Planet Interactive Fiction Last Update: Thursday, 23. March 2023 14:03

Med Systems has been one of our more innovative companies featured here, making the first person adventure games Deathmaze 5000 (TRS-80 and Apple II), Labyrinth (TRS-80 only) and Asylum (TRS-80 only).

Asylum II is a direct follow-up to Asylum, and gives main credit to William Denman while just crediting Frank Corr with “graphics”. Given the amount of graphical re-use from the prior game it may be Frank Corr was not involved at all.

The game did end up on platforms other than TRS-80 through a confusing route: by 1982 Med Systems had been merged with Intelligent Systems, and somehow between that year and 1984 they had a.) started publishing software under the name Screenplay and b.) been bought (?) by the parent company AGS Computers, Inc (source here). Asylum II got re-published under the Screenplay label (as just “Asylum” with the “II” dropped) with improved graphics for Atari, DOS, and C-64 systems; the last is what seems to be their most famous product.

I’m going to stick with the TRS-80 version for consistency with my last three play-throughs, but I may poke in on the Commodore 64 version from time to time just to see what the graphics look like. I can say there is at least an immediate difference: the room you start in has a “nut fork” in the TRS-80 version and a “credit card” in the C-64 one. Both can be used to unlock the door of the cell you start in.

The objective, as with all these other games, is to escape, although an inmate two doors down from where you start gives you some helpful tips on how to do that.

They also suggest to find a doctor’s outfit.

My first choice before playing in earnest was how to make my map. This is essentially an old-school Wizardry-style dungeon crawler but in adventure game form. I’ve done a spreadsheet with borders filled in (on Deathmaze) and I’ve done raw pencil and paper (on Asylum). It had been long enough since the last two games I poked around if there were any new solutions, and I ran across the software Dungeon Scrawl. It seems to mostly cater to people making tabletop RPG campaigns, but it works with the kind of map I need as well.

Well, mostly work. On corridors I did not explore yet but just saw in the distance I put a “half exit” that doesn’t fill the whole square. I was able to map out various doors quite well; all the ones that I were able to get in I used the “nut fork” on. This led to me having a bird costume, stethoscope, steel key, and bean bag loaded up in my inventory. However, you’ll notice there’s some spots on the maze marked with “T”; that’s where the corridors became inconsistent. Unfortunately, starting with Labyrinth, the various Med System games have used teleports to induce non-Euclidean geometry, and I’m guessing that’s the case here. I haven’t experimented yet to figure out if I’ve made any errors or they truly represent teleports, in which case I need to decide how to tweak my mapping system.

Look, pretty isometric view! Kind of a pain to play with it set this way but it makes the maps look like Aaron Reed’s book.

I did have one encounter even given my tentative stepping out. Once you have the stethoscope a “hypochondriac” encounters you in the hall.

If you give the stethoscope over they start habitually using it, but also running away and shouting GERMS! The hypochondriac then keeps appearing and I assume I have to do something about the germs next.

I’m definitely not “stuck”; I’ve still got quite a bit of map to keep making, and the doors on the west side on my map are only part of what seem like very long rows. I suspect I might be running into a scenario like the original Asylum, which had a five-sided figure (where it wasn’t obvious it was five sided!) and even though Dungeon Scrawl technically can handle the situation I’ll need to fall back to pencil-and-paper for a bit.

I’m guessing I’ll need a coin for this.

A door I have yet to open. I vaguely recall in Asylum 1 that opening such a door resulted in getting a lobotomy.

(Want to skip ahead? This game’s been played by Will Moczarski over at The Adventure Gamer.)

The Boston IF meetup for March will be Wednesday, March 22, 6:30 pm Eastern time.

We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.

Warning: this article spoils the ending of Spycraft: The Great Game!

On January 6, 1994, Activision announced in a press release that it was “teaming up with William Colby, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, to develop and publish espionage-thriller videogames.” Soon after, Colby brought his good friend Oleg Kalugin into the mix as well. With the name-brand, front-of-the-box talent for Spycraft: The Great Game — and, if all went swimmingly, its sequels — thus secured, it was time to think about who should do the real work of making it.

Even as late as 1994, Activision’s resurrection from its near-death experience of 1991 was still very much a work in progress. The company was chronically understaffed in relation to its management’s ambitions. To make matters worse, much of the crew that had made Return to Zork, including that project’s mastermind William Volk, had just left. (On balance, this may not have been such a bad thing; that game is so unfair and obtuse as to come off almost as a satire of player-hostile adventure-game design.)

Luckily, Activision’s base in Los Angeles left it well situated, geographically speaking, to become a hotbed of interactive movie-making. Bobby Kotick hired Alan Gershenfeld, a former film critic and logistical enabler for Hollywood, to spearhead his efforts in that direction. Realizing that he still needed help with the interactive part of interactive movies, Gershenfeld in turn took the unusual step of reaching out to Bob Bates, co-founder of the Virginia-based rival studio and publisher Legend Entertainment, to see if he would be interested in designing Spycraft for Activision.

He was very interested. One reason for this was that Legend lived perpetually hand to mouth in a sea of bigger fish, and couldn’t afford to look askance at paying work of almost any description. But another, better one was that he was a child of the Washington Beltway with a father who had been employed by the National Security Agency. Bates had read his first spy novel before starting high school. Ever since, his literary consumption had included plenty of Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum, and John Le Carré. It was thus with no small excitement that he agreed to spend 600 hours creating a script and design document for an espionage game, which Legend’s programmers and artists might also end up playing a role in bringing to fruition if all went well.

At this time, writers of espionage fiction and techno-thrillers were still trying to figure out what the recent ending of the Cold War meant for their trade. Authors like those Bates had grown up reading were trying out international terrorist gangs, mafiosi, and drug runners as replacements for that handy all-purpose baddie the Soviet Union. Activision faced the same problem with Spycraft. One alternative — the most logical one in a way, given the time spans of its two star advisors’ intelligence careers — was to look to the past, to make the game a work of historical fiction. But the reality was that there was little appetite for re-fighting the Cold War in the popular culture of the mid-1990s; that would have to wait until a little later, until the passage of time had given those bygone days of backyard fallout shelters and duck-and-cover drills a glow of nostalgia to match that of radioactivity. In the meanwhile, Activision wanted something fresh, something with the sort of ripped-from-the-headlines relevance that Ken Williams liked to talk about.

Bates settled on a story line involving Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, that unstable fledgling democracy whose inheritance from the Soviet Union encompassed serious organized-crime and corruption problems along with the ongoing potential to initiate thermonuclear Armageddon any time it chose to do so. He prepared a 25,000-word walkthrough of a plot whose broad strokes would survive into the finished game. Changing the names of all of the real-world leaders involved in order to keep the lawyers at bay, it hinged around a race for the Russian presidency involving a moderate, Yeltsin-like incumbent and two right-wing opposition candidates. When one of the latter is assassinated, it redounds greatly to the benefit of his counterpart; the two right-wingers had otherwise looked likely to split the vote between themselves and hand the presidency back to the incumbent. So, there are reasons for suspicion from the get-go, and the surviving opposition candidate’s established ties with the Russian Mafia only gives more reasons. That said, it would presumably be a matter for Russia’s internal security police alone — if only the assassination hadn’t been carried out with an experimental CIA weapon, a new type of sniper rifle that can fire a deadly accurate and brutally lethal package of flechettes over long distances. It seems that there is a mole in the agency, possibly one with an agenda to incriminate the United States in the killing.

On the one hand, one can see in this story line some of the concerns that William Colby and Oleg Kalugin were expressing in the press at the time. On the other, they were hardly alone in identifying the instability of internal political Russia as a threat to the whole world, what with that country’s enormous nuclear arsenal. Bates himself says that he quickly realized that Activision was content to use Colby and Kalugin essentially as a commercial license, much like it would a hit movie or book. In the more than six months that he worked on Spycraft, he met Colby in person only one time, at his palatial Georgetown residence. (“It was clear that he was wealthy. He was very old-school. Circumspect, as you might imagine.”) Kalugin he never met at all. Fortunately, Legend’s niche in recent years had become the adaptation of commercial properties into games, and thus Bates had become very familiar with playing in other people’s universes, as it were. The milieu inhabited by Colby and Kalugin, as described by the two men in their memoirs, became in an odd sort of way just another of these pocket universes.

In other ways, however, Bates proved less suited to the game Activision was imagining. He was as traditionalist as adventure-game designers came, having originally founded Legend with the explicit goal of making it the heir to Infocom’s storied legacy. Activision’s leadership kept complaining that his design was not exciting enough, not “explosive” enough, too “tame.” To spice it up, they brought in an outside consultant named James Adams, a British immigrant to the United States who had written seven nonfiction books on the worlds of espionage and covert warfare along with three fictional thrillers. In the early fall of 1994, Bates, Adams, and some of Activision’s executives had a conversation which is seared on Bate’s memory like nothing else involving Spycraft.

They were saying it wasn’t intense or exciting enough. We were just kicking around ideas, and as a joke I said, “Well, we could always do a torture scene.”

And they said, “Yes! Yes!”

And I said, “No! No! I’m kidding. We’re not going to do that.”

And they said, “Yes, we really want to do that.”

And I said, “No. I am not putting the player in a position where they have to commit an act of torture. I just won’t do that.” At that point, the most violent thing I’d ever put into a game was having a boar charge onto a spear in Arthur…

Shortly after this discussion, Bates accepted Activision’s polite thanks for his contributions along with his paycheck for 600 hours of his time, and bowed out to devote himself entirely to Legend’s own games once again. Neither he nor his company had any involvement with Spycraft after that. His name doesn’t even appear in the finished game’s credits.

James Adams now took over full responsibility for the convoluted script, wrestling it into shape for production to begin in earnest by the beginning of 1995. The final product was released on Leap Day, 1996. It isn’t the game Bates would have made, but neither is it the uniformly thoughtless, exploitive one he might have feared its becoming when he walked away. What appears for long stretches to be a rah-rah depiction of the CIA — exactly what you might expect from a game made in partnership with one of the agency’s former directors — betrays from time to time an understanding of the moral bankruptcy of the spy business that is more John Le Carré than Ian Fleming. In the end, it sends you away with a distinctly queasy feeling about the things you’ve done and the logic you’ve used to justify them. All due credit goes to James Adams for delivering a game that’s more subtle than the one Activision — and probably Colby and Kalugin as well — thought they were getting.

But let’s table that topic for the moment, while I first go over the ways in which Spycraft also succeeds in being an unusually fun interactive procedural, the digital equivalent of a page-turning airport read.

Being a product of its era, Spycraft relies heavily on canned video clips of real actors. It’s distinguished, however, by the unusual quality of same, thanks to what must have been a substantial budget and to the presence of movie-making veterans like Alan Gershenfeld on Activision’s payroll. It was Gershenfeld who hired Ken Berris, an experienced director of music videos and commercials, to run the video shoots; he may not have been Steven Spielberg, but he was a heck of a lot more qualified than most people who fancied themselves interactive-movie auteurs. Most of those other games were shot like the movies of the 1930s, with the actors speaking their lines on a static sound stage before a fixed camera. Berris, by contrast, has seen Citizen Kane; he mostly shoots on location rather than in front of green screens that are waiting to be filled in with computer graphics later, and his environments are alive, with a camera that moves through them. Spycraft‘s bravura opening sequence begins with a single long take shown from your point of view as you sign in at CIA headquarters and walk deeper into the building. I will go so far as to say that this painstakingly choreographed and shot high-wire act, involving several dozen extras moving through a space along with the camera and hitting their marks just so, might be the most technically impressive live-action video sequence I’ve ever seen in a game. It wouldn’t appear at all out of place in a prestige television show or a feature film. Suffice to say that it’s light years beyond the hammy amateurism of something like The 7th Guest, a sign of how far the industry had come in only a few years, just before the collapse of the adventure market put an end to the era of big-budget live-action interactive movies for better or for worse.

There are no stars among the journeyman cast of supporting players, but there are at least a few faces and voices that might ring a bell somewhere at the back of your memory, thanks to their regular appearances in commercials, television shows, and films. Although some of the actors are better than others, by the usual B-movie standards of the 1990s games industry the performances as a whole are first rate. Both William Colby and Oleg Kalugin also appear in the game, playing themselves. Colby becomes an advisor of sorts to you, popping up from time to time to offer insights on your investigations; Kalugin has only one short and rather pointless cameo, dropping into the office for a brief aside when you’re meeting with another agent of Russia’s state-security apparatus. Both men acquit themselves unexpectedly well in their roles, undemanding though they may be. I can only conclude that all those years of pretending to be other people while engaged in the espionage trade must have been good training for acting in front of a camera.

You play a rookie CIA agent who is identified only as “Thorn.” You never actually appear onscreen; everything is shown from your first-person perspective. Thus you can imagine yourself to be of any gender, race, or appearance that you like. Spycraft still shows traces of the fairly conventional adventure-game structure it would doubtless have had if Bob Bates had continued as its lead designer: you have an inventory that you need to dig into from time to time, and will occasionally find yourself searching rooms and the like, using an interface not out of keeping with that found in Legend’s own contemporaneous graphic adventures, albeit built from still photographs rather than hand-drawn pixel art.

A lock pick should do the trick here…

But those parts of the game take up a relatively small part of your time. Mostly, Thorn lives in digital rather than meat space, reading and responding to a steady stream of emails, poking around in countless public and private databases, and using a variety of computerized tools that have come along to transform the nature of spying since the Cold War heyday of Colby and Kalugin. These tools — read, “mini-games” — take the place of the typical adventure game’s set-piece puzzles. In the course of playing Spycraft, you’ll have to ferret out license-plate numbers and the like from grainy satellite images; trace the locations of gunmen by analyzing bullet trajectories (this requires the use of the aptly named “Kennedy Assassination Tool”); identify faces captured by surveillance cameras; listen to phone taps; decode secret messages hidden in Usenet post headers; create deep-fake photographs; trace suspects’ travels using airline-reservation systems and Department of Treasury banknote databases; even run a live exfiltration operation over a digital link-up.

The tactical exfiltration mini-game is the most ambitious of them all, reminding me of a similar one in Sid Meier’s Covert Action, another espionage game whose design approach is otherwise the exact opposite of Spycraft‘s. It’s good enough that I kind of wish it was used more than once.

These mini-games serve their purpose well. If most of them are too simplistic to be very compelling in the long term, well, they don’t need to be; most of them only turn up once. Their purpose is to trip you up just long enough to give you a thrill of triumph when you figure them out and are rocketed onward to the next plot twist. Spycraft is meant to be an impressionistic thrill ride, what Rick Banks of Artech Digital Productions liked to call an “aesthetic simulation” back in the 1980s. If you find yourself complaining that you’re almost entirely on rails, you’re playing the wrong game; the whole point of Spycraft is the subjective experience of living out a spy movie, not presenting you with “interesting decisions” of the sort favored by more purist game designers like Sid Meier.

In Spycraft, you roam a simulated version of cyberspace using a Web-browser interface, complete with “Home,” “Back,” and “Forward” buttons — a rather remarkable inclusion, considering how new the very notion of browsing the Web still was when this game was released in February of 1996. The game even included a real online component: some of the sites you could access through the games received live updates if your computer was connected to the real Internet. Thankfully, nothing critical to completing the game was communicated in this way, for these sites are all, needless to say, long gone today.

As is par for the course with spy stories, the plot just keeps getting more and more tangled, perchance too much so for its own good. Just in case the murder of a Russian presidential candidate with a weapon stolen from the CIA isn’t enough for you, other threads eventually emerge, involving a gang of terrorists who are attempting to secure a live nuclear bomb and a plan to assassinate the president of the United States when he comes to Russia to sign a nuclear-arms-control agreement. You’re introduced to at least 50 different names, many of them with multiple aliases — again, this is a spy story — in the handful of hours it will take you to play the game. The fact that you spend most of your time at such a remove from them — shuffling through their personnel files and listening to them over phone taps rather than meeting them face to face — only makes it that much harder to keep them all straight, much less feel any real emotional investment in them. There are agents, double agents, triple agents, and, I’m tempted to say, quadruple agents around every corner.

I must confess that I really have no idea how well it all hangs together in the end. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt. I suppose it doesn’t really matter all that much; as I said, there’s only one path through the game, with minimal deviations allowed. Should you ever feel stuck, forward progress is just a matter of rummaging around until you find that email you haven’t read yet, that phone number you haven’t yet dialed, or that mini-game you haven’t yet completed successfully. Spycraft never demands that you understand its skein of conspiracies and conspirators, only that you jump through the series of hoops it sets before you in order to help your alter ego Thorn understand it. And that’s enough to deliver the impressionistic thrill ride it wants to give you.

The plot is as improbable as it is gnarly, making plenty of concessions to the need to entertain; it strains credibility to say the least that a rookie agent would be assigned to lead three separate critical investigations at the same time. And yet the game does demonstrate that it knows a thing or two about the state of the world. Indeed, it can come across as almost eerily prescient today, and not only for its recognition that a hollowed-out Russia with an aggressively revanchist leader could become every bit as great a threat to the democratic West as the Soviet Union once was. It also recognizes what an incredible tool for mass surveillance and oppression the Internet and other forms of networked digital technology were already becoming in 1996, seventeen years before the stunning revelations by Edward Snowden about the activities of the United States’s own National Security Agency. And then there is the torture so unwittingly proposed by Bob Bates, which did indeed make it into the game, some seven years before the first rumors began to emerge that the real CIA was engaging in what it called “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the name of winning the War on Terror.

Let’s take a moment now to look more closely at how Spycraft deals with this fraught subject in particular. Doing so should begin to show how this game is more morally conflicted than its gung-ho surface presentation might lead you to expect.

Let me first make one thing very clear: you don’t have to engage in torture to win Spycraft. This is one of the few places where you do have a measure of agency in choosing your path. The possibility of employing torture as a means to your ends is introduced about a third of the way into the game, after your colleagues have captured one Ying Chungwang, a former operative for North Korea, now a mercenary on the open market who has killed several CIA agents at the behest of various employers. She’s the Bonnie to another rogue operative’s Clyde. Your superiors suggest that you might be able to turn her by convincing her that her lover has also been captured and has betrayed her; this you can do by creating a deep-fake photograph of him looking relaxed and cooperative in custody. But there may also be another way to turn her, a special gadget hidden in the basement of the American embassy in Moscow, involving straps, electrodes, and high-voltage wiring. Most of your superiors strongly advise against using it: “There’s something called the Geneva Convention, Thorn, and we’d like to abide by it. Simply put, what you’re considering is illegal. Let’s not get dirty on this one.” Still, one does have to wonder why they keep it around if they’re so opposed to it…

Coincidentally or not, the deep-fake mini-game is easily the most frustrating of them all, an exercise in trial and error that’s made all the worse by the fact that you aren’t quite sure what you’re trying to create in the first place. You might therefore feel an extra temptation to just say screw it and head on down to the torture chamber. If you do, another, more chilling sort of mini-game ensues, in which you must pump enough electric current through your victim to get her to talk, without turning the dial so high that you kill her. “It burns!” she screams as you twist the knob. If you torture like Goldilocks — not too little, not too much — she breaks down eventually and tells you everything you want to know. And that’s that. Nobody ever mentions what happened in that basement again.

What are we to make of this? We might wish that the game would deliver Thorn some sort of comeuppance for this horrid deed. Maybe Ying could give you bad intelligence just to stop the pain, or you could get automatically hauled away to prison as soon as you leave the basement, as does happen if you kill her by using too much juice. But if there’s one thing we can learn from the lives of Colby and Kalugin, it’s that such an easy, cause-and-effect moral universe isn’t the one inhabited by spies. Yes, torture does often yield bad intelligence; in the 1970s, Colby claimed this was a reason the CIA was not in the habit of using it, a utilitarian argument which has been repeated again and again in the decades since to skeptics who aren’t convinced that the agency’s code of ethics alone would be enough to cause it to resist the temptation. Yet torture is not unique in being fallible; other interrogation techniques have weaknesses of their own, and can yield equally bad intelligence. The decision to torture or not to torture shouldn’t be based on its efficacy or lack thereof. Doing so just leads us back to the end-justifies-the-means utilitarianism that permitted the CIA and the KGB to commit so many outrages, with the full complicity of upstanding patriots like Colby and Kalugin who were fully convinced that everything they did was for the greater good. In the end, the decision not to torture must be a matter of moral principle if we are ever to trust the people making it.

Then again, if you had hold of an uncooperative member of a terrorist cell that was about to detonate an atomic bomb in a major population center, what would you do? This is where the slippery slope begins. The torture scene in Spycraft is deeply disturbing, but I don’t think that James Adams put it there strictly for the sake of sensationalism. Ditto the lack of consequences that follow. In the real world, virtue must often be its own reward, and the wages of sin are often a successful career. I think I’m glad that Spycraft recognizes this and fails to engage in any tit-for-tat vision of temporal justice — disturbed, yes, but oddly proud of the game at the same time. I’m not sure that I would have had the guts to put torture in there myself, but I’m convinced by some of the game’s other undercurrents that it was put there for purposes other than shock value. (Forgive the truly dreadful pun…)

Let’s turn the clock back to the very beginning of the game for an example. The first thing you see when you click the “New Game” button is the CIA’s official Boy Scout-esque values statement: “We conduct ourselves according to the highest standards of integrity, morality, and honor, and to the spirit and letter of our law and constitution.” Meanwhile a gruffer, more cynical voice is telling you how it really is: “Some things the president shouldn’t know. For a politician, ignorance can be the key to survival, so the facts might be… flexible. The best thing you can do is to treat your people right… and watch every move they make.” It’s a brilliant juxtaposition, culminating in the irony that is the agency’s hilariously overwrought Biblical motto: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” And then we’re walking into CIA headquarters, an antiseptic place filled with well-scrubbed, earnest-looking people, and that note of moral ambiguity is forgotten for the nonce as we “build the team” for a new “op.”

But as you play on, the curtain keeps wafting aside from time to time to reveal another glimpse of an underlying truth that you — or Thorn, at least — may not have signed on for. One who has seen this truth and not been set free is a spy known as Birdsong, a mole in the Russian defense establishment who first started leaking secrets to the CIA because he was alarmed by some of his more reactionary colleagues and genuinely thought it was the right thing to do. He gets chewed up and spit out by both sides. “I can tell the truth from lies no more,” he says in existential despair. “Everything is blurry. This has been hell. Everyone has betrayed me and I have betrayed everyone.” Many an initially well-meaning spy in the real world has wound up saying the same.

And then — and most of all — there’s the shocking, unsatisfying, but rather amazingly brave ending of the game. By this point, the plot has gone through more twists and turns than a Klein bottle, and the CIA has decided it would prefer for the surviving Russian opposition candidate to win the election after all, because only he now looks likely to sign the arms-control treaty that the American president whom the CIA serves so desperately desires. Unfortunately, one Yuri, a dedicated and incorruptible Russian FSB agent who has been helping you throughout your investigations, is still determined to bring the candidate down for his entanglements with the Russian Mafia. In the very last interactive scene of the game, you can choose to let Yuri take the candidate into custody and uphold the rule of law in a country not much known for it, which will also result in the arms-control agreement failing to go through and you getting drummed out of the CIA. Or you can shoot your friend Yuri in cold blood, allowing the candidate to become the new president of Russia and escape any sort of reckoning for his crimes — but also getting the arms-control agreement passed, and getting yourself a commendation.

As adventure-game endings go, it’s the biggest slap in the face to the player since Infocom’s Infidel, upending her moral universe at a stroke. It becomes obvious now, if we still doubted it, that James Adams appreciates very well the perils of trying to achieve worthy goals by unworthy means. Likewise, he appreciates the dangers that are presented to a free society by a secretive institution like the CIA — an arrogant institution, which too often throughout its history has been convinced that it is above the moral reckoning of tedious ground dwellers. Perhaps he even sees how a man like William Colby could become a reflection of the agency he served, could be morally and spiritually warped by it until it had cost him his family and his faith. “Uniquely in the American bureaucracy,” wrote Colby in his memoir, “the CIA understood the necessity to combine political, psychological, and paramilitary tools to carry out a strategic concept of pressure on an enemy or to strengthen an incumbent.” When you begin to believe that only you and “your” people are “uniquely” capable of understanding anything, you’ve started down a dangerous road indeed, one that before long will allow you to do almost anything in the name of some ineffable greater good, using euphemisms like “pressure” in place of “assassinate,” “strengthen an incumbent” in place of “interfere in a sovereign foreign country’s elections” — or, for that matter, “enhanced interrogation techniques” in place of “torture.”

Spycraft is a fascinating, self-contradictory piece of work, slick but subversive, escapist but politically aware, simultaneously carried away by the fantasy of being a high-tech spy with gadgets and secrets to burn and painfully aware of the yawning ethical abyss that lies at the end of that path. Like the trade it depicts, the game sucks you in, then it repulses you. Nevertheless, you should by all means play it. And as you do so, be on the lookout for the other points of friction where it seems to be at odds with its own box copy.

Spycraft wasn’t a commercial success. It arrived too late for that, at the beginning of the year that rather broke the back of interactive movies and adventure games in general. Thus the Spycraft II that is boldly promised during the end credits never appeared. Luckily, Activision was in a position to absorb the failure of their conflicted spy game. For the company was already changing with the times, riding high on the success of Mechwarrior 2, a 3D action game in which you drive a giant robot into combat. “How about a big mech with an order to fry?” ran its tagline; this was the very definition of pure escapism. Mainstream gaming, it turned out, was not destined to be such a ripped-from-the-headlines affair after all.

I do wonder sometimes whether Colby and Kalugin ever knew what a bleak note their one and only game ended on. Somehow I suspect not. It was, after all, just another business deal to them, another way of cashing in on the careers they had put behind them. Their respective memoirs tell us that both were very, very smart men, but neither comes across as overly introspective. I’m not sure they would even recognize what a telling commentary Spycraft‘s moral bleakness is on their own lives.

It was just two months after the game’s release that William Colby disappeared from his vacation home. When his body turned up on May 6, 1996, those few people who had both bought the game and been following the manhunt were confronted with an eyebrow-raising coincidence. For it just so happens that the CIA’s flechette gun isn’t the only experimental weapon you encounter in the course of the game. Later on, an even more devious one turns up, a sort of death ray that can kill its victims without leaving a mark on them — that causes them to die from what appears to be a massive coronary arrest. The coroner who examined Colby’s body insisted that he must have had a “cardiovascular incident,” despite having no previous history of heart disease. Hmm…

The case of Colby’s demise has never been officially reopened, but one more theory has been added to those of death by misadventure and death by murder since 1996. His son Carl Colby, who made a documentary film about his father in 2011, believes that he took his own life purposefully. “I think he’d had enough of this life,” he reveals at the end of his film. “He called me two weeks before he died, asking for my absolution for his not doing enough for my sister Catherine when she was so ill. When his body was found, he was carrying a picture of my sister.” In a strange way, it does seem consistent with this analytical, distant man, for whom brutal necessities were a stock in trade, to calmly eat his dinner, get into his canoe, paddle out from shore, and drown himself.

Oleg Kalugin, on the other hand, lived on. Russia’s new President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent himself, opened a legal case against Kalugin shortly after he took office, charging him with “disclosing sources and methods” in his 1994 memoir that he had sworn an oath to keep secret. Kalugin was already living in the United States at that time, and has not dared to return to his homeland since. From 2002, when a Russian court pronounced him guilty as charged, he has lived under the shadow of a lengthy prison sentence, or worse, should the Russian secret police ever succeed in taking him into custody. In light of the fate that has befallen so many other prominent critics of Russia’s current regime, one has to assume that he continues to watch his back carefully even today, at age 88. You can attempt to leave the great game, but the great game never leaves you.

(Sources: the book Game Plan by Alan Gershenfeld, Mark Loparco, and Cecilia Barajas; the documentary film The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby; Sierra On-Line’s newsletter InterAction of Summer 1993; Questbusters of February 1994; Electronic Entertainment of December 1995; Mac Addict of September 1996; Next Generation of February 1996; Computer Gaming World of July 1996; New York Times of January 6 1994 and June 27 2002. And thanks as always to Bob Bates for taking the time to talk to me about his long career in games.

Spycraft: The Great Game is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com.)

I’m quite nearly done with the game so I’ll sum up next time, but I wanted to devote a single post to one puzzle, as it is the most interesting of the game.

Last time I left off in a museum adjacent to a block-pushing puzzle, but had yet to describe exits to the north and east. Here’s where you end up if you go east from the museum:

Museum Entrance
This is the entrance to the Royal Museum, the finest and grandest in the Great Underground Empire. To the south, down a few steps, is the entrance to the Royal Puzzle and to the east, through a stone door, is the Royal Jewel Collection. A wooden door to the north is open and leads to the Museum of Technology. To the west is a great iron door, rusted shut. To its left, however, is a cleft in the rock providing a western route away from the museum.

>open stone door
The door is now open.

>e
Jewel Room
You are in a high-ceilinged chamber in the middle of which sits a tall, round steel cage, which is securely locked. In the middle of the cage is a pedestal on which sit the Crown Jewels of the Great Underground Empire: a sceptre, a jewelled knife, and a golden ring. A small bronze plaque, now tarnished, is on the cage.

From the Zork User Group map, via the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities.

The plaque, importantly, notes these are “Crown Jewels” presented to the museum by Dimwit Flathead, dedicated 777 GUE. The year has been mentioned quite a few times through the manuals for the game, including a library checkout sticker for this game.

The last checkout date above is 948; now look at the room to the north of the museum:

>n
Technology Museum
This is a large hall which hosted the technological exhibits of the Great Underground Empire. A door to the south is open.
Directly in front of you is a large golden machine, which has a seat with a console in front. On the console is a single button and a dial connected to a three-digit display which reads 948. The machine is suprisingly shiny and shows few signs of age.
A strange grey machine, shaped somewhat like a clothes dryer, is on one side of the room. On the other side of the hall is a powerful-looking black machine, a tight tangle of wires, pipes, and motors.
A plaque is mounted near the door. The writing is faded, however, and cannot be made out clearly. The two machines seem to be in bad shape, rusting in many spots.

I realized, after some thought, that the gold machine had to be a time machine. (Aside: it also then occured to me: is this how the blog Gold Machine got its name? And indeed it was, and I fortunately hadn’t checked the About page because it would have spoiled the puzzle.)

From the ZUG version of Invisiclues, via the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

The most immediate thing I then I wanted to try was jumping to 777, as mentioned on the plaque.

>turn dial to 777
The dial is set to 777.

>push button
Nothing seems to have happened.

>sit in chair
You are now in the gold machine.

>push button
You experience a brief period of disorientation. When your vision returns, you are confronted with a goodly number of particularly stupid-looking people dressed in peculiar uniform and pointing waffle-like objects in your general direction. One twists his waffle and you slump to the ground, dead.

** You have died **

Normally you get resurrected (in Zork III) or given a RESTORE/RESTART/etc. prompt (in some other Infocom games) but after the death message here you get directly kicked to the exit and the game interpreter quits. Clearly this is outside the realm of the Dungeon Master.

My next experiment was testing the year right before, 776, on the theory things might be built up but not fully. This turned out to be right, but before getting into that, I should mention the game is careful with detail:

– if you go any farther back than 776, you end up in solid rock, as the room hasn’t been dug out yet
– if you go any time form 777 to 882, you get the person shooting you with a waffle
– if you go to 883 or any year up to the present (948) you get essentially the same description as before, except the door leading in the museum has no break next to it
– if you go after 948, the cleft leading in the museum is described as having been filled in with rocks

Even though I essentially hit correctly immediately, I still checked these because I just was having fun with the simulation aspect of it and trying to see if anything new would show up. It is pretty rare in this era for an adventure to allow playing with one of the available items like a toy.

OK, let’s jump to 776 now:

>push button
You experience a brief period of disorientation. When your vision returns, your surroundings appear to have changed. From outside the door you hear the sounds of guards talking.
You notice that everything you were holding is gone!

The “everything you were holding is gone” means you can’t take items back in time. You will also (after enough turns) eventually get popped back into the present. The lack of items eliminates any outside-inventory solution to the puzzle.

If you wait a bit, the guards will eventually leave, usually.

>wait
Time passes…
You hear, from outside the door, guards marching away, their voices fading. After a few moments, a booming crash signals the close of what must be a tremendous door. Then there is silence.

I say usually, because sometimes by random chance a guard will poke their head in and shoot you. I believe this is just random chance. It is fairly low random chance, but if I hadn’t already known it was possible to survive longer, I might have thought I was still on the wrong track.

Also by random chance, you might hear Lord Flathead himself, which is gratifying in a way. Is this the only time in the Zork series as whole you get any interaction direct from one of the Flatheads?

One particularly loud and grating voice can now be heard above the others outside the room. “Very nice! Very nice! Not enough security, but very nice! Now, Lord Feepness, pay attention! I’ve been thinking and what we need is a dam, a tremendous dam to control the Frigid River, with thousands of gates. Yes! I can see it now. We shall call it … Flood Control Dam #2. No, not quite right. Aha! It will be Flood Control Dam #3.” “Pardon me, my Lord, but wouldn’t that be just a tad excessive?” “Nonsense! Now, let me tell you my idea for hollowing out volcanoes…” With that, the voices trail out into nothingness.

Once the guards have left, you can go back in the museum and find the stone door leading to the artifacts is locked. I assumed “not enough security” was a prompt along the lines of the artifacts would be lootable if I could get in there. I had the “morphing skeleton key” from last time but that was stuck in the present. I had wild plans of perhaps hiding the key in the machine in Zork I (that’s using the Scenic Table and going to the place with the timber) and that was somehow in the past enough it was really the machine in 777 and we could find the key then? That makes no sense at all, but I was definitely and truly stumped here, and I did look up a hint.

I don’t know if I regret it or not. Probably not. The gold machine, despite being large and something you can sit in, is movable.

>push gold machine east
Jewel Room
You are in a high-ceilinged chamber in the middle of which sits a tall, round steel cage, which is securely locked. In the middle of the cage is a pedestal on which sit the Crown Jewels of the Great Underground Empire: a sceptre, a jewelled knife, and a golden ring. A small bronze plaque, now tarnished, is on the cage.
With some effort, you push the machine into the room with you.

I do think the game could have clued the movability a little better (maybe have it subtly shift position when getting out of it) although I was also fooled visualizing the mechanics of how the time travel worked. I was thinking, if warping back to 776, I’d simply be landing where the person who was living in 776 placed the gold machine. This does not makes sense for the fact you land in stone if you go to 775, but this was more a sense than a fully coherent thought anyway. (The gold machine does go back to the technology museum though after jumping in time, so I wasn’t completely off with my thought process either.)

Now, teleporting back to 776 while in the Jewel Room gets a different description:

Jewel Room
You are in a high-ceilinged chamber, in the center of which is a pedestal which is the intended home of the Crown Jewels of the Great Underground Empire: a jewelled knife, a golden ring, and the royal sceptre. The room is, by appearances, unfinished.
Through the door you can hear voices which, from their sound, belong to military or police personnel.

You can scoop up all three items without incident; the problem is that the time machine doesn’t let you take inventory items back with you. The key here — and this is genuinely a brilliant stroke — is that if you want to steal the item you need to move it. As the guards in 776 will discover whatever theft you do, they’ll search for it, and it needs to be stored somewhere it will stay all the way up to 948.

While a brilliant idea, this led to another design bobble:

>examine gold machine
The machine consists of a seat and a console containing one small button and a dial connected to a display which reads 776.

>examine seat
There is nothing on the seat.

>search seat
You find nothing unusual.

>shake seat
You can’t take it; thus, you can’t shake it!

It turns out you can MOVE SEAT or LOOK UNDER SEAT. This verb admittedly showed up in Zork I (at the rug) but it is a fairly natural action to look under a rug; looking under a seat where it is not even clear that such an action can be done is much fussier. (I was imagining more of a hard plastic, which wouldn’t have anything underneath at all.)

>move seat
You notice a small hollow area under the seat.

I needed to check hints to find this. Again, this could have been solved with a minor tweak; maybe having the seat shift a little bit at the same time as the gold machine, so it becomes obvious it is movable.

There’s one extra finesse to the puzzle: you can’t fit all the treasures.

>put sceptre under seat
It’s too big to hide under the seat.

>put knife under seat
It’s too big to hide under the seat.

>put ring under seat
The ring is concealed underneath the seat.

You can only take the ring. This is hinted at because the player wears it automatically, and in a couple other cases elsewhere in the game the player also wears important items automatically.

Incidentally, the jewel room changes after the theft:

>read plaque
The plaque explains that this room was to be the home of the Crown Jewels of the Great Underground Empire. However, following the unexplained disappearance of a priceless ring during the final stages of construction, Lord Flathead decided to place the remaining jewels in a safer location. Interestingly enough, he distrusted museum security enough to place his prized possesion, an incredibly gaudy crown, within a locked safe in a volcano specifically hollowed out for that purpose.

If you do things wrong, it is possible for the people in 776 to realize the gold machine is working (there’s a plaque that says all the machines are non-functional which is how they made the mistake before) and they’ll hide the machine away so you can’t get a second attempt.

This is all a fantastic level of detail and worldbuilding. I’d love to say I could just forgive the mistakes and call this the best puzzle of the Zork Trilogy, but this isn’t like 5 minutes of a modernist French film that I needed to re-watch to understand some detail; this is more like a book with part of the pages stuck together and nothing I could do would get them open.

From the back of the Zork 3 manual, via the Infocom Documentation Project.

7 days ago

Yes, I do mention Spellbreaker near the end.

Up From the Bottom

In 1993, things at Activision were indisputably on the upswing. A short two years previous, the company, which held a sizable number of video game properties, was sixty million USD underwater. Since then, investors acquired it for a mere two million dollars, then took it through bankruptcy reorganization. Zork, and Infocom generally, played a surprising role in sustaining Activision through this process. The Lost Treasures of Infocom I and II were both hits. With no new content to create and no royalties to pay, these anthologies were comfortably profitable. The Infocom reissues are usually considered a factor in Activision’s survival during the reorganization process as a steady source of revenue with little overhead and sustained critical goodwill.

The Zork brand was part of Activision’s bounce back, too. 1993’s Return to Zork was a bona fide hit, with sales pushing beyond one million. It’s an incredible figure, considering that sales of the standalone version of Zork I never reached a half million. This isn’t a way of arguing that people preferred Return to Zork to Zork I then or now (remember that compilations like the Lost Treasures sold well). It’s more an indication that the audience and scale of video games as a medium were changing. Return to Zork was a success, mathematically, and suggested that a bright future might await Zork as a brand.

Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision both then and now, once famously said that “Zork on a brick would sell 100,000 copies.” Judging from Activision’s post-Infocom takes on the brand, he really believed that to be true. In fairness, it was true. Or, more accurately, Zork spackled on top of a point and click with high production values would sell quite well. It was a golden age of graphical adventure games: the landmark title Myst would release just after Return to Zork. Myst would prove to be a killer app for Macintosh, and PC owners had new technologies of their own that they wanted to fully utilize. Looking through old reviews, it seems that many customers, who may or may not have been familiar with Infocom’s text adventure games, enjoyed RtZ‘s full-motion-video snippets and humorous acting (though perhaps not all of its humor was intentional).

Return to Zork, then, was a successful product, and Zork must have seemed a viable brand. In addition to satisfactory sales figures, it was also named runner-up in Computer Gaming World‘s “Adventure Game of the Year” award, beaten out by Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers and Day of the Tentacle. Considering that Myst was the big leader from the Mac side of the house, Return to Zork was certainly keeping good company. Today, though, those other games have enjoyed staying power in terms of critical interest and player goodwill. Return to Zork, on the other hand, seems largely relegated to the status of inside joke or obscure meme.

Want Some Zork? Of Course You Do!

Jimmy Maher, a reliable critic whose honesty can be depended upon, has this to say regarding Return to Zork:

In fact, let me be clear right now: Return to Zork is a terrible adventure game. Under no circumstances should you play it, unless to satisfy historical curiosity or as a source of ironic amusement in the grand tradition of Ed Wood. And even in these special cases, you should take care to play it with a walkthrough in hand. To do anything else is sheer masochism; you’re almost guaranteed to lock yourself out of victory within the first ten minutes, and almost guaranteed not to realize it until many hours later. There’s really no point in mincing words here: Return to Zork is one of the absolute worst adventure-game designs I’ve ever seen — and, believe me, I’ve seen quite a few bad ones.

I’ve been asking this question since the very beginning of Gold Machine: what is Zork? Is it whatever the copyright holder says that it is? If Activision had made a Zork soccer/football game, would that have been Zork? What about one of those “interactive” CD ROMs so popular at the time? If Activision had published a “Paula Deen’s Zork Cookbook,” would that have been Zork? If your definition or conception of Zork is commercial, then cookbooks and soccer are in. Return to Zork, likewise, is in. The weirdly grimdark non-sequitur that is Nemesis? Zork.

Separating innocent little Bill and June (text only version here), only to have Bill (Bivotar) bludgeoned to death by the Nemesis? Zork, baby!

Note that I’m not really interested in determining which post-Infocom games are “good”. Rather, I am interested in what might or might not make them Zorkian. It’s fine to enjoy Nemesis, Grand Inquisitor, or even Return to Zork. It’s none of my business. I do think that six (seven if you count Wishbringer) games down the road, it’s probably time for me to say with the confidence one expects of video game critics: why does the saga end after six games? Point and click games are one thing, but am I really snubbing Beyond Zork? Zork Zero?

I shouldn’t beat around the bush: yes, I am snubbing Beyond Zork and Zork Zero. I personally consider Beyond Zork a noble but failed experiment and Zork Zero a complete failure. While both games will get their own time in (or out) of the sun at Gold Machine, I have to talk about them now because many of you have asked–reasonably–why the saga stops with Spellbreaker. To answer that, I have to try and define what Zork is to me as a critic. I need to explain the criteria I use to evaluate these games and make judgements about them. In a sense, the entire arc of this series–not just on Spellbreaker but on Infocom–has been leading to this question. I’ve returned to it again and again: what makes Zork what it is?

I have written more about Zork here than I have any other subject, including A Mind Forever Voyaging. As Zork III once advertised: “it all comes down to this.” To answer the questions of what Zork is and why it ends, we’ll have to go back to the beginning. I’ll examine the world models of both the original mainframe Zork as well as the commercial trilogy and try to determine how and/or if a significant evolution took place between the two. I’ll take a look at the “Great Underground Empire,” emphasis on “empire,” and compare it with the sunlit, federated world of the Enchanter trilogy.

Finally, I’ll discuss what I consider the aesthetics of Zorkian media, which frequently seem missing, misapplied, or, perhaps, misunderstood. Only in that context can the force of Spellbreaker’s conclusion can be measured in full. Furthermore, subsequent efforts to negate or undermine it can be understood as the disappointments that they are.

Disclaimer

I seriously don’t think Grand Inquisitor is a bad game. I like it better than Zork Zero. There’s no need to be upset!

Next

As advertised, we’ll go all the way back to the start. Stick around!

The post It’s the End of Zork as We Know It appeared first on Gold Machine.

Reclaim your mother’s throne with the mighty power of the skies! Bring down lightning on your foes, climb an endless tower, and call the ghosts of ages past to your aid. But will your sorcery save the city, or tear it apart? Stars Arisen is a one-million-word interactive epic fantasy novel by Abigail C. Trevor, author of Heroes of Myth. I sat down with Abby to discuss her new game and her growth as Choice of Games author. Stars Arisen releases this Wednesday, March 15th. You can play the first few chapters today for free.

It’s been just under four years since your last game, Heroes of Myth, an epic in its own right. Now Stars Arisen is here and is an incredible 1 million words long. Tell me about the writing process this time.

It’s basically the same as the writing process for Heroes of Myth, except it kept going for longer.

That’s maybe a bit of an oversimplification, but my core process hasn’t changed: when I’m working on a project I write or do something related to writing every day. Some days that’s 4000 words, some days it’s 10, some days it’s making the characters in online dollmakers. And then I keep doing that until the project is done. The biggest disruption this time was that I used to almost always write in coffee shops, which stopped being an option a few months into the game for obvious global reasons. I have a hard time focusing on writing without a change to my environment. But now I spend a lot of time writing outside, weather permitting.

You obviously were interested in telling a much bigger story this time around. How did that translate to the scope of the game–I sense there are big branches to explore here and deep relationship building.

I’m not very good at estimating length in a tangible way. I knew when I was writing the initial outline that this would be a longer and more complex game than Heroes of Myth, but I had no idea what that would translate to in terms of word count. I wasn’t convinced the game would actually be over a million words until I was in the last couple of chapters.

I hope there’s deep relationship building, and not just with the love interests. (But also with the love interests.) There’s a lot of follow-through—people remember what you told them, or what you didn’t tell them. There aren’t many fixed points—you can change your mind about what you believe and what you want as you see the story develop, and characters will remember that you did that too. And in terms of branching, a lot of it is about fulfilling promises. I don’t want to imply possibilities in the beginning that you can’t really achieve by the end. That’s probably why there are seven different possible configurations for the government by the end. Maybe more than that, if you count some specifics I won’t go into just yet. And that’s before we get to the Stars.

What do you think will surprise players about this game?

In a lot of ways, this isn’t necessarily a game about being surprised. It’s more about giving you tools and seeing how you use them. There are reveals in the story that I don’t expect to be particularly surprising—to the characters, maybe, but I expect a lot of players can figure them out. That’s because I’m less interested in shocking you than in finding out what you do next.

That’s not to say there aren’t any moments I expect to be surprising. And I hope there are choices you’re surprised to end up making, ways you didn’t think your character would turn. But I hope you’re satisfied more than I hope you’re surprised.

Stars Arisen has a very specific fantasy world and magic system, both of which I think are very fun. Can you tell me a little about the powers the PC can wield?

The magic in this world comes from the Remnant Stars, five fallen stars with incredible powers. (There’s a sixth still waiting up above.) The characters believe the Remnant Stars are actual stars from specific constellations. Astute readers will note that this is not how meteorites work, but the thing about the Remnant Stars is that no one knows for certain how they actually work or what they truly are, so the characters could be wrong. Either that or it’s magic. I’d say the odds are about 50/50.

The Remnant Stars grant their wielders a variety of sorcerous abilities, from calling light and darkness, to controlling the weather, to healing wounds or even raising the dead. And they’re bound at their cores to the emotions and desires of the people who use them, more than some of those people ever realize. Some characters want them desperately. Others believe they’re too dangerous to exist. You’ll have to decide where you fall along that scale.

Also, there’s a magical city with a pulse that resounds in your bones. It’s probably fine.

How has your writing changed in the course of the last few years?

Well, more of it’s been done outside.

Trying to answer this question reminds me of one of those videos where a guy takes a picture of his face every day for ten years, and What Happens Will Shock You. But there’s no individual moment where the guy himself is shocked, he sees it all the time, it’s just his face. Writing the game was a standard part of my life every day for so long, and I was focused enough on moving forward that I haven’t spent a lot of time getting introspective about the writing itself. But I’d be interested to see how someone else would answer this question about my writing, because I think it would probably surprise me.

What are you working on next?

I took a break after finishing Stars Arisen, which I actually did a few months ago, and just started work on a new game idea very recently. It’s early enough that I don’t want to give too much of a preview because a lot could still change, so in the interest of that and of being infuriatingly vague, I will say that it currently involves some or all of the following:

• Ghosts
• Dragons
• Ghost dragons
• The weight of history, again
• Meddling in forces beyond mortal comprehension
• Just a really big snake

When playing adventure games — any genre of games really — I sometimes have “moments of recognition” where systems click together and a secret pattern is revealed.

With adventure games, this can include recognizing a technical restraint or common usage; a recent example would be Seek where it took some time to realize all action happened between rooms and USE worked as a verb with absolutely everything (even though other verbs were acceptable). Patterns might be a little more abstract, like recognizing a design tendency of the author; for instance, some of the Cambridge mainframe games like Hamil have very little in the way of “just scenery” rooms, so if there’s an unusual detail, there’s a fair chance it has some real significance (like dust on the floor being poison).

Katakombs might have went fully-on moon logic with its puzzle where you give sugar to a dragon, but once the pattern is established it becomes easier to recognize you might want to give salt to an elephant (even if still not terribly logical).

Art from the early Zork Users’s Group map. From the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities. Not how I envisioned the Dungeon Master.

With Zork III I already mentioned a scene where you go down a ledge, find a chest, and have someone ask about tying the rope to the chest. You then wait a bit, and climb up to find the man has already raided the chest and hands you over a staff he supposedly found in the chest. (The staff doesn’t fit back in the chest, so: suspicious.) There’s then a delay while he looks at his valuables and then leaves.

You can incidentally kill the man and take the valuables, but they are literally just described as valuables — there’s absolutely no point in having them.

The important thing on the sequence is that you have to WAIT. You not only need to WAIT for the man to come back with the rope, but you need to wait to have the whole sequence trigger in the first place:

Cliff Ledge
This is a rock-strewn ledge near the base of a tall cliff. The bottom of the cliff is another fifteen feet below. You have little hope of climbing up the cliff face, but you might be able to scramble down from here (though it’s doubtful you could return).
A long piece of rope is dangling down from the top of the cliff and is within your reach.
A large chest, closed and locked, is lying among the boulders.

>wait
Time passes…

>wait
Time passes…
At the edge of the cliff above you, a man appears. He looks down at you and speaks. “Hello, down there! You seem to have a problem. Maybe I can help you.” He chuckles in an unsettling sort of way. “Perhaps if you tied that chest to the end of the rope I might be able to drag it up for you. Then, I’ll be more than happy to help you up!” He laughs again.

Now, when I first ran across this I was examining things so it was quite natural to hang out for two turns, but it did start to lead me to suspect that there’s a general plot thread of patience, and in a practical sense, it may mean persistence and repetition could be the key to solving some puzzles.

I vaguely recalled seeing a ship somewhere in the game, so I went to the Flathead Ocean and waited. After six turns:

>look
Flathead Ocean
You are at the shore of an amazing underground sea, the topic of many a legend among adventurers. Few were known to have arrived at this spot, and fewer to return. There is a heavy surf and a breeze is blowing on-shore. The land rises steeply to the east and quicksand prevents movement to the south. A thick mist covers the ocean and extends over the hills to the east. A path heads north along the beach.

>look
Flathead Ocean
You are at the shore of an amazing underground sea, the topic of many a legend among adventurers. Few were known to have arrived at this spot, and fewer to return. There is a heavy surf and a breeze is blowing on-shore. The land rises steeply to the east and quicksand prevents movement to the south. A thick mist covers the ocean and extends over the hills to the east. A path heads north along the beach.
Passing alongside the shore now is an old boat, reminiscent of an ancient Viking ship. Standing on the prow of the ship is an old and crusty sailor, peering out over the misty ocean.

I did quite quickly come up with the next part, even though it is spectacularly unfair, or at least requires you to use some knowledge from Zork I.

The Land of the Dead, as depicted on the Zork User Group map for Zork I. Also from the Gallery for Undiscovered Entities.

Specifically, there’s a book that later gets used in combination with a candle and bell at the Land of the Dead.

COMMANDMENT #12592
Oh ye who go about saying unto each: “Hello sailor”:
Dost thou know the magnitude of thy sin before the gods?
Yea, verily, thou shalt be ground between two stones.
Shall the angry gods cast thy body into the whirlpool?
Surely, thy eye shall be put out with a sharp stick!
Even unto the ends of the earth shalt thou wander and
unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.

It was essentially a joke phrase in Zork I, and in Zork mainframe (which I was actually thinking of) the end game has the Dungeon Master ask where the phrase “Hello Sailor” is useful; the proper response is “nowhere”. Due to that, it was irresistible to try:

>say “hello sailor”

The seaman looks up and maneuvers the boat toward shore. He cries out “I have waited three ages for someone to say those words and save me from sailing this endless ocean. Please accept this gift. You may find it useful!” He throws something which falls near you in the sand, then sails off toward the west, singing a lively, but somewhat uncouth, sailor song.
The boat sails silently through the mist and out of sight.

There seems to be zero indication in Zork III itself to do this. I could check the Invisiclues to see if there’s an official explanation but I’ve managed to steer clear so far so I’ll wait until I’m done / actually stuck. (If this is really the case, the upsetting part isn’t the carry-over of knowledge as much as the lack of clarity it could even happen; Savage Island Part 2 uses information from Part 1 but it requires a password from the end of part 1 to even get started, marking it as clearly a continuity of work.)

The sailor drops off a vial. I’m not sure what to do with it yet.

>examine vial
It is a small, transparent vial which looks empty but is strangely heavy.

>open vial
The vial is open. There is a sweet odor from within the vial, apparently coming from a heavy but invisible liquid.

You can drink it with no apparent ill effect, but no apparent good effect either. I originally suspected it might be the grue repellent but there’s no way to apply it to the skin, and I vaguely recall the repellent is straightforwardly labeled as such.

Moving on: I was able to apply the patience pattern to another puzzle entirely.

The Land of Shadow, from the Zork III ZUG map.

The Land of Shadow had a figure that attacks. Repeated attempts at combat did not seem to be going anywhere, so I assumed this involved a puzzle of some sort. Maybe we’re not supposed to attack the shadow at all, but make peace with it?

Land of Shadow
Through the shadows, a cloaked and hooded figure appears before you, blocking the northwestern exit from the room and carrying a brightly glowing sword.
From nowhere, the sword from the junction appears in your hand, wildly glowing!

>kill figure with sword
A good stroke, but it’s too slow.
The hooded figure attempts a thrust, but its weakened state prevents hitting you.

>kill figure with sword
A quick stroke, but the hooded figure is on guard.
The hooded figure attempts a thrust, but its weakened state prevents hitting you.

>kill figure with sword
A good slash, but it misses by a mile.
You are wounded by a lightning thrust!

I decided, after the other events that involved WAITing, to just be persistent. After about 50 or so exchanges — certainly enough that it would indicate in most games we were barking up entirely the wrong tree — I finally won.

>kill figure with sword
A sharp thrust and the hooded figure is badly wounded!
The figure appears to be badly hurt and defenseless.
The hooded figure attempts a thrust, but its weakened state prevents hitting you.

>kill figure with sword
The hooded figure, fatally wounded, slumps to the ground. It gazes up at you once, and you catch a brief glimpse of deep and sorrowful eyes. Before you can react, the figure vanishes in a cloud of fetid vapor.

Now, even though this caused my score to go up by one, I’m not sure this is quite right — there’s the message right before about “badly hurt and defenseless” which may mean we need to do something special there. Even knowing that it is possible to reach that state with nothing other than KILL FIGURE WITH SWORD is progress, though.

Speaking of score: it is now at 3. One point for picking up the lantern (at the very first room!) one point for getting the sword (which involves doing nothing, more or less) and one from the combat I just mentioned. I originally thought it might be a set of 7 items but now I’m not so sure. The score certainly feels much different than any other Infocom game.

I did manage to solve one more puzzle. The old man that appears at the engravings I mentioned last time is also something of a patience-event; I only met him on a repeat visit to the room.

>ne
Engravings Room
You are in a room with passages heading southwest and southeast. The north wall is ornately carved, filled with strange runes and writing in an unfamiliar language.

>sw
Damp Passage

>ne
Engravings Room
An old and wizened man is huddled, asleep, in the corner. He is snoring loudly. From his appearance, he is weak and frail.

Going by the logic maybe we are supposed to “prove our worth” and the usual fairy tale thing of proving kindness to strangers, I took the bread that had been laying out in the open by the tree and gave it to the man.

>wake man
The old man is roused to consciousness. He peers at you through eyes which appear much younger and stronger than his frail body and waits, as if expecting something to happen.

>give bread
(to the old man)
He looks up at you and takes the waybread from you. Slowly, he eats the bread and pauses when he is finished. He starts to speak: “Perhaps what you seek is through there!” He points at the carved wall to the north, where you now notice the bare outline of a secret door. When you turn back to the old man, you notice that he has gone!

This leads to a new area that I recognize from the mainframe Zork endgame.

>n
Button Room
You are standing at the southern end of a long, dimly lit hall. To the south, stairs ascend into darkness. To the north the corridor is illuminated by torches set high in the walls, out of reach. On one wall is a red button.

>n
Beam Room
You are in the middle of a long north-south corridor whose walls are polished stone. A narrow red beam of light crosses the room at the north end, inches above the floor.
The corridor continues north and south.

>n
Hallway
This is a part of the long hallway. The east and west walls are dressed stone. In the center of the hall is a shallow stone channel. In the center of the room the channel widens into a large hole around which is engraved a compass rose.
The hallway continues to the south.
A large mirror fills the north side of the hallway.

The button normally just goes click with no effect. I remember having to block the beam with an object, for some reason.

>put lamp in beam
The beam is now interrupted by a lamp lying on the floor.

Putting the lamp in the beam and then pressing the button again:

>push button
Click. Snap!

This has an effect in the mirror room:

Hallway
This is a part of the long hallway. The east and west walls are dressed stone. In the center of the hall is a shallow stone channel. In the center of the room the channel widens into a large hole around which is engraved a compass rose.
The hallway continues to the south.
A large mirror fills the north side of the hallway.
The mirror is mounted on a panel which has been opened outward.

I haven’t had time to investigate further, but I can say: glorious forward progress! The game does seem to be aiming at a compact experience, so I don’t expect this to go much longer than two more posts.

One last, brief note for now. You can download any version of an Infocom game here, but if you download Zork 3, do not download the last one listed (r25-s860811). Instead download the one right before, marked “Masterpieces version”. I’ve found r25 to sometimes crash when taking an object (one you aren’t allowed to, but the game isn’t supposed to crash!) and the prior version I have had no issues with.

A flat Earth

A dodecahedral Earth

Earthshapes is a series of 12 hypothetical Earths as conceived by Joseph N. Portney in 1968 during a flight to the North Pole onboard a U.S. Air Force KC-135. The aircraft was equipped with dual Litton LTN-51 Inertial Navigation Units that were the primary navigation source for the flight. As the North Pole was reached, Portney looked on the icy terrain below and mused to himself, "What if the Earth were......?" The results of this imaginative lapse were the Earthshapes. The 12 hypothetical Earths were then sketched and captioned by Portney and given to the Litton Guidance & Control Systems graphic arts group to create the models. They were then photographed and became the theme of a Litton publication entitled Pilots and Navigators Calendar for 1969. Each month was introduced with a different one of the 12 hypothetical Earths. The calendar was an international sensation, receiving awards and heavy fan mail. To satisfy customer demand it was reprinted as a fiscal calendar.

Earthshapes was used on the cover of the U.S. Air Force publication The Navigator, displayed at the Los Angeles Central Library, appeared on TV, developed as an educational publication and referenced in math texts. Earthshapes has been shown in classrooms throughout the world by students and instructors for 27 years.

A toroidal Earth

A cataclysmal Earth

A modern navigation problem involves the safe guidance and control of high altitude, long-range aircraft (both military and commercial). Joseph N. Portney has been involved in solving this problem since joining Litton Guidance and Control Systems in 1960. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and served as a navigator-bombardier in the U.S. Air Force. Mr. Portney has participated in the development of several inertial navigation systems and has aligned and tested several of these systems on flights over the North Pole. To show the capabilities of one of these navigational systems, Mr. Portney began to think, "What if the Earth were..." and the odd shaped models shown on the posters resulted. Merely by reprogramming the guidance system's computer, a plane could be guided safely over and around the odd curves and corners of different worlds.

Chart from the pamphlet

Joe created Earthgrids and Earthshapes that became award winning Pilots' and Navigators' Calendar-Atlas'.

Police recover William Colby’s body on the coast of Maryland, May 6, 1996.

The last people known to have seen William Colby alive are a cottage caretaker and his sister. They bumped into the former head of the CIA early on the evening of April 27, 1996, watering the willow trees around his vacation home on Neale Sound in Maryland, about 60 miles south of Washington, D.C. The trio chatted together for a few minutes about the fine weather and about the repairs Colby had spent the day doing to his sailboat, which was moored in the marina on Cobb Island, just across the sound. Then the caretaker and his sister went on their way. Everything seemed perfectly normal to them.

The next morning, a local handyman, his wife, and their two children out on the water in their motorboat spotted a bright green canoe washed up against a spit of land that extended from the Maryland shore. The canoe appeared to be abandoned. Moving in to investigate, they found that it was full of sand. This was odd, thought the handyman; he had sailed past this same place the day before without seeing the canoe, and yet so much sand could hardly have collected in it naturally over the course of a single night. It was almost as if someone had deliberately tried to sink the canoe. Oh, well; finders keepers. It really was a nice little boat. He and his family spent several hours shoveling out the sand, then towed the canoe away with them.

In the meantime, Colby’s next-door neighbor was surprised not to see him out and about. The farthest thing from a layabout, the wiry 76-year-old was usually up early, puttering about with something or other around his cottage or out on the sound. Yet now he was nowhere to be seen outside and didn’t answer his door, even though his car was still in the driveway and the neighbor thought she could hear a radio playing inside the little house. Peeking around back, she saw that Colby’s green canoe was gone. At first, she thought the mystery was solved. But as the day wore on and he failed to return, she grew more and more concerned. At 7:00 that evening, she called the police.

When they arrived, the police found that both doors to the cottage were unlocked. The radio was indeed turned on, as was Colby’s computer. Even weirder, a half-eaten meal lay in the sink, surrounded by unwashed dishes and half a glass of white wine. It wasn’t at all like the man not to clean up after himself. And his wallet and keys were also lying there on the table. Why on earth would he go out paddling without them?

Inquiries among the locals soon turned up Colby’s canoe and the story of its discovery. Clearly something was very wrong here. The police ordered a search. Two helicopters, twelve divers, and 100 volunteers in boats pulling drag-lines behind them scoured the area, while CIA agents also arrived to assist the investigation into the disappearance of one of their own; their presence was nothing to be alarmed at, they assured everyone, just standard procedure. Despite the extent of the search effort, it wasn’t until the morning of May 6, nine days after he was last seen, that William Colby’s body was found washed up on the shore, just 130 feet from where the handyman had found his canoe, but on the other side of the same spit of land. It seemed that Colby must have gone canoeing on the lake, then fallen overboard and drowned. He was 76 years old, after all.

But the handyman who had found the canoe, who knew these waters and their currents as well as anyone, didn’t buy this. He was sure that the body could not have gotten so separated from the canoe as to wind up on the opposite side of the spit. And why had it taken it so long to wash up on shore? Someone must have gone out and planted it there later on, he thought. Knowing Colby’s background, and having seen enough spy movies to know what happened to inconvenient witnesses in cases like this one, he and his family left town and went into hiding.

The coroner noticed other oddities. Normally a body that has been in the water a week or more is an ugly, bloated sight. But Colby’s was bizarrely well-preserved, almost as if it had barely spent any time in the water at all. And how could the divers and boaters have missed it for so long, so close to shore as it was?

Nonetheless, the coroner concluded that Colby had probably suffered a “cardiovascular incident” while out in his canoe, fallen into the water, and drowned. This despite the fact that he had had no known heart problems, and was in general in a physical shape that would have made him the envy of many a man 30 years younger than he was. Nor could the coroner explain why he had chosen to go canoeing long after dark, something he was most definitely not wont to do. (It had been dusk already when the caretaker and his sister said goodbye to him, and he had presumably sat down to his dinner after that.) Why had he gone out in such a rush, leaving his dinner half-eaten and his wine half-drunk, leaving his radio and computer still turned on, leaving his keys and wallet lying there on the table? It just didn’t add up in the eyes of the locals and those who had known Colby best.

But that was that. Case closed. The people who lived around the sound couldn’t help but think about the CIA agents lurking around the police station and the morgue, and wonder at everyone’s sudden eagerness to put a bow on the case and be done with it…

Unusually for a septuagenarian retired agent of the security state, William Colby had also been a game developer, after a fashion at least. In fact, at the time of his death a major game from a major publisher that bore his name very prominently right on the front of the box had just reached store shelves. This article and the next will partly be the story of the making of that game. But they will also be the story of William Colby himself, and of another character who was surprisingly similar to him in many ways despite being his sworn enemy for 55 years — an enemy turned friend who consulted along with him on the game and appeared onscreen in it alongside him. Then, too, they will be an inquiry into some of the important questions the game raises but cannot possibly begin to answer.

Sierra’s Police Quest: Open Season, created with the help of controversial former Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, was one of the few finished products to emerge from a brief-lived vision of games as up-to-the-minute, ripped-from-the-headlines affairs. Spycraft: The Great Game was another.

Activision’s Spycraft: The Great Game is the product of a very specific era of computer gaming, when “multimedia” and “interactive movies” were among the buzzwords of the zeitgeist. Most of us who are interested in gaming history today are well aware of the set of technical and aesthetic approaches these terms imply: namely, games built from snippets of captured digitized footage of real actors, with interactivity woven as best the creators can manage between these dauntingly large chunks of static content.

There was a certain ideology that sometimes sprang up in connection with this inclusion of real people in games, a belief that it would allow games to become relevant to the broader culture in a way they never had before, tackling stories, ideas, and controversies that ordinary folks were talking about around their kitchen tables. At the margins, gaming could almost become another form of journalism. Ken Williams, the founder and president of Sierra On-Line, was the most prominent public advocate for this point of view, as exemplified by his decision to make a game with Daryl F. Gates, the chief of police for Los Angeles during the riots that convulsed that city in the spring of 1992. Williams, writing during the summer of 1993, just as the Gates game was being released:

I want to find the top cop, lawyer, airline pilot, fireman, race-car driver, politician, military hero, schoolteacher, white-water rafter, mountain climber, etc., and have them work with us on a simulation of their world. Chief Gates gives us the cop game. We are working with Emerson Fittipaldi to simulate racing, and expect to announce soon that Vincent Bugliosi, the lawyer who locked up Charles Manson, will be working with us to do a courtroom simulation. My goal is that products in the Reality Role-Playing series will be viewed as serious simulations of real-world events, not games. If we do our jobs right, this will be the closest most of us will ever get to seeing the world through these people’s eyes.

It sounded good in theory, but would never get all that far in practice, for a whole host of reasons: a lack of intellectual bandwidth and sufficient diversity of background in the games industry to examine complex social questions in an appropriately multi-faceted way (the jingoistic Gates game is a prime case in point here); a lack of good ideas for turning such abstract themes into rewarding forms of interactivity, especially when forced to work with the canned video snippets that publishers like Sierra deemed an essential part of the overall vision; the expense of the games themselves, the expense of the computers needed to run them, and the technical challenges involved in getting them running, which in combination created a huge barrier to entry for newcomers from outside the traditional gamer demographics; and, last but not least, the fact that those existing gamers who did meet all the prerequisites were generally perfectly happy with more blatantly escapist entertainments, thank you very much. Tellingly, none of the game ideas Ken Williams mentions above ever got made. And I must admit that this failure does not strike me as any great loss for world culture.

That said, Williams, being the head of one of the two biggest American game publishers, had a lot of influence on the smaller ones when he prognosticated on the future of the industry. Among the latter group was Activision, a toppled giant which had been rescued from the dustbin of bankruptcy in 1991 by a young wheeler-dealer named Bobby Kotick. His version of the company got fully back onto its feet the same year that Williams wrote the words above, thanks largely to Return to Zork, a cutting-edge multimedia evocation of the Infocom text adventures of yore, released at the perfect time to capitalize on a generation of gamers’ nostalgia for those bygone days of text and parsers (whilst not actually asking them to read much or to type out their commands, of course).

With that success under their belts, Kotick and his cronies thought about what to do next. Adventure games were hot — Myst, the bestselling adventure of all time, was released at the end of 1993 — and Ken Williams’s ideas about famous-expert-driven “Reality Role-Playing” were in the air. What might they do with that? And whom could they get to help them do it?

They hit upon espionage, a theme that, in contrast to many of those outlined by Williams, seemed to promise a nice balance of ripped-from-the-headlines relevance with interesting gameplay potential. Then, when they went looking for the requisite famous experts, they hit the mother lode with William Colby, the head of the CIA from September of 1973 to January of 1976, and Oleg Kalugin, who had become the youngest general in the history of the First Central Directorate of the Soviet Committee for State Security, better known as the KGB, in 1974.

I’ll return to Spycraft itself in due course. But right now, I’d like to examine the lives of these two men, which parallel one another in some perhaps enlightening ways. Rest assured that in doing so I’m only following the lead of Activision’s marketers; they certainly wanted the public to focus first and foremost on the involvement of Colby and Kalugin in their game.

William Colby (center), looking every inch the dashing war hero in Norway just after the end of World War II.

William Colby was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on January 4, 1920. He was the only child of Elbridge Colby, a former soldier and current university professor who would soon rejoin the army as an officer and spend the next 40 years in the service. His family was deeply Catholic — his father thanks to a spiritual awakening and conversion while a student at university, his mother thanks to long family tradition. The son too absorbed the ethos of a stern but loving God and the necessity of serving Him in ways both heavenly and worldly.

The little family bounced around from place to place, as military families generally do. They wound up in China for three years starting in 1929, where young Bill learned a smattering of Chinese and was exposed for the first time to the often compromised ethics of real-world politics, in this case in the form of the United States’s support for the brutal dictatorship of Chiang Kei-shek. Colby’s biographer Randall Bennett Woods pronounces his time in China “one of the formative influences of his life.” It was, one might say, a sort of preparation for the many ugly but necessary alliances — necessary as Colby would see them, anyway — of the Cold War.

At the age of seventeen, Colby applied to West Point, but was rejected because of poor eyesight. He settled instead for Princeton, a university whose faculty included Albert Einstein among many other prominent thinkers. Colby spent the summer of 1939 holidaying in France, returning home just after the fateful declarations of war in early September, never imagining that the idyllic environs in which he had bicycled and picnicked and practiced his French on the local girls would be occupied by the Nazis well before another year had passed. Back at Princeton, he made the subject of his senior thesis the ways in which France’s weakness had allowed the Nazi threat on its doorstep to grow unchecked. This too was a lesson that would dominate his worldview throughout the decades to come. After graduating, Colby received his officer’s commission in the United States Army, under the looming shadow of a world war that seemed bound to engulf his own country sooner or later.

When war did come on December 7, 1941, he was working as an artillery instructor at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. To his immense frustration, the Army thought he was doing such a good job in that role that it was inclined to leave him there. “I was afraid the war would be over before I got a chance to fight,” he writes in his memoir. He therefore leaped at the opportunity when he saw an advertisement on a bulletin board for volunteers to become parachutists with the 82nd Airborne. He tried to pass the entrance physical by memorizing the eye chart. The doctor wasn’t fooled, but let him in anyway: “I guess your eyesight is good enough for you to see the ground.”

Unfortunately, he broke his ankle in a training jump, and was forced to watch, crestfallen, as his unit shipped out to Europe without him. Then opportunity came calling again, in a chance to join the new Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Just as the CIA would later on, the OSS had two primary missions: foreign intelligence gathering and active but covert interference. Colby was to be dropped behind enemy lines, whence he would radio back reports of enemy troop movements and organize resistance among the local population. It would be, needless to say, an astonishingly dangerous undertaking. But that was the way Colby wanted it.

William Colby finally left for Britain in December of 1943, aboard the British luxury liner Queen Elizabeth, now refitted to serve as a troop transport. It was in a London bookstore that he first encountered another formative influence, the book Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence — the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, who had convinced the peoples of the Middle East to rise up against their Turkish overlords during the last world war. Lawrence’s book was, Colby would later say, an invaluable example of “an outsider operat[ing] within the political framework of a foreign people.” It promptly joined the Catholic Bible as one of the two texts Colby carried with him everywhere he went.

As it happened, he had plenty of time for reading: the weeks and then months passed in Britain, and still there came no orders to go into action. There was some talk of using Colby and his fellow American commandos to sow chaos during the run-up to D-Day, but this role was given to British units in the end. Instead Colby watched from the sideline, seething, as the liberation of France began. Then, out of the blue, action orders came at last. On the night of August 14, 1944, Colby and two exiled French soldiers jumped out of a B-24 bomber flying over central France.

The drop was botched; the men landed fifteen miles away from the intended target, finding themselves smack dab in the middle of a French village instead of out in the woods. Luckily, there were no Germans about, and the villagers had no desire to betray them. There followed a hectic, doubtless nerve-wracking month, during which Colby and his friends made contact with the local resistance forces and sent back to the advancing Allied armies valuable information about German troop movements and dispositions. Once friendly armies reached their position, the commandos made their way back to the recently liberated Paris, thence to London. It had been a highly successful mission, with more than enough danger and derring-do to suffice for one lifetime in the eyes of most people. But for Colby it all felt a bit anticlimactic; he had never even discharged his weapon at the enemy. Knowing that his spoken German wasn’t good enough to carry out another such mission behind the rapidly advancing Western European front, Colby requested a transfer to China.

He got another offer instead. Being an accomplished skier, he was asked to lead 35 commandos into the subarctic region of occupied Norway, to interdict the German supply lines there. Naturally, he agreed.

The parachute drop that took place on the night of March 24, 1945, turned into another botched job. Only fifteen of the 35 commandos actually arrived; the other planes strayed far off course in the dark and foggy night, accidentally dropping their passengers over neutral Sweden, or giving up and not dropping them at all. But Colby was among the lucky (?) fifteen who made it to their intended destination. Living off the frigid land, he and his men set about dynamiting railroad tracks and tunnels. This time, he got to do plenty of shooting, as his actions frequently brought him face to face with the last underfed, under-conditioned, under- or over-aged dregs of the strangled Wehrmacht.

On the morning of May 7, word came through on the radio that Adolf Hitler was dead and his government had capitulated; the war in Europe was over. Colby now set about accepting the surrender of the same German occupiers he had recently been harassing. While the operation he had led was perhaps of doubtful necessity in the big picture of a war that Germany had already been well along the path of losing, no one could deny that he had demonstrated enormous bravery and capability. He was awarded the Silver Star.

Gung ho as ever, Colby proposed to his superiors upon returning to London that he lead a similar operation into Francisco Franco’s Spain, to precipitate the downfall of that last bastion of fascism in Europe. Having been refused this request, he returned to the United States, still seeming a bit disappointed that it had all ended so quickly. Here he asked for and was granted a discharge from the Army, asked for and was granted the hand in marriage of his university sweetheart Barbara Heinzen, and asked for and was granted a scholarship to law school. He wrote on his application that he hoped to become a lawyer in the cause of organized labor. (Far from the fire-breathing right-wing extremist some of his later critics would characterize him to be, Colby would vote Democrat throughout his life, maintaining a center-left orientation when it came to domestic politics at least.)

Oleg Kalugin at age seventeen, a true believer in Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party.

While the war hero William Colby was seemingly settling into a more staid time of life, another boy was growing up in the heart of the nation that Colby and most other Americans would soon come to regard as their latest great enemy. Born on September 6, 1934, in Leningrad (the once and future Saint Petersburg), Oleg Kalugin was, like Colby, an only child of a couple with an ethic of service, the son of a secret-police agent and a former factory worker, both of whose loyalty to communism was unimpeachable; the boy’s grandmother caused much shouting and hand-wringing in the family when she spirited him away to have him baptized in a furtive Orthodox ceremony in a dark basement. That piece of deviancy notwithstanding, Little Oleg was raised to see Joseph Stalin as his god on earth, the one and only savior of his people.

On June 22, 1941, he was “hunting maybugs with a pretty girl,” as he writes, when he saw a formation of airplanes roar overhead and drop a load of bombs not far away. The war had come to his country, six months before it would reach that of William Colby. With the German armies nearing Leningrad, he and his mother fled to the Siberian city of Omsk while his father stayed behind to fight. They returned to a devastated hometown in the spring of 1944. Oleg’s father had survived the terrible siege, but the boy had lost all of his grandparents — including that gentle soul who had caused him to be baptized — along with four uncles to either starvation or enemy bullets.

Kalugin remained a true believer after the Great Patriotic War was over, joining the Young Communist League as soon as he was eligible at the age of fourteen. At seventeen, he decided to join the KGB; it “seemed like the logical place for a person with my academic abilities, language skills, and fervent desire to fight class enemies, capitalist parasites, and social injustice.” Surprisingly, his father, who had seen rather too much of what Soviet-style class struggle really meant over the last couple of decades, tried to dissuade him. But the boy’s mind was made up. He entered Leningrad’s Institute of Foreign Languages, a shallow front for the training of future foreign agents, in 1952.

When Stalin died in March of the following year, the young zealot wrote in his diary that “Stalin isn’t dead. He cannot die. His physical death is just a formality, one that needn’t deprive people of their faith in the future. The fact that Stalin is still alive will be proven by our country’s every new success, both domestically and internationally.” He was therefore shocked when Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, delivered a speech that roundly condemned the country’s erstwhile savior as a megalomaniac and a mass-murderer who had cynically corrupted the ideology of Marx and Lenin to serve his own selfish ends. It was Kalugin’s initiation into the reality that the state he so earnestly served was less than incorruptible and infallible.

Nevertheless, he kept the faith, moving to Moscow for advanced training in 1956. In 1958, he was selected on the basis of his aptitude for English to go to the United States as a graduate student. “Just lay the foundation for future work,” his superiors told him. “Buy yourself good maps. Improve your English. Find out about their way of life. Communicate with people and make as many friends as possible.” Kalugin’s joyous reaction to this assignment reflects the ambivalence with which young Soviets like him viewed the United States. It was, they fervently believed, the epicenter of the imperialism, capitalism, racism, and classism they hated, and must ultimately be destroyed for that reason. Yet it was also the land of jazz and rock and roll, of fast cars and beautiful women, with a standard of living so different from anything they had ever known that it might as well have been Shangri-La. “I daydreamed constantly about America,” Kalugin admits. “The skyscrapers of New York and Chicago, the cowboys of the West…” He couldn’t believe he was being sent there, and on a sort of paid vacation at that, with few concrete instructions other than to experience as much of the American way of life as he could. Even his sadness about leaving behind the nice Russian girl he had recently married couldn’t overwhelm his giddy excitement.

William Colby in Rome circa 1955, with his son Carl and daughter Catherine.

As Oleg Kalugin prepared to leave for the United States, William Colby was about to return to that same country, where he hadn’t been living for seven years. He had become a lawyer as planned and joined the National Labor Relations Board to forward the cause of organized labor, but his tenure there had proved brief. In 1950, he was convinced to join the new CIA, the counterweight to the KGB on the world stage. He loved his new “band of brothers,” filled as he found it to be with “adventuresome spirits who believed fervently that the communist threat had to be met aggressively, innovatively, and courageously.”

In April of 1951, he took his family with him on his first foreign assignment, under the cover identity of a mid-level diplomatic liaison in Stockholm, Sweden. His real purpose was to build and run an intelligence operation there. (All embassies were nests of espionage in those days, as they still are today.) “The perfect operator in such operations is the traditional gray man, so inconspicuous that he can never catch the waiter’s eye in a restaurant,” Colby wrote. He was — or could become — just such a man, belying his dashing commando past. Small wonder that he proved very adept at his job. The type of spying that William Colby did was, like all real-world espionage, more John Le Carré than Ian Fleming, an incrementalist milieu inhabited by just such quiet gray men as him. Dead-letter drops, secret codes, envelopes stuffed with cash, and the subtle art of recruitment without actually using that word — the vast majority of his intelligence contacts would have blanched at the label of “spy,” having all manner of other ways of defining what they did to themselves and others — were now his daily stock in trade.

In the summer of 1953, Colby and his family left Stockholm for Rome. Still riven by discontent and poverty that the Marshall Plan had never quite been able to quell, with a large and popular communist party that promised the people that it alone could make things better, Italy was considered by both the United States and the Soviet Union to be the European country most in danger of changing sides in the Cold War through the ballot box, making this assignment an unusually crucial one. Once again, Colby performed magnificently. Through means fair and occasionally slightly foul, he propped up Italy’s Christian Democratic Party, the one most friendly to American interests. His wife and five young children would remember these years as their happiest time together, with the Colosseum visible outside their snug little apartment’s windows, with the trapping of their Catholic faith all around them. The sons became altar boys, learning to say Mass in flawless Latin, and Barbara amazed guests with her voluble Italian, which was even better than her husband’s.

She and her children would gladly have stayed in Rome forever, but after five years there her husband was growing restless. The communist threat in Italy had largely dissipated by now, thanks to an improving economy that made free markets seem more of a promise than a threat, and Colby was itching to continue the shadowy struggle elsewhere. In 1958, he was recalled to the States to begin preparing for a new, more exotic assignment: to the tortured Southeast Asian country of Vietnam, which had recently won its independence from France, only to become a battleground between the Western-friendly government of Ngo Dinh Diem and a communist insurgency led by Ho Chi Minh.

Oleg Kalugin (center) at Columbia University, 1958.

While Colby was hitting the books at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in preparation for his latest assignment, Kalugin was doing the same as a philology student on a Fulbright scholarship to New York City’s Columbia University. (Fully half of the eighteen exchange students who traveled with him were also spies-in-training.) A natural charmer, he had no trouble ingratiating himself with the native residents of the Big Apple as he had been ordered to do.

He went home when his one-year scholarship expired, but returned to New York City one year after that, to work as a journalist for Radio Moscow. Now, however, his superiors expected a bit more from him. Despite the wife and young daughter he had left behind, he seduced a string of women who he believed could become valuable informants — so much so that American counter-espionage agents, who were highly suspicious of him, labeled him a “womanizer” and chalked it up as his most obvious weakness, should they ever be in need of one to exploit. (For his part, Kalugin writes that “I always told my officers, male and female, ‘Don’t be afraid of sex.’ If they found themselves in a situation where making love with a foreigner could help our work, I advised them to hop into bed.”)

Kalugin’s unlikely career as Radio Moscow’s foreign correspondent in New York City lasted almost four years in all. He covered — with a pro-Soviet spin, naturally — the election of President John F. Kennedy, the trauma of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassination of Kennedy by a man with Soviet ties. He was finally called home in early 1964, his superiors having decided he was now attracting too much scrutiny from the Americans. He found returning to the dingy streets of Moscow from the Technicolor excitement of New York City to be rather dispiriting. “Worshiping communism from afar was one thing. Living in it was another thing altogether,” he writes wryly, echoing sentiments shared by many an idealistic Western defector for the cause. Shortly after his return, the reform-minded Nikita Khrushchev was ousted in favor of Leonid Brezhnev, a man who looked as tired as the rest of the Soviet Union was beginning to feel. It was hard to remain committed to the communist cause in such an environment as this, but Kalugin continued to do his best.

William Colby, looking rather incongruous in his typical shoe salesman’s outfit in a Vietnamese jungle.

William Colby might have been feeling similar sentiments somewhere behind that chiseled granite façade of his. For he was up to his eyebrows in the quagmire that was Vietnam, the place where all of the world’s idealism seemed to go to die.

When he had arrived in the capital of Saigon in 1959, with his family in tow as usual, he had wanted to treat this job just as he had his previous foreign postings, to work quietly behind the scenes to support another basically friendly foreign government with a communist problem. But Southeast Asia was not Europe, as he learned to his regret — even if the Diem family were Catholic and talked among themselves in French. There were systems of hierarchy and patronage inside the leader’s palace that baffled Colby at every turn. Diem himself was aloof, isolated from the people he ruled, while Ho Chi Minh, who already controlled the northern half of the country completely and had designs on the rest of it, had enormous populist appeal. The type of espionage Colby had practiced in Sweden and Italy — all mimeographed documents and furtive meetings in the backs of anonymous cafés — would have been useless against such a guerilla insurgency even if it had been possible. Which it was not: the peasants fighting for and against the communists were mostly illiterate.

Colby’s thinking gradually evolved, to encompass the creation of a counter-insurgency force that could play the same game as the communists. His mission in the country became less an exercise in pure espionage and overt and covert influencing than one in paramilitary operations. He and his family left Vietnam for Langley in the summer of 1962, but the country was still to fill a huge portion of Colby’s time; he was leaving to become the head of all of the CIA’s Far Eastern operations, and there was no hotter spot in that hot spot of the world than Vietnam. Before departing, the entire Colby family had dinner with President Diem in his palace, whose continental cuisine, delicate furnishings, and manicured gardens almost could lead one to believe one was on the French Riviera rather than in a jungle in Southeast Asia. “We sat there with the president,” remembers Barbara. “There was really not much political talk. Yet there was a feeling that things were not going well in that country.”

Sixteen months later — in fact, just twenty days before President Kennedy was assassinated — Diem was murdered by the perpetrators of a military coup that had gone off with the tacit support of the Americans, who had grown tired of his ineffectual government and felt a change was needed. Colby was not involved in that decision, which came down directly from the Kennedy White House to its ambassador in the country. But, good soldier that he was, he accepted it after it had become a fait accompli. He even agreed to travel to Vietnam in the immediate aftermath, to meet with the Vietnamese generals who had perpetrated the coup and assure them that they had powerful friends in Washington. Did he realize in his Catholic heart of hearts that his nation had forever lost the moral high ground in Vietnam on the day of Diem’s murder? We cannot say.

The situation escalated quickly under the new President Lyndon Johnson, as more and more American troops were sent to fight a civil war on behalf of the South Vietnamese, a war which the latter didn’t seem overly inclined to fight for themselves. Colby hardly saw his family now, spending months at a stretch in the country. Lawrence of Arabia’s prescription for winning over a native population through ethical persuasion and cultural sensitivity was proving unexpectedly difficult to carry out in Vietnam, most of whose people seemed just to want the Americans to go away. It appeared that a stronger prescription was needed.

Determined to put down the Viet Cong — communist partisans in the south of the country who swarmed over the countryside, killing American soldiers and poisoning their relations with the locals — Colby introduced a “Phoenix Program” to eliminate them. It became without a doubt the biggest of all the moral stains on his career. The program’s rules of engagement were not pretty to begin with, allowing for the extra-judicial execution of anyone believed to be in the Viet Cong leadership in any case where arresting him was too “hard.” But it got entirely out of control in practice, as described by James S. Olsen and Randy W. Roberts in their history of the war: “The South Vietnamese implemented the program aggressively, but it was soon laced with corruption and political infighting. Some South Vietnamese politicians identified political enemies as Viet Cong and sent Phoenix hit men after them. The pressure to identify Viet Cong led to a quota system that incorrectly labeled many innocent people the enemy.” Despite these self-evident problems, the Americans kept the program going for years, saying that its benefits were worth the collateral damage. Olsen and Roberts estimate that at least 20,000 people lost their lives as a direct result of Colby’s Phoenix Program. A large proportion of them — possibly even a majority — were not really communist sympathizers at all.

In July of 1971, Colby was hauled before the House Committee on Government Operations by two prominent Phoenix critics, Ogden Reid and Pete McCloskey (both Republicans.) It is difficult to absolve him of guilt for the program’s worst abuses on the basis of his circuitous, lawyerly answers to their straightforward questions.

Reid: Can you state categorically that Phoenix has never perpetrated the premeditated killing of a civilian in a noncombat situation?

Colby: No, I could not say that, but I do not think it happens often. Individual members of it, subordinate people in it, may have done it. But as a program, it is not designed to do that.

McCloskey: Did Phoenix personnel resort to torture?

Colby: There were incidents, and they were treated as an unjustifiable offense. If you want to get bad intelligence, you use bad interrogation methods. If you want to get good intelligence, you had better use good interrogation methods.

Oleg Kalugin (right) receives from Bulgarian security minister Dimitri Stoyanov the Order of the Red Star, thanks largely to his handling of John Walker. The bespectacled man standing between and behind the two is Yuri Andropov, then the head of the KGB, who would later become the fifth supreme leader of the Soviet Union.

During the second half of the 1960s, Oleg Kalugin spent far more time in the United States than did William Colby. He returned to the nation that had begun to feel like more of a home than his own in July of 1965. This time, however, he went to Washington, D.C., instead of New York City. His new cover was that of a press officer for the Soviet Foreign Ministry; his real job was that of a deputy director in the KGB’s Washington operation. He was to be a spy in the enemy’s city of secrets. “By all means, don’t treat it as a desk job,” he was told.

Kalugin took the advice to heart. He had long since developed a nose for those who could be persuaded to share their country’s deepest secrets with him, long since recognized that the willingness to do so usually stemmed from weakness rather than strength. Like a lion on the hunt, he had learned to spot the weakest prey — the nursers of grudges and harborers of regrets; the sexually, socially, or professionally frustrated — and isolate them from the pack of their peers for one-on-one persuasion. At one point, he came upon a secret CIA document that purported to explain the psychology of those who chose to spy for that yin to his own service’s yang. He found it to be so “uncannily accurate” a description of the people he himself recruited that he squirreled it away in his private files, and quoted from it in his memoir decades later.

Acts of betrayal, whether in the form of espionage or defection, are almost in every case committed by morally or psychologically unsteady people. Normal, psychologically stable people — connected with their country by close ethnic, national, cultural, social, and family ties — cannot take such a step. This simple principle is confirmed by our experience of Soviet defectors. All of them were single. In every case, they had a serious vice or weakness: alcoholism, deep depression, psychopathy of various types. These factors were in most cases decisive in making traitors out of them. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that no [CIA] operative can consider himself an expert in Soviet affairs if he hasn’t had the horrible experience of holding a Soviet friend’s head over the sink as he poured out the contents of his stomach after a five-day drinking bout.

What follows from that is that our efforts must mostly be directed against weak, unsteady members of Soviet communities. Among normal people, we should pay special attention to the middle-aged. People that age are starting their descent from their psychological peak. They are no longer children, and they suddenly feel the acute realization that their life is passing, that their ambitions and youthful dreams have not come true in full or even in part. At this age comes the breaking point of a man’s career, when he faces the gloomy prospect of pending retirement and old age. The “stormy forties” are of great interest to an [intelligence] operative.

It’s great to be good, but it’s even better to be lucky. John Walker, the spy who made Kalugin’s career, shows the truth in this dictum. He was that rarest of all agents in the espionage trade: a walk-in. A Navy officer based in Norfolk, Virginia, he drove into Washington one day in late 1967 with a folder full of top-secret code ciphers on the seat of his car next to him, looked up the address of the Soviet embassy in the directory attached to a pay phone, strode through the front door, plunked his folder down on the front desk, and said matter-of-factly, “I want to see the security officer, or someone connected with intelligence. I’m a naval officer. I’d like to make some money, and I’ll give you some genuine stuff in return.” Walker was hastily handed a down payment, ushered out of the embassy, and told never under any circumstances to darken its doors again. He would be contacted in other ways if his information checked out.

Kalugin was fortunate enough to be ordered to vet the man. The picture he filled in was sordid, but it passed muster. Thirty years old when his career as a spy began, Walker had originally joined the Navy to escape being jailed for four burglaries he committed as a teenager. A born reprobate, he had once tried to convince his wife to become a prostitute in order to pay off the gambling debts he had racked up. Yet he could also be garrulous and charming, and had managed to thoroughly conceal his real self from his Navy superiors. A fitness report written in 1972, after he had already been selling his country’s secrets for almost five years, calls him “intensely loyal, taking great pride in himself and the naval service, fiercely supporting its principles and traditions. He possesses a fine sense of personal honor and integrity, coupled with a great sense of humor.” Although he was only a warrant officer in rank, he sat on the communications desk at Norfolk, handling radio traffic with submarines deployed all over the world. It was hard to imagine a more perfect posting for a spy. And this spy required no counseling, needed no one to pretend to be his friend, to talk him down from crises of conscience, or to justify himself to himself. Suffering from no delusions as to who and what he was, all he required was cold, hard cash. A loathsome human being, he was a spy handler’s dream.

Kalugin was Walker’s primary handler for two years, during which he raked in a wealth of almost unbelievably valuable information without ever meeting the man face to face. Walker was the sort of asset who turns up “once in a lifetime,” in the words of Kalugin himself. He became the most important of all the spies on the Kremlin’s payroll, even recruiting several of his family members and colleagues to join his ring. “K Mart has better security than the Navy,” he laughed. He would continue his work long after Kalugin’s time in Washington was through. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, Navy personnel wondered at how the Soviets always seemed to know where their ships and submarines were and where their latest exercises were planned to take place. Not until 1985 was Walker finally arrested. In a bit of poetic justice, the person who turned him in to the FBI was his wife, whom he had been physically and sexually abusing for almost 30 years.

The luster which this monster shed on Kalugin led to the awarding of the prestigious Order of the Red Star, and then, in 1974, his promotion to the rank of KGB general while still just shy of his 40th birthday, making him the youngest such in the post-World War II history of the service. By that time, he was back in Moscow again, having been recalled in January of 1970, once again because it was becoming common knowledge among the Americans that his primary work in their country was that of a spy. He was too hot now to be given any more long-term foreign postings. Instead he worked out of KGB headquarters in Moscow, dealing with strategic questions and occasionally jetting off to far-flung trouble spots to be the service’s eyes and ears on the ground. “I can honestly say that I loved my work,” he writes in his memoir. “My job was always challenging, placing me at the heart of the Cold War competition between the Soviet Union and the United States.” As ideology faded, the struggle against imperialism had become more of an intellectual fascination — an intriguing game of chess — than a grand moral crusade.

William Colby testifies before Congress, 1975.

William Colby too was now back in his home country on a more permanent basis, having been promoted to executive director of the CIA — the third highest position on the agency’s totem pole — in July of 1971. Yet he was suffering through what must surely have been the most personally stressful period of his life since he had dodged Nazis as a young man behind enemy lines.

In April of 1973, his 23-year-old daughter Catherine died of anorexia. Her mental illness was complicated, as they always are, but many in the family believed it to have been aggravated by being the daughter of the architect of the Phoenix Program, a man who was in the eyes of much of her hippie generation Evil Incarnate. His marriage was now, in the opinion of his biographer Randall Bennett Woods, no more than a “shell.” Barbara blamed him not only for what he had done in Vietnam but for failing to be there with his family when his daughter needed him most, for forever skipping out on them with convenient excuses about duty and service on his lips.

Barely a month after Catherine’s death, Colby got a call from Alexander Haig, chief of staff in Richard Nixon’s White House: “The president wants you to take over as director of the CIA.” It ought to have been the apex of his professional life, but somehow it didn’t seem that way under current conditions. At the time, the slow-burning Watergate scandal was roiling the CIA almost more than the White House. Because all five of the men who had been arrested attempting to break into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters the previous year had connections to the CIA, much of the press was convinced it had all been an agency plot. Meanwhile accusations about the Phoenix Program and other CIA activities, in Vietnam and elsewhere, were also flying thick and fast. The CIA seemed to many in Congress to be an agency out of control, ripe only for dismantling. And of course Colby was still processing the loss of his daughter amidst it all. It was a thankless promotion if ever there was one. Nevertheless, he accepted it.

Colby would later claim that he knew nothing of the CIA’s many truly dirty secrets before stepping into the top job. These were the ones that other insiders referred to as the “family jewels”: its many bungled attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, before and after he became the leader of Cuba, as well as various other sovereign foreign leaders; the coups it had instigated against lawfully elected foreign governments; its experiments with mind control and psychedelic drugs on unwilling and unwitting human subjects; its unlawful wiretapping and surveillance of scores of Americans; its longstanding practice of opening mail passing between the United States and less-than-friendly nations. That Colby could have risen so high in the agency without knowing these secrets and many more seems dubious on the face of it, but it is just possible; the CIA was very compartmentalized, and Colby had the reputation of being a bit of a legal stickler, just the type who might raise awkward objections to such delicate necessities. “Colby never became a member of the CIA’s inner club of mandarins,” claims the agency’s historian Harold Ford. But whether he knew about the family jewels or not beforehand, he was stuck with them now.

Perhaps in the hope that he could make the agency’s persecutors go away if he threw them just a little red meat, Colby came clean about some of the dodgy surveillance programs. But that only whet the public’s appetite for more revelations. For as the Watergate scandal gradually engulfed the White House and finally brought down the president, as it became clear that the United States had invested more than $120 billion and almost 60,000 young American lives into South Vietnam only to see it go communist anyway, the public’s attitude toward institutions like the CIA was not positive; a 1975 poll placed the CIA’s approval rating at 14 percent. President Gerald Ford, the disgraced Nixon’s un-elected replacement, was weak and unable to protect the agency. Indeed, a commission chaired by none other than Vice President Nelson Rockefeller laid bare many of the family jewels, holding back only the most egregious incidents of meddling in foreign governments. But even those began to come out in time. Both major political parties had their sights set on future elections, and thus had a strong motivation to blame a rogue CIA for any and all abuses by previous administrations. (Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, for example, had personally ordered and supervised some of the attempts on Fidel Castro’s life during the early 1960s.)

It was a no-win situation for William Colby. He was called up to testify in Congress again and again, to answer questions in the mold of “When did you stop beating your wife?”, as he put it to colleagues afterward. Everybody seemed to hate him: right-wing hardliners because they thought he was giving away the store (“It is an act of insanity and national humiliation,” said Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, “to have a law prohibiting the president from ordering assassinations”), left-wingers and centrists because they were sure he was hiding everything he could get away with and confessing only to that which was doomed to come out anyway — which was probably true. Colby was preternaturally cool and unflappable at every single hearing, which somehow only made everyone dislike him that much more. Some of his few remaining friends wanted to say that his relative transparency was a product of Catholic guilt — over the Phoenix Program, over the death of his daughter, perchance over all of the CIA’s many sins — but it was hard to square that notion with the rigidly composed, lawyerly presence that spoke in clipped, minimalist phrases before the television cameras. He seemed more like a cold fish than a repentant soul.

On November 1, 1975 — exactly six months after Saigon had fallen, marking the humiliating final defeat of South Vietnam at the hands of the communists — William Colby was called into the White House by President Ford and fired. “There goes 25 years just like that,” he told Barbara when he came home in a rare display of bitterness. His replacement was George Herbert Walker Bush, an up-and-coming Republican politician who knew nothing about intelligence work. President Ford said such an outsider was the only viable choice, given the high crimes and misdemeanors with which all of the rank and file of the CIA were tarred. And who knows? Maybe he was right. Colby stayed on for three more months while his green replacement got up to speed, then left public service forever.

An Oleg Kalugin campaign poster from 1990, after he reinvented himself as a politician. “Let’s vote for Oleg Kalugin!” reads the caption.

Oleg Kalugin was about to suffer his own fall from grace. According to his account, his rising star flamed out when he ventured out on a limb to support a defector from the United States, one of his own first contacts as a spy handler, who was now accused of stealing secrets for the West. The alleged double agent was sent to a Siberian prison despite Kalugin’s advocacy. Suspected now of being a CIA mole himself, Kalugin was reassigned in January of 1980 to a dead-end job as deputy director of the KGB’s Leningrad branch, where he would be sure not to see too much valuable intelligence. You live by the sword, you die by the sword; duplicity begets suspicions of duplicity, such that spies always end up eating their own if they stay in the business long enough.

Again according to Kalugin himself, it was in Leningrad that his nagging doubts about the ethics and efficacy of the Soviet system — the same ones that had been whispering at the back of his mind since the early 1960s — rose to a roar which he could no longer ignore. “It was all an elaborately choreographed farce, and in my seven years in Leningrad I came to see that we had created not only the most extensive totalitarian state apparatus in history but also the most arcane,” he writes. “Indeed, the mind boggled that in the course of seven decades our communist leaders had managed to construct this absurd, stupendous, arcane ziggurat, this terrifyingly centralized machine, this religion that sought to control all aspects of life in our vast country.” We might justifiably wonder that it took him so long to realize this, and note with some cynicism that his decision to reject the system he had served all his life came only after that system had already rejected him. He even confesses that, when Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982 and was replaced by Yuri Andropov, a former head of the KGB who had always thought highly of Kalugin, he wasn’t above dreaming of a return to the heart of the action in the intelligence service. But it wasn’t to be. Andropov soon died, to be replaced by another tired old man named Konstantin Chernenko who died even more quickly, and then Mikhail Gorbachev came along to accidentally dismantle the Soviet Union in the name of saving it.

In January of 1987, Kalugin was given an even more dead-end job, as a security officer in the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. From here, he watched the extraordinary events of 1989, as country after country in the Soviet sphere rejected its communist government, until finally the Berlin Wall fell, taking the Iron Curtain down with it. Just like that, the Cold War was over, with the Soviet Union the undeniable loser. Kalugin must surely have regarded this development with mixed feelings, given what a loyal partisan he had once been for the losing side. Nevertheless, on February 26, 1990, he retired from the KGB. After picking up his severance check, he walked a few blocks to the Institute of History and Archives, where a group of democracy activists had set up shop. “I want to help the democratic movement,” he told them, in a matter-of-fact tone uncannily similar to that of John Walker in a Soviet embassy 22 years earlier. “I am sure that my knowledge and experience will be useful. You can use me in any capacity.”

And so Oleg Kalugin reinvented himself as an advocate for Russian democracy. A staunch supporter of Boris Yeltsin and his post-Soviet vision for Russia, he became an outspoken opponent of the KGB, which still harbored in its ranks many who wished to return the country to its old ways. He was elected to the Supreme Soviet in September of 1990, in the first wave of free and fair elections ever held in Russia. When some of his old KGB colleagues attempted a coup in August of 1991, he was out there manning the barricades for democracy. The coup was put down — just.

William Colby in his later years, enjoying his sailboat, one of his few sources of uncalculated joy.

William Colby too had to reinvent himself after the agency he served declared that it no longer needed him. He wrote a circumspect, slightly anodyne memoir about his career; its title of Honorable Men alone was enough to tell the world that it wasn’t the tell-all book from an angry spy spurned that it might have been hoping for. He consulted for the government on various issues for larger sums than he had ever earned as a regular federal employee, appeared from time to time as an expert commentator on television, and wrote occasional opinion pieces for the national press, most commonly about the ongoing dangers posed by nuclear weapons and the need for arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union.

In 1982, at the age of 62, this stiff-backed avatar of moral rectitude fell in love with a pretty, vivacious 37-year-old, a former American ambassador to Grenada named Sally Shelton. It struck those who knew him as almost a cliché of a mid-life crisis, of the sort that the intelligence services had been exploiting for decades — but then, clichés are clichés for a reason, aren’t they? “I thought Bill Colby had all the charisma of a shoe clerk,” said one family friend. “Sally is a very outgoing woman, even flamboyant. She found him a sex object, and with her he was.” The following year, Colby asked his wife Barbara for a divorce. She was taken aback, even if their marriage hadn’t been a particularly warm one in many years. “People like us don’t get a divorce!” she exclaimed — meaning, of course, upstanding Catholic couples of the Greatest Generation who were fast approaching their 40th wedding anniversary. But there it was. Whatever else was going on behind that granite façade, it seemed that Colby felt he still had some living to do.

None of Colby’s family attended the marriage ceremony, or had much to do with him thereafter. He lost not only his family but his faith: Sally Shelton had no truck with Catholicism, and he only went to church after he married her for weddings and funerals. Was the gain worth the loss? Only Colby knew the answer.

Old frenemies: Oleg Kalugin and William Colby flank Ken Berris, who directed the Spycraft video sequences.

Oleg Kalugin met William Colby for the first time in May of 1991, when both were attending the same seminar in Berlin — appropriately enough, on the subject of international terrorism, the threat destined to steal the attention of the CIA and the Russian FSB (the successor to the KGB) as the Cold War faded into history. The two men had dinner together, then agreed to be jointly interviewed on German television, a living symbol of bygones becoming bygones. “What do you think of Mr. Colby as a leading former figure in U.S. intelligence?” Kalugin was asked.

“Had I had a choice in my earlier life, I would have gladly worked under Mr. Colby,” he answered. The two became friends, meeting up whenever their paths happened to cross in the world.

And why shouldn’t they be friends? They had led similar lives in so many ways. Both were ambitious men who had justified their ambition as a call to service, then devoted their lives to it, swallowing any moral pangs they might have felt in the process, until the people they served had rejected them. In many ways, they had more in common with one another than with the wives and children they had barely seen for long stretches of their lives.

And how are we to judge these two odd, distant men, both so adept at the art of concealment as to seem hopelessly impenetrable? “I am not emotional,” Colby said to a reporter during his turbulent, controversy-plagued tenure as director of the CIA. “I admit it. Oh, don’t watch me like that. You’re looking for something underneath which isn’t there. It’s all here on the surface, believe me.”

Our first instinct might be to scoff at such a claim; surely everyone has an inner life, a tender core they dare reveal only to those they love best. But maybe we should take Colby at his word; maybe doing so helps to explain some things. As Colby and Kalugin spouted their high-minded ideals about duty and country, they forgot those closest to them, the ones who needed them most of all, apparently believing that they possessed some undefined special qualities of character or a special calling that exempted them from all that. Journalist Neil Sheehan once said of Colby that “he would have been perfect as a soldier of Christ in the Jesuit order.” There is something noble but also something horrible about such devotion to an abstract cause. One has to wonder whether it is a crutch, a compensation for some piece of a personality that is missing.

Certainly there was an ultimate venality, an amorality to these two men’s line of work, as captured in the subtitle of the computer game they came together to make: “The Great Game.” Was it all really just a game to them? It would seem so, at least at the end. How else could Kalugin blithely state that he would have “gladly” worked with Colby, forgetting the vast gulf of ideology that lay between them? Tragically, the ante in their great game was all too often human lives. Looking back on all they did, giving all due credit to their courage and capability, it seems clear to me that the world would have been better off without their meddling. The institutions they served were full of people like them, people who thought they knew best, who thought they were that much cleverer than the rest of the world and had a right to steer its course from the shadows. Alas, they weren’t clever enough to see how foolish and destructive their arrogance was.

“My father lived in a world of secrets,” says William’s eldest son Carl Colby. “Always watching, listening, his eye on the door. He was tougher, smarter, smoother, and could be crueler than anybody I ever knew. I’m not sure he ever loved anyone, and I never heard him say anything heartfelt.” Was William Colby made that way by the organization he served, or did he join the organization because he already was that way? It’s impossible to say. Yet we must be sure to keep these things in mind when we turn in earnest to the game on which Colby and Kalugin allowed their names to be stamped, and find out what it has to say about the ethical wages of being a spy.

(Sources: the books Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby by John Prados, Spymaster: My Thirty-Two Years in Intelligence and Espionage against the West by Oleg Kalugin, Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam, 1945-2010, sixth edition by James S. Olson and Randy Roberts, Shadow Warrior: William Egan Colby and the CIA by Randall B. Woods, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA by William Colby and Peter Forbath, and Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of America’s Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam by William Colby and James McCargar; the documentary film The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby; Sierra On-Line’s newsletter InterAction of Summer 1993; Questbusters of February 1994. Online sources include “Who Murdered the CIA Chief?” by Zalin Grant at Pythia Press.)

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Will you find yourself crushed by the intrigues of the bold, the idealistic, and the desperate? Or will you take your place among them as one of the Lords of Infinity?

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

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Tuesday, Dec. 20,. 2022 over zoom.   Zarf, anjchang, Carrington (Eaten By A Grue), Hugh, Kyrill, Michael Hilborn, Emilie Z,  Josh Grams,  Kathryn,  Stephen Eric Jablonski, and Dana Freitas attended.  Warning: What follows is perhaps not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.

Carrington is reviewing Hadean Lands on Eaten By A Grue. Discussion about reset command in Hadean Lands. Hugh found a bug in EBAG show dates.

In the podcast they mentioned, Jason Shiga’s Leviathan which is now on Steam!

What we’re playing:

• Mad God
• Then You Come to A House Unlike the Previous One.
• Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebees

The author has been running a mailing list game “Inbox Adventure: Interactive Fiction via Email”
Check out this author, Geoffrey Golden giving his talk at Narrascope video. Also check out misadventure snack, a form that collects ideas for guiding an interactive IF game.

Call for talks on Narrrascope is up https://narrascope.org/pages/call.html

Zarf has been judging for indie game festival (IGF) this year. Mention of some of the games he’s judging:

• Betrayal at Club Low (Alt Geek City environment)
• Midnight Girl
• Butterfly soup 2 (asian teenagers growing up in america)
• Beacon Pines (point and click adventure)

Emilie and Angela attended Nick’s Interactive Narratives final project class:

• Ginseng Soup
• Lost in the Woods
• Rubber Ducky

Zarf did a tiny game in November https://confoundingcalendar.itch.io
Advent mirror short IFpuzzlegame https://zarf.itch.io/advent-mirror

Next year is the 9th anniversary of Hadean Lands , plan to release
Trope tank has a copy of physical book of Hadean Lands.

Life and Suffering of Sir Brante– medieval narrative
https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_life_and_suffering_of_sir_brante

Kyrill found it interesting they games they deal with slow time. These games explore the “dead time” as something productive to get you involveed deeper into the world of the game. Exploring what happens when nothing is happening.For example in Pentiment, referring to the slow time in medieval age. Everything is thoughtful and meaningful. Heidegger’s theories about a broken tool eliciting out what people think. “A perfect tool is a broken tool. ” Invites the thought that humans are in constant repair.

Beyond the Chiron Gate bay John Ayliff deals with exploring alien technology. Also mentioned Voyageurs by Bruno Dias, Out there by Ayliff . Concept of procedurally generated planet description with more of a plot line.

Gods will be watching– a semi strategy game.

Kyrill is working with Jim Andrews on a bigger version of Sea of Power, a larger version of “Sea of 9” from Taper. Idea of control over text.

Kathryn has been reading Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

Carrington working with Kay on beta testing his PunyInform adventure. Check out DORM Adventure!

Emilie is finishing up her dating simulator! Sunflowers and god reference. Sunflowers are invasive and alien-looking! Carrington just went to a sunflower maze in the fall.

Now in three (or more) astounding dimensions!

The Meaningfully Divergent Cover Art of Spellbreaker

Spellbreaker was the only game in the Zork saga (Zork I, Zork II, Zork III, Enchanter, Sorcerer, and Spellbreaker) to initially release in the gray box format. The cover art was attractive, albeit a departure from the illustrations for the first two games in the trilogy. Both of those images implied the flatness of the printed word on paper. Enchanter‘s cover features an ornate letter “E” that might have been at home in an illuminated manuscript, while the minimalist and monochromatic amulet pictured on the cover of Sorcerer, complete with identically-shaped bits of magic flying off in all directions, implies a thing rendered rather than a thing itself.

The Spellbreaker package, by contrast, features its subject in what we are meant to perceive as three-dimensional space. A cube rests on a flat, reflective surface with one of its vertices pointed at the audience. The area is filled with varied and complex lighting: hues of green, purple, and blue splash against both the cube and the flat surface below it. A strange symbol adorns one side of the otherwise featureless cube.

It’s a comparatively busy cover. What are we to make of it? It would be naive to ignore the obvious answer: someone thought it would entice people to buy it. Likewise, it would be cynical to stop there. It seems that dimensionality is a central theme or trope of Spellbreaker. The primary treasures of Enchanter and Sorcerer are two dimensional. They are texts on flat surfaces: pages, papers, and so forth. In Spellbreaker, the player collects cubes. Rather than gather bits of writing, the player finds objects to write on. The cover art for Spellbreaker makes sense: in many ways, the story is one of breaking free of or through or beyond the flatness of the written word.

This has implications for posts I’ve previously made about the Enchanter series. I’ve argued, for instance, that Enchanter was ultimately concerned with the transformational power of language. I still think that’s true, but how does that align (or not) with the story of Spellbreaker? I’ll try to return to this question next time.

Metatext and Spellbreaker

In addition to the game and various instructional references, Spellbreaker shipped with a copy of the Frobozz Magic Equipment Catalog, a set of six “enchanter cards,” and an Enchanter’s Guild pin. The catalog does timeline and continuity wonks (Zork continuity was once a going concern) the favor of declaring its year of publication right on its cover. My memory is fuzzy on this point: did Sorcerer specify the year of its occurrence, or did one have to calculate the year based on Belboz’s age? In any case, the catalog indicates that Spellbreaker takes place in 966, just eighteen years after the events of Zork III.

The Catalog is the best of all the Enchanter trilogy browsies. Enchanter‘s “A Brief History of Magic,” whose cover reflects an unwillingness to reconcile the original art to the new page dimensions of the gray box, features an improbably hideous, Pepto-Bismol pink border. That browsie may, in fact, be the absolute worst of all of Infocom’s gray box offerings. That’s to say nothing of the text itself, whose vain strivings toward hilarity typify the post-folio “lord frambozz flatwit bweh heh heh” humor so characteristic of many of Infocom’s rereleases. Therein, continuity fans were confronted with three Ages (two of them sounding quite scientific) that seem nested within an Age of Magic, which would ultimately be followed by… the Age of Science. The text yields a timeline featuring Magic Science, Magic Empiricism, and, yes, actual Science Science.

By contrast, the jokes in Spellbreaker‘s catalog actually land. The text gently lampoons mail-order catalogs of the time (The Sharper Image comes to mind), while also using commercial language to discuss the central crisis of the game: the increasing unreliability of magic. The overall effect is ideal for an in-store browsie: an amusing characterization of the game and its world that generates player curiosity. In-browsie worldbuilding works best when it is evocative and is at its worst when it bombards hapless shoppers with factoids and in-jokes. In spite of the light humor, readers of the Catalog will notice that it is a “Special Crisis Edition.” Many product listings emphasize reliability and even offer alternatives to magic: “If magic fails to protect you, turn to the blades that will.” The Catalog also helpfully explains what a “burin” is, a fact which few other than Dave Lebling are likely to know.

The collectible enchanter cards serve as copy protection, and they are reminiscent of baseball cards. An image of a famous enchanter adorns one side of a card, while a brief text summary of his (they are all male) career occupies the other. Listen, I don’t want to be any less fun than I’ve already been, so I’ll just say that I don’t think they’re very funny. I don’t think Double Fanucci is inherently funny (or even synthetically funny), which is a significant, recurring gag in these cards. The information provided is used to pass a copy protection challenge. They are certainly superior to A Mind Forever Voyaging‘s code wheel on that front. This content is wildly out of step with Spellbreaker‘s tone, though they do afford more dates for students of Zork continuity.

However, I am not a student of Zork continuity.

A Brief Synopsis of Spellbreaker

The previous games in the Enchanter series (let’s add Zork III to the pile while we’re at it) all featured compelling openings, and Spellbreaker does not disappoint in this regard. Play begins in the midst of a meeting between guild masters from across the region. These leaders represent various trade guilds as well as chapters of the Guild of Enchanters. It seems that the magic that trade guilds rely on is no longer working. An argument escalates, but before the scene culminates in physical confrontation, a mysterious, shadowy figure turns everyone in the guild hall into an amphibian. Everyone except the protagonist, of course, who chases him out into the busy streets of Accardi-by-the-Sea.

When the shadow disappears into a puff of acrid smoke, the Novice (that’s what we’ve always called him) finds that it left behind a white, featureless cube. The player also realizes that a new spell is in the Novice’s spell book: “The blorple spell (explore an object’s mystic connections).” Finding cubes and BLORPLing them is a goal, new to Spellbreaker, that surpasses the old objective of finding new spells. By using the BLORPLE spell on these white cubes, new geographies are introduced to the game world. Unlike the world maps of Sorcerer and Enchanter, Spellbreaker‘s map is not beholden to a contiguous representation of space. This returns us to the previously mentioned characteristic of dimensionality: the map of Spellbreaker is not “flat.” Its connections are often contextual rather than literal.

As the Novice traverses the spaces within and without these cubes, the goal of catching the Shadow seems to take second place to the objective of collecting all of the cubes. While I will discuss this in detail next time, it is enough to say for now that Spellbreaker is in many ways the brilliant inversion that Zork III really ought to have been. Gathering every cube leads to a confrontation with the Shadow, a meeting that culminates in what I consider Infocom’s greatest ending (I’m sure many of you prefer Trinity, which is a reasonable opinion). It’s a shame that Infocom would endeavor to defang it just two years later, but that is a story for another day.

Next

What does Spellbreaker have to do with the Zork Trilogy? What doesn’t it have to do with Zork: Nemesis? Such is my commitment that I will revisit all of the point and click Zork games in preparation for a final look at Spellbreaker and the Zork saga!

If I can get them running, of course.

I apologize for the delays. My Inform 7 work in progress has been in testing again, and that process burns up a lot of my creative energy. This can’t go on forever; Spring Thing isn’t far away! I can’t talk much about it until after Spring Thing is over, but I will document my experiences as a new Inform 7 author when that time comes.

The post Spellbreaker: The Cube on the Box appeared first on Gold Machine.

00290 REM This is the Haunted House Game. It was conceived
00300 REM primarily by Rich Stratton, with Rich Gould and
00310 REM Norm Hurst.
00450 REM November, 1979

We’ve got a namespace clash here with Haunted House (1979), the TRS-80 game intended to fit in 4K on two sides of a tape. This instead was for a DEC PDP-10 mainframe, as found in this directory at bitsavers. I don’t have any other biographical context on this game’s creation other than the names found above. However, it is fair to say (from the content) that the authors would definitely have been in their teenage years.

You are in the Ghost’s Study. It is filled with books and magazines about famous ghosts.
What next? READ BOOK
Hmm..this seems to be written in Swedish!
Each page says..
‘Oh, yah…on chancer der boom-boom!
VIRDE !’

From the now-closed Living Computers Museum.

I discovered (and played) Haunted House via the website 8bitworkshop, which has a lovely online BASIC interpreter which lets you simulate various flavors of old BASIC, including the original Dartmouth one. Amongst games I was familiar with (like Wumpus and Star Trader) it had Haunted House listed, which I hadn’t heard of before.

Occasionally, someone asks I how I drudge up all these old games; part of the trick is being alert for when something new pops up amidst the very common.

For any transcripts that follow, I am mashing together paragraphs for readability. Additionally, while the November 1979 version isn’t archived, we have versions from March 1980 and June 1982; I’m playing the latter.

This is the latest version as of 2-Jun-82.
Welcome to the Haunted House.
Do you want Instructions? YES
You are about to begin a perilous journey. You will wake up and find yourself in one of the many rooms of an old mansion—a mansion which has been abandoned and is now infested with Evils and Unspeakable Deaths of many kinds. You must escape from the confines of the house. By using single-word comands you may move through the maze of old rooms. You have the following items with you:
TOILET PAPER
CROWBAR
LANTERN
FLASHLIGHT
RADAR JAMMER
MACHETE
A CAN OF GHOST REPELLANT
MATCHES
A DICTIONARY
FLY-SWATTER
Use your common sense to tell you what to do….
Type ‘HELP’ for help.
Select your difficulty level: 1 (easy) to 9 (hard).
?

Straight off here we’ve got a very unusual thing, and I’m not even referring to the difficulty level — implying this is an adventure-roguelike with randomized elements, like we’ve covered before — but the fact that you start with nearly all the objects already in your inventory. You can find a key and treasure, but otherwise the tools are permanent parts of your inventory. The game hard-codes the “INVENTORY” command that way:

10270 PRINT “You have with you…..”
10271 PRINT ” TOILET PAPER, a CROWBAR, a LANTERN, a FLASHLIGHT,”
10272 PRINT ” a RADAR JAMMER, a MACHETE, A CAN OF GHOST REPELLANT,”
10273 PRINT ” some MATCHES, A DICTIONARY, and a FLY-SWATTER.”
10280 PRINT “You have collected…..”
10285 FOR N8=1 TO 30

It’s interesting how rare this is amongst adventure games; it makes sense for an infiltration (like Spider and Web) or hiking trip to have a well-prepared character, but there’s often still a reluctance to give the main character too much to start with.

The difficulty, incidentally, just sets

a.) light level — you have both the lantern and flashlight that work, and can refill the lantern with kerosene if you find it and the flashlight with batteries if you find them.

b.) how soon you need to DEFECATE

Directly from the source code:

01670 IF Q$=”DEFECATE” THEN 1690

This needs to be done in a room with a toilet (if you don’t you attract wolverines who eat you) plus the game prompts you after:

06600 PRINT “What next”;

Then to survive you must type WIPE to which the game says “Good. You have saved yourself from the wolverines.” Otherwise:

You neglected to clean up. A pack of wolverines have been attracted by the scent and have devoured you.

While you get started in a random spot, the overall map structure is not random. The game has a slightly different feel to the opening when you start in a basement torture chamber complex…

You are in the torture chamber. Great place for some discipline. You can’t see past your nose since it’s so dark down here. The smell of death is omnipresent.
What next? E
You are in the torture chamber. I’d get out before you undergo a little head shrinking. But who knows which way to go?
What next? E
You are in the torture chamber. You’ll have to find a way out fast, or learn to be a masochist.

…versus a hallway on one of the upper floors.

You are in the Foyer. There is a heavy oak door on the north wall. There is also a doorway to the south.
There is a small box here.
What next? LIGHT FLASHLIGHT
The lantern casts eerie shadows on the wall.
What next? OPEN BOX
Inside the box there is nothing….it’s empty
What next? S
You are in a Hallway. To the north and south are doorways. To the east is a large staircase heading up into the darkness.
What next? S
You are in a Hallway. To the north and south are doorways. To the east is an archway with darkness beyond.

The boxes mentioned in the second excerpt are both filled randomly and placed randomly. They might contain something valuable (like coins) they might have a deadly snake, or the might have an “ambiguity”.

You are in a Bathroom. A toilet sits in the corner. To the north and south are doors.
There is a small box here.
What next? OPEN BOX
Inside the box there is an ambiguity.
What next? READ AMBIGUITY
You can’t read a AMBIGUITY , FOOL!!

As befits this sort of game, you have multiple gruesome ways to die.

The ghosts have strapped you to the bed and smothered you!!!!

A failure to use GHOST-REPELLANT.

You are surrounded by darkness…..thousands of dwarves and goblins, no longer afraid of you, attack and devour you!!!! AAAAARRRRRRGGHHH!!!

You ran out of your light sources or forgot to turn one on.

The bats have pecked your eyes out and you you have bled to a hideous death!!!!

You didn’t turn on the RADAR-JAMMER when bats are around.

Essentially, the perma-tools in inventory are each applicable to a particular obstacle, so surviving is mostly a matter of knowing the right command to do when. The parser is the very crude bespoke type so the right syntax to use something isn’t necessarily obvious. It isn’t terrible to work out but a single wrong move in the wrong place means death (as opposed to a gentle error message letting you try again) so I dove for the source code early to get a verb list so I wouldn’t be quite so irritated while playing.

01460 IF Q$=”CHOP” THEN 7500
01470 IF Q$=”SWAT” THEN 9570
01480 IF Q$=”SPRAY” THEN 7470

A secondary goal is to get treasures for points, but the primary goal is simply to escape. There are a couple ways, some with a random chance of death.

First, you can find a bedroom with a window. You can OPEN WINDOW; the game will then prompt you what to do next. The response the game wants is TIE SHEETS (although it only bothers to check if your first three letters are TIE, you could say TIE NONSENSE and the game behaves the same).

You have tied the sheets together and they are lowered out of the window. They don’t look very strong…..What next

Then if you go DOWN the game has a partial chance of just killing you, and a low chance (10%) of letting you escape.

Second, you can find the Foyer to the game, have a key randomly obtained from one of the boxes, and escape straightforwardly (no chance of death).

Third, you can follow the senator Ted Kennedy. He can appear randomly.

You are in a Hallway. Your fate is in your
own hands.
SUDDENLY……
an icy chill races down your spine; Someone is behind you!!
you turn……..
It’s
!! T E D K E N N E D Y !!
He offers to show you the way out; will you follow him? YES
CONGRATULATIONS!! You have overcome all odds
and escaped from the house!
You are no longer in the house or the game.
You were in the house for exactly 18 moves.
You scored a total of 124 points.

There is a 50% chance if you try to follow you will die instead because he takes a wrong turn. Also, you can summon Ted right away by READING the DICTIONARY that you start with in your inventory.

What next? READ DICTIONARY
You open the dictionary….it says…
Ahhhh…too bad. It is written in ghost language.
Do you know how to read ghost language? YES
What does IARANDME mean? I AM A NERD
That is CORRECT!! You must be a NERD to understand ghost language.
All is not lost however. All you have to do is talk to …
!! T E D K E N N E D Y !!
He offers to show you the way out;
will you follow him? YES
Ah Ted, shouldn’t we be going left here??
TED, left…. NO TED, LEFT…..LEFT!!!!!
ooops, looks like Ted missed that turn, but he’ll be back in a week to pull you out (or rather dredge you up).

Incidentally, if you get the anagram wrong, the game gets upset that you were lying about knowing ghost language and kills you.

Despite the game’s written-by-teenager-ness, it does follow in our adventure-roguelike category, and it is useful to ask the same question we’ve asked for the other games: does it work? Does anything work? I think starting with all the tools was necessary, given the game will otherwise sometimes drop you in a room where you’re just going to die otherwise; this evades the problem some games like Lugi had of giving the player a puzzle but hiding the solution so well for a particular random seed it was impossible to solve. I also did like the randomly placed non-descript boxes; for some reason they worked more atmospherically than scattering items would, just because of the possibility of empty boxes or a trap.

One of the floors mapped out, although I can’t guarantee complete accuracy because the game is fussy about describing what exits are possible from each room.

The most erratic aspect is the complete lack of worry on putting the player near the exit. One time I started right at the Foyer; the only reason I couldn’t just walk out immediately was a lack of a key. And of course the DICTIONARY provides immediate exit. However, since this game is really leaning on the slot-machine end of things (but far less painful than Conquest of Memory Alpha) I think the chaotic setup works as is; it wouldn’t necessarily work with games that are less obviously goofy larks.

This is my finale post for Zork III, so make sure you’ve read my other posts about Zork III before this one.

From The Infocom Gallery.

While I had discovered the area of the game with a “beam room” and so forth about 40% of the way through my gameplay…

>n
Beam Room
You are in the middle of a long north-south corridor whose walls are polished stone. A narrow red beam of light crosses the room at the north end, inches above the floor.
The corridor continues north and south.

…I remembered the beam being the start puzzle to the endgame of mainframe Zork, so I wanted to save it for after I had everything else taken care of first. There’s some interesting (and slightly confusing) aspects the game has for people who enter this section early (which I’ll get into later), but for my own game I only had two things left to do.

First was a secret action which I got essentially by luck. When you fall into the lake any items you are carrying drop in. I originally got the feeling that such items were lost forever, but you can dive in and find them:

>d
Underwater
You are below the surface of the lake. It turns out that the lake is quite shallow and the bottom is only a few feet below you. Considering the frigid temperature of the water, you should probably not plan an extended stay. The lake bottom is sandy and a few hearty plants and algae live there.
There is a lamp here.
Out of the corner of your eye, a small, shiny object appears in the sand. A moment later, it is gone!

(Mind you, the lamp is ruined if you do this with that item specifically, although you can make do with the torch.)

The “small, shiny object” is a medallion, one of the items you need. Rather frustratingly, there is a 50% chance picking it up will fail, and if you stay in the water too long you will drown. So there is a chance for some people they would assume there is some extra puzzle other than just typing GET SHINY over and over. I died after 5 failed attempts, which has about a 3% chance of happening. Game designers, would you really be happy with 3 out of 100 people being in this circumstance? (I know, I’ve gone over this before, and it is a flaw I don’t see in modern games nearly so often, but everyone once in a while it does happen.)

The last remaining issue was the battle with the hooded figure.

From the Zork User Group hintbook, via the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

I was able to kill the figure entirely through raw persistence, which was a puzzle in itself (my first combat took, without exaggeration, about 50 turns, and it is possible to straight-up die if you’re unlucky) but that still felt fairly unsatisfying even though it caused my score to go up by 1.

I ended up needing to check hints. I think I get (by reverse engineering later events) how this was supposed to be puzzled out, but at least at the time I didn’t manage.

>hit man with sword
A good parry! Your sword wounds the hooded figure!
The figure is hurt, and its strength appears to be fading.
The hooded figure attempts a thrust, but its weakened state prevents hitting you.

>get hood
The hooded figure, though recovering from wounds, is strong enough to force you back.
The hooded figure attempts a thrust, but its weakened state prevents hitting you.

>hit man with sword
A good slash, but it misses by a mile.
The hooded figure attempts a thrust, but its weakened state prevents hitting you.

>hit man with sword
A good stroke, but it’s too slow.
The hooded figure attempts a thrust, but its weakened state prevents hitting you.

>hit man with sword
A quick stroke catches the hooded figure off guard! Blood trickles down the figure’s arm!
The figure appears to be badly hurt and defenseless.
The hooded figure attempts a thrust, but its weakened state prevents hitting you.

>get hood
You slowly remove the hood from your badly wounded opponent and recoil in horror at the sight of your own face, weary and wounded. A faint smile comes to the lips and then the face starts to change, very slowly, into that of an old, wizened person. The image fades and with it the body of your hooded opponent. The cloak remains on the ground.

As the early part of the excerpt indicates, this is only possible at the exact right moment. I tested it multiple times and I’m fairly sure I’ve also had a situation where it the figure went from not-wounded-enough straight to dead after a good sword blow, making the hood-nabbing impossible. I had tried every iteration of yielding or stopping the combat I could think, so I had the right concept, just the wrong action.

I think the point of the puzzle was to suss out, from the description of the Dungeon Master (which is given fairly explicitly on death)…

He is dressed simply in a hood and cloak, wearing a few simple jewels, carrying something under one arm, and leaning on a wooden staff. A single key, as if to a massive prison cell, hangs from his belt.

…that we are supposed to try to match; that is, we need the hood to complete our ensemble in the first place.

Clearly, the authorial goal (I think Marc Blank is the person making the choices here as opposed to Lebling, but I’m not sure) is to intentionally have a bit of the flair of randomness which was admittedly present back in Zork I to craft a puzzle around. Having circumstances, say, where exactly five turns of hitting are needed before the action, would feel a bit mechanical a suck some of the appeal out of the combat system. The game also is extremely forgiving on death, so in a ludological sense needing to have a “rematch” with the hooded figure may be an intended part of the narrative.

The end result of the two resolutions was give me:

A wooden staff
A strange key
A vial
A cloak (being worn)
A hood (being worn)
A sword
A lamp
A very ancient book
A golden ring (being worn)
A golden amulet (being worn)
A torch

I also had a chest (too heavy to be carried at the same time as the items above) but I used it to immediately solve a puzzle in the end game.

Beam Room
You are in the middle of a long north-south corridor whose walls are polished stone. A narrow red beam of light crosses the room at the north end, inches above the floor.
The corridor continues north and south.

>put chest in beam
The beam is now interrupted by a chest lying on the floor.

This allows pushing a button to the south, which consequently allows entering a “mirror room” to the north.

>push button
Click. Snap!

>n
Beam Room
There is a chest here.

>n
Hallway
This is a part of the long hallway. The east and west walls are dressed stone. In the center of the hall is a shallow stone channel. In the center of the room the channel widens into a large hole around which is engraved a compass rose.
The hallway continues to the south.
A large mirror fills the north side of the hallway.
The mirror is mounted on a panel which has been opened outward.

>n
Inside Mirror
You are inside a rectangular box of wood whose structure is rather complicated. Four sides and the roof are filled in, and the floor is open.

As you face the side opposite the entrance, two short sides of carved and polished wood are to your left and right. The left panel is mahogany, the right pine. The wall you face is red on its left half and black on its right. On the entrance side, the wall is white opposite the red part of the wall it faces, and yellow opposite the black section. The painted walls are at least twice the length of the unpainted ones. The ceiling is painted blue.

In the floor is a stone channel about six inches wide and a foot deep. The channel is oriented in a north-south direction. In the exact center of the room the channel widens into a circular depression perhaps two feet wide. Incised in the stone around this area is a compass rose.

Running from one short wall to the other at about waist height is a wooden bar, carefully carved and drilled. This bar is pierced in two places. The first hole is in the center of the bar (and thus the center of the room). The second is at the left end of the room (as you face opposite the entrance). Through each hole runs a wooden pole.

The pole at the left end of the bar is short, extending about a foot above the bar, and ends in a hand grip. The pole has been dropped into a hole carved in the stone floor.

The long pole at the center of the bar extends from the ceiling through the bar to the circular area in the stone channel. This bottom end of the pole has a T-bar a bit less than two feet long attached to it, and on the T-bar is carved an arrow. The arrow and T-bar are pointing west.

How was one supposed to work out interrupting the beam was needed? Even though I solved the puzzle right away I have no earthly idea. I remembered the puzzle from Zork mainframe and applied that solution. Importantly, the mainframe version of the puzzle had a different feel to it: you have your inventory reduced to the iconic sword and lamp, but you need to interrupt the beam! I remember feeling a pang at leaving the sword behind; so even though the puzzle didn’t have good motivation, at least it led to a good narrative moment. Here, the empty chest (or likely a few other item choices, like the empty grue repellent can) hardly makes for the same poignance.

The “Inside Mirror” room is just as headache-inducing as I remembered. 12 years ago when I wrote about the scene I compared it to Myst, writing “Myst is really awkward and difficult described as text”. To sum up what’s going on:

The room is a vehicle that can shift around on a track. The track only goes south/north.

The short pole is sort of an anchor that keeps the vehicle from turning. You need to raise it first to be able to get rotation buttons to work.

The red and yellow panels are buttons which both rotate clockwise when pushed.

The black and white panels rotate counterclockwise when pushed.

The mahogany panel moves forward, and the pine panel opens the vehicle.

The long pole and arrow indicate direction.

With these functions sussed out the solution is pretty straightforward: lift the short pole, turn to the north, drop the short pole, move to the end of the track, lift the short pole again, spin so the exit is on the north side, and open. Voila.

>PUSH PINE
The pine wall swings open.

>N
As you leave, the door swings shut.
Dungeon Entrance
You are in a north-south hallway which ends, to the north, at a large wooden
door.
The south side of the room is divided by a wooden wall into small hallways to
the southeast and southwest.
The wooden door has a barred panel in it at about head height. The door itself
is closed.
Your sword is glowing with a faint blue glow.

Now, anyone familiar with the game might know I skipped over something: the Guardians of Zork.

These are statues standing on either side of the track that will wallop you if they see you, which can happen if the vehicle is wobbly (that is, you don’t stabilize with the short pole). I only found this after after the fact looking at people writing about the game, though! The Guardians are meant to thwap anyone who they see, but if there is a stable mirror passing through it looks like they’re just seeing the other Guardian.

There’s a part that makes this even more confusing. Let’s suppose you’ve gone through this and find you haven’t completed all the tasks in the first part of the game. I’m guessing there’s a couple results based on the circumstances, but here’s one if you leave an item behind.

>knock on door
The knock reverberates along the hall. For a time it seems there will be no answer. Then you hear someone unlatching the small wooden panel. Through the bars of the great door, the wrinkled face of an old man appears. He looks you over with his keen, piercing gaze and then speaks gravely. “I have been waiting a long time for you, and you are nearly ready for the last test! I will remain here. When you feel you are ready, go to the secret door and ‘SAY “FROTZ OZMOO”‘! Go, now!” He starts to leave but turns back briefly and wags his finger in warning. “Do not forget the double quotes!” A moment later, you find yourself in the Button Room.
Your sword is no longer glowing.

This gives you a “teleport” command that now works to jump past the mirror altogether. However, you still can’t get back using the vehicle (at least from everything I’ve tried). The only way back through is to ignore the mirror vehicle and walk, on foot, past the Guardians.

>sw
Narrow Room
You are in a narrow room, whose east wall is a large mirror.
The opposite wall is solid rock.
Somewhat to the south, identical stone statues face each other from pedestals on opposite sides of the corridor. The statues represent Guardians of Zork, a military order of ancient lineage. They are portrayed as heavily armored warriors standing at ease, hands clasped around formidable bludgeons.
Your sword is no longer glowing.

>examine guardians
The guardians are quite impressive. I wouldn’t get in their way if I were you!

>se
You can’t go that way.

>s
The Guardians awake, and in perfect unison, utterly destroy you with their stone bludgeons. Satisfied, they resume their posts.

**** You have died ****

This is doable if you’ve got the flask from the sailor. The liquid will make you invisible for a turn, long enough to scoot by the Guardians safely. But there’s only one dose, so you need to use the FROTZ OZMOO in order to come back.

So we have a weird circumstance, where

a.) the flask is technically optional

b.) however, it is not optional for someone coming to visit the Dungeon Master early

c.) however, who would arrive at the Dungeon Master early and keep playing, rather than load a saved game?

Also! You can, weirdly enough, move the mirror vehicle a bit (you can’t ignore it entirely), get out of it, and then walk north past the Guardians on foot. This requires the invisibility again.

So the vial is intended to give a little extra flexibility — was the ability to use it to avoid finishing the mirror puzzle more or less inadvertent? The manner of obtaining it (saying HELLO SAILOR) I’ve already prodded at as a design flaw, but it works a little better if it considered optional. I still never found anywhere in Zork III to give a clue on the phrase, though.

Going back to the door, here’s what happens when you have done everything correctly and have all the relevant items. This means: hood, amulet, ring, key, staff, book.

>knock on door
The knock reverberates along the hall. For a time it seems there will be no answer. Then you hear someone unlatching the small wooden panel. Through the bars of the great door, the wrinkled face of an old man appears. After a moment, he starts to smile broadly. He disappears for an instant and the massive door opens without a sound. The old man motions and you feel yourself drawn toward him.
“I am the Master of the Dungeon!” he booms. “I have been watching you closely during your journey through the Great Underground Empire. Yes!,” he says, as if recalling some almost forgotten time, “we have met before, although I may not appear as I did then.” You look closely into his deeply lined face and see the faces of the old man by the secret door, your “friend” at the cliff, and the hooded figure. “You have shown kindness to the old man, and compassion toward the hooded one. I have seen you display patience in the puzzle and trust at the cliff. You have demonstrated strength, ingenuity, and valor. However, one final test awaits you. Now! Command me as you will, and complete your quest!”

Narrow Corridor
You are in a narrow north-south corridor. At the south end is a door and at the north end is an east-west corridor. The door is closed.
The dungeon master is quietly leaning on his staff here.
Your sword has begun to glow very brightly.

The way the game is structured (especially with the ability to loop back) this is really where the endgame for Zork III starts, as opposed to starting at the beam with Zork mainframe. It is consequently fairly short and feels odd in a plot-drama sense.

brief aside on endgames of old school text adventures

Crowther/Woods Adventure had a simple, impossibly abstruse puzzle, but tried to make it a finale with a giant collection of items from the game and a giant explosion. Warp tried a very long impossibly complicated sequence of puzzles. It really seems like you’d optimally want something in the middle, something that is both a narrative and game climax, where the narrative speeds to some dramatic reckoning and the puzzles perhaps involve putting together prior insights but aren’t necessarily hard in order to keep things from getting driven into the ground. It is shockingly hard to find a game that has those two parts in combination. Hezarin managed to have a nice final showdown with a the titular wizard, but got absurdly hard. (Is the absurdly hard part a bad thing? Should the culmination actually be testing the most extreme puzzle skills?) The only game from All the Adventures so far that I think really stuck the landing is Level 9’s take on Adventure, which pushed hard on difficulty, true, but not absurdly so, had the cave slowly flooding for added drama, and included one of the best puzzles in the entire game (or all of 1982, even) in the form of “rescue all the elves”.

end aside

Mainframe Zork had a trivia quiz which seemed to encapsulate “include some element of all things from the journey before”. This gets understandably cut here, but without a replacement, it is just a single straightforward puzzle.

Here, the Dungeon Master follows you around and you can give him commands, like STAY or PUSH BUTTON. There’s a parapet by a cell door which is quickly recognizable as an elevator of sorts.

Parapet
You are standing behind a stone retaining wall which rims a large parapet overlooking a fiery pit. It is difficult to see through the smoke and flame which fills the pit, but it seems to be more or less bottomless. The pit itself is circular, about two hundred feet in diameter, and is fashioned of roughly hewn stone. The flames generate considerable heat, so it is rather uncomfortable standing here.
There is an object here which looks like a sundial. On it are an indicator arrow and (in the center) a large button. On the face of the dial are numbers 1 through 8. The indicator points to the number 1.
To the south, across a narrow corridor, is a prison cell.
The dungeon master follows you.

>master, stay
The dungeon master answers, “I will stay.”

>turn dial to 3
The dial now points to 3.

>s
North Corridor
Your sword is glowing with a faint blue glow.

>s
Prison Cell
You are in a featureless prison cell. You can see an east-west corridor outside the open wooden door in front of you. Your view also takes in the parapet, and behind, a large, fiery pit.
The dungeon master is standing on the parapet, leaning on his wooden staff. His keen gaze is fixed on you and he looks somewhat tense, as if waiting for something to happen.
Your sword is no longer glowing.

>master, push button
“If you wish,” he replies.
Prison Cell
You are in a bare prison cell. Its wooden door is securely fastened, and you can see only flames and smoke through its small window.
You notice that the cell door is now closed.

This sequence here incidentally traps you. The thing to realize is to mess with the elevator first and find there is a special bronze door in the “cell” when you set the number to 4. Then go through the same sequence above, but while you are calling the the master from within the elevator, have him set the dial to 1 and only then push the button. Then you can pass through the bronze door:

Treasury of Zork
This is a large room, richly appointed in a style that bespeaks exquisite taste. To judge from its contents, it is the ultimate storehouse of the wealth of the Great Underground Empire.

There are chests here containing precious jewels, mountains of zorkmids, rare paintings, ancient statuary, and beguiling curios.

On one wall is an annotated map of the Empire, showing the locations of various troves of treasure, and of several superior scenic views.

On a desk at the far end of the room may be found stock certificates representing a controlling interest in FrobozzCo International, the multinational conglomerate and parent company of the Frobozz Magic Boat Co., etc.

As you gleefully examine your new-found riches, the Dungeon Master materializes beside you, and says, “Now that you have solved all the mysteries of the Dungeon, it is time for you to assume your rightly-earned place in the scheme of things. Long have I waited for one capable of releasing me from my burden!” He taps you lightly on the head with his staff, mumbling a few well-chosen spells, and you feel yourself changing, growing older and more stooped. For a moment there are two identical mages standing among the treasure, then your counterpart dissolves into a mist and disappears, a sardonic grin on his face.

For a moment you are relieved, safe in the knowledge that you have at last completed your quest in ZORK. You begin to feel the vast powers and lore at your command and thirst for an opportunity to use them.

Your potential is 7 of a possible 7, in 377 moves.

The puzzle is oddly simple to finish things off, but I also do appreciate it not requiring an absurd act either. However, I do remember being blown away by mainframe Zork’s ending, and not quite as much here.

The last sentence is remarkable. That was the ending?

I was stuck by it as a lens of sorts: here is a new art form, one raw and unrefined, with the potential to be serious and profound.

For me it was the most gratifying moment of playing Zork.

The thing about this is: the last sentence of mainframe Zork is not the same as Zork III. Mainframe ends at the sardonic grin. Zork III ends with “You begin to feel the vast powers and lore at your command and thirst for an opportunity to use them.”

This changes the tone drastically. The first almost seems like a cruel cosmic joke, with it left ambiguous just how happy the protagonist is about their situation. The second ending is much more explicit about the protagonist’s position, and it dampens the effect. I can see why it’d be more commercially desirable but I certainly would not call it “the most gratifying moment of playing Zork III”.

Let me round things out with two reviews or at least comments, one from the period and one recent. First, from the 1984 Kim Schuette Book of Adventure Games:

If you play this game the same way you play other adventures, you’ll never get anywhere. This time you must consider sensitivity, trust, and human compassion. Yes, educational value occurs here, as well as a lot of interesting puzzles, some of which have alternate solutions … The game pays superb attention to detail. Did you know, for example, that the chest is watertight?

Regarding “the same way you play other adventures”: from the perspective of 1982, this was something very, very, different. We’d certainly had games that interrogated the idea of killing monsters (including a direct parody of killing the troll from Zork in House of Thirty Gables) but the scene with the chest, which really doesn’t have a puzzle at all, and just demands you have the patience to allow yourself to get “ripped off” of the valuables in the chest, was nearly without precedent.

On the chest being waterproof: later versions of Zork III removed this, but the earlier versions let you fit the lamp in the chest. This allows for a solution to the dark dilemma where you put the lamp in the chest, close it, enter the lake, grab the chest from the lake, get out on the south side, open the chest and get the lamp, and then use the lamp to safely reach the key. (The dark rooms just don’t have a description, sadly.)

Here’s some quotes from Gold Machine’s coverage last year two years ago (god where did time go):

Zork III begins in a no less innovative way that challenges the amorality of the Zork trilogy as well as our own assumptions about adventure games. Unfortunately, Zork III: The Dungeon Master fails to escape the diminishing gravity of Dungeon. The result is a sputtering conclusion to the Zork trilogy.

I agree with the evaluation here: in their plot-essence, the new parts of the game stronger than the old parts. However, many of the new puzzles get foiled at least partly by random aspects, somewhat; even the chest puzzle has a random number of turns before the man first appears to offer the rope, so one player might leave the room too early while another would get the encounter even though they do the exact same commands. On the other hand, the elements from original Zork, despite lacking that random aspect, don’t add the same thematic gravitas.

On the other (other) hand Zork always had a feel of a ramshackle combination of parts, ideas jammed in at random, so it is a remarkable feat that Zork III managed a coherent theme at all, so I’m still able to admire the end product.

Now, this might normally be my goodbye to the Zork Trilogy, but I do still plan to return to the (relatively recently unearthed) 1977 source code to compare gameplay. I’d also like to take another shot at the weird Zork-clone that happened on PLATO systems that I wasn’t able to finish (and given the lack of information/hints on the Internet, nobody has been able to finish).

For now, though, I’ll going to do a one-shot visit to a game I can nearly guarantee you haven’t heard of before, followed by a return to Med Systems and the first-person adventure game Asylum II.

One of the most valuable resources for folks learning an authoring system is source code for existing games, so they can see how others have solved problems similar to the ones they’ve faced. Publicly-available source is also nice to have for folks who appreciate a game and want to learn more about the nuts and bolts of implementation, and it also helps satisfy the archival impulse that animates many parts of our community.

[...] I’m proposing that April 1 be denominated Source Code Amnesty Day: a day when we can all show our dirty laundry to the world, confident that if we all do it at once no one person’s awful awful coding will come in for special attention or derision. Marking it to April Fool’s Day also hopefully indicates the degree of seriousness with which folks should take proceedings.

-- Mike Russo, "April 1 is Source Code Amnesty Day (we’re making it a thing)", March 15th

Still, there are far more games without release source code than games with it, and for many of the smaller authoring systems, there may only be a handful of worked examples out there.

The main reason for this is not exactly a mystery, of course – it’s the reason I haven’t released the source for my two games: the average author looks at the elegantly-conceived, deeply-commented stuff that the leading authors have put out, then looks at the regurgitated pile of dog sick that constitutes their barely-working game, and wonders what possible value there could be in inflicting such horrors on an unsuspecting public.

-- Mike Russo, "April 1 is Source Code Amnesty Day (we’re making it a thing)", March 15th

[...] if others would like to also post your stuff, please piggyback on the thread – or just quietly update IFDB or upload to the IF Archive so as not to draw attention to yourself, that works too.

-- Mike Russo, "April 1 is Source Code Amnesty Day (we’re making it a thing)", March 15th

Except Hadean Lands, because I still make money off that one.

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

It’s 33% off until March 22nd!

Reclaim your mother’s throne with the mighty power of the skies! Bring down lightning on your foes, climb an endless tower, and call the ghosts of ages past to your aid. But will your sorcery save the city, or tear it apart?

Stars Arisen is a one-million-word interactive epic fantasy novel by Abigail C. Trevor, author of Heroes of Myth. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

After a four-hundred-year reign over the city-state Kelestri, your mother, the immortal and all-powerful Sorceress of the Skies, was overthrown in a violent revolution. Called a tyrant and forced into exile, she was believed dead by all. Only you, her secret child and chosen heir, know the truth. Now, as the Sorceress’s life begins to fade, she has given you a task: steal back the fallen stars that granted her power and reclaim her crown.

With the last vestiges of your mother’s magic in your hands, you descend to Kelestri to find a city on the edge of change. Factions feud over its governance, riots fill the streets, and would-be sorcerers grasp at the remnants of magic in the city’s secret corners. Seeing the rising new world, do you still intend to fulfill your mother’s ancient vision? Will you restore the Sorceress’s might, shatter it for good, or claim it for yourself?

• Play as male, female, or non-binary; gay, straight, bisexual, monogamous, polyamorous, asexual, and/or aromantic
• Wield the power of the stars to call down storms, shape the earth, ride the wind, raise the dead – or even to become immortal!
• Romance a radical orator, a savvy journalist, an outlaw mage, the heir to the rebellion, or the ghost of a master thief
• Use your political acumen to pit feuding factions against each other, or guide them to peace
• Uncover the stories that your mother wanted to bury: the secrets of her power, your ancestry, and the nature of magic itself
• Reclaim your mother’s place as ruler of Kelestri, strengthen the revolutionary government, or seize the throne for yourself!

With the magic of fallen stars in your hands, how high will you rise?

We hope you enjoy playing Stars Arisen. 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.

Definite progress!

From the Commodore cover of the game, via Mobygames.

Some of this progress was, admittedly, sheer luck in timing. The game continues its pattern of having time be important, and one particular moment I solved what would was potentially a very tricky puzzle by accident.

Last time I had left off on killing a shadowy figure, who I still haven’t fully figured out yet. If there’s something special to do there I figured I might need an item elsewhere, and I still had puzzles to nudge at. Specifically, I took the opportunity to puzzle over the Scenic Vista.

Scenic Vista
You are in a small chamber carved in the rock, with the sole exit to the north. Mounted on one wall is a table labelled “Scenic Vista,” whose featureless surface is angled toward you. One might believe that the table was used to indicate points of interest in the view from this spot, like those found in many parks. On the other hand, your surroundings are far from spacious and by no stretch of the imagination could this spot be considered scenic. An indicator above the table reads “IV”.
Mounted on one wall is a flaming torch, which fills the room with a flickering light.

I thought there had to be something else to the table, so I kept trying out verbs until hitting paydirt…

>turn table
You can’t turn that!

>feel table
You touch the table and are instantly transported to another place!

Sacrificial Altar
This is the interior of a huge temple of primitive construction. A few flickering torches cast a sallow illumination over the altar, which is still drenched with the blood of human sacrifice. Behind the altar is an enormous statue of a demon which seems to reach towards you with dripping fangs and razor-sharp talons. A low noise begins behind you, and you turn to see hundreds of hunched and hairy shapes. A guttural chant issues from their throats. Near you stands a figure draped in a robe of deepest black, brandishing a huge sword. The chant grows louder as the robed figure approaches the altar. The large figure spots you and approaches menacingly. He reaches into his cloak and pulls out a great, glowing dagger. He pulls you onto the altar, and with a murmur of approval from the throng, he slices you neatly across your abdomen.

**** You have died ****

You find yourself deep within the earth in a barren prison cell. Outside the iron-barred window, you can see a great, fiery pit. Flames leap up and very nearly sear your flesh. After a while, footfalls can be heard in the distance, then closer and closer…. The door swings open, and in walks an old man.

He is dressed simply in a hood and cloak, wearing a few simple jewels, carrying something under one arm, and leaning on a wooden staff. A single key, as if to a massive prison cell, hangs from his belt.

He raises the staff toward you and you hear him speak, as if in a dream: “I await you, though your journey be long and full of peril. Go then, and let me not wait long!” You feel some great power well up inside you and you fall to the floor. The next moment, you are awakening, as if from a deep slumber.

Endless Stair
There is a lamp here.

…or at least a very amusing death. This indicated I could use the table to teleport to the four different places being viewed. Other than the instant-death one there was one in the main dungeon proper (which can be used to transport objects out of the area, since ordinarily you have to jump in the lake which doesn’t let you).

>touch table
You touch the table and are instantly transported to another place!

Damp Passage
This is a particularly damp spot even by dungeon standards. You can see a crossroads to the west, and two nearly identical passages lead east and northeast. A stone channel, wide and deep, steeply descends into the room from the south. It is covered with moss and lichen, and is far too slippery to climb. The channel crosses the room, but the opening where it once continued north is now blocked by rubble.

Additionally, I found a room which I think comes straight out of Zork I. Remember I mentioned the crystal ball from mainframe Zork showed an area that was in Zork I so it couldn’t quite match the puzzle; this seems to be at least a nod to that.

Timber Room
This is a long and narrow passage, which is cluttered with broken timbers. A wide passage comes from the east and turns at the west end of the room into a very narrow passageway. From the west comes a strong draft.
There is a broken timber here.

From Reddit.

Finally, most importantly, I found the Grue Repellent I had been looking for!

Room 8
This is a small chamber carved out of the rock at the end of a short crawl. On the wall is crudely chiseled the number “8”. The only apparent exit, to the east, seems to be a blur and a loud, whirring sound resounds through the rock.
A spray can is in the corner. In large type is the legend “Frobozz Magic Grue Repellent.”

This room is adjacent to the Carousel from Zork II.

From a Zork User Group poster, via Andrew Plotkin.

While, again, you can’t jump in the lake with objects, what you can do is apply the repellent right before popping into the lake (which I imagine rubs some it off, but not all of it) and then head into the dark cave where I remembered walking through some grues.

From the Zork 3 manual.

While they don’t hold particular terror now I remember this being one of the most unnerving parts of the game back when I was 12 or so, which is how the existence of repellent stuck in my mind in the first place.

>apply can to me
The spray smells like a mixture of old socks and burning rubber. If I were a grue I’d sure stay clear!

>enter lake
The shock of entering the frigid water has made you drop all your possessions into the lake!

On the Lake

>s
Southern Shore
You are on the south shore of the lake. Rock formations prevent movement to the west and thickening swamp to the east makes the going all but impossible. To the south, where the beach meets a rock formation, you can make out a dark passage sloping steeply upward into the rock.

>s
It is pitch black.

>s
There are sinister gurgling noises in the darkness all around you!
It is pitch black.
The ground continues to slope upwards away from the lake. You can barely detect a dim light from the east.
That horrible smell is much less pungent now.

(I had to repeat this sequence a couple times until I found “south” was the appropriate exit. The dim light from the east makes the next step easy.)

>e
Key Room
You are between some rock and a dark place, The room is lit dimly from above, revealing a lone, dark path sloping down to the west.
To one side of the room is a large manhole cover.
The light from above seems to be focused in the center of the room, where a single key is lying in the dust.

The key is one that’s always shifting if you try to examine it. It seems to be a “master key” of sorts.

>examine key
The key is round and thin, more like a pencil than a key.
Strange, though. The key seems to change shape constantly.

>examine key
The key is a long and heavy skeleton key.
Strange, though. The key seems to change shape constantly.

Past the key is the bit where I got very, very, lucky. Normally you can then just walk your way to a water slide which goes down to the Damp Passage viewable from the table earlier. After X turns in the game (this is a global timer but I haven’t bothered to figure out what X is) is an earthquake that hits the caverns. If you wait too long to get through this section the passage is cut off. I managed to view the event while it was happening:

Water Slide
You are near the northern end of this segment of the aqueduct system. To the south and slightly uphill, the bulk of the aqueduct looms ominously, towering above a gorge. To the north, the water channel drops precipitously and enters a rocky hole. The damp moss and lichen would certainly make that a one-way trip.
There is a great tremor from within the earth. The entire dungeon shakes violently and loose debris starts to fall from above you.
The channel beneath your feet trembles. At once, the channel directly to the south of you collapses with its supporting pillar and falls into the chasm!

I might have puzzled out that this was essentially a softlock from my being too slow to get through this section, but I’m not so sure. I might also have caught on due to the earthquake also having a positive effect, as you’ll see in a moment.

Incidentally, if you don’t set up the torch first in the Damp Corridor the room is dark and you inevitably become grue bait. However, revival is forgiving and doesn’t drop score. This is doubly odd given the softlock I just mentioned. I think it isn’t about gameplay cruelty (or lack thereof) as much as plot; it makes sense the Dungeon Master is trying to help, but he can only do so much.

Moving on, I decided to try my newly-found key out on the rusted door branch I couldn’t get through. The obstacle seemed like rust, not the lack of a key, but I thought it was worth a try anyway.

Great Door
This is the south end of a monumental hall, full of dust and debris from a recent earthquake. To the east is a great iron door, rusted shut. To its right, however, is a gaping cleft in the rock and behind, a cleared area.

The “cleft” is new! It happens when the earthquake damages the caverns.

>e
Museum Entrance
This is the entrance to the Royal Museum, the finest and grandest in the Great Underground Empire. To the south, down a few steps, is the entrance to the Royal Puzzle and to the east, through a stone door, is the Royal Jewel Collection. A wooden door to the north is open and leads to the Museum of Technology. To the west is a great iron door, rusted shut. To its left, however, is a cleft in the rock providing a western route away from the museum.

To the north is a time machine (!) which I’ll talk about next time. I instead want to discuss the royal puzzle.

>s
Royal Puzzle Entrance
This is a small square room, in the middle of which is a perfectly round hole through which you can discern the floor some ten feet below. The place under the hole is dark, but it appears to be completely enclosed in rock. In any event, it doesn’t seem likely that you could climb back up. Exits are west and, up a few steps, north.
Lying on the ground is a small note of some kind.

>read note
Warning:
The Royal Puzzle is quite dangerous and it is possible to become trapped within its confines. Please do not enter the puzzle after hours or when museum personnel are not present.
The Management

>d
Room in a Puzzle
You are in a small square room bounded to the north and west with marble walls and to the east and south with sandstone walls.

So: this is Sokoban. The actual puzzle game was designed in 1981 and released in 1982, but this puzzle was present wholesale in the mainframe Zork, so it came beforehand. (I’m almost 100% certain Hiroyuki Imabayashi, inventor of Sokoban, had no chance to see the game. The Sierra On-Line Apple II adventures made it over the ocean early but not Zork.)

You start at the upper left, and push sandstone blocks (the lighter ones on the map). The X has a depression which contains a book with an elegant description.

The book is written in a strong and elegant hand and is full of strange and wondrous pictures. The text is in a tongue unknown to you and is penned in many colours. Some of the words seem to change colour as you read them. The book itself is very old and the pages dry and brittle.

(Why British spelling, I wonder?)

You can use the book at a door with a narrow slot to escape (that’s on the bottom row of the map) but it consumes the book. The right way to get out and keep the book is to push the block with a ladder attached to the west side so it is positioned in a way you can climb back up the way you came.

You need to clear space more or less as shown. What makes this interesting in a puzzle sense is both blocks in the top row are restricted to that row via Sokoban-rules, so you don’t have enough room to push the ladder over via a direct route.

>u
With the help of the ladder, you exit the puzzle.
Royal Puzzle Entrance
Lying on the ground is a small note of some kind.

I’ll get into the other exits from the Museum (a Technology Museum and a Jewel Room) next time, and possibly get all the way to the endgame? I’m still worried about another secret or holistic timing element (like the earthquake) I haven’t run into yet.

We are thrilled to announce that Vampire: The Masquerade—Sins of the Sires, by Natalia Theodoridou, is a finalist for the Nebula Game Writing Award, and it’s on sale, 25% off this week! To celebrate Natalia’s second time as a finalist, we are also putting every previous Nebula Finalist game on sale:

The Luminous Underground
The Road to Canterbury
The Magician’s Workshop
Rent-A-Vice
The Martian Job

Vampire: The Masquerade—Sins of the Sires is a 300,000-word interactive interactive novel set in the World of Darkness shared story universe. In this elegy of blood, everyone in Athens owes your boss a favor, making you untouchable! Who will you use, who will you help, and who will you prey on?

This is the fifth year that there has been a Nebula award for game writing, and the fourth year that Choice of Games authors have been finalists. Past Choice of Games Nebula finalists are: Phoebe Barton for The Luminous Underground, Kate Heartfield for The Road to Canterbury and The Magician’s Workshop, Natalia Theodoridou for Rent-A-Vice, and M. Darusha Wehm for The Martian Job.

Since 1965, the Nebula Awards have been given annually to the best works of science fiction and fantasy published that year, as voted on by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). The 58th Annual Nebula Awards ceremony will be streamed live during the 2023 Nebula Conference, May 12-14, 2023. Stay tuned for more!

As in a dream, you see yourself tumbling down a great, dark staircase. All about you are shadowy images of struggles against fierce opponents and diabolical traps. These give way to another round of images: of imposing stone figures, a cool, clear lake, and, now, of an old, yet oddly youthful man. He turns toward you slowly, his long, silver hair dancing about him in a fresh breeze. “You have reached the final test, my friend! You are proved clever and powerful, but this is not yet enough! Seek me when you feel yourself worthy!” The dream dissolves around you as his last words echo through the void…

Infocom followed Deadline (which I played last year) with two games in time for the Christmas shopping season: Starcross, a hard sci-fi game where you play a black hole prospector, and Zork III, the finale to their best-selling trilogy.

From The Infocom Documentation Project.

I do want to emphasize “best selling” here — we have very good data from 1981 to 1986 that shows 378,987 units sold. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was second at 254,249. The importance is in, essentially, the critical mass: it left a mark that makes it remembered today amongst even “normal” gamers in a way that one of the critically acclaimed games like A Mind Forever Voyaging or Trinity didn’t.

To put it another way, for most of this blog’s existence the reason the average person found it is that they were looking up something about Zork. (This has now been outdone by Cain’s Jawbone, which I should get back to this summer for an encore performance; people are still editing the commentary document.) So I’m looking forward to giving the trilogy a proper farewell. Given the games essentially started from the mainframe version and I first wrote about mainframe Zork in 2011, this has been essentially a 12-year odyssey.

The general wisdom is that Zork mainframe was split into 3 parts in order to form the trilogy. That’s only sort-of correct; Zork I and mainframe Zork quite clearly match, Zork II grabs some puzzles and arranges them in a much different geography and with a brand-new overarching plot involving a demon, and Zork III grabs most of the remaining puzzles as well as a section of the endgame. Since the end of Zork mainframe matches Zork III (to the best of my memory, I haven’t played Zork III since 1990) in one sense Zork III actually matches more closely the original source material.

But only in a sense: certainly the framing is not around gather-the-treasures in the same way. One remarkable thing I remember is that there are only 7 points possible, and getting all 7 points does not mean you’ve reached the end of the game.

Endless Stair
You are at the bottom of a seemingly endless stair, winding its way upward beyond your vision. An eerie light, coming from all around you, casts strange shadows on the walls. To the south is a dark and winding trail.
Your old friend, the brass lantern, is at your feet.

>score
Your potential is 0 of a possible 7, in 0 moves.

You embark on the journey, as the above clip indicates, by starting at the bottom of a staircase, the same one found at the end of Zork II. There’s an “old, yet oddly youthful man” that speaks to us, but the game is otherwise evasive. Even the advertising copy is evasive; Issue II of The New Zork Times states “The greatest challenge [of Zork III] is figuring out what is going on and what you are there for.”

Without a treasure directive, the only thing to do is: explore.

>turn on lamp
The lamp is now on.

>s
Junction
You are at the junction of a north-south passage and an east-west passage. To the north, you can make out the bottom of a stairway. The ways to the east and south are relatively cramped, but a wider trail leads to the west.
Standing before you is a great rock. Imbedded within it is an Elvish sword.

>get sword
The sword is deeply imbedded in the rock. You can’t budge it.

This moment made me glad, because it means I didn’t remember everything about the game; I don’t remember this moment at all.

In fact, I don’t remember enough that I have yet to solve a puzzle, even though I’ve mapped out the initially accessible areas. Let’s take a tour:

You start at the stairs and junction; the sword, incidentally, isn’t really a puzzle, as it will simply appear in your hands later. Just to the east of the junction there’s a small area with “stone channel” that is “too slippery to climb” (this might be a puzzle, but I suspect this is just an exit rather than an entrance) as well as an “engravings room” which echoes a similar room in Zork 1.

Engravings Room
You are in a room with passages heading southwest and southeast. The north wall is ornately carved, filled with strange runes and writing in an unfamiliar language.
An old and wizened man is huddled, asleep, in the corner. He is snoring loudly. From his appearance, he is weak and frail.

The wizened man — who I suspect to be the Dungeon Master — incidentally is here at random. You can wake him but I haven’t gotten anything useful to happen from it.

>wake man
The old man is roused to consciousness. He peers at you through eyes which appear much younger and stronger than his frail body and waits, as if expecting something to happen.

Down an adjacent branch is a crystal grotto leading to a rusted door which I am unable to open.

Crystal Grotto
This is a chamber of breathtaking beauty. Mighty stalagmites form structured shapes of rock, encrusted with crystalline formations. Phosphorescent mosses, fed by a trickle of water from some unseen source above, make the crystals glow and sparkle with every color of the rainbow. There is an opening to the west, and a man-made passage heads south.

>s
This is the north end of a large hall with a vaulted ceiling. A long, tiled hallway leads north through a tall arch. Although the origin or purpose of this room is unclear, there is a large rendering of the Royal Seal of Lord Dimwit Flathead carved on the wall.

>s
Great Door
You are in the southern half of a monumental hall. To the east lies a tremendous iron door which appears to be rusted shut.

I do like the brief moment here of Lord Flathead for building atmosphere and setting, but I don’t know if it has an significance other than marking the door as leading to something Royal-related.

Down a south branch is an area with a view of an aqueduct and a lake. The aqueduct seems to be merely for scenery.

Aqueduct View
This is a small balcony carved into a near-vertical cliff. To the east, stretching from north to south, stands a monumental aqueduct supported by mighty stone pillars, some of which are starting to crumble from age. You feel a sense of loss and sadness as you ponder this once-proud structure and the failure of the Empire which created this and other engineering marvels. Some stone steps lead up to the northwest.

The lake’s icy waters cause you to be “nearly paralyzed” and drop any items you have. This makes it impossible to carry your lamp; this is meaningful as the south shore has an exit but is dark.

Southern Shore
You are on the south shore of the lake. Rock formations prevent movement to the west and thickening swamp to the east makes the going all but impossible. To the south, where the beach meets a rock formation, you can make out a dark passage sloping steeply upward into the rock.

>s
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

>e
Oh, no! You have walked into a den of hungry grues and it’s dinner time!

(In one of the few things I remember clearly, I’m fairly sure grue repellent is used here, but I don’t know where to get it and if we have to be concerned about the lake washing it off.)

There’s one more shore you can visit that has a “Scenic Vista”, a table that switches between four scenes like a surveillance camera. They are marked I, II, III, and IV. I do not remember this part of the game at all.

I:

>examine table
The surface is pale and featureless, but slowly, an image takes shape!
You see a passage cluttered with broken timbers. An extremely narrow opening can be seen at the end of the room.
The image slowly fades.

II:

>examine table
The surface is pale and featureless, but slowly, an image takes shape!
You see a tiny room with rough walls. Chiseled crudely on one wall is the number “8”. The only apparent exit seems to be a blur.
The image slowly fades.

III:

>examine table
The surface is pale and featureless, but slowly, an image takes shape!
You see a wide room with two nearly identical passages leading east and northeast. A wide channel descends steeply into the room and seems to be blocked by rubble.
The image slowly fades.

IV:

>examine table
The surface is pale and featureless, but slowly, an image takes shape!
You see the interior of a huge temple rudely constructed of basalt blocks. Flickering torches cast a sallow illumination over an altar still wet with the blood of human sacrifice, its velvet covers stained and encrusted with gore.
The image slowly fades.

This seems to be invoking one of my favorite puzzles of original mainframe Zork, where you gaze into a crystal ball and see a scene with coal dust, and since the room is one not previously visited, you need to induce from the clues where the room might be. However, since the section of the game that had this room was already used in Zork I, the puzzle must be arranged differently here.

To the west there are three areas; first, a Land of Shadow made of multiple rooms (see the map) and where you hear “quiet footsteps” while walking about before being confronted.

Land of Shadow
You are in a dark and shadowy land. All around you are gentle hills and eerie shadows. Far above, shrouded in mist, you can barely make out the ceiling of the enormous cavern that spans this entire land.
Through the shadows, a cloaked and hooded figure appears before you, blocking the northwestern exit from the room and carrying a brightly glowing sword.
From nowhere, the sword from the junction appears in your hand, wildly glowing!

Any attempts to engage in battle fail. This uses a similar system of combat to the duels with the Thief in Zork 1, but you and the shadow are evenly matched. Interestingly enough, if you drop your sword the figure picks it up and hands it to you.

(It is faintly possible this figure is also the Dungeon Master.)

To the far west there is an ocean. Sometimes there is a ship but I haven’t been able to get its attention.

Flathead Ocean
You are at the shore of an amazing underground sea, the topic of many a legend among adventurers. Few were known to have arrived at this spot, and fewer to return. There is a heavy surf and a breeze is blowing on-shore. The land rises steeply to the east and quicksand prevents movement to the south. A thick mist covers the ocean and extends over the hills to the east. A path heads north along the beach.

To the northwest there’s a cliff under a gaping hole where sunshine is visible, with a piece of bread and a rope you can climb. Climbing the rope leads down to a ledge with a locked chest. After waiting briefly a man offers to help:

At the edge of the cliff above you, a man appears. He looks down at you and speaks. “Hello, down there! You seem to have a problem. Maybe I can help you.” He chuckles in an unsettling sort of way. “Perhaps if you tied that chest to the end of the rope I might be able to drag it up for you. Then, I’ll be more than happy to help you up!” He laughs again.

After sufficient waits the man does, indeed, come back:

>wait
Time passes…
A familiar voice calls down to you. “Are you still there?” he bellows with a coarse laugh. “Well, then, grab onto the rope and we’ll see what we can do.” The rope drops to within your reach.

>grab rope
You grab securely on to the rope.
The man starts to heave on the rope and within a few moments you arrive at the top of the cliff. The man removes the last few valuables from the chest and prepares to leave. “You’ve been a good sport! Here, take this, for whatever good it is! I can’t see that I’ll be needing one!” He hands you a plain wooden staff from the bottom of the chest and begins examining his valuables.
The chest, open and empty, is at your feet.

This may be the optimal result? I suspect something else is afoot here. But all I have for now is a sword, a staff, and some bread, and a smattering of puzzles that don’t want to budge.

The simulation occurs in the era when Napoleon is just beginning to emerge as the power in France. Acting as Ezekiel Breckenridge, a spy in His Majesty’s Service, it is your task to offset the intensity of these chaotic times in order to secure the interests of king and country.

— From the manual

The Apple II started to become an educational powerhouse quite early, especially when MECC (the Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation, they of Oregon Trail and Lemonade Stand) started to go all-in on the platform. But of course, there were more companies other than MECC trying to get on the action, like Spinnaker, a highly professionalized company founded strategically and based on venture capital; we’ll eventually get to them and their involvement with “Bookware”.

Superior Software (also located in Minnesota like MECC), despite targeting the same market, is not in the same category: it was the solo effort of Stephen Cabrinety, who was 16 years old at the time. His company came out with three “simulation” games.

Softalk, December 1983.

Legendary Conflict and Quest for the Scarlet Letter both seem to be genuinely enough on the simulation side that I won’t be playing them; The Breckenridge Caper, on the other hand, despite also being described as a simulation, is clearly an adventure game, with a map to explore, items to find, places to search, and puzzles to solve.

Via the Museum for Computer Adventure Games. I think a Simulation would be easier to sell in this case than an Adventure; “simulation” was a common word amongst history educators at the time, as classroom simulations became popular starting in the 1970s; having a Revolutionary War classroom game, for instance, where has half the class start as Revolutionaries and half start as Loyalists.

By 1798, while Napoleon was ambitious but hadn’t yet declared himself First Consul (1802) or Emperor (1804). He went on a campaign in Egypt — disrupting the British who used it as a route to India — and the game seems to be set right when Napoleon is still en route from France to Egypt.

A French diplomat described as a “Robespierre idealist” has made contact with the British and claims information about French military movements; your job is to meet the diplomat and obtain what he has.

The entire game is set on a pair of long streets in the city of Portsmouth, where the diplomat is supposed to make an appearance. The geography is on a circle, as you can go either LEFT (L) or RIGHT (R), and if you move enough times you loop back to where you start. There’s one side street reachable via an ALLEY (A). Most locations are by a building where you can then type ENTER and go inside; the buildings then either have everything happen in prompts, with no physical location, or have an room described by the game (where you can pick up items or SEARCH). If you study the map I have some exits marked by “x”; those are the ones that aren’t “real rooms” in the sense of an adventure game.

A portion of the overall map, the starting room is marked in green. This was taken while my gameplay was in progress, and the rooms marked in the corners are the one I’ve already used SEARCH on.

While the game actions are clearly adventure-related — you’re keeping an eye on time and hunger, but both are adventure standards — it is curious how it still feels slightly adventure-adjacent. Almost as if in an alternate universe with no Crowther/Woods Adventure, simulations would be another route to eventually develop adventure games (maybe without compass directions?)

Some places just sell things; you can get food or a place to stay at night, for instance. Some places are intended to allow you to grab items, either right out in the open or after a SEARCH.

Two items you can find are a RAZOR (at a barber shop) and a ROPE (at some stables) which can help find off some robbers who attack if you try to wander around at night; you can, however, simply avoid the night altogether.

The initial goal is to figure out what the diplomat looks like. The game isn’t fully clear on the plot here but it seems that the diplomat has already been in town long enough for a few people to notice; one way to find him is via a clothing shop where the diplomat has bought a disguise.

However, the clerk needs to be bribed in order to talk; you can go to a silversmith and buy something silver for 100 pence that will make the clerk happy.

Much simpler is to go in a coffeehouse; with coffee and a newspaper, you find information in a newspaper that identifies what the diplomat looks like.

Either way, the next task is tracking the diplomat down. The easiest thing is to simply run across him randomly; while checking the disk file later, I found content indicating there’s a magic scroll somewhere (!?) that can also be used to locate him.

The password bit is curious — there’s a couple places in the game where you can find phrases. You can donate at a church to get MAY GOD DELIVER THY SOUL. You can give money to an almanac maker to get AVARICE IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL.

As seen earlier, searching in some shipyards gets TIP THE TREE OF EVENTS AND SHAPE THE FUTURE OF THE ENTIRE WORLD. The actual phrase comes from searching at a newspaper and searching and finding a plaque: PRIDE IS CHIEF DETERRENT TO PROGRESS.

Typing that phrase (in whole, and without a period mark) is the password. It is unclear why a random plaque in a location the diplomat just arrived at would also be a password, and why we as the spy who was supposed to make contact never was told about it but — let’s just move on.

The problem with moving on is: I don’t know what to do here. This essentially is the end of the game already. I tried killing enough time that the “48 hours” we have runs out, and if that happens you lose. You can also get game over in other creative ways, like being recruited to the navy.

It could be as simple as declaring we’re finished but with a command I’m not understanding? In any case, I checked the file after and saw the winning message was

THREE CHEERS FOR A HERO OF THE WORLD! YOUR EFFICIENCY IN PERFORMING YOUR ASSIGNMENT HAS ALLOWED BRITISH NAVAL FORCES TO BLOCKADE CAIRO HARBOR AND THUS DEFEAT THE FRENCH ARMY COMMANDED BY THE ‘CORSICAN MONSTER’.

Which is good enough for me.

The game somewhat oversells its educational value; the instructions claim the need for SOME KNOWLEDGE OF EUROPEAN HISTORY AND ENGLISH LITERATURE. Perhaps I’m missing something in one of those two items in order to trigger the end game, but really, the setting was very loose on accuracy. Still, importantly, the setting felt different, and the “simulation” orientation led to some aspects (like optional encounters and puzzles) that were unusual for adventures at the time. This is another case, like Nellan is Thirsty, where innovation is triggered by aiming for a different audience than is normal.

Cabrinety unfortunately died young: of cancer in 1995. He still well-remembered, though, because he had been building a computer collection since 1975 and founded the Computer History Institute for the Preservation of Software in 1989, essentially the first of its kind. His collection now resides at Stanford.

It’s taken more than a decade to comb through the 800 or so file-size boxes of games and other software (another 150-odd mini-fridge-size boxes of hardware remain), but processing of the Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection in the History of Microcomputing at Stanford is now nearly complete. Eric Kaltman, who has been chiefly responsible for cataloging the collection, says the value of the assemblage is that it reflects not only “things that existed,” but “how people interacted with them.”

In addition to realia such as the Odyssey “brown box” (the very first video game console) or the Pong home-version game controller, early computer magazines—at one point Cabrinety subscribed to 60 different publications, according to his sister—reveal “perceptions of the media at the time, where people thought computers were going.” The intervening years have seen video games and interactive entertainment emerge as a dominant expression of culture, Kaltman says. “It’s good to be able to show a history and track a lineage, see trends emerge.”

And, thanks to Cabrinety’s foresight, we can.

I’ve been unusually quiet lately and not even following my usual link assortment schedule – apologies for that, especially to people who’ve sent me interesting links lately. I do mean to resume in time, but have needed to set even this aside for a little while. The end of last year was rough; I lost a couple of people close to me, one of them very unexpectedly and much too young. And work-wise, I’ve been deep in finishing Mask of the Rose.

However! I will be speaking at GDC, in person this time, and I expect to be more present here again once Mask launches.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

You’re a thief in need of gold, stuck in the poor town of Greywood. The only gold in town is locked up in the Merchant’s Guild vaults, guarded by mercenaries. Word on the street is that a new delivery of gold is coming by horse-drawn carriage. You’re not the only one interested in this delivery, however, as a band of adventurers also has their eye on it. Do you team up with the band of adventurers, or strike out on your own? Either way, you can’t pass up on this golden opportunity!

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

Right away I discovered that software was not at the top of the food chain. My people didn’t work in headquarters with everyone else. Instead they were exiled a few miles down the road to an abandoned shopping center. They shared a building with the cable-cutting operation. The programmers created software while listening to the constant CHUNK, CLUNK, CLANK of the cable-cutting machines. I learned that the previous year there was talk of moving software all the way up to Maine. A crazy idea — luckily it fell through.

For you non-computer people you need to understand that separating the software people from the engineers who design the hardware was very wrong. Software is the heart of a computer. A computer is useless without the basic stuff that my people developed: the operating system, programming languages, data management software, communications, etc. But DG didn’t see it that way. Its roots were hardware. Software was a necessary evil, created by hippy-freaks.

— Bill Foster, who joined Data General in 1976

It is done. As the playing of Ferret was a saga that lasted six months, you should read the prior posts in order before this one.

From the Computer Museum History Center.

I had left off last time on a space station, the Liberator, invaded by ooze; we needed to escape through a teleport, but we couldn’t get it working. There were three parts to the issue.

First was something the Ferret Authors hinted at directly via email, although not through the game:

The Liberator is a high security area so you need all protocols in place.

This was referring to an event long back in Phase 10 where we found a communicator, which notified us that we had “failed to register with The Department”.

The communicator emits three short beeps followed by: “Area Scan commenced. Scan Completed. One humanoid detected in vicinity. Continuing. Automatic Personnel Identification Procedure initiated. APIP completed. Continuing. Agent identified, Darkins, B. O. Message Retrieval Service activated. Standby…. Latched. Continuing.
This is your automated message service. You have one new message as follows: Darkins, you have failed to register with The Department for an excessive period. According to standard protocol you must text the first 8 characters of your Security Pass Number to 80085 immediately, whereupon you will be notified regarding your court hearing. Failure to comply will result in immediate termination. This message has been deleted automatically”.

I had tried, at the time, to type 80085, and a few random security pass numbers besides, but never got anywhere; I assumed it was essentially a goof. But apparently, this was the part of the hold-up for reaching the glorious finale.

One thing I did manage to wrangle out is the likely possibility the Security Pass Number we wanted was way off a pass back in Phase 1.

This is because the message specifically said “first 8 characters” which only makes sense if a.) there’s things other than just numbers and b.) there’s a natural cut-off at 8, which there is for the pass. In other words, we needed to send

R4E339I0

to the number 80085.

Mustelid discovered we needed to dial the number 80085 followed by whatever ID number we needed all in the same string. However, the string

80085R4E339I0

does not work; there’s a second trick that also must be applied. We already had needed to use a special “old cell phone text message” style to put in some codes, where pressing 2 once could get an A, pressing 2 twice could get a B, and press 2 thrice could get a C.

So 80085R4E339I0 is close, but the part after the 80085 must also be given in text message code. The letters were simple enough to change to numbers (R, for instance, becomes 777), but still,

type 800857774333394440

doesn’t work. The digits got converted but not the numbers! In the “text message mode” typing “4” once would be assumed to be the letter G, not the digit “4”. The way to make it through (and I realized this due to behavior on an old phone of mine) is to keep pressing: once you’ve cycled through the letters, you make it to numbers. That is, 4 is G, 44 is H, 444 is I, but 4444 gets the actual digit “4”.

-> type 8008577744443333333333999994440

Typed.
The communicator emits a beep followed by a series of tones. After a short pause you hear a voice that says “Confirmed”.

Phew. All that work for a minor message that only affects things at the very end of the game.

With that out of the way, we needed to then set something or another in the navigation room, followed by using the teleport. The old “mica rectangle” that had been used to activate the controls at the lake were useful here; you can put it in a slot at navigation, then type ESCAPE FROM HOT ITV as the destination. (We learned this from doing anagrams of Blakes 7 epsiodes, and if you don’t remember how that goes, I’ll link to the post from last month.)

Lude
Navigation. West. Keyboard. Slot. Ooze.
Exits: —W ——– —
-> put mica in slot
Done.
You are starting to feel hot.
-> type ESCAPE FROM HOT ITV
Typed.
Faintly, off in the distance, you hear “Confirmed”.

Then, wearing a teleport bracelet from all the way in phase 9, you can re-use the mica rectangle at the teleport room.

Thatch-Wade
Teleport. East. West. Up. Bench. Control Panel. Slot. Ooze.
Exits: –EW ——– U-
Score increment of 20 points.
You are starting to feel very hot.
-> PUT MICA IN SLOT
Done.
You feel as though you have been through a slightly strange, out of body, experience.
Escape from hot ITV
You are in the escape pod for a high-gain constant acceleration max-thrust Interstellar Transport Vehicle. Affixed to the floor is a square object with an ornate hatch. On the hatch is engraved a logo. On top of the object is an illuminated red button marked “Initiate Launch Sequence”.
There is an embroidered sampler here
There is an elm trunk here
Score increment of 50 points.

There’s still an obstacle here: the button just goes “Click.” when you press it, no launch! The hatch is from the “Ferrigo Energy Utility Corporation.” which specifies to “Use approved fuels only.”

You might remember from back on the ground level there was a whole scene with a train crashing revealing some irradiated pellets. Through cunning trickery I was able to carry the pellets without dying of radiation sickness by putting them in a leather wallet, but an update to the version of Ferret from the authors put a stop to that technique, so either there was another way to carrying the pellets or they were a red herring.

They were a red herring.

The whole point of the train scene was to pick up the timber shards that result from the door of the warehouse crashing in. You have to take those shards up to the spaceship.

-> open hatch
Opened.
-> look in hatch
Peering inside you can see:
a fuel chamber
-> put shards in chamber
Done.
-> close hatch
Closed.
-> push button
Click.
An ethereal voice intones “Starting automated launch sequence.”
There is a shallow rumbling followed by a gentle grinding.
The voice continues: “Initial checks complete. Status is: ‘continue’.”
The volume of rumbling increases as does an incidious vibration.
A siren blast makes you jump. An unpleasant odour pervades the escape pod. “Launch sequence interrupted. Invalid parameter setting. Attempting shutdown. Cannot complete shutdown as program ‘sludgepest’ will not terminate. Would you like to terminate ‘sludgepest’ manually? Error, user requires termination not interrogation. Semantic overload. Who wrote this code? It’s rubbish. Abort sequence. Fail over. Fall over. Start again. Rebooting.”
Suddenly there is a jarring thump as the escape pod cover is explosively ejected from the ship, rapidly followed by the escape pod. You start to feel light-headed (and light-bodied) as the escape pod is blasted into free space. You lose consciousness for an indeterminate period of time. As you drift back into the land of the living (if you can call this living) you are overwhelmed by feelings of inner knowledge, but also the need to, to, what is it, er, wait! As the Guru says, wait and enlightenment will follow. There is another sensation. You sense the need for a new beginning, to start over. You intuit that you will gain new knowledge by revisiting and reviewing your journey as in rereading an old diary can shine new light on past experiences and yield new insights. Anyway, enough of this woo, woo, the launch sequence appears to have failed but at least you escaped. But from what and to what?
Escape from hot ITV
You are floating through space in the escape pod from a high-gain constant acceleration max-thrust Interstellar Transport Vehicle. Affixed to the floor is a square object with an ornate hatch. On the hatch is engraved a logo.
On top of the object is an illuminated red button marked “Initiate Launch Sequence”.
There is an embroidered sampler here
There is an elm trunk here
-> examine sampler
OVNER NA WYR OVN
-> examine trunk
The wooden trunk is heavy and about the size of an old-fashioned Dansette gramophone player. Engraved into one side of the trunk is the word AMGINE.

(The sampler’s message is Welsh, “Fear that knows no fear.” I take a Welsh sidetrack later, as you’ll see.)

Waiting long enough then results in The Final Challenge, and things were about to get very strange indeed:

The klaxon repeats its earlier trick, and so do you, followed by a disembodied voice intoning: “Red Alert! Red Alert! Routine surveillance has detected an automatic teleport rescue scan. The living contents of this vessel will be teleported to the nearest habitable planet or spacecraft. Locking on to scan. Prepare for automatic teleportation in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 seconds.”
You feel disoriented (what a surprise), very tired and the need for sleep….
Quarantine Central
A featureless, senseless, disorienting, isolating chamber.
Score increment of 20 points.
The Guru incants:
111. Lastly, if the end is opaque, compare Phase 16 room manes with Blake’s 7.

This is a lot to take in:

a.) This is the final room, where we are supposed to do one thing to win.

b.) This one thing related to the “Guru incant” message. The game has entered “Guru” mode, and if you restart from the beginning, every time your game’s score increases you get one of the “Guru” messages. This means you have to play all the way through, all over again, from the beginning.

Resuscitation Chamber
This room contains a number of box-like machines. There is a door to the west. To the left of a display are three illuminated buttons, one red, one orange, one green. In the centre of the room, atop a metal plinth is a large chest. The lid of the chest is closed. Fixed to the side of the chest is a brass plaque.
Exits: –E- ——– —
There is a large box here
The Guru incants:
80. a science fiction book had saved Darkins from starvation in the tiny

Even worse….

-> hint
GLORY(ULTIMATE) = POINTS(MAX) & MOVES(MAX(2500)) & SOLUTION(FINAL)

c.) As the hint from the final room indicates, we need to have all the points and have an optimized turn count.

Part c was a little tricky on both counts. I already had part of a walkthrough written, and it took about an hour or so to write one for the rest, and then another hour to optimize my gameplay. My walkthrough scrounged every item possible like a packrat, since it was unknown what items were needed to solve what. Now that we had finally solved things, we could start to ignore picking up certain items (like the picnic box I carted all the way from phase 8 to phase 17). You also don’t need to hit any “information” things whatsoever; there’s nothing where information changes on a piece of paper between playthroughs.

In addition to optimizing, we were missing 30 points. The authors gave over a list of their point values at each phase which led us to realize we weren’t done yet with the Reactor.

Control Centre
You are in a brightly lit, partially derelict control centre set in solid rock. Most of the apparatus has been destroyed, however some still appears viable. There are three buttons, coloured red, orange and green; two switches, coloured blue and yellow; two knobs, one green, the other red; one lever and two digital gauges, one orange, the other blue. There is a steel door to the east.

This was a phase which consisted mainly of manipulating a device which opened doors on a grid; the main goal was to find a rod which could then be used to unlock a door.

I’ll discuss the pink rooms in a moment.

There were some fun deaths involving wandering in the nuclear area too long or opening too many doors (causing a meltdown) but this was otherwise one of the easier Phases, and it didn’t seem like it held any secrets. However, along the edges of the reactor proper, there were a series of dark rooms. Back when I first passed through the phase I checked through every single dark room and found nothing. What I did not do is check if the dark rooms had anything unusual happen if you tried other exits.

-> w
Nuclear Core
You are in a very warm room.
Exits: N-EW ——– —
-> n
You are in the dark.
-> drop orange pin
Dropped.
-> d
You are in the dark.
-> get orange pin
Taken.
-> drop orange pin
Dropped.
-> u
You are in the dark.
-> get orange pin
I can’t see anything like that around here.

To parse what just happened: if you go down in the dark room you loop back to the same room. If you go up you end up in a different room. (I had to boot up an old version of Ferret to test this — the current build doesn’t let you pick up dark things in rooms.) This meant I was onto something, but I needed to bring light to the dark room. The nuclear rod (the one we got to open a door) turned out to be the answer:

-> get rod
Taken.
A terrible feeling of nausea radiates through your body.
-> n
Dark Tunnel
-> l
Dark Tunnel
You are in a gloomy tunnel cut in sheer rock, with a stairway leading up.
Exits: -S– ——– U-
-> u
Dark Tunnel
You are in a gloomy tunnel cut in sheer rock. There are stairways leading up
and down.
Exits: —- ——– UD
-> u
Dark Tunnel
You are in a gloomy tunnel cut in sheer rock. There is a stairway leading down.
Exits: N— ——– -D

It only glows if exposed to enough radiation, so for the first time around I had to actually hang it in Death Area for a little bit to make sure it got glowy enough. (More safely, you can just drop the rod, leave to the dark room which is safe, then come back and get the rod all charged up.)

Unfortunately, the above sequence leads to a dead end!

-> n
Dark Tunnel
You are in a gloomy tunnel cut in sheer rock. There is a stairway leading down.
Exits: -S– ——– -D
-> d
Dark Tunnel
You are in a gloomy tunnel cut in sheer rock. There is a dark stairway leading
up.
Exits: —- ——– U-

However, there were other dark rooms, so I just needed to test … all of them! By tediously switching around doors using the machine (you can’t just open all of them because it causes the reactor to melt down).

This took a while; I found the right room second to last:

In my defense, it is a little harder to get to than some of the other rooms because you are at the limit in terms of number of doors you can safely open. Finally making it through:

Dark Tunnel
You are in a gloomy tunnel cut in sheer rock. There is a dark exit to the
south, and a brighter exit to the north.
Exits: NS– ——– —
-> n
Cutting
You are in a rock cutting. There is a dark tunnel to the south.
Exits: NS– ——– —
-> n
Cutting
You are in a rock cutting.
Exits: NS– ——– —

This gets absolutely nothing except for 30 more points. You can pass through to end up at the very start of the level and walk back round to the door that needs the rod to be unlocked. But remember, those 30 points also give a Guru message!

51. near death experiences appeared to mitigate against the annual review. The

I suppose now is the right time to explain the Guru messages. They don’t appear in order; for the first 87 they appear in alphabetical order as you’re playing through the game, but the numbers easily let you sort them into a story afterwards. After 87 they can be found directly in order (although some puzzles can be done in slightly different sequences, so even then there can be a little jumbling).

This is brilliant and awful at the same time. Brilliant in that the story of the game is recounted in a way that has us recount our steps, and awful in the requirement of forcing players to play the whole game over again. I’ll get back to this point, but first, let me give the entire Guru story. Feel free to skip down past the quote, though.

1. Bob Darkins couldn’t remember. That was the problem. A
2. vast void, no content, no context, no reference points. The fall from grace
3. that consisted of tumbling free from the resuscitation chamber was the
4. start of time as far as Bob was concerned. He had no option, he had to get
5. on with this life or perish. According to the plaque on the resuscitation
6. chamber the unknown virus might make perishing the odds-on favourite but he
7. didn’t even know if the plaque applied to him. He realised that his amnesia
8. was not absolute, as he could read, but the extent of his memory loss was
9. unquantifiable without further data. He wasn’t sure he even recognised his
10. own name.
11. Darkins had led an extraordinarily ordinary life. His only claim to fame
12. was that he had managed to contract an unidentifiable virus which had
13. completely baffled the medical authorities. At the time the process of
14. freezing bodies until a cure could be found for any untreatable ailment was
15. gaining momentum and the associated costs were tumbling, especially for the
16. rogue outfits that simply dumped the frozen bodies. Darkins invested a
17. small inheritance on his personal incarceration and hoped for the best.
18. Apart from hosting a malignant foreign body Darkins possessed a very vivid
19. imagination, far too vivid for his own good.
20. The complete lack of bodies was a mystery. Darkins had not seen a single
21. human, alive or dead in his travels. Apart from the occasional skeleton
22. there was very little evidence of life, current or previous, on the planet.
23. The escape from the house had been difficult. Vague recollections of bombs,
24. timers and ticking triggered partial memories of special operations, armed
25. forces, military intelligence and the overwhelming need to follow orders.
26. Maybe that explained the pass he found belonging to the Militech, was he a
27. member of a military research team? Was the house a research facility, HQ,
28. barracks, safe-house or what? Too many questions. The strange place with
29. the circular arrangement of rooms was a concern. It appeared to be
30. protected by a strange force that compromised the magnetic field of the
31. area and its surroundings. Could he have received special training that
32. allowed him to find the way through? Would he ever find somebody that could
33. answer his questions and fill in the blanks? Those mazes and tunnels added
34. to the feeling of being tested. Was he still in training or was this a real
35. mission on enemy territory, possibly a foreign research installation. That
36. would fit. But what is the objective? Would he know when he found it, or
37. would mere survival be the prize? The cathedral was a total anachronism.
38. Darkins could not remember religion be practised in his lifetime, or was
39. that just the amnesia. The monastery accentuated the mystery. Was he on a
40. different planet? The computer devices built into the pins indicated a
41. significant level of technology but nothing that exceeded his experience or
42. advances that could have been made while he was frozen.
43. Darkins was an average family man, some would even say militantly dull. A
44. mousey wife, 2 mousey children, a suburban dwelling with 3 bedrooms, 2
45. cars, 2 jobs in his life, 3 best mates, 2 glasses of wine a day, his whole
46. life was counted in 2’s and 3’s.
47. The revolving walls stirred memories of his training. Eliminate the
48. impossible, then work on the possible. If there’s no exit then make one, as
49. he had to do in the ravine. Thoughts of surveillance intruded. Was he being
50. watched, assessed even? Surely this isn’t a performance appraisal. No, the
51. near death experiences appeared to mitigate against the annual review. The
52. transporter curtain was a concern. What fragments of physics he could
53. recall made any form of matter transfer impossible, or brought death in an
54. instant. Assuming that event was some form of teleportation then that would
55. indicate this was a different planet, or worse, a different universe.
56. But the coloured rooms were more reminiscent of Ancient Egypt, maybe the
57. planet had a rich history of many lost civilisations like dear old Earth.
58. Was the shimmering curtain some form of trickery, an illusion possibly?
59. The Nuclear Core indicated an industrialised civilisation at least to the
60. Third Universal Technology Level, reinforced by the use of multiple forms
61. of transport such as trains, planes and helicopters. But then some areas
62. were definitely Universal Era Stage 12 Impressionist (a shop selling furs,
63. for example) virtually prehistoric by modern reckoning. Where was this
64. analysis coming from? Darkins must be experiencing flash memory post-trauma
65. refreshment syndrome causing isolated synaptic connections to join into
66. larger configurations.
67. Was it 42 or 43? The answer could determine if Darkins was in his home
68. Universe or a near parallel clone. The relationship of 43 (or 42) to the
69. Great Universal Model of How Everything Works and Why (GUMHEWY) is unclear,
70. even today. The number 17 appears to have more influence than any others in
71. the latest research.
72. Alien presence was quite apparent. The automaton and cyborg were
73. definitely unearthly, possibly indicating post-apocalypse invasion or, at
74. the least, visitation. The drongoid could have been some form of genetic
75. and radio-active mutation, it certainly belonged in the horror comics.
76. There were so many inconsistencies, teleportation mixed with shops from the
77. pre-harmonised era, archaic office blocks with sentient post-modern
78. architecture. It didn’t make sense.
79. The most remarkable episode had been in the escape pod. Only the memory of
80. a science fiction book had saved Darkins from starvation in the tiny
81. life-raft floating in space. He had recalled how an escape pod had
82. activated its survival beacon which had been traced by an automated
83. recovery drone, which, once it located life, automatically honed into range
84. and teleported the body to the nearest habitable planet. If only he could
85. remember the sequence of actions that was needed, maybe he had done what
86. was required inadvertently without realising the consequences. He did,
87. however, remember the piece of text that had led him to the solution:
88.
89. Shell rocks Home would have illuminated
90. Rues cocoa tune Slip could have sniffed it
91. Coone club Imports would have got it last
92. Lip rim paw Hole could have smoked it out
93. Yes, let wimp Order would have been spiffed off
94. Cure hero Pilot could have sensed the plot
95.
96. There was a common theme there somewhere. For the life of him he struggled
97. to find it. In the beginning there was a pod for resusitation, now there
98. is a pod for rescue, is that the link?
99.
100. The thoughts of the Guru so enunciated are an intimate description of your
101. recent times which form an allegory for life: birth, the adventure of the
102. journey of life and place of final rest, safe, free from disease. To reach
103. your destiny you will need to expostulate according to the following code:
104.
105. _4_55_91_17
106. 31____92_72
107. 93____84_51
108. ______48__6
109.
110. Unfortunately, not all of the code survived the ravages of time….
111. Lastly, for those with OCD, compare Phase 16 room manes with Blake’s 7.

Remember, Ferret is divided into “phases” due to the technical requirements of the Data General Eclipse 16-bit that it started on. The phases were all given to different authors who worked essentially independently, so while there was clearly some coordination going on, there was also a random smattering of genres in the post-apocalyptic world, and the Guru section here gives a chance to try to gather all the threads together.

Thoughts of surveillance intruded. Was he being watched, assessed even? Surely this isn’t a performance appraisal. No, the near death experiences appeared to mitigate against the annual review.

The ultimate goal at the end is given as a sort of transcendence: “The thoughts of the Guru so enunciated are an intimate description of your recent times which form an allegory for life: birth, the adventure of the journey of life and place of final rest, safe, free from disease.”

I (and everyone playing along, although I gave a save file if someone wanted to skip ahead) finally made it to the last room with full points and a low enough turn count for the final victory to be at hand. And then … we were stumped. For quite a long time. I immediately suspected the numbers in the code referred to Guru lines, but I originally was thinking of whole words. It took a little while to come across the idea of just using the initial letters…

sics
a_la
y_an
__ic

…and, then what? This gets, if reading top to bottom, left to right, SAY _I___ CLAISANC where Google Translate determined Claisac meant “weed” in Welsh.

I and others did a deep dive into Welsh; I tried looking for a five-letter word that would fit in the blank where the second letter was “I”. This got nowhere for a long time.

The Guru text mentioned “not all of the code survived the ravages of time” so I assumed that was referring to the blanks. In addition to the Welsh-diving I spent a long time trying to find a numerical pattern to recover them.

The wrong assumption was that the missing code was in the blanks. The blanks are intentional! The code is missing lines below.

As theorized by Sha1tan in the comments:

sics
a_la
y_an
__ic
__mt
___u
___a
___r
___y

That is:

Quarantine Central
A featureless, senseless, disorienting, isolating chamber.
-> say i claim sanctuary
‘i claim sanctuary’
The disorienting feeling you are experiencing crystalises into a total sensation of discombobulation. You feel, sense, hear, you can’t tell which, an ethereal voice. Thoughts form in your mind and you realise you have reached a point of completion, an all-consuming peace pervades your soul. You have arrived. The end is nigh. Well done, the puzzle is complete, you can sleep peacefully again, no more to be troubled by the furious, ferocious, bare-fanged Ferret erupting from your frightening nightmares.
Phase 17 (Illumination)
Mode: Guru
You have scored 1670 (out of 1670) points in 2439 moves.
Rooms visited: 769. Rank achieved: Chief.

The End.

(As pointed out by the authors after, just typing i clai sanc into Google will immediately get that as a suggestion. I never thought to try it; that required realizing “i” was a complete column as opposed to a letter followed by three missing unknown letters.)

…

Let’s back way, way, up, to the philosophy of art.

Is there really any such thing as good or bad art?

At its most radical, we can say all aesthetic judgements are entirely arbitrary, and for the aliens of Zebulon V, maybe the work “Spewing Rubik’s Cubes” from Boston’s Museum of Bad Art is a masterpiece.

This sort of radicalism is particularly puzzling in the case of games: it is quite possible to have a game that nobody can play, perhaps due to a crash, or an almost literally impossible puzzle. It seems like on technical grounds alone, there has to be some kind of judgment.

And yet–

I’ve discussed before The Tower of Druaga. It’s a Japanese arcade game that is near-impossible to win on one’s own, because many of the 60 floors require doing arbitrary actions, like not touching a chest until after killing monsters in an arbitrary order. The video below gives an entire walkthrough with explanations.

Yet, people have beaten the game, and still beat the game. It was intended for arcades, as a collaborative effort. Sheets and notebooks were placed at the arcades and as people discovered new things, they got added to the sheets, so the next players could get a little farther, and discover something new. It was game as community effort.

Actual Druaga arcade sheet. From @waisar on Twitter. The historian Alexander Smith thinks that the secrets and warp pipes of Super Mario Bros. were directly inspired from Druaga.

So with that preface, this all means some of the moves in Ferret might be a bit more reasonable under the aegis of community: no, you don’t have to actually make a walkthrough, because there are multiple other players, all who can help provide what they already have. (One of our actual players, K, never used save files, but instead did a running walkthrough; this was made easy through some tools the games provides.) Some outrageously difficult puzzles are less outrageous when multiple people are passing the same steps.

Well, some. We still needed hints quite a few times. I am still hesitant to judge “good or bad”, just “different gameplay experience”. I do think there are points the game went too far; I won’t recount the sins of the Mastermind puzzle again, and the mathematical puzzle involving pipe flow was almost unbelievably cheeky, even with the “mass mind” approach.

I showed this to some people who weren’t playing; they assumed there was some sort of joke or trick. There isn’t. The authors sent me a full mathematical solution.

Still, the whole point of stretching boundaries is to have a different and unique experience, and Ferret provided that. It did essentially topple Quondam as the world’s most difficult adventure, although in a lateral way that makes them hard to compare. Quondam had every single step fraught with peril, in a manner of horror vacui; by contrast, Ferret has many large open spaces, and is completely unafraid to toss out red herrings.

Ah, the red herrings. I’m still not sure what to think about them. I think the ones that landed best had some “resolution” despite being red herrings, like the code from the sewer that deciphered an entire fake floor code much later. I can think of a couple other cases where I’d be hesitant to take the herrings away, because they gave certain puzzles an edge (like the 2s and 3s lines from Guru, which felt out of place and were tempting as puzzle fodder but entirely irrelevant to the solution). Some herrings really did seem like loose parts and wasted time. I still haven’t come up with a way to articulate which is which, but that’s because no adventure I’ve played before has ever had so comprehensive a catalog.

I’m sure there’s more to be said about so dense a game, and maybe the players — who numbered among the many — can give their thoughts in the comments. (Even if you only provided a single comment way back months ago, you were part of the game-space, so don’t be shy!) For now, I really am tired, after six months of this epic that took 40 years to write, and I think I’ll be taking that place of final rest now.

We’re essentially at a turning point for the Softside Adventure of the Month series: they numbered up to 20, and we’re at number 10.

From Softside, March 1982.

They were, to recap, a monthly series for Atari, Apple II, and TRS-80 connected with Softside magazine; mysteriously, only the Atari versions survive on many of the games. (Well, not that mysteriously on Apple II, since distributions seems mainly to have been on tape. Not a single disk has surfaced from the series on any platform that I know of, and Apple II tape preservation is terrible. I don’t think it is from modern norms either, I think it is due to it being in the top price category, allowing for disks, so people moved on from tapes much faster than with other platforms.)

Peter Kirsch is the one most associated with the series and seems to be the one who arranged the ports for when submissions came in. He also wrote three of the games so far, Arabian Adventure, Jack the Ripper, and Around the World in Eighty Days. His general operating procedure has been to focus his games around “cinematic scenes”, as opposed to open structures. This is genuinely not a common thing for this time; Crowther/Woods Adventure set the standard (gather 15 treasures, wander anywhere) and adventure games so far have generally followed this idea. Even the generally linear games like Arrow of Death haven’t generally been centered around reactive scenes, where there is a crisis (being attacked by enemy X) that is averted, immediately throwing the player into another crisis.

James Bond stories are very much series-of-cinematic-scenes fodder; 007 must defy death in some situation, and after doing so must face another situation, followed by another, etc. Every once in a while he stops to drink or gamble or seduce. So I wasn’t surprised at all when James Brand Adventure came up next on my queue that this was another Peter Kirsch jam.

As the ad I put earlier explains:

The President’s life is in danger. As James Brand, you must save his life and destroy the evil Dr. Death. Your life is constantly on the line; each move you make could be your last.

You start in a minimalist “headquarters”, without a chance to talk to Q or M.

You do have a Q-like gizmo, although it is a little hard to figure out at first.

Specifically, the parser stubbornly refuses to allow you to refer to the “SMALL SUITCASE” in inventory. It can only be referred to as a CASE. Once you do so you can open it to find a car key, but also LOOK at it to find that there are red and yellow buttons. The red button blows a smokescreen, and the yellow button shoots a knife.

Entering the car and starting it leads immediately to a danger and the scene shown: it is being remotely out of your control. I’m pretty sure this happened in a real one of the movies and Bond did something cool like hit an ejection seat button. In this game, you just turn the key to shut off the ignition.

Immediately after you end on a road where you attacked by a jousting motorcyclist wearing a suit of armor, and no, I’m not making this up.

You have about five moves to react; the best action, fortunately not hard to suss out, is to activate the smokescreen. This causes the attacker to fall off his or her bike so you can steal it.

The next part of the game lands you in a small urban environment with two scenes, buth with people trying to kill you. One involves a house with a bomb.

This isn’t too terrible a scene; all you need to do is walk out rather than read the note in order to survive, and the effect when the explosion happens (the second screen, where the text animates by inverting) is clever. Unfortunately, the whole point for going through that scene is to go back in after the explosion and find a quarter.

The author has caught the high-stakes right-action-to-survive feel of Bond, but it still does Adventure Game things, and it is about to get worse. To get to the next part of the plot, you find on another street you get slipped a node from “Madame XXX” which asks you to meet her at the Kit Kat Klub. If you go to do so:

Going back to your inventory, you’ve been toting around two cyanide pills. You can PUT PILL before sitting down to try to sneak it into Madame’s wine, but she notices and swaps the drinks.

After a large amount of parser struggle I hit upon SWITCH GLASSES. This switch-back is sufficiently stealthy somehow to work, despite Madame noticing the initial sleight-of-hand, and the poison kills her.

However, there seems to be no point to the scene: you get no information or items, not even a quarter. The scene is necessary because, nearby, there’s a HOT DOG STAND that doesn’t open until the Madame scene happens, and you need a hot dog.

I’m leaving in some of my struggle to purchase a 25 cent dog.

Before moving on: yes, as stated, “the reason to go through a scene to kill someone is to buy a hot dog” sounds absolutely absurd, but clearly what the author had in mind is a scripted series of events. Yes, as coded, one thing follows another, but my guess is that’s because whatever movie was going through Kirsch’s head ran in that sequence and he never even thought of it as cause and effect.

Back to the hot dog. So now I bought one; what was the purpose? Well, to feed a clam that was under a lake, which gives up a key that can be used to launch a speedboat.

It is my understanding this sort of thing happened all the time in the Reagan era.

The speedboat lets you get DEATH ISLAND. There’s a bit with a blade-boomerang aimed at your head…

…and then, for some reason, at the tree in the same room you can get on it and find a silencer for your gun.

The silencer is necessary to kill a guard up ahead without alerting other guards. Then you can sneak into Dr. Death’s palace only to fall immediately into a trap.

Looking at the backglass reveals a tilt light; the right command here is TILT MACHINE which causes the “ball to go out of play”. Then you can wander around the pinball machine, climb into a hole, foil some gas coming out of a vent using the trick-knife from your briefcase…

…and eventually end up in the lair of Dr. Death, who challenges you to pool.

There’s no way to get an actual pool scene here; PLAY POOL or the like doesn’t work. If you look at the table it mentions the 8 ball looks different; it is really an explosive and you can pick it up and throw it, killing the guards. Then Dr. Death takes a hostage:

Oh, you thought events so far have been goofy? Get ready for the best/worst puzzle in the game.

That bit about being sleepy: that’s supposed to be a cue to YAWN. (No, I didn’t figure this out on my own; I used Dale Dobson’s walkthrough at Gaming After 40. He didn’t figure it out either, he just checked the source code.)

After this glorious scene you can make your escape by grabbing some tacks, and as guards with swords are chasing you, drop the tacks.

But we’re not done yet! The whole issue, remember, is the assassination of the President of the United States. We can escape the island now, getting by a hungry crocodile via using a stick we found back in the palace…

…and find ourselves at, by wild coincidence, a golf course that the President happens to be playing at. There’s a nearby sewer you can dive into and find that at the hole of the course, there is a bomb wired up.

Fortunately, there’s an exposed red wire, and if you go back to the CLUBHOUSE on the golf course you can grab a “razor”. Then razor can be used to CUT WIRE and save the day.

Yes, this was bad in all sorts of ways. I was genuinely looking forward to James Brand given that Kirsch’s prior game Around the World in Eighty Days was one of the strongest of the whole Adventure of the Month series. James Brand was one of the weakest.

While Eighty Days still had a sensibility of a fast-driving plot driven by scenes, it still spends enough time to create geography at each location that it leans into the adventure format just enough to work. James Brand treats its locations with minimalist detachment and really just focuses on immediate danger-scenes. Brand also has aspirations for interesting character actions like swapping poisoned glasses that aren’t supported very well by the parser, whereas Eighty Days mostly stayed within the author’s technical chops.

In other words, it was an experiment in a different genre that just didn’t work given what a parser in BASIC is capable of.

From an insert in Softside, issue 47.

I’ve got one more one-shot upcoming — a very curious one with a completely different setting than anything else we’ve seen — and then we’re going to make it to a substantial landmark, something that might even be, dare I say it, an actual good game. (After the sequence of Jungle Island -> Inferno -> James Brand, I can only hope.)

Oh, and I might as well give a light Ferret update. If you haven’t been following along, we are past all the spaceship part and onto the very very last puzzle, which hinges on deciphering a 16-number code. I have a feasible decipherment which might indicate we just need to SAY something to win, but the thing to say is in … Welsh? Check the thread if you want to know more. Please: if you have any thoughts, add them, because my brain is utterly melted.