The most significant edit is the elimination of a separate, embodied cyberspace, which was already beginning to feel dated in 1994, having been parachuted in straight out of William Gibson’s 1984-vintage Neuromancer. Cyberspace has its charms in System Shock 1, but few would deny that it’s the roughest part of the game in terms of implementation; it was probably a wise choice for Ken Levine and company to focus their efforts elsewhere. More debatable are their decisions to simplify the hacking mini-games that you sometimes need to play to open locked doors and the like, and to eliminate the unique multi-variant difficulty settings of the first game, which let you turn it into whatever kind of experience you desire, from a walking simulator to an exercise in non-stop carnage to a cerebral pseudo-adventure game. System Shock 2 settles for letting you choose a single setting of “Easy,” “Normal,” “Hard,” or “Impossible,” like any standard-issue shooter of the era.

In fact, at first glance this game looks very much like a standard shooter. If you try to play it as one, however, you’ll be quickly disabused of that notion when you die… and die and die and die. This isn’t a stealth game to the same extent as Thief, but it does demand that you proceed with caution, looking for ways to outwit enemies whom you can’t overcome through firepower. If you can’t see your way to noticing and disabling the security cameras that lurk in many a corner, for example, you’re going to find yourself overwhelmed, no matter how fast and accurate a trigger finger you happen to possess.

By way of a partial replacement for the multi-variant difficulty settings of its predecessor, Irrational chose to graft onto System Shock 2 more CRPG elements. Theoretically at least, these give you almost as much control over what kind of game you end up playing. You can go for a combat-oriented build if you want more of a shooter experience — within reason, that is! — or you can become a hardcore tech-head or even a sort of Jedi who makes use of “psi” powers. Or you can judiciously mix and match your abilities, as most players doubtless wind up doing. After choosing an initial slate of skills at the outset, you are given the opportunity to learn more — or to improve the ones you already have — at certain milestones in the plot.

You create your character in System Shock 2 in a similar way to the old Traveller tabletop RPG, by sending him off on three tours of duty with different service branches — or the same one, if you prefer. (I fancy I can see some traces of the Star Trek: Voyager game which Ken Levine once set out to make in the vibe and the iconography here.) This is an example of how System Shock 2 can sometimes feel like it has a few too many ideas for its own good. It seems like an awful lot of effort to go through to establish a character who is about to get his memories erased anyway.

System Shock 2 is an almost universally acclaimed game today, perhaps even more so than its uglier low-res predecessor. There are good reasons for this. The atmosphere of dread builds and builds as you explore the starship, thanks not least to masterful environmental sound design; if anything, this game is more memorable for its soundscape than for its visuals. Although its emergent qualities are certainly nothing to sneeze at, in my opinion the peak moment of the game is actually pre-scripted. A jaw-dropping plot twist arrives about halfway through, one of the most shocking I’ve ever encountered in a game. I hesitate to say much more here, but will just reveal that nothing and no one turn out to be what you thought they were, and that SHODAN is involved. Because of course she is…

For all its increased resolution and equal mastery of atmosphere, however, System Shock 2 doesn’t strike me as quite so fully realized as the first System Shock. It also suffers by comparison with Warren Spector’s own System Shock successor Deus Ex, which was released about nine months later. System Shock 2 never seems entirely sure how to balance its CRPG elements, which are dependent on character skill, with its action elements, which are dependent on player skill. Increasing your character’s skill in gunnery, for example, somehow makes your guns do more damage when you shoot someone with them; this is not exactly intuitive or realistic. Deus Ex just does so much of this sort of thing so much better. In that game, a higher skill level lets your character hold the gun steadier when you’re trying to shoot with it; this makes a lot more sense.

Unusually for Looking Glass, who seldom released a game before its time, System Shock 2 shows all the signs of having been yanked out of its creators’ hands a few months too early. The level design declines dramatically during the final third of the game, becoming downright sketchy by the time you get to the underwhelming finale. The overall balance of the gameplay systems is somewhat out of whack as well. It’s really, really hard to gain traction as a psi-focused character in particular, and dismayingly easy to end up with a character that isn’t tenable by choosing the wrong skills early on. I found a lot of the design choices in System Shock 2 to be tedious and annoying, such that I wished for a way to just turn them off: the scarcity of ammunition (another way to find yourself in an unwinnable cul de sac), the way that weapons degrade at an absurd pace and constantly need to be repaired, the endlessly respawning enemies that make hard-won firefights feel kind of pointless, the decision to arbitrarily deprive you of your trusty auto-map just at the point when you need it most.

Granted, some of this was also in System Shock 1, but it irritated me much more here. In the end, the two games provide very similar subjective experiences. Perchance this was just a ride I was only interested in going on once; perchance I would have a very different reaction to System Shock 2 if I had met it before its older sibling. Or maybe I’m just getting more protective of my time as I get older and have less and less of it left. (Ach… hold that morbid thought!)

Whatever its ratio of strengths to weaknesses, System Shock 2 didn’t do very well at all upon its release in August of 1999. Many folks from both Looking Glass and Irrational attribute this disappointment entirely to the tragic occurrence of four months earlier in Columbine, Colorado. Although the full picture is surely more nuanced — it always is, isn’t it? — we have no reason to doubt that the fallout from the massacre was a major factor in the game’s commercial failure. According to Paul Neurath, Electronic Arts pondered for a while whether it was wise to put System Shock 2 out at all. He remembers EA’s CEO Larry Probst telling him that “we may just want to walk away from doing shooters because there’s talk of these shooters causing these kinds of events.” “We convinced them to release the game,” says Neurath, “but they did almost zero marketing and they put it in the bargain discount $9.95 bin 45 days after the game launched. It never stood a chance to make any money. That really hurt us financially.”

If System Shock 2 was to some extent a victim of circumstances, Looking Glass’s next game was a more foreseeable failure. For some reason, they just couldn’t stop beating the dead horse of flight simulation, even though it had long since become clear that this wasn’t what their primary audience wanted from them at all. Flight Unlimited III wasn’t a bad flight simulator, but the changes it introduced to the formula were nowhere near as dramatic as those that marked Flight Unlimited II. The most notable new development was a shift from the San Francisco Bay to Washington State, a much larger geographical area depicted in even greater detail. (Owners of the second game were given the privilege of loading their old scenery into the new engine as well.) Innovation or the lack thereof aside, the same old problem remained, in the form of Microsoft’s 800-pound-gorilla of a flight-simulation franchise, which was ready with its own “2000” update at the same time. Published by Electronic Arts in late 1999, Flight Unlimited III stiffed even more abjectly than had System Shock 2.

On the left, we see Seattle-Tacoma International Airport as depicted in Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2000. On the right, we see the same airport in Flight Unlimited III. The former modeled the whole world, including more than 20,000 airports; the latter tried to compete by modeling a comparatively small area better. Regardless of the intrinsic merits of the two approaches, Looking Glass’s did not prove a formula for marketplace success.

A comparatively bright spot that holiday season was Thief Gold, which added three new missions to the original’s twelve and tweaked and polished the existing ones. It did decently well as a mid-tier product with a street price of about $25, plus a $10 rebate for owners of the previous version of Thief and the promise of a $10 discount off the upcoming Thief II. But a product like this was never going to offset Looking Glass’s two big failures of 1999.

In truth, the Looking Glass goose was probably already more or less cooked as Y2K began. The only thing that might have saved them was Thief II: The Metal Age turning into a massive hit right out of the gate. Sadly, there was little likelihood of that happening; the best that Looking Glass could realistically hope for was another solid half-million seller. There was already a sense in the studio as the final touches were being put on Thief II that, barring a miracle, this game was likely to be their swansong.

As swansongs go, Thief II acquits itself pretty darn well. It comes off as far more self-assured than its predecessor, being focused almost exclusively on stealth rather than monster-slaying through its fifteen cunningly crafted levels. Some of these spaces — a huge central bank, a sprawling warehouse complex, a rich art collector’s country estate — are intricate and beautiful enough that you almost wish there was an option to just wander around and admire them, without having to worry about guards and traps and all the rest. There’s a greater willingness here to use gameplay to advance the larger story: plot twists sometimes arrive in the midst of a mission, and you can often learn more about what’s really going on, if you’re interested, by listening carefully to the conversations that drift around the outskirts of the darkness in which you cloak yourself. Indeed, Thief II is positively bursting with little Easter eggs for the observant. Some of them are even funny, such as a sad-sack pair of guards who have by now been victimized by Garrett several times in other places, who complain to one another, Laurel and Hardy style, about their lot in life of constantly being outsmarted.

The subtitle pays tribute to the fact that the milieu of Thief has now taken on a distinct steampunk edge, with clanking iron robots and gun turrets for Garrett to contend with in addition to the ever-present human guards. Garrett now has a mechanical eye which he can use to zoom in on things, or even to receive the visual signal from a “scouting orb” that he’s tossed out into an exposed space to get a better picture of his surroundings. I must confess that I’m somewhat of two minds about this stuff: it’s certainly more interesting than zombies, but I do still kind of long for the purist neo-Renaissance milieu I thought I was getting when I played the first level of Thief I.

The “faces” on the robots look a bit like SHODAN, don’t they? Some of the code governing their behavior was also lifted directly from that game. But unlike your mechanical enemies in System Shock 2, these robots have steam boilers on their posteriors which you can douse with water arrows to disable them.

Beyond this highly debatable point, though, there’s very little to complain about here, unless it be that Thief II, for all its manifest strengths, doesn’t quite manage to stand on its own. Oddly in light of what a make-or-break title this was for them, Looking Glass seems not to have given much thought to easing new players into this very different way of approaching a first-person action game; they didn’t even bother to rehash the rudimentary tutorial that kicks off Thief I. As a result, and as a number of otherwise positively disposed contemporary reviewers noted, Thief II has more the flavor of an expansion pack — a really, really well-done one, mind you — than a full-fledged sequel. It probably isn’t the best place to start, but anyone who enjoyed the first game will definitely enjoy this one.

Looking Glass’s problem, of course, was that none of what I’ve just written sounds like a ticket to id- or Blizzard-level success, which was what they needed by this point to save the company. As Computer Gaming World wrote in its review, Thief II “is a ’boutique’ game: a gamer’s game. It pays its dividends in persistent tension rather than in bursts of fear. It still pumps as much adrenaline, but it works on a subtler level. It’s the difference between Strangers on a Train and Armageddon, between the intimated and the explicit.”

Having thus delivered another cult classic rather than a blockbuster, Looking Glass’s fate was sealed. By March of 2000, when Eidos published Thief II, Paul Neurath had been trying to sell the studio for a second time for the better part of a year. Sony was seriously interested for a while, until a management shakeup there killed the deal. Then Eidos was on the verge of pulling the trigger, only to have its bankers refuse to loan the necessary funds after a rather disappointing year for the company, in which the Tomb Raider train seemed to finally be running out of steam and John Romero’s would-be magnum opus Daikatana, which Eidos was funding and publishing for Ion Storm, ran way over time and budget. Not wanting to risk depriving his employees of their last paychecks, Neurath decided to shut the studio down with dignity. On May 24, 2000, he called everyone together to thank them for their efforts and to tell them that Thief II had been Looking Glass’s last game. “We’re closing,” he said. What else was there to say?

Plenty, as it turned out. The news of the shuttering prompted paroxysms of grief throughout gaming’s burgeoning online ecosystem, frequently accompanied by a full measure of self-loathing. Looking Glass had been just too smart for a public that wasn’t worthy of them, so the story went. Many a gamer who had always meant to pick up this or that subtly subversive Looking Glass masterstroke, but had kept delaying in favor of easier, more straightforward fare, blamed himself for being a part of the problem. But no amount of hand-wringing or self-flagellation could change the fact that Looking Glass was no more. The most it could do was to turn having worked for the studio into a badge of honor and one hell of a line item on anyone’s CV, as a Looking Glass diaspora spread out across the industry to influence its future.

To wit: the tearful tributes were still pouring in when Ion Storm’s Warren Spector-led Deus Ex reached store shelves in June of 2000. Cruel irony of ironies: Deus Ex became a hit on a scale that Thief, Looking Glass’s biggest game ever, could scarcely have dreamed of approaching. Right to the end, Looking Glass was always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

Looking Glass was a cool group, and a lot of us put a lot of time and energy and a large part of our lives into it, and it’s sad when that doesn’t work out. So there’s some part of me that says, oh, that sucks, that’s not fair, but it’s the real world and it had a pretty good run.

— Doug Church

Without consciously intending to, I’ve found myself writing quite a lot of obituaries of gaming icons recently: TSR, Sierra On-Line, MicroProse, Bullfrog, the adventure-making arm of Legend Entertainment. Call it a sign of the millennial times, a period of constant, churning acquisition and consolidation in which it began to seem that just half a dozen or so many-tendriled conglomerates were destined to divide the entirety of digital gaming among themselves. Now, we can add Looking Glass to our list of victims of this dubious idea of progress.

A lot of hyperbole has been thrown around about Looking Glass over the past quarter-century. A goodly portion of it is amply justified. That said, I do think there is some room for additional nuance. (There always is, isn’t there?) At the risk of coming off like the soulless curmudgeon in the room, I’m not going to write about Looking Glass here as if they were a bunch of tortured artists starving in a garret somewhere. Instead I’m going to put on my pragmatist’s hat and go off on in search of some more concrete reasons why these remarkable games didn’t resonate as much as they may have deserved to back in the day.

It shouldn’t be overlooked that Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner made some fairly baffling business decisions over the years. Their disastrous choice to try to make a go of it as an independent publisher against gale-force headwinds in 1995 can be all too easily seen as the precipitating event that sent Looking Glass down the road to closure five years later. Then, too, Neurath’s later insistence on persisting with the Flight Unlimited series must stand high on the list of mistakes. Incredibly, at the time Looking Glass was shut down, they were still at the flight-simulation thing, having spent a reported $3 million already on a fourth one, which was finally to add guns and enemy aircraft to the mix; this was half a million more than they had spent to make Thief II, a game with a far more secure customer base. ^[1]After the closure, some Looking Glass staffers migrated to the nearby Mad Doc Software, where they incorporated much of their flight-simulation code into Jane’s Combat Simulations: Attack Squadron. Released in 2002, it was not positively reviewed.

Then again, this isn’t a Harvard Business School case study. What final words are there to say about the games themselves, the real legacy of this company that failed rather spectacularly at its business-school ambition of making a lot of — okay, any — money? How should we understand them in their full historical context?

As you probably know, historical context is kind of my jam. Writing for this site is for me a form of time travel. I don’t play modern games for lack of hours in the day, and I’ve long since settled into a more or less one-to-one correspondence between present time and historical time; that’s to say, it takes me about one year worth of articles on this site to fully cover one year of gaming history and matters adjacent. We’ve by now moved out of the era when I was playing a lot of games in my previous life, so most of what I encounter is new to me. I think this puts me in a privileged position. I can come pretty close to experiencing and appreciating games — and the evolution of the medium as a whole — as a contemporary player might have done. When I read in the year 2025 that Looking Glass was poorly rewarded for their uncompromising spirit of innovation, I can understand and even to a large extent agree. And yet, in my role as a time traveler, I can also kind of understand why a lot of gamers ended up voting with their wallets for something else.

The decade after Looking Glass’s demise saw the rise of what gaming scholar Jesper Juul has dubbed the Casual Revolution; this was the heyday of Bejeweled, Zuma, Diner Dash, and the Big Fish portal, which brought gaming to whole new, previously untapped demographics who dwarfed the hardcore old guard in numbers. In 2010, when this revolution was at its peak, Juul put forth five characteristics that define casual gaming: “emotionally positive fictions”; “little presupposed knowledge” on the player’s part; a tolerance for being played in “short bursts”; “lenient punishments for failing”; and “positive feedback for every successful action the player performs.” The games of Looking Glass are the polar opposite of this list. At times, they seem almost defiantly so; witness the lack of an “easy” setting in Thief, as if to emphasize that anyone who might wish for such a thing is not welcome here. Looking Glass’s games are the ultimate “gamer’s games,” as Computer Gaming World put it, unabashedly demanding a serious commitment of time, focus, energy, and effort from their players. But daily life demands plenty of those things from most of us already, doesn’t it? In this light, it doesn’t really surprise me that a lot of people decided to just go play something more welcoming and less demanding. This didn’t make them ingrates; it just made them people who weren’t quite sure that there was enough space in their life to work that hard for their entertainment. I sympathize because I often felt the same in the course of my time-traveling; when I saw a new Looking Glass game on the syllabus, it was always a little bit harder than it ought to have been for me to muster the motivation to take the plunge. And this is part of what I do for a living!

Now, there’s certainly nothing wrong with gamer’s games. But they are by definition niche pursuits. The tragedy of Looking Glass (if I can presume to frame it in those terms in an article which has previously mentioned the real tragedy that took place at Columbine High School) is that they were making niche games at a time when the economics of the industry were militating against the long tail, pushing everyone toward a handful of tried-and-true mainstream gameplay formulas. After the millennium, the rise of digital distribution would give studios the luxury of being loudly and proudly niche, if that was where their hearts were. (Ironically, this happened at the same instant that ultra-mainstream casual gaming took off, and was enabled by the same transformative technology of broadband in the home.) But digital distribution of games as asset-heavy as those of Looking Glass was a non-starter throughout the 1990s. C’est la vie.

This situation being what it was, I do feel that Looking Glass could have made a bit more of an effort to be accessible, to provide those real or metaphorical easy modes, if only in the hope and expectation that their customers would eventually want to lose the training wheels and play the games as they were meant to be played. On-ramping is a vital part of the game designer’s craft, one at which Looking Glass, for all their strengths in other areas, wasn’t all that accomplished.

Another thing that Looking Glass was not at all good at, or seemingly even all that interested in, was multiplayer, which became a bigger and bigger part of gaming culture as the 1990s wore on. (They did add a co-operative multiplayer mode to System Shock 2 via a patch, but it always felt like the afterthought it was.) This was a problem in itself. Just to compound it, Looking Glass’s games were in some ways the most single-player games of them all. “Immersion” was their watchword: they played best in a darkened room with headphones on, almost requiring of their players that they deliberately isolate themselves from the real world and its inhabitants. Again, this is a perfectly valid design choice, but it’s an inherently niche one.

Speaking only for myself now, I think this is another reason that the games of Looking Glass proved a struggle for me at times. At this point in my life at least, I’m just not that excited about isolating myself inside hermetically sealed digital spaces. If I want total immersion, I take a walk and immerse myself in nature. Games I prefer to play on the sofa next to my wife. My favorite Looking Glass game, for what it’s worth, is System Shock 1, which I played at an earlier time in my life when immersion was perhaps more of a draw than it is today. Historical context is one thing, personal context another: it’s damnably difficult to separate our judgments of games from the circumstances in which we played them.

Of course, this is one of the reasons that I always encourage you not to take my judgments as the final word on anything, to check out the games I write about for yourself if they sound remotely interesting. It’s actually not that hard to get a handle on Looking Glass’s legacy for yourself. Considering the aura of near-divinity that cloaks the studio today, the canon of widely remembered Looking Glass classics is surprisingly small. They seem to have had a thing for duologies: their place in history boils down to the two Ultima Underworld games, the two System Shock games, and the two Thief games. The rest of their output has been pretty much forgotten, with the partial exception of Terra Nova on the part of the really dedicated.

Still, three bold and groundbreaking concepts that each found ways to advance the medium on multiple fronts is more than enough of a legacy for any studio, isn’t it? So, let us wave a fondly respectful farewell to Looking Glass, satisfied as we do so that we will be meeting many of their innovations and approaches, sometimes presented in more accessible packages, again and again as we continue to travel through time.

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

Sources: The books Game Design Theory & Practice (2nd. ed.) by Richard Rouse III, A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players by Jesper Juul, and the Prima strategy guide to Thief II by Howard A. Jones; Computer Gaming World of January 1999, November 1999, January 2000, February 2000, and June 2000;  Retro Gamer 60, 177, and 260; Game Developer of November 1999; Boston Globe of May 26 2000; Boston Magazine of December 2013.

Online sources include “Ahead of Its Time: A History of Looking Glass” and “Without Looking Glass, There was No Irrational Games” by Mike Mahardy at Polygon, James Sterrett’s “Reasons for the Fall: A Post-Mortem on Looking Glass Studios,” a GameSpy featurette by John “Warrior” Keefer, Christian Nutt’s interview with Ken Levine on the old Gamasutra site, and AverStar’s millennial-era corporate site.

My special thanks to Ethan Johnson, a fellow gaming historian who knows a lot more about Looking Glass than I do, and set me straight on some important points after the first edition of this article was published.

Where to Get Them: System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster (which includes the original version of the game as a bonus) and Thief II: The Metal Age are available as digital purchases on GOG.com.

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

The creatures here all very standard-issue (troll, dragon, minotaur) and the author even has in the title (“Odysseys” plural) the implication that this is a mash-up of sorts, but at the very least I think we can pin him on thinking of Clash of the Titans (1981).

Medusa lining up a shot, from Clash of the Titans.

Continuing from last time, I had a flying horse, minotaur, dragon, and zombie horde to deal with. All were linked to the same thing: I had neglected to try climbing the tree the horse was tied to.

Not sure why I missed this. I almost always immediately try climbing every tree. Probably I got distracted by there being both writing and a flying horse tied to it.

While that was extremely easy (“easy”) to find, much harder is that the sword itself hides a secret, but I didn’t discover that until later. For now, I used it to kill the minotaur…

…and the dragon (which I had put to sleep, but couldn’t sneak by).

Killing the minotaur allows grabbing the *PERSAIN RUG* and that’s that. Killing the dragon allows going south by it, reaching a lair with a chest of coins…

…and a whole new area.

Down the stairs (I like the description, even with no change in action it makes it more vivid) you can go east, arriving under the chasm that required waving the sword to jump over (regular jumping didn’t work because it was too big a gap). Eventually this leads to a magma river, which is small enough to jump over.

We’ll get to the LEMON WALL hint in a moment.

This is followed by a locked brass door (key from near the zombies works) and the lair of Medusa.

The crossbow is very unusual and not from anywhere other than the author’s imagination; the idea of Medusa having a bow isn’t unprecedented but it doesn’t show up in any other adventure I’ve seen. It does show up in Clash of the Titans which only came out two years before, hence my suspicion.

The original Medusa model at a museum, via Reddit.

It immediately occurred to me the chalice that is very shiny at the zombies would be helpful, but I hadn’t taken down the zombies yet. It’s possible you’d have the item before seeing the Medusa, but it isn’t likely, because the LEMON WALL hint is needed. Dramatically, it’s much better for the player to wander into the lair early and only have the resolution later (otherwise she ends rather quickly!)

Armed with the cryptic GO LEMON ROCK! DIG LEMON WALL! message and the shovel I still had from digging up the flintrock, I wandered about looking for an appropriate room, and came across limestone. Lime is kind of related to lemon, it was worth a try?

With the silver cross, the zombies could be driven back. Prior to D&D I want to say crosses only worked on vampires, demons, and the like, but D&D made it so they worked on all undead.

The shiny chalice works predictably with Medusa.

This is everything from the cave; the only thing unused is a “cloth rag” that’s just sitting out in the open. Only the flying horse remains.

Pegasus from the movie.

This is where I was horribly stuck; I tried HELP in every room fishing for information, and found, while at the top of the tree (with the magic sword) the message:

WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH THE SWORD? (AS IN MOTION)
IT’S MAGIC, YOU KNOW!

Just like a wand, you can WAVE SWORD; this reveals a pair of spurs. Then you can SPUR HORSE while riding:

The falling down while wrangling is reminiscent of the movie, where Pegasus takes some work to capture. The bridle doesn’t appear until after you’ve tried the spurs.

The bridle that appears can be tied to the horse so that you can actually hang on the second time around.

This is where a third, possibly non-existent game in the Herrick Venture series gets mentioned.

The temple has an Oracle guarding a golden idol.

Keep in mind the author is modifying details (bow to crossbow, Pegasus starts tied up) this may be another Harryhausen movie and related to the Oracle of All Knowledge from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.

From the official comic of the movie.

This is still a very different circumstance and a simply delightful puzzle; if it wasn’t for the fact I was reduced to essentially one item, maybe not so delightful, but since all that was left was the cloth.

Now the golden idol can be taken without complaint.

I delivered everything to the temple (including the MAGIC WAND and MAGIC SWORD which count as treasures) but I was short one treasure. I correctly guessed I missed another dig location, and went on a shovel rampage before finding back at the desert you can dig up a crown.

And that’s it for the works of Richard Herrick, Jr., unless the GHOSTTOWNS game was actually finished and somehow surfaces.

Despite this being a retro-step for the author (old school treasure hunt vs. the first game’s escape) it did come off as more skillfully crafted, with a relatively open map yet where the player still gets nudged into backtracking (like the key from the zombie area to get to Medusa, and then the hint from that area to get a secret SILVER CROSS item, and then the SILVER CROSS to get the chalice from the zombies, and then the chalice to defeat Medusa). The spelling errors were sloppy but the writing at least attempted to be more vivid than your standard Scott Adams game (enabled by having more memory space). There were no moments like where sleeping on a bed or running a sink causes a completely random item to appear.

The magic words had random effects but the reference to WORDS OF TRAVEL AND MANIPULATION and the fact there were four of them all contained together made them feel using them like “experiment” rather than “frustratingly testing everything everywhere”. The quicksand clearly needed a magic word, and there’s no reason PRESTO would be the one, but it wasn’t hard to just run through the list and test them. The original D&D campaign that Crowther played in had magical experimentation; it works on tabletop because of the flexibility of the player trying just about anything they can think in order to draw out what an item’s properties are. When this was translated into the rod of Crowther’s Adventure the concept became more obscure; other authors have tried to reproduce the technique with varying levels of success. Somehow the balance held here, perhaps by leaning heavily on prior reference (Alice, Sinbad, having a magic wand used to get over a chasm just like Adventure) but also by having the magic words apply to specific obvious dilemmas (unlike some other games where magic words could be used in entirely random places).

I suspect Richard Herrick was a spirited teenager with commercial ambitions who could never pull them off. It’s always possible some magazine or fan club publication will surface in the future with more information. For now: one more random British game, with more drama to the backstory than you’d expect VIC-20 software to have, followed by an obscure Apple II game by a famous company.

Will you spill the tea about the secret, cozy magical cafe on the college campus? Brew potions and romance on coffee dates with your new friends!

Witch’s Brew: Love and Lattes is a 426,000-thousand word interactive cozy romance novel by Cay Macres. I sat down with Cay to talk about their writing and upcoming game! Witch’s Brew: Love and Lattes releases next Thursday, October 23rd. You can wishlist it on Steam today, it really helps, even if you don’t plan to purchase on Steam.

This is definitely not your first time writing in the game-space. Tell our readers about your background.
My first step into games was working on game jams with friends, doing dialogue and narrative design. After that, I was a contract writer for StoryLoom, an interactive novel site by Pixelberry Studios. I had always been drawn to sci fi but, with StoryLoom, I discovered how much fun fantasy is!

How did you get interested in interactive fiction?
A lot of my favorite games are cozy RPGs with strong narratives. I also love reading fantasy and sci fi! I really appreciate that interactive fiction feels like the middle point between RPGs and traditional novels.

You’ve also got some novels under your belt?
I haven’t yet published any non-interactive novels. I have a couple in the works that I’m still editing. As a writer, it’s difficult to ever feel truly done with a project.

What was your favorite part of writing this game?
I’m a writer who loves describing things, so I had fun creating the cozy, coastal, autumnal vibes of Peridot Pines! I also enjoyed figuring out all the lore around magic. And, of course, I loved writing the cat’s snarky dialogue. I tried my best to channel my own two tabbies.

If you were the PC, who would you be romancing?
I think I would romance Mel. The type of romances I enjoy are usually the shy, will-they-won’t-they, slow-burns.

What are you working on next?
Next, I hope to wrap up editing and finally start querying agents to get my non-interactive novels published! I also want to write more flash fiction. I find that it’s a helpful warm-up that reminds me how much a single word can alter a story.

IFTF is thrilled to announce the next round of our microgrant program, providing modest grants to folks working on interactive fiction technology, education, preservation, or outreach. Do you have a project in the works that will benefit an interactive fiction community and could use a bit of funds to get it to the finish line? We would love to hear from you: applications for this year’s program are now open.

The goal of the grant program is to support projects that benefit the interactive fiction community at large (rather than funding the commission of new games, for instance). We especially love projects that provide tangible benefits to a community of IF players or makers in their work to preserve, maintain, and inspire the continued growth of this medium. Proposals are evaluated by an independent committee of advisors (distinct from the grant admin committee) for merit, feasibility, and potential impact.

Our budget for the grants program is small: we have $3,000 of funds in total to split between awardees, with a maximum award per application of $1,000. (Requesting a smaller amount is okay and helps us support more projects.) To preserve our volunteer bandwidth, we will not consider funding projects needing less than $150. We will ask you to submit a simple budget to back up the amount you are asking for, as well as a few details about your project and its scope, but we try to keep the application process as simple as possible.

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

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

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

We can’t wait to see what ideas you’ve got brewing this year. If you have any questions about the IFTF Microgrants or the application process, please reach out to [email protected]. And if you don’t intend to apply but are still thrilled that IFTF is funding cool projects, you can donate to the grants program directly (choose “IFTF Grants” in the donation page dropdown), or simply to the IFTF General Fund to help us keep this and many other great programs running!

The IFTF Grant Admin Committee is pleased to announce that the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation’s microgrant program is returning (after a successful pilot last year). Do you have a project in the works that would benefit an interactive fiction community and could use a bit of funds to get it over the finish line? We would love to hear from you: applications for this year’s program are now open.

In our first year, we provided funding to support four great projects:

• Improve accessibility features for Parchment on iOS (Dannii Willis)
• An IF Workshop for writers in Indonesia (Felicity Banks)
• Audiobook Documentation for Inform (Ryan Veeder)
• Chronicling the history of annual IF awards (Brian Rushton)

As the list of last year’s awardees might suggest, the goal of the grant program is to support projects that benefit the interactive fiction community at large (rather than funding the commission of new games, for instance). We especially love projects that provide tangible benefits to a community of IF players or makers in their work to preserve, maintain, and inspire the continued growth of this medium. Proposals are evaluated by an independent committee of advisors (distinct from the grant admin committee) for merit, feasibility, and potential impact.

Our budget for the grants program remains small: we have $3,000 of funds in total to split between awardees, with a maximum award per application of $1,000. (Requesting a smaller amount is okay and helps us support more projects.) To preserve our volunteer bandwidth, we will not consider funding projects needing less than $150. We will ask you to submit a simple budget to back up the amount you are asking for, as well as a few details about your project and its scope, but we try to keep the application process as simple as possible.

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

If you’re interested in applying or learning more about the process, please check out our grant guidelines. Applications will be open until October 31, 2024, and we except to announce accepted projects by January 31, 2025.

If you have any questions, please reach out to [email protected]. We can’t wait to see the ideas the community comes up with!

We wrap up this series of grant reports with this fourth and final blog post, on Felicity Banks’ project and how support from IFTF made her able to travel to Indonesia and spread the word about IF!

Felicity is a long-time IF author who lives in Australia but has ties to Indonesia, having travelled there over half a dozen times and learned the main language, Bahasa Indonesia. She applied for a microgrant to travel there for the Ubud Writers’ and Readers’ Festival, the largest writing festival in South-East Asia), hoping to offer an IF workshop as part of the official program track. However, after the festival declined the proposal, Felicity instead shifted the project’s focus to connecting with authors in Ubud around the time of the festival and giving a series of workshops. (Oh, and go to cat cafés and monkey forests.)

This proved to be very successful, with Felicity teaching 7 small workshops (focusing on the use of tools such as Twine) involving 18 Indonesian-speaking authors! The workshops went very well, as told by Felicity:

“It is wonderful to see people’s faces light up as they see their words transformed into a game at the touch of a few buttons. They are extremely impressed that volunteers on the other side of the world care so much about inviting Indonesian people into the community.”

Following these workshops, Felicity sought to keep the momentum going - as part of her application, she proposed to stay in touch with participants for two years after the workshops, to follow their progress. A WhatsApp group was created with over a dozen of Indonesian authors joining, and everyone keeps in touch and remains engaged with IF. Felicity also ran, in late 2024/early 2025, a small friendly comp for her students, with small cash prizes for the three best interactive stories.

We love this project - despite the fact that Indonesian is spoken by 200-250 million people, we are not aware of a Indonesian-speaking IF scene, and we would love for one to spring to life! Felicity’s familiarities and ties with Indonesia have allowed her to become an ambassador for IF there, and plant the seed among the community of authors; we are very happy the microgrants program was able to help make it happen!

“This was an incredible journey and I met lots of wonderful writers. Thank you so much.” -Felicity Banks

On February 22, 2025, IFTF elected two new officers to the roles of Treasurer and Technical Officer. The former position is being filled by Colette Zinna, while the latter, a new role, is being filled by Doug Valenta. Previously, these tasks were handled jointly by Andrew Plotkin, whose term on the board finished in March 2024 and whose time as Treasurer has now also ended. The board thanks Andrew for his many years of service to the organization’s administration; he will be continuing as the chair of the IFArchive committee and helping with the NarraScope conference.

Colette Zinna is a longtime fan of narrative games and an occasional game developer. She’s attended or volunteered at NarraScope every year since it began.

Doug Valenta is a programmer and creator focusing on games, narrative, language, and the web, and a two-time NarraScope speaker. Doug works as a software engineering manager, leading a platform engineering team at a data management startup. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner and two dogs.

As we celebrate our two new officers, we look forward to the organization’s continued growth as we continue to expand our purview, operational activities, and service to the world of interactive fiction and narrative games. You can read more about IFTF’s leadership, and join us on the Intfiction.org Forums to toast the new officers.