(Continued from my last post, or if you want to read my entire series on this game including when I played it on a MUD, the link here will work.)

I’ve done some major exploration of Moria, which is very open. I get the impression that part of the goal is “touristic”, just letting the player inhale the air of Tolkien’s universe without having too many puzzles in the way.

Not like Moria is as safe as the Polynesian Islands—

Moria, as shown on a movie poster by Dan Mumford. Source.

Let’s start with a meta-map. (If you haven’t seen one of mine before, this is a map where the directions are only vague, and is intended to show the general interconnectivity and sort things into regions.)

The maze may be an absolute trap — at least it seems to be one room that loops, and any items that you drop get swallowed up — and the trolls are an obstacle I haven’t gotten past yet. (And the point of them may not be to go past, but I’ll get into that later.)

The start area is central in more ways than one. There’s multiple holes visible in the ceiling from the start that you can’t reach, but you can go through the on the other side. That means multiple places will drop down back to the starting room (whenever they occur, I’ve marked them in red).

Regarding that “shadow” I saw just east of the start room, it appears at random at any point during the explorations, so is an “event” like the pirate appearing in Adventure. You can simply just wait in place (or as happened to me often, test to see if particular exits work and get lots of “dead end” type messages) and it will re-appear. There’s a knife nearby and I tried to USE it while the shadow was visible but Frodo is apparently “clumsy” and “unaccustomed” to handling one and just manages to cut himself instead. That’s not to say an aggressive approach will always fail but for the moment in my gameplay the shadow (my guess is, Gollum having reclaimed the ring and lurking invisible) is just something that happens.

Another possible random encounter is a “flokk med småtroll” (“group of small trolls”) although as long as you move to a different room when they appear they won’t cause trouble. (Orc in Norwegian is Orker; when I first encountered the flokk I briefly wondered if småtroll was intended to mean orc.)

Just to the north of the start is the axe which promised death, and I took it with no ill effects (but I theorized one might come in the future). Indeed, later (I don’t know if “at random” or on a timer) a “skummel dverg” (“scary dwarf”) arrives and looks at you; it may simply run away, but if you happen to be holding the axe, he’ll return with friends.

Dvergen ser skarpt på øksa du holder og piler rundt hjørnet. Etter noen sekunder kommer en hel flokk dverger løpende mens de roper noe opphisset. De river fra deg den hellige øksa og hugger deg ned.

The dwarf looks intently at the axe you are holding and darts around the corner. After a few seconds, a pack of dwarves comes running while yelling. They rip the holy axe from you and cut you down.

Closing out the central area is a pile of straw to the west of the axe, and a “wing of literature” to the east. Randomly, that wing has an elf hat and a pearl necklace, but also the inside text of the One Ring written in Black Speech.

Ash Nazg durbatuluk,
ash Nazg gimbatul,
ash Nazg thrakatuluk
agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

(“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”)

Proceeding in that same direction leads to a “square room”…

…where branching off to the north is a pyramid (“some notes of music can be heard in the distance”), a “rat’s nest”, and finally a dwelling of a “huldra”. The huldra is a Norwegian mythical creature/sorceress that is usually depicted as young…

Actual stamp from Norway, 2022. Via europa-stamps.

…but for the purposes of this game, it is old, and surrounded by toads. She asks if you want to solve three riddles; if you fail, you’ll get toad-ified.

Ei gammel trollkjerring sitter foran en stol oppstøttet av silkeputer.
Hun vrir det heslige ansiktet sitt til et groteskt grin og sier:

`Er du beredt til å svare på tre vanskelige og skjebnesvangre gåter?’

An old witch sits in front of a chair, propped up by silk pillows.
She turns her ugly face into a grotesque smile and says:

“Are you prepared to answer three difficult and deadly riddles?”

This was in MUD-Ringen and the riddles are the same, except that the translation of the creature is of a “ogress”. This is one moment we have confirmed from Pål-Kristian Engstad himself that this was added by him to the home computer version.

… I have only made this creature up from my imagination. It might or might not be very Tolkienish, but it always made the players wonder. I have personally always felt that the passing through of Moria was too briefly explained in Tolkien’s works, but that is in a way nice, since it allows to imagine what actually is there (or might be there).

The first riddle asks about a being who covets something round (Sauron) and the second, trickier riddle asks about which dwarf “made the great gate in the west.” Despite the gate in question being the Doors of Durin this refers to the dwarf Narvi.

He’s in the Rings of Power television show. (I like the dwarf parts, not wild about anything else.)

I have no idea the answer to the third riddle.

Deep in the mountains, in the Mines of Moria.
Witch and sorceress, what is my name?

It might be in-game rather than trivia (since the author already admitted the character was non-Tolkien). (And before anyone asks, “name” or “my name” do not work.)

Moving back to the main path, you reach a crossroads, then can go south down a slide (back to the starting room) or north past a “greenhouse”.

Du er inne i et fabelaktig drivhus av en dal!
Et mylder av vekster gror her, og det er ganske mørkt. Mot sør er ei åpning og mot nord fortsetter hagen så langt du kan se. Stien mot nord er smal, men brukbar.

You are inside a fabulous greenhouse of a valley!
A multitude of plants grow here, and it is quite dark. To the south is an opening; facing north, the garden continues as far as you can see. The path to the north is narrow but usable.

Off to one side is a “low hill” with an herbal drink; this herbal drink serves as healing (in case of, say, clumsy knife handling). Farther on is a dense undergrowth “maze” I mentioned earlier which may be a trap rather than a maze.

Du har gått deg vill i krattskogen!!

>ø
Ok.
Du har gått deg vill i krattskogen!!

>v
Ok.
Du har gått deg vill i krattskogen!!

>n
Ok.
Du har gått deg vill i krattskogen!!

Reversing back to the beginning and heading west is what I’m calling the Gorge Area.

To the far west is a Maritime Room with a cylinder (no idea what it does); the most important room is a hall with a bag of gold dust and some elves that appear. They will shout “troll” if you appear normally, but if you happen to be holding the elf hat they’ll have a different reaction.

Jeg er Gloriendel, lederen for denne lille flokken. Jeg ser av ditt hodeplagg at du er venn av alvene. Er du Ringbæreren?

I am Gloriendel, the leader of this small group. I see from your hat that you are a friend of the elves. Are you the Ringbearer?

Saying “yes” has Gloriendel give some advice about an “enormous monster” known as the Balrog which “has been in Moria since the dawn of time.” According to the elf, the One Ring has “a power greater than the Balrog” and that if you have “received the wizard’s mark” you may be able to overcome him.

You then receive a gift of mithril armor.

While you can go directly to the throne room area by going up where you meet the elves, I’m going to loop back to near the start where the knife was, and go east to what I’m calling the Huge Corridor Area.

As the name implies, the geography is dominated by a large corridor, although you can go up to a “window” to get a scene that I remember from MUD Ringen.

Du er ved vinduet.
Du ser utover et majestetisk slettelandskap. Fra ditt utsiktspunkt høyt oppe i fjellsida har du utsikt over fjell og daler ute i det fri, og den klare fullmånen som belyser landskapet. Mot sør strekker Tåkefjellene seg, og mot vest de gresskledte slettene i ditt hjemland. (Snufs!) Det er ikke mulig å presse seg ut av vinduet, men det er et hull i gulvet her, og mot sør ei vindeltrapp.

The direct translation from the MUD is:

You are standing by the window. You have a majestic view over the scenery from here. From this spot high up in the mountain you can see past mountains and valleys out in the free, and the clear full moon shines upon the landscape. Southwards the Misty Mountains extend, and to the west there are the grassy plains of your homeland. (Sniff!) You cannot squeeze yourself through the window, but there is a hole in the floor here, and a spiral staircase in the south end of the room.

I had theorized this was pulled from the original just due to how unusual a description of state of mind is in MUD-rooms. (In general, the DOS game has lots of “scenery” rooms so leans to MUD-like already. I can see why Pål-Kristian thought of porting it.)

The corridor includes a black staff and a necklace and at the far north are two trolls that will spot you right away (I assume the One Ring mitigates this). You can run away by climbing up, or you can try to run down the corridor instead and get captured and thrown in troll-jail. It’s then possible to break out and this seems to be a new area, but I’m going to save describing the dungeon for next time because I haven’t explored thoroughly yet. The important point here is that possibly you need to get captured to win the game.

The lower dungeon.
This is a small hole roughly carved out of the rock. An exit is up. On the dirty and dusty wall is a sign: “I, Gloin, was here. There is a secret exit from here, which the trolls do not know about, made by us dwarves. Just say the name of the legendary Bilbo’s nephew, son of Drogo, and you will escape — but watch out for trolls!”

One branch off the corridor leads to a “secret meeting room” with some stinking sulfur which will be used for a puzzle in a moment. In the meantime, let’s go to the last section I’m talking about today:

There’s a throne room described as being where the “Mountain King” held court, with a small side offshoot behind some drapes containing a magnifying glass. To the east is a “holy room” (with a “scent of incense and myrrh”) next to a “gold room” (everything is made out of gold, but you can’t pick it up) with an empty bottle. Curiously, the spiritual room is right next to a Vampire room, where some bats will bite and poison you if you hang out too long. The game explicitly mentions the medicine at the greenhouse as curing the poison.

Under the ceiling are several thousand small vampire bats. The floor is covered in excrement and there is an intense smell.

Back at the throne room just to the north is a dragon’s lair. This was in the MUD version and I kept getting shoved out of the room because of my scent being detected, but while holding the stinky sulfur it is possible to enter safely.

A fifty-meter-long dragon lies sleeping here. There appears to be an exit to the north, behind the dragon.

The problem is that going past the dragon just hits a slide, which goes back to the start! So I have no idea why you’d bother with the dragon in the first place. I still don’t know if the game’s norms allow this to be a “scene” for fun or if there must be some deeper significance (or at least a treasure).

Speaking of treasures, you may have spotted there have been items like the gold dust and the necklace which seem to serve solely as treasures in the Crowther/Woods style. I don’t know yet if that’s how they’ll work out; the game’s sole objective given at the start is escape, but perhaps the treasures count as points and Frodo can afford a small beach vacation before tackling Mount Doom.

Æons ago, in the pre-pandemic year of 2019, I wrote about the Norwegian game Ringen, based on Lord of the Rings. I only knew about it from a vague reference in a list of Tolkien games which gave the game as being from 1979, written by “Hansen”, and later converted into a region of Genesis MUD (that later made it to VikingMUD). VikingMUD’s section is still mostly the same as the original, so I was able to play through and theorize about what the original Ringen was like.

Back in September, two articles dropped on the site spillhistorie.no (run by Joachim Froholt) about rescued Norwegian games, both written by Robert Robichaud. The first was on SVHA Adventure (which I’ve now played) and the second was about an authentic version of Ringen in Norwegian. The game originated in 1983, not 1979, and was originally by Halvor Nilsen, not “Hanson”. There’s quite a lot of detail to the article and I am going to give a shorter summary here; the important thing to point out right away is there’s actually four versions: the original on mainframe, a port made to C64 done direct from the mainframe source code by Pål-Kristian and Per Arne Engstad, another port to DOS, and finally the leap to the MUD systems. Enough survives of the mainframe version it may eventually be restored, the C64 version is lost, and the DOS version is the one I’m about to play.

One curiosity about the title screen above is that it refers to Lord of the Rings using the title of the second translation of Lord of the Rings into Norwegian (“Ringenes Herre”), which came out in 1984, after the first version of the game Ringen. In 1983 the only translation available was one by Nils Werenskiolds in the early 70s (“Krigen om Ringen”) which was written in an old-fashioned “riksmål” style and is considered inferior.

From TolkeinGuide, the trilogy without dust jackets.

The University of Tromsø was the fourth university established in Norway (1968) after Bergen, Oslo, and Trondheim. All four obtained computer science programs. Of the four, Trondheim had more an engineering focus (with their MIT and Norsk Data links, see SVHA Adventure for more), Bergen emphasized numerical analysis, and Oslo included theoretical work on programming languages (with their first professor, Ole Johan Dahl, co-inventing the first object-oriented programming language). University of Tromsø was singular for, if nothing else, their location, still the farthest north on Earth of any university.

Their far-north position made them an optimal place to do astronomy and geophysical research (with phenomena like the Aurora Borealis); the Department of Physics is where their computing first started. Their computer science was hence of a pragmatic sort, working hand-in-hand with science, and through the 1970s leaning towards engineering. For example, they did work on the Tandberg line of terminals.

Source.

They were always small, and failed to break out as their own graduate college separate from math and science; according to a paper from History of Nordic Computing:

The department was the youngest and smallest of the four departments of the Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences. As a result, it was constantly in the minority when the voting for lecturing capacity had taken place.

In the Fall 1983 term, a student named Halvor Nilsen decided to write an adventure based on Lord of the Rings, using Norwegian for the game rather than English.

It was mostly to test what I had learned during my studies on a “proper” project, partly because I was interested in both Tolkien and computer games.

The game was finished and popular by December; so popular that Nilsen added a time-limiting function in a January version.

Welcome text, via the mainframe Ringen source code.

Word of the game spread outside the school, and Pål-Kristian (age 15) and Per Arne Engstad (age 14) had heard about it. No story of stealth this time, they just asked for and got a login:

Getting into the University computer room was pretty easy. I just asked, and they gave me a username. Everything was fine as long as I behaved, was quiet, and let the students have their space if they needed it.

Having played it and wanting to have it on their home computer, they ported it to C64 (based on printed Pascal source code) and again later to DOS; they considered professional publication, but:

I was fifteen in the fall of 1985, and my brother was 16. At that time, the internet didn’t exist. There were no real game companies in Norway, I think. Who should we have turned to? In addition, it was never, at least as I remember it, the intention that we would make money from this. In any case, I was driven by the fact that it was incredibly exciting, both with the programming itself and also that it was possible to make games in a fairy tale world. We could have contacted Halvor to get something together, but we never did.

You can see the exact details on Rob’s post, including how it got ported to MUD systems. Regarding game companies in Norway, spillhistorie.no has a story about the Norwegian version of The Quill, but it is true they did not have a regular “gaming industry” making things easy like with the bedroom coders of England.

From spillhistorie.no, and we’ll return to this in 1984. The start of The Quill (English version) is coming soon to this blog.

The main difference between the mainframe and DOS versions is (allegedly) an exploration section cut at the start; the DOS version instead starts right in the action, as you’ll see in a moment.

To get into the DOS version the program asks for your name (and for it to be your real name, not something silly) and a date (which the game emphatically states must be a real one) in the format MM/DD-YY, with the “/” and “-” characters exactly. This might not seem like a challenge, but the Norwegian character set is needed to play (there’s a SETUP.BAT that will do that for you) which means the keys are changed. Shift-7 gave me a “/” and “/” gave me a “-“. I also found after some fiddling:

; gives ø or Ø
‘ gives æ or Æ
[ gives å or Å

The game really does need the characters; you can type “på” (that is, “on”) to wear the One Ring if you have it, and “pa” does not work. If you are a Norwegian speaker, you may think “of course, pa is an entirely different thing, you wouldn’t treat that the same” but there are games like Skatte Jagt from this era that just ignore non-Latin characters. The spelling-substitute of “paa” doesn’t work either.

Letter blocks from Etsy including the three Danish/Norwegian characters.

The fortunate thing (from my perspective) is that the game contains a relatively complete verb-list in the instructions.

`Nord’,`Sør’,`Vest’, `Øst’,`Opp’,`Ned’: directions, first letters work so you can use “Ø” for east
`Av’, `På’: Wear or take off the ring
`Bruk’: Use (according to Rob’s article, this gets used generally for most objects)
`Kast’: Drop
`Se’: Look (get room description)
`Si’: Say
`Ta’: Take
`Undersøk’: Examine

Unlike the game Ring Quest where the player was essentially every character at once, Ringen squarely identifies the player as Frodo. You’re with the Fellowship, about to pass the Misty Mountains, when you are attacked by trolls and separated from the group; you lose the One Ring in the process. The action picks up with troll soldiers in hot pursuit; your goal is to enter Moria, find the One Ring, and escape on the other side (I will assume with a Balrog encounter somewhere).

Du er fanget mellom trollsoldatene og den glatte, kalde fjellveggen! Trollsoldatene beveger seg veldig raskt opp fjellstien du brukte for å flykte. Trøst og bær hvis du ikke kan komme deg unna!!

You are trapped between troll soldiers and the slippery mountain wall! They are moving quickly up the path you used to escape. Say your prayers now if you can’t get away!

I was stuck here for a bit; the player has no inventory and none of the directions work. I needed to catch on to the fact that the game lets you examine things embedded in descriptions (rather than separated as “items”); in this case, you can examine the mountain wall (“fjellveggen”).

Still checking vocabulary with image searches. Source.

Doing this reveals a message: “Ennyn Durin Aran Moria: / pedo mellon a minno. / Im Narvi hain echant: / Celebrimbor o Eregion / theithant i thiw hin.” Translated in Norwegian:

Durins Dører, Herren over Moria:
Tal, venn, og tred inn.
Jeg Narvi gjorde dem:
Celebrimbor av Eregion
risset disse runene.

This is the famous “say friend and enter” door. Unlike the MUD’s door where I needed to say “mellon”, this one uses the word “venn” (friend in Norwegian).

>si venn
Sakte deler fjellet seg foran deg, og en stor port glir utover. Innenfor kan du se ei mørk trapp. Plutselig skjer mye på en gang. Opp stien kommer trollsoldatene i stor fart rett mot deg ! Du rygger inn i porten, og i det samme smeller den igjen med stor kraft !! Du er fanget inne i fjellet !

Slowly the mountain splits before you, and a large gate slides open. Inside, you can see a dark staircase. Suddenly, everything happens at once. Up the path, the troll soldiers rush at you with great speed! You back into the gate, and it slams shut with great force! You are trapped in the mountain!

The game is fairly open from here, and I’m fairly slow at playing it (see: Norwegian, although it is close enough to Danish this isn’t as bad as I’d thought it would be). I’d like to share the first couple rooms just to get a sense of what the game is like.

Dette er et stort rundt rom.
En stor, støvete gang går mot øst, mens en liten, ubetydelig gang går nordover. Det er mange sprekker i taket; noen er små, mens andre er store nok til å krype inn i. Hullene er dessverre alt for langt oppe for at du skal klare å nå dem.

This is a large round room.
A large, dusty corridor goes east, while a small, insignificant corridor leads north. The ceiling has many cracks; some are small, others are large enough to crawl into. Unfortunately, the cracks are too high up to reach.

Heading east:

Steinkammeret.
Det er steiner overalt her inne. Dette kammeret må en gang ha blitt brukt til vaktrom, til tross for at det nå bare ligger gråstein på bakken her. Det er bare en utgang; mot vest.

Du hører lyden av lette fottrinn, og i den ene øyenkroken ser du en utydelig skygge som beveger seg langsomt.

Stone Chamber.
There are stones everywhere. This chamber must have once been used as a guard room, even though there is only grey stone on the ground. There is only one exit, to the west.

You hear the sound of footsteps, and in the corner of your eye you see a vague shadow move slowly.

I tried examining the shadow but was told everything I needed was in the text; it isn’t permanent so I’m not sure what’s going on here. Maybe examining the mountain to get the riddle was a one-shot thing.

Looking for “en utydelig skygge”. Source.

One more room for good measure; back to the start and then north:

Sørenden av et langt, lavt rom. Østveggen er overgrodd med fin, hvit mose, mens vestveggen er glatt og
trist. Gulvet her er nydelig utskjert i berget, men taket er ruflete og svært fuktig. Det er noen hull i øst- og vestveggene, og på ei steintavle nedfelt i gulvet står det risset med noen dvergeruner:
“Død over den som våger å røre Durins hellige øks!”
Du ser:
En liten vanndam.
Ei lita stridsøks tilsmurt med blod !!

South End of Long, Low Room
The east wall is overgrown with fine white moss, while the west wall is smooth and dull. The floor is beautifully carved into the rock, but the ceiling is ragged and quite damp. There are holes to the east and west walls, and on a stone tablet embedded in the floor there are written some dwarven runes: “Death to anyone who dares to touch Durin’s holy axe!”
You see:
A small pool of water.
A small battle axe smeared with blood!

You might think taking the axe would be Bad somehow but taking it doesn’t seem to have any effect. (Yet? Or maybe this isn’t the axe the message is referring to.)

Lots of exploration next time, and likely a big map. I’m going to approach this from scratch first before I compare with my original Ringen map (which already is very different, given the MUD had a large outdoors section).

Topple the vampires from the streets below! Will you unite the homeless, the gangs, and the secret hunter societies to defy vampiric rule?

Hunter: The Reckoning — A Time of Monsters is an interactive novel by Paul Wang, set in the World of Darkness, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 1,000,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

I sat down with Paul to talk about his upcoming game and experiences writing it. Hunter: The Reckoning — A Time of Monsters releases Thursday, November 13th. You can play the demo on Steam and wishlist the game in advance of release!

Our Choice of Games and Hosted Games fans all know you from your games with us, but our World of Darkness extended universe fans may not. Can you introduce yourself for those readers?

I’m Paul Wang, a first-generation Canadian living in Burnaby, which is one of the bigger municipalities of the Metro Vancouver area. I have an academic background in history – especially military history – but I started writing for Hosted Games and then Choice of Games when I was an undergrad, thirteen years ago. For the past decade or so, I’ve been working full time as a games writer.

I’m probably best known for my Dragoon Saga (Sabres of Infinity, Guns of Infinity, and Lords of Infinity) on the Hosted Games catalogue: a long-running blackpowder fantasy series set in my original setting of the Infinite Sea. I also write a high fantasy series (The Hero of Kendrickstone and The Cryptkeepers of Hallowford) set in another of my settings, the Fledgling Realms, for Choice of Games. A long, long time ago, I also wrote Mecha Ace – half military science fiction and half homage to ‘real robot’ anime like Mobile Suit Gundam. More recently, I worked as a writer on WW2 tactical RPG Burden of Command, which just released earlier this year.

Do you feel like A Time of Monsters represents a kind of progression in your work as an interactive storyteller?

As you can probably tell from my previous work, my writing has primarily focused on military and political fiction, with a side-helping of high adventure. This means I’m personally treading a lot of new ground by setting foot into urban fantasy and gothic punk. My first priorities have been mostly to get the tone and setting right. I’m writing a lot more conversationally and a lot more colloquially than I usually do, and that’s definitely been a change. The Dragoon Saga employs a sort of circumspect aristocratic register for its narrative voice, and even the Fledgling Realms is more rigid and formal. This time around, the narration is a lot looser – more stream of consciousness and more casual.

But at the same time, I’ve also tried to iterate on Hunter’s 5th Ed rules in a way which makes for an accessible gameplay experience in a way which I haven’t before. If there’s any consistent feedback I’ve gotten on my past games, it’s that they’re too hard and unforgiving, especially when it comes to skill checks. In a lot of cases, this isn’t so much a difficulty issue as it is an informational one: players take risks they think they can succeed at, only to get kicked in the face. This time around, I’m leaning heavily on the Storyteller System which previous Choice of Games’ World of Darkness titles have developed to give the player the tools to make decisions more effectively – should they choose to do so.

This doesn’t mean that I’m going to make things easy, of course. I interpret one of the core themes of Hunter as that of being the ultimate underdog – and you can’t sell an underdog story by making the player feel like they’re completely in control. I want the player to feel like they really are just ordinary base model H. Sap fighting an enemy which outclasses them in almost any way that matters. I want the desperation to be real, I want the fear to be real. That means I’ve spent a lot of time and effort trying to put the player in the position of weakness without making them feel helpless. I want the player to understand just how powerless they are at the beginning, so that if (not when, if) they’re able to turn the tables on their supernatural foes and make it to sunrise, they feel like they’ve earned that privilege.

Tying to maintain that balance between tone and accessibility has been one of the three big challenges of working on A Time of Monsters, and it’s one I desperately hope I’ve managed to nail.

Tell me a little about your background and experience with the World of Darkness and TTRPGs and/or LARPing.

My first experience with tabletop roleplaying games was when I got the Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 starter set at the age of twelve. In the twenty years since then, I’ve played 4th Ed, 5th Ed, Pathfinder, Savage Worlds, Dark Heresy, Shadowrun, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Lancer, and Blades in the Dark.

But here’s the thing: aside from Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines, I had never played anything – digital or tabletop – set in the World of Darkness. Not “Hunter: The Reckoning,” not “Werewolf: The Apocalypse,” not even “Vampire: The Masquerade.”

This meant that when I was approached to do “Hunter: The Reckoning,” I was starting almost completely fresh – but I was also starting fresh in a world inhabited by many, many people who care deeply about its characters, its history, and its lore.

So, like any newcomer looking not to step on anything dangerous, I looked for guides. When I began the writing process, I sought out playtesters who had the experience that I lacked. Some of them had been deeply involved in the old World of Darkness, some of them were running or playing campaigns in the current edition. One of them had been a “Vampire: The Masquerade” LARPer for almost as long as I’ve been alive. They’ve been the ones who’ve kept a close eye on my narrative as it’s progressed from plot outline to mechanical skeleton to fully-fledged game, and they’re the ones who’ve been keeping me honest through the whole process. If I’ve gotten any of it right, it’s only thanks to their efforts in educating me on a world which they know far more intimately than I do.

What will WOD fans find surprising about your approach to the world of Hunter in A Time of Monsters?

The one thing that stood out for me the most about Hunter was how it’s Gothic Punk in contrast to say, “Vampire: The Masquerade’s” Gothic Horror.

To me, “punk” is a genre which is inherently about power, specifically how those without it are caught up in the machinations of those who have it – and how those powerless, downtrodden bystanders choose to respond to being trampled on by those who may not even be willing to acknowledge their existence.

Most of the World of Darkness game line – and most of its adaptations – have, I think, focused primarily on the perspective of those with power over those who don’t. While a vampire can pretend that they’re a representative of the othered and the marginalised, that the hierarchy of their society shackles them, and the cost of their ‘curse’ robs them of their humanity, that line of argument rings rather hollow when you remember that vampires are still, for the most part, immortal nigh-indestructible superhumans with supernatural powers who inherently see normal mortal human beings as amusing pets at best and prey animals at worst. Their hierarchies constrain them, but they also empower them. Their powers come at a cost, but that hasn’t stopped them from amassing wealth, influence, and the ability to commit spontaneous violence on a scale no individual human can. They’re the equivalent of the privileged members of society who insist that they’re the real victims here, even as they stand richer and more powerful than the vast majority of their society, and even as their ‘victimhood’ consists solely of the fact that a small minority still exist ‘above’ them.

Which brings us to the Hunter.

The Hunter has no inherent supernatural abilities to fall back on. The Hunter has no hierarchy to call for help. The Hunter is a normal human with nothing but their own resources, going up against an enemy which they cannot survive a head-to-head one-on-one fight against: a normal person who’s seen just enough of this other world to know just how dangerous it is to themselves, their loved ones, and their communities.

Some Hunters have personal fortunes to rely on, training, resources, and connections – all factors that can help mitigate their relative weakness. Your Hunter will begin with none of those things. They are, in almost every sense of the word, starting with nothing, facing an enemy which not only outclasses them in every way, but which they have no chance of escaping from.

How they proceed from there is up to the player’s choices, and when inhabiting the life of someone at the bottom of any kind of society, every choice is a compromise. Do you trust those around you to help you, even if they’re barely keeping afloat themselves? Do you look further afield for more capable allies regardless of the cost they might exact? What lines do you cross to get the food and shelter you need to survive, or the weapons and equipment you need to take your fight to the enemy? What terrible people do you cozy up to for support? What awful systems do you perpetuate? Who do you risk helping? Who do you risk opening yourself up to? Who do you betray, if it means living to see another sunrise?

When someone’s back is against the wall and their stomach is empty and their entire future is an endless, hopeless war against a world which sees their existence as an inconvenience and an enemy which seems unstoppable, what kind of decisions do people make? What kind of decisions would you make? And are they ones which let you look in the mirror and say, with complete sincerity, that you are still a better person than the one your circumstances have tried to force you to be?

That, in essence, is my take on Hunter. I’m not sure if it’ll be surprising, especially given how many passionate veterans of the game line there are out there.

But that’s what I’ve got.

Was there a character you enjoyed writing most?

You know, come to think of it, I really enjoyed writing most of the major characters, but I think it was the player character I enjoyed writing the most.

Most of what I’ve written before has been, if not entirely archaic, then a lot more formal than what my conversational style is like. Writing an aristocrat in a Regency-analogue military setting, or even an adventurer in a high fantasy one doesn’t really let me cut loose quite as much as I would if I weren’t writing a certain type of person in a certain kind of place. That applies to the responses the player has access to as well. There are certain social boundaries which can’t be crossed, certain things which the genre conventions or the basic concept of the character doesn’t let you make them say.

But I’m not writing an aristocratic cavalry officer or a high fantasy adventurer or even a WW2-era company commander. This time, I’m writing someone who grew up in and inhabits the same society I do, which means they have a chance to be as irreverent and informal as I’d like to be sometimes – especially in the face of fear and hopelessness. I’ll stress that this is still a choice. They can choose to exhibit as much deference or defiance as they want – but the players who choose to play their Hunters as the kinds of people who don’t feel like they need to restrain themselves around their friends, or show false respect to their enemies, or simply want to occasionally let the intrusive thoughts win? They’ll have some real good material to work with.

If you were the PC in A Time of Monsters, what would your character sheet/customization look like?

To be honest? I have no idea.

I’ve taken a lot of liberties with the base system of “Hunter: The Reckoning.” This wasn’t out of some desire to ‘dumb down’ the mechanics so much as it was from the fact that I’ve always held to the belief that a game with meaningful character creation should have as few stats as it can possibly get away with – so that every point allocated and every character advancement choice made has significant weight.

For A Time of Monsters, this means I stripped down the stats system to its bare essentials – only the things a Hunter would need to survive and investigate and run and fight, no more, no less. Obviously, the base system was designed much the same way, but a system intended for a party-based tabletop game isn’t one that works well for a single-player Choicescript game which follows a single character. A well-balanced Hunter cell can fill all of the roles which the base system allows for, but in A Time of Monsters, you are not playing a well-balanced Hunter cell, unless you can find the allies to make one.

So all this is to kind of say ‘I don’t know’. I know what my strengths and weaknesses are, but I don’t have to go out at night looking for vampire lairs. I might know how strong I am in the gym or how smart I am in front of a desk – but in the dead of night with nothing but a flashlight and an ancient semi-automatic up against some thing which shouldn’t exist but is somehow still bearing down on me faster than any human could possibly move? I’d have no idea.

And I hope I never have the chance to find out.

Why did you choose to set A Time of Monsters in Vancouver?

Simply put? Because I live here.

I’ve lived in probably a dozen places in three countries over the course of my life, but this is the place I’d choose over everywhere else. I genuinely love it here, and I hope that love shows in the way I’ve portrayed not just the city of Vancouver itself, but the area around it, the people who live here, its often-conflicted history, and the culture of British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, as I see it.

Of course, loving a place means also acknowledging its faults, and Vancouver’s faults are ones which tend to create some rather deep hypocrisies: a global port home to multiple diasporas, yet built on land stolen from its original inhabitants; a place open to the world, but only if you can afford the sky-high cost of living; a metropolis which has the potential to be one of the greatest cities in the world but is being strangled by its refusal to grow in the ways that matter. It’s fabulous wealth next to excruciating poverty, high-tech infrastructure next to a spiralling housing shortage, world-class parks next to opioid addiction. It’s deeply complicated and deeply complex place, and part of the reason I chose to set A Time of Monsters here is that I want to show people how I see this city, about the problems it’s facing, and about why I love this place despite those problems.

The end result, I think, is a story which is unabashedly Canadian – and unabashedly Vancouverite. I don’t want my players mistaking the setting of A Time of Monsters for anywhere else in the world, and I’d like to think I’ve succeeded there. It’s almost certainly not a perfect representation, but it’s one which I feel is authentic to how I see the place where I live – and one which reflects my feelings towards it.

The last time I wrote about a Japanese game was with The Palms, where I mentioned skipping over two games from 1982 because there were no copies available. This was one of them.

Via bsittler of Gaming Alexandria. I’ve decided to use the name from the title screen of the game rather than the tape case.

Brief history recap: Japan’s efforts in adventures kicked off with Omotesando Adventure (1982, written in English by ASCII for a special April Fools insert in their magazine); the goal was to sneak into ASCII’s own headquarters and cause sabotage (and set a precedent for games after to involve the company making them in the plot somehow). This was followed by Mystery House from Micro Cabin which introduced graphics, followed by a sequel three months later. They then published Diamond Adventure and today’s game near the end of the year, before the floodgates started to truly open (I have more than 50 Japanese games listed for 1983).

Takara Building Adventure (for early Sharp computers like the MZ-80K) was written when Akimasa Tako was in junior high (in Japan, ages 12-15) but unlike our other young authors, he didn’t send his game off to the publisher (Micro Cabin) with fingers crossed. He made the game “just for friends” but “it was released without my knowledge.”

Akisma Tako from a 2017 panel in Tokyo about Micro Cabin.

It was hence a private game according to his own words, although it riffs off the same “corporate stealth” plot as Omotesando, Diamond Adventure, and some games we haven’t reached yet. I am somewhat confused since the goal here is to sneak into Micro Cabin’s office, yet it wasn’t written for them. The Micro Cabin influence is strong, though, so maybe it was a fan-work of sorts. Given Tako did get royalties, he must have been contacted by the company first before it hit store shelves, so it could have been retro-fitted.

It sold 2,000 copies which was respectable for the market at the time, but not enough to “get rich”: he received 50,000 yen from the proceeds. (In 2025, that’s about 71,000 yen, or $470 in US dollars.) Mystery House itself, on the other hand, sold so many copies it literally paid for the building that Micro Cabin was housed in.

The game is split into two parts, sold as separate items. Most references don’t have the two versions listed separately.

Screens from a Yahoo auction of part 2, just to demonstrate it is definitely a distinct version.

The game kicks off with an animation where a small person enters a building, then gets flung out of the Micro Cabin window and dies on the street below. Then you enter stage left: now it is your turn. Your job is to make it to the Micro Cabin offices, alive.

You start at the front door, with 1000 yen in your pocket, next to a vending machine.

Before checking out the vending machine, let’s wander briefly. South runs into the (not yet open) door, east and west don’t work, and north turns to a “garbage character” screen.

With a comment from Matt T. and consultation from some Gaming Alexandria people, this is basically “my eyes are blocked by junk”, but it’s the double joke that the screen is filled with garbage characters. The main point is the player can’t see ahead of them. It’s a little like Adventureland where you wander into a memory chip.

Head farther north and the game is over.

You stagger out into the street and get run over by an ambulance that just happened to be passing. Rest in peace.

Back to the start, you can take some of your 1000 yen and BUY JUICE (this spends ¥90), or rather, BUY (hit enter) JUICE (hit enter); you can also OPEN / DOOR and go south to get inside.

WEST will turn the player west here, facing a cigarette machine; you can BUY / CIGARETTE for ¥150.

On directions, this is designed halfway to the Mystery House System. You can’t look in a direction if there’s nothing interesting, but if there is something there, you will turn rather than walk that way. Notice how the compass changed.

Head farther south and you will be able to look in all four directions.

“Beyond here is dangerous, entry prohibited.”

Trying to beat the barricade just chastises the player with NO! (…Mystery House flashbacks…) but the Oasis is open.

The way purchases work is you pick the items (and they have limited stock, so you can’t buy, say, more than one beer) and then check out, and if you exceed what you’re holding (remember it started at 1000 yen, and you may already have bought juices/cigarettes) the police come.

This animates the police car moving to the left.

If you buy the BEER and then turn over to the person guarding the barricade, you can GIVE BEER. They will ask if you want to share some; if you say NO they will end up wandering off drunk. That’s 400 yen left (assuming you hadn’t bought anything else).

This lets you go farther, to the fire alarm on the wall. You can turn to find a stair leading up…

…where of course going up is fatal (you fall). Turning around there’s an elevator, but you get similarly stalled by a giant person inside.

If you GIVE JUICE they’ll go away and you can go inside. This wins the game, which tells you to go on to play volume 2.

To the far right that’s “Poor Mr. Tako. Only his arm is depicted.”

To summarize the plot: you buy a juice outside, and a beer inside. You do one bribe with beer, then with juice, and then you win the game. The only difficulty was in spending money wisely.

This really does feel like a private game. A great deal of work went into the rendering the scenes and telling in-jokes. There’s also no generalized parser, each room has the parser commands custom-listed:

4060 IF(IN$=”PUSH”)*(R=0)THENGOSUB120:IFIN$=”BUTTON”THENR=1:GOTO4170
4070 IF(IN$=”GIVE”)*(S=0)THENGOSUB120:IF(IN$=”JUICE”)*(JU>0)THEN4150
4080 IF(IN$=”S”)*(R=1)*(S=1)THEN5010
4090 IF(IN$=”S”)*(R=1)*(S=0)THEN4210
4100 IFIN$=”W”THENS=0:R=0:GOTO3710
4110 IFIN$=”N”THENS=0:R=0:GOTO3810
4120 IFIN$=”E”THENS=0:R=0:GOTO3010

If I was playing these for the sheer games-in-themselves, I would be a bit disappointed. As a piece of pure history, this is wonderful. This is still the “hardscrabble” phase for Japanese adventures — the very start of people making their own — and this shows the author constructing a multi-direction world piece by piece with a limited MZ-80K machine. The character-drawing set leads to some great touches, like the “Oasis” logo or the attempts at perspective drawing. Also, the early-mover aspect — the third or fourth adventure written in Japanese — means it is possible this game influenced something more serious that came out later (there’s many Japanese adventures coming, so we’ll just have to file that for later).

If nothing else, it got Akimasa Tako into the game industry. He did another game with Microcabin adventure based on Alice in Wonderland, then later worked on games like Princess Maker 2 and Shenmue.

While we don’t have part 2 available (yet) you can take a look at a walkthrough here if you’re truly curious what happens (there’s an early minigame which apparently is a serious headache).

Thanks to Video Game King on Gaming Alexandria for help with a translation, and bsittler for scanning and sharing the previously missing game. (Download is here for a package, where save state 1 starts right before the introduction, and save state 2 starts where the player can put input. Remember that verb and noun are typed separately. Also note early Sharp computers didn’t have a backspace, so “delete” is the same as backspace. A larger package here includes more scans and notes from bsittler.)

(Continued from my previous posts.)

I’ve finished the game. This was far more elaborate than I expected and it might verge into a “good” game if some of the dodgier design choices were tweaked. It certainly is not the game a child would likely solve on their own (despite it being positioned as a children’s game by Molimerx).

Basic adventure mainly aimed at the kids but for all the family! Uses a scenario of nursery rhymes and fairytales within which to find the treasures.

Last time I was stuck with the palace/parlour and trying to get the pie to do something, and planting a “ruby seed”. I ended up making progress not being thinking of the goals but thinking of the verbs and objects I had available I hadn’t used yet.

CUT, DIG, READ, DRINK, EAT, LOCK, TIE, POUR, PULL, MOVE, MAKE, WEAR, GIVE, EXAMINE, BUY, KISS, PLAY, COOK, FOLLOW, CHOP, PLANT

Of the verbs, TIE came to mind as notably unused (and there’s no equivalent UNTIE to match). I still had a “line” from the maid which previously had laundry, and I had a and I thought where a rope might go, and I faintly remembered that at the dog/cat/moon/etc. scene when the cow appears, you can try to take it, but it give the message “it keeps escaping”. On something else (like the moon) the game just says you can’t do that; I had mentally shelved the two things together but that was a mistake. It is possible to TIE COW.

Now the cow is portable! Or at least it takes as much inventory space as a piece of toffee does. But what to do with a cow?

I admit getting distracted for a while thinking of the spiders back in the shed, and maybe somehow re-creating the curds/whey scene, but none of them are giant spiders (in fact, the spiders are entirely a red herring).

The cow instead goes to the pedlar…

…and it was only after this moment I remembered Jack in the story traded a cow for beans, rather than money. I perceived the “ruby” part of the bean earlier as just a modification of the story, but there are instead two beans, the ruby one and the regular one.

You might incidentally notice the pedlar has disappeared; he just has moved to a new place, outside the hut (where the murder of an old lady happened). So you can also give over the money to get a ruby bean too and that just counts as a treasure in itself. (There’s some maybe-softlocks here, as forewarned by Voltgloss in the comments. If you get the ruby bean first the pedlar doesn’t move, and then if you get the regular bean after he moves and the ruby bean moves. I eventually found the ruby bean back at the pedlar sign even though I had it stashed at the candy-house. Something went awry in the coding here.)

Now that I had the right seed, I almost had enough to plant the seed, but I still was missing a parser command, because straight PLANT SEED doesn’t work. You need to first DIG HOLE (a noun not appearing in the game, you just need to come up with it), followed by PLANT SEED, DROP MANURE, and POUR WATER.

Predictably, this makes a beanstalk you can climb up…

…but I’m going to wait on going inside and meeting the giant, because I solved the puzzle inside last.

Rather than puzzle-solving or verb-solving I switched to item-solving and thought about what I had left I hadn’t used. The plastic mac (“raincoat”) in particular was prominent and unused and almost certainly had to go somewhere, yet I had only found water in one place.

I maybe was deceived by playing the illustrated version of the game; this doesn’t look like the sort of waterfall with a secret cave, but it is absolutely the kind of waterfall with a secret cave. One GO CAVE while wearing the mac later:

Going west kills you from here and the game is never clear why.

MOVE ROCK opens a passage, which you can go through to find a cottage.

The honey and pliers are two other items I hadn’t used yet, which is why I was holding them at this moment.

Notice the knife! I’ll refer to it later.

Combining comments from Voltgloss and arcanetrivia helped here. Voltgloss mentioned that Saucepanman will take other gifts other than just oats (I used the sugar from candy-house in the end) and arcanetrivia suggested making porridge out of oats. It was messy to work out still, because you need to GRIND OATS first (mortal and pestle, which ground the bones last time) and then MAKE PORRIDGE while holding a saucepan with water.

Or as I’ve typed here, MAKE PORR, as the game only looks at the first three letters of each word.

Heading back west, you can POUR (PORR)IDGE and make some bears happy…

…but now Goldilocks is sad. (It’s funny how in the Red Riding Hood story you just see the aftermath, and here you instigate the whole thing.) I had been toting around the honey; dropping the honey first distracts the bears, so Goldilocks can get some of the porridge and give a GOLDEN LOCK as a prize.

Drawn here as a literal padlock.

That’s everything for that side-story (the lock goes with the treasures), but the knife is useful! I had tried to CUT PIE at one point and the game crashed, which suggests right-action-wrong-conditions. Cutting a pie with an axe might be considered a bit much, but what about a knife?

The amber claw that’s in the room description is the result, the birds aren’t useful for anything.

I was then on the last puzzle of the game, the giant.

The giant starts non-aggressive but wide awake. I puzzled out that getting the tooth was needed, and the pliers (of my unused objects) would come in handy, but it was impossible to just yank right away.

I thought this was the best puzzle of the game, but as I’ve already mentioned, I like the cross-lore puzzles. Jack deals with a sleeping giant, but in this case we need to make the giant sleeping. What have we already seen that might help cause sleepiness?

The needle that pricked Sleeping Beauty! It counts as a treasure so I had it stashed. With the giant asleep you can now PULL TOOTH (which counts as a treasure) but that wakes the giant up, who is now definitely not peaceful. You can at least run away, and can even go back down the beanstalk, but eventually the giant gets you and you die.

Again, cross-lore works here.

The axe that was used at the Battle of Grandma’s House strikes again! It took down both a Big Bad Wolf and a Giant. Get it framed.

The moment before I realized the ruby had moved from the candy-house to the place where the pedlar had been.

As I started with, this verged near to a “good” game, ruined by some unfair elements. I especially liked the items being passed around the stories, and I made a chart of the more iconic items and how they get shuffled.

That’s genuinely clever design and I’d love to try Keith Campbell’s next two games to see if he shakes off doing so many softlocks, but neither is available in any form. Stott also wrote Goblin Adventure in 1990 along with his ports but it’s an original game. So Wonderland and Dreamworld will have to wait and see if either the BBC Micro or TRS-80 versions turn up somewhere. We still have three more of his games to go: a demo game from his book published with Melbourne House (The Computer & Video Games Book Of Adventure) followed by two games in 1984, The Vespozian Incident and The Pen And The Dark.

Coming up: a previously lost game.

You’ve spent years undercover, disguised as a human, infiltrating the city’s magical law-enforcement organization. They stole your magic from you. Can you steal it back? An Imp and an Impostor is an interactive historical urban fantasy novel by Athar Fikry, author of The Dragon and the Djinn. I sat down with them to discuss their Egyptian background and how it informs their work.

An Imp and an Impostor releases Wednesday, November 26th; you can wishlist it on Steam today—it really helps, even if you don’t intend to purchase it on that platform.

We published your first game The Dragon and the Djinn in 2022 and now we are thrilled to have a second game from you coming out next month. Tell me all about the setting of An Imp and an Impostor.
Thank you so much! I’m likewise thrilled to be back. An Imp and an Impostor is set in the coastal city of Raqout – which is one of many Raqouts! Our PC is actually from an alternate dimension version of it and they aren’t the only one, as this dimension’s Raqout wound up being a nexus for all sorts of creatures and beings and was half-drowned by a big old (benevolent?) eldritch entity not too long ago as a result.

Understandably, the city’s gotten a bit magic-shy, and so ended up with a branch of magical law enforcement called Arkan, just to handle that whole mess. Arkan is, of course, very competent and not at all corrupt, which is why our titular imp PC manages to infiltrate it so easily.

Raqout is also loosely based on my hometown of Alexandria as it was in the early 1900s, and contains a lot of my strongest visual impressions of it, especially the view of the crashing Mediterranean and the busy markets and gorgeous old buildings and villas. I haven’t been there in over a decade now, and much of the PC’s yearning for a home that’s just to the left of the one they’re in is very much mine, because I know that if and when I go back, it’ll be very different than the place I grew up in. There are references aplenty for those who know it, because I couldn’t help myself, and for those who don’t, I hope you enjoy your drives across the Corniche! Alexandria in the winter is really something.

Naturally, we have an Egyptian theme from our favorite Egyptian author.
Haha, yes! I couldn’t resist. I’m pretty sure all of my pitches this time were Egypt-centric, so thank you, CoG, for letting me write one! It’s not the Egypt most readers will be expecting, I imagine, even aside from this being a fantasy analogue. There are absolutely zero pharaohs involved, for one, beyond passing mention in the backdrop. No shade on pharaohs, it’s just that (and maybe this is a function of having had to study them for so many years at school) I find that period of Egyptian history one of the least interesting to me, personally. I much prefer the time period I’ve played around with in this game, where Egypt was stuck in between overlapping occupations, in the odd limbo between modernisation and tradition in a world rapidly changing around and within it, and grappling with what modernisation would look like given it so often came with foreign influence, simultaneously the land of “exotic” legend and opulence and also just…you know, a regular place where people lived.

So, yeah, no pharaohs, no ancient curses. Just a rainy seaside city with regular people (including imps and necromancers, yes, shush) suffering under corruption and forces too strong to fathom and sort of muddling through their day-to-day.

Oh, and also, SO many descriptions of food. Just so many.

What inspirations did you take from for the sort of magic in this game?
I’m sure it will come as no surprise to anyone who’s seen or read Fullmetal Alchemist that I count it as one of my foundational media. Fullmetal Alchemist has that effect on people. I will freely admit that the image of the talsam, the chalking of precise geometric shapes in a magic system that’s more scientific in feel, owes its origin to Fullmetal Alchemist’s transmutation circles. This combines with my absolute adoration for Arabic calligraphy and the way it can be used to create shapes and images, and how real life protective talismans here (or, well, you know, depends on how much you believe in that sort of thing, but for those who do) will often consist of specific words folded into pieces of paper and kept on one’s person, and here we are! That’s where talsama came from.

The imp’s own form of magic is inspired by weaving imagery, the idea of plucking at the threads of fate, and the fact I cannot visualise very well and so often like to reach for other senses to ground a scene—the concept of magic corresponding to taste and scent was just a very fun one, so I ran with it.

I feel like I also need to shout out Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence for its particular flavour of bureaucratic magic, as well as the show Torchwood for inspiring the organisation of Arkan and…other things, but those would be spoilers.

What was your favorite part about returning to writing ChoiceScript?
In the small sense: The fact it’s SO EASY to code in such small variations into the text and be responsive to many small decisions. I played with Twine a bit in between games and oof, I really missed that ease and simplicity.

In the larger sense: having a game get away from me (again) (can you believe this was supposed to be a short one?) and yet still have all its disparate parts come together in the end, often in ways I didn’t expect going in. It always feels a little bit like having pulled off a magic trick, although I need to be clear in that it wouldn’t at all have been possible without the guidance and hard work of my editor, Rebecca, who is herself magic, I’m pretty sure.

How has your other work been going? I know you’ve been a contributor to a TTRPG.
I have, yes! Aside from the Emerald Templars TTRPG I mentioned last time, I’ve also made my own little things over on itch.io, including a solo-journaling game called SPITE about eating your stats to, well, spite your reflection. I really enjoy making bite-sized horror things and hope to make more. Everything on my itch is free to play, so please do check it out.

I also have a TTRPG setting book that had to be put on hold while I finished Imp and an Impostor, so if anyone here has been waiting for news on Marrowbreak, know that I’ll be going back to that soon!

As for non-TTRPG work, I have a few prose projects on the backburner that I look forward to returning to. I’m also an associate editor for Baffling Magazine and although I can’t talk about it yet, there’s some exciting stuff I’ll get to do with Baffling in the coming months!

Keith Campbell is well-known amongst a certain circle of adventure enthusiasts as from issue 1 of the UK magazine Computer and Video Games (November 1981) he ran an Adventure column. The column ran both reviews of games and hints, with a steady influx of letters of people asking for help on particular games or just commenting about adventures in general. It became a central information hub for adventures through the 80s.

From the author’s first column.

So, for the uninitiated, what is Adventure? The game consists usually of a logical network of locations which must be explored or traversed. The locations can contain objects, creatures/monsters, and/or treasures, which may be carried and manipulated in sometimes obscure ways to achieve the objective of the game.

He has some later work which ties directly into his magazine writing, so I’m not going to linger on the history there, but rather, take the scene slightly earlier—

Keith Campbell had been an electrical engineer working in southeast England with the Central Electricity Board for a long time (starting in 1961); in 1980, he obtained his first computer, a TRS-80, and his career was about to change. He took the TRS-80 with him to show to some “colleagues” in Kent (this was when computers were still novelty items) and one of them happened to have a tape of Adventureland to try out:

None of us had heard of it before, and had no idea how to play it. However, we were all so intrigued at the apparent intelligence of the game, that I ordered a copy almost immediately. It arrived the next day (a Saturday) and the whole family sat down and played it.

A later (May 1984) version of the header of Keith’s column, when it included a Helpline section for game hints.

A year later, when he had changed jobs to the Engineering Computer Applications section of the Board, he then got the idea (with three colleagues who all owned TRS-80s or Video Genies) to have an “adventure competition” at the Social Club for the company. He bought a copy of Ghost Town (Scott Adams), played it through taking notes to prepare, then held a race with four teams (four of five each) all playing at the same time.

We provided aids like a large sheet of paper to draw the map, stick on stars to mark where treasure was to be found, and I walked around half answering questions, and giving cryptic clues to those who were lagging. A forerunner of the Helpline! The result was that three people who were playing went out and bought a TRS-80 the very next week, just on the basis of playing that game!

He needed more competition games so rather than spending money he decided to write them himself, in the end getting a trilogy of games: Fairytale (today’s game), Wonderland, and Dreamworld.

It was while the first of these was being played during a competition evening, and bugs were being thrown up, that I suddenly realised I had an excellent play testing system here, and decided to see if I could get the game published.

He had published a game already with Molimerx, a strategy game called Creole Lobstercatcher…

The theme of this interesting new program is that the player is a fisherman in the Caribbean and when he commmences play he owns one boat, six lobster pots and no cash. He may fish inshore or offshore and in the case of the former. he can earn £2 per pot per day and in the case of the latter.

…so sent the trilogy over to them, which advertised it as “aimed at family participation”. Notably, that means while at least the first game ended up in the classroom (more on that in a moment) it was designed for children and adults simultaneously working together, rather than just “for children”.

The catalog entry is long-rambling and the proprietor A. John Harding clearly was thinking of the Mysterious Adventures and Temple of Bast they published the same year being in machine code.

When one comes to think of it there really is no reason why an adventure should not be written in Basic … We elected to publish this Basic adventure because it was written with the hindsight of the machine language program and indeed, it follows the general layout of them quite closely.

He points out that speed and security are the two general problems, but that Fairytale is reasonably fast (“there is some delay after an instruction is entered before the computer complies, but it can only really be called a hesitancy”) and the Break key is disabled to avoid snooping in the source code.

None of the three original TRS-80 games are available. However, likely keeping in mind the “child friendly” aspect, and the ease of porting BASIC, the trilogy got ported to BBC Micro (the overwhelming choice of machine for British classrooms in the 80s) when Molimerx expanded into the market in the middle of 1983. The only three of the BBC Micro games we have is Fairytale, which was rescued from a dodgy WAV file posted to Facebook.

Still, that means we have a file close to the original of this game! And we have it in a different way, because William Stott (the teacher who had his class write Dragon Adventure) also did a port. Just like Dragon Adventure it was originally for Acorn Archimedes; he later made a z-code port but that one seems to have been lost (the original web site is nuked, the Internet Archive only saved the Archimedes ports, and the file never got put on the if-archive).

Before diving into the content, I should also mention Fairytale is based on a children’s book series, the Faraway Tree series by Enid Blyton, which kicked off with The Enchanted Wood in 1939. It involves three children (Jo, Bessie, and Fanny) who move to the country and find the Enchanted Wood near their house, with creatures in the branches like Dame Washalot and Moon-Face, where “if you climb to the very top you can walk into a different world almost every day.”

From the 1949 7th edition, illustrated by D. M. Wheeler. Fair warning, one of the later images in the book is “problematic”.

The goal of the game, while ambiguous from the starting room, is simply to collect all the treasures, Adventureland-style.

At the start, we’re not at the faraway tree, but we can climb it to see things far away. (I was initially quite confused because the first item is listed as “candy” but you can’t take it. You see candy in the distance. Surely this confused some of the beginners who were playing.)

The actual faraway tree is instead just to the east.

The game doesn’t say why you can’t get the saucepan.

If you just step up one level on the tree, you can safely go back down again, but if you go up to a higher branch, you’re now in danger.

That’s the moon-faced man from the book; if you try to go down the game will kill you, tossing you in a death scene that is clearly derived off of Adventureland.

This is a “friendly death” (ignore the fire and brimstone) insofar that you have unlimited turns to get out. Going up brings you back to the moon-faced man, going down brings you safely to a “one-way street” which leads back to the regular map.

The problem here is this scatters your items. Theoretically, it means you need to get down into safety, which can be done by going in the “slippery slip” that Moon-Face guards. However, nothing I’ve tried has worked on him, and GIVE ITEM will just have him take it (…and the item disappear forever? Are softlocks really that easy?)

Going up from Moon-Face activates the Faraway mechanism and you can be sent to one of two places. (If more, I haven’t figured out how yet.)

Here, despite the game being picky about your inventory earlier, you can grab the “cat”, “dish & spoon”, “dog”, and “fiddle”. The only thing you can’t grab is the moon (nor can you GO MOON to get to a new location; it was worth a try). PLAY FIDDLE just gives “lovely tune” but no effect I can find yet.

The other location is a palace.

You can nab the line and laundry (the maid doesn’t care, and I haven’t found any way to even interact); you can go into the palace for another scene.

The “book of accounts” is a “micro-computer” in the BBC Micro version (which can’t be taken, again, no explanation); you can safely grab the money and pie.

Unfortunately, none of these objects will work to bribe Moonface — he’ll just take them and then they are lost. Trying to GO SLIP gives the message (in the Archimedes port) that Moon face won’t let you yet. With the BBC Micro version the situation is even worse: I don’t have a way of communicating trying to get by. (My guess is if you solve the puzzle an exit east or west will open up. The Archimedes port simply added a message to clarify things. I was baffled enough as an adult that I worry what will happen here with a child playing.) I’m starting to wonder if there’s book knowledge that would make the puzzle easier; typing HELP mentions that Moonface has a weakness, but there’s such minimal text here it isn’t conveyed what that weakness might be (and I haven’t read any of the Blythe books).

Looking at the rest of the map, there’s a “dead bat” to the forest of the west before arriving at a shed, with “oats”, “spiders”, a “garden trowel”, and a “plastic mac”.

Just like Dragon Adventure, inventory items being held are displayed graphically.

Heading back to the start point and going north instead, you pass by a witch…

…with a food-based house to the north.

Inside you can find some chocolate money (marked with the “treasure” indicator) and an oven. You are unable to take the money and I’m unclear why.

You can enter the oven (which has oven trays and a silver key) but the door gets shut behind you and you die, so obviously just plowing right in isn’t the best approach.

Moving past the candy-house, there’s an empty chest, followed by a “pedlar” hanging out at a room with a “no pedlars” sign. I tried giving the pedlar some items but he simply took them without anything being traded or anything good happening.

This appears to be a dead end, but that’s because it’s possible to enter from the other side. Looping back to the start and heading due east past the Faraway Tree to the last section, there’s a thorny bush that scratches you as you go by (no death or other ill effects) followed by a hut which is locked. Continuing even farther, there’s a “Fairytale Castle”.

The castle can be passed through to reach the place where the pedlar is, or you can go upstairs and find a “dusty spinning wheel” and a “sleeping girl”.

That’s a lot of content and essentially no puzzle-solving! Very curious for a game based on a children’s book. Unlike Deliver the Cake which had very clear messages about what to do, this one is aiming for the regular Adventureland experience, except everything seems quite unresponsive. None of the characters talk, and the only “effect” I’ve had is the generic one where they accept an item you give them; this makes it distressing to test giving items as a solution.

I’ll keep cranking at it, I still don’t expect this to go for long. Has anyone read the books and have a notion what at least Moon-Face is up to?

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

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

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

…followed by SWING ROPE.

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

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

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

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

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

With the key, a new area opens up.

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

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

Tiny evil Christmas tree, perhaps?

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

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

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

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

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

The end result is a trapdoor you can pull open.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note the comment about being not “worthy”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two missing points to cover:

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

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

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

Title Page Digitized by: Arthur Britto.

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

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

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

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

Now let's talk survey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Fred Sirotech, president of Sir-Tech

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

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

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

From Brian Stuart.

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

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

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

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

Scenes from Trenton, via Creative Computing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— From an interview with Roland Gustafsson on software cracking

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

From Mobygames.

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

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

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

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

WELCOME TO THE CRYPT OF MEDEA …

WE’VE BEEN EXPECTING YOU .. .

Your goal is escape.

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

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

>LOOK CRYPT

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

YOU FIND SOME MATCHES!

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

TRY PUSH….

Fine, PUSH:

MOVING IT REVEALS A PASSAGE DOWN!

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

Getting the hand is fatal.

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

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

>BURN HAND

WITH WHAT? (TRY BURN XXXX WITH XXXX)

>BURN HAND WITH CANDLE

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

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

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

VISIBLE OBJECTS: A LAB TABLE, A FLASK

VISIBLE EXITS: SOUTH, EAST, WEST

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

Next time: probably lots of deathtraps!

Amidst so much else, the 1990s saw the rise and fall of the narrative-driven space sim. The sub-genre was effectively invented in 1990, when Wing Commander dared to add a set-piece story line to the sturdy foundation of the more open-ended British classic Elite. It reached a peak of commercial and critical acceptance in 1994 with Wing Commander III and TIE Fighter, only to fall off the big publishers’ radar completely by shortly after the turn of the millennium. As you regular readers know, I’ve been writing the final installments to a lot of stories recently, a symptom of the period of churn and consolidation in which these histories currently find themselves. Now I’m on the verge of writing my last words on not just a company but a whole category of games as a mainstream commercial force — almost, I’m tempted to say, a whole subculture of gaming, one of the oddest of them of all when you stop to think about it.

Even the phrase “space sim” is kind of strange and misleading. What were these games supposed to be simulating? Definitely not any form of real spaceflight — not when they chose to implement atmospheric drag, meaning that your ship slows down if you let off the throttle in exactly the way that a real vehicle out in the vacuum of space doesn’t. Their developers started with the way space combat was presented in the Star Wars films, which had themselves happily ignored everything we know about the nature of real space travel in favor of dogfights borrowed from old Second World War movies. Then they just piled on whatever seemed fun and interesting to them, which often entailed delving deeper into the same wellspring as George Lucas. (It was no coincidence that Lawrence Holland, one of the foremost practitioners of the space sim, cut his teeth as a game developer on World War II flight simulators.) Space sims were known by that name because of their vibe alone — because they subjectively felt like simulators, no matter how divorced they were from the reality of space travel. (There are lessons to be drawn from this, if we choose to heed them. The fact is that almost every game which is labelled a simulator is less of one than it purports to be. This is worth remembering any time anyone encourages you to take any game too seriously as a reflection of the real world.)

Chris Roberts’s Wing Commander games made the space-sim formula still more uncanny, by interleaving the missions in space with potboiler relationship drama. It may have been weird on the face of it, seemingly more a product of some random butterfly somewhere flapping its wings than anything flown in on the wings of fate, but for the better part of a decade quite a lot of people loved it.

And then they didn’t so much anymore…

Wing Commander III includes a love triangle. Because of course it does…

Being an inveterate hiker when I’m not sitting behind a computer, I can tell you that it’s sometimes harder than you think it ought to be to realize when you’ve reached peak elevation in a landscape. The same is true in the landscape of media. As I noted above, the space sim reached its peak already in 1994, even though it would take a few years for everyone to cotton onto that fact. For this was the year that both the Wing Commander series and LucasArts’s Star Wars space sims, the eternal yin and yang of the sub-genre, released their best-remembered installments.

Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger doubled down on creator Chris Roberts’s passion for the cinematic side of the experience by interleaving a fairly workmanlike space-combat game with a semi-interactive movie that featured digitized human actors, among them such established Hollywood talents as Jason Bernard, Malcolm McDowell, John Rhys-Davies, and Tom Wilson. In what was arguably the greatest feat of stunt casting in the history of games, the star of the show was none other than Mark Hamill. Over a decade after he had last portrayed Luke Skywalker on the big screen, he portrayed here another space-fighter jock, the player’s own avatar, Colonel Christopher Blair. The presence of so many recognizable actors garnered Wing Commander III considerable attention in the glossy mainstream press. The “Siliwood” dream of Northern and Southern California joining forces to forge a new form of entertainment was nearing its frenzied peak in tandem with the space sim in 1994. Wing Commander III was widely hailed, notwithstanding its computer-generated sets and general B-movie aesthetics, as a proof of concept for the better, richer interactive movies that were still to come. Hyped inside the industry as the most expensive game yet made, it garnered a rare five-stars-out-of-five review from Computer Gaming World, and sold at least half a million copies in the United States alone, at an average street price of about $70.

If Wing Commander III was trying to capitalize on gamers’ love for Star Wars in some less-than-subtle ways, LucasArts’s TIE Fighter had the advantage of literally being Star Wars, coming out of George Lucas’s very own games studio. It also had the advantage of being a much better, deeper game where it really counted, eschewing digitized actors and soapy relationship drama to focus firmly on the action in the cockpit. It too was given a perfect score by Computer Gaming World, and sold in similar numbers to Wing Commander III, albeit without attracting the same level of attention from the mainstream press.

Alas, it was mostly downhill for the two franchises from there; such is rather the nature of peaks, isn’t it? In early 1996, barely eighteen months after Wing Commander III, Chris Roberts and his employer Origin Systems were ready with Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom. Despite the short turnaround time, it represented another dramatic escalation in budget and ambition on the cinematic side of the equation. (The combat engine, with which Roberts by now hardly bothered to concern himself, was largely unchanged.) Mark Hamill and most of the rest of the previous cast were back, for a production that was shot on film this time rather than videotape, on real sets rather than in front of green screens that were filled in with computer-generated backgrounds after the fact. Yet many gamers found the end results to be paradoxically less stunning. The filmed sequences of Wing Commander IV fell into a sort of uncanny valley, being no longer clearly part of a computer game and yet having nowhere near the production values of even the most modest Hollywood features of the standard stripe. Probably more importantly, the Siliwood cultural moment was quickly passing, leaving the game with something of the odor of an anachronism. The mainstream was becoming more interested in the burgeoning World Wide Web than the wonders of multimedia and CD-ROM, even as hardcore gamers were embracing the non-stop action of the first-person-shooter and real-time-strategy genres, having lost patience with the long cutscenes and endless exposition of interactive movies.

For a cost of more than three times that of Wing Commander III, Wing Commander IV sold a third as many copies. Origin’s management told Chris Roberts that any future games in the series would have to scale back the movie angle and try harder to refresh the increasingly stale gameplay. By way of a response, Roberts quit his job at Origin.

From here, the decline was steep for Wing Commander. In September of 1996, the USA television network debuted Wing Commander Academy, a Saturday-morning cartoon featuring the voices of Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and Tom Wilson among other actors from the last couple of games. All of the parties involved had envisioned the show capitalizing on a hit game. Absent said hit, it disappeared from the airwaves after just thirteen episodes.

The franchise’s last hurrah as a game came with Wing Commander: Prophecy, which appeared at the end of 1997. “Wing Commander III and IV were both great products,” said Prophecy’s producer Adam Foshko, straining hard to be diplomatic toward his predecessor Chris Roberts, “but they are more like unequal halves. This is a much more synergistic product. It’s very team-driven. It’s not one person’s vision, and I think it shows.” At its best, Prophecy really did play better than any Wing Commander in years, evincing the far greater level of attention the team paid to the action in the cockpit. Less positively, the movie sequences were cheesier and more constrained, even as a plan to bring the game fully in line with the hardcore set’s current priorities by adding a multiplayer component ultimately came to naught. When Prophecy didn’t sell well, that was that for Wing Commander as a gaming franchise. The commercial prospects of an expansion pack that the team had been working on — a return to the old “mission disks” that had made Origin a bundle back before the former Luke Skywalker and his Hollywood friends had entered the picture — looked so dire that Origin just dumped the whole thing onto the Internet for free.

Meanwhile Lawrence Holland and his colleagues had been going through some travails of their own. After making a well-received TIE Fighter expansion pack and a “Collector’s CD-ROM” with yet more new missions to fly, Holland left LucasArts on amicable terms to start a studio called Totally Games, taking his technology and most of his team with him. From the average fan’s perspective, this was a distinction without a difference: Totally’s games would still be Star Wars space sims, and they would still be published by LucasArts.

Like their counterparts at Origin, the folks at Totally could totally see the potential in offering a multiplayer mode to keep up with the changing times. But unlike them, they stuck with the program. In fact, the next iteration of their series was designed to be multiplayer first and foremost. Holland and his people spent almost two years finding ways to make multiplayer work reliably despite all of the challenges of the high-latency, dial-up Internet of the era.

The result of those efforts landed with a resounding thud in the spring of 1997, becoming a case study in the dangers of failing to understand your customers. Holland’s X-Wing and TIE Fighter games may not have been interactive movies in the sense of Wing Commander III and IV, but people had nevertheless loved their unfolding campaigns, loved the sense of playing a part in what could easily have been a novel set in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. The ingeniously titled X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter didn’t give them any of that; its single-player mode was little more than a place to practice for multiplayer matches. “The sad part is, I was really looking forward to this game,” wrote Computer Gaming World’s reviewer, echoing the sentiments of thousands upon thousands of deeply disappointed ordinary players. “After the high of TIE Fighter, I wanted another Star Wars experience that would be just as immersive and fun. And while my wish for multiplayer Star Wars action was fulfilled, my hope for an equivalent single-player experience wasn’t.” In a last-ditch attempt to save their baby, Totally put together an expansion pack whose sole purpose was to provide a single-player campaign of the old style. It did so competently enough, but inspired it was not, and it never had much chance of rescuing a base game that was already a fixture of bargain bins by the time the expansion appeared in January of 1998.

In contrast to Wing Commander, however, LucasArts and Totally’s space-sim series was afforded one more kick at the can after 1998. To hear Lawrence Holland talk about it when it was still in development, Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance was the be-all, end-all in space sims. For those who wanted a story-driven campaign, this game’s would be the biggest and best ever. For those who wanted multiplayer action, this game’s multiplayer mode would be more stable and convenient than that of X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter. For those who cared about graphics, this game’s would be the best yet, taking full advantage of the 3D-accelerator cards that were proliferating everywhere. It was an ambitious plan, especially considering that this old-school Star Wars game had to be finished before The Phantom Menace, the first new Star Wars movie in more than a decade and a half, reached theaters in June of 1999, bringing with it an onslaught of next-generation toys and games.

X-Wing Alliance met that goal, being released in March of 1999. The most remarkable thing about it is how many of its other lofty goals it managed to achieve against the strictures of time and budget. The story is almost Wing Commander-like in its elaborateness, presenting for the first time a named, strongly characterized protagonist, a youthful member of a trading family caught between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire. His story is told not only through the usual mission briefings but also through emails and radio chatter full of enough interpersonal drama to warm the cockles of Chris Roberts’s heart. The campaign begins on the ice-planet Hoth, is interwoven with the events of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and climaxes with you getting to fly the Millennium Falcon at the Battle of Endor. What dedicated Stars Wars fan could resist?

Sadly, further examination of X-Wing Alliance reveals some significant shortcomings. The individual missions are often unpolished, sometimes failing to even convey adequately what their goals are; trying to complete some of them feels like trying to read the designers’ minds. Ironically, this is the same general set of issues that dragged down the original X-Wing, upon which TIE Fighter did such a magnificent job of improving. It’s disheartening to see them making a return at this late date. Like so many flawed games, X-Wing Alliance might have been amazing if it had just been allowed a few more months in the oven.

That said, the biggest obstacle that X-Wing Alliance faced in the marketplace was probably just the tenor of the times. As I already noted, at a time when everyone was excited and optimistic about The Phantom Menace, the new face of Star Wars, this game was old-school. And yet that was only the beginning of the commercial headwinds it faced. Gamers in general were turning away from simulations in droves; real-world flight and combat simulators too, which had in some earlier years accounted for more than 20 percent of the computer-game industry’s total revenues, had now fallen markedly out of favor. Fewer and fewer gamers even owned joysticks anymore. (To what extent this was a cause and to what extent it was a symptom of simulators’ declining fortunes is a matter of debate.) Existing fans and would-be fans of simulations were being tempted away by other action-packed genres that were quicker and easier to pick up and play for the first time, while still offering plenty of long-term rewards for those who stuck with them. It seemed that fewer people had the patience for games that started by asking you to read a thick manual, then required you to go through a veritable digital flight school before you could start playing them for real.

At any rate, by Y2K both Wing Commander and the Star Wars space sims had been consigned by their publishers to the dustbin of history. Other titles in development that had dreamed of competing with the space sim’s dynamic duo head-on suffered the same fate. The most high-profile of the cancellations was a space sim from Sierra that took place in the universe of the recently concluded Babylon 5 television series. Created with heavy input from Christy Marx, a Babylon 5 scriptwriter who had earlier designed a couple of point-and-click adventure games for Sierra, it was supposed to “tart up a tired genre” and “radically change the face of gaming” with “non-linear, non-branching storytelling, a brilliant modular refit job on nearly five hours of [television composer] Christopher Franke’s music, plus an attention to the physics of space travel that will raise the high bar on space-combat games for years to come.” It got to within a few months of completion, got as far as having the box art prepared before falling victim in late 1999 to an uncongenial marketplace and to the chaos inside Sierra that had followed that venerable mom-and-pop company’s purchase by two separate corporate conglomerates in a period of just a few years.

Still, the space-sim diehards did get one last pair of classics from an utterly unexpected source before their favored sub-genre disappeared from the catalogs of the big publishers forever. In fact, many a grizzled joystick jockey will tell you even today that the second of the two Freespace games is the best of its type ever created — yes, better even than the hallowed TIE Fighter.

The first mover without whom Freespace would never have come to be was a native Chicagoan named Mike Kulas, whose early gigs as a game programmer included stints at subLogic of Flight Simulator fame and at Lerner Research, a precursor to the legendary Looking Glass Studios. At the latter workplace, he befriended one Matt Toschlog. “If this is what it means to run a company, we can do it too,” the friends decided after spending two years at the dawn of the 1990s on an ultimately unsatisfying racing game that was sold in the trade dress of Car and Driver magazine. “What’s the worst that could happen? It’ll fail and we’ll have to go back to work for somebody else.” Kulas and Toschlog moved out of the Boston area and back to Champaign, Illinois, also the home of subLogic. Champaign seemed a good place to open a new studio: it had the advantages of fairly cheap rents and a large pool of enthusiastic young tech talent, thanks to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the source of such innovations as the pioneering PLATO system of the 1970s and the point-and-click Mosaic browser that was popularizing the nascent World Wide Web at that very moment.

Kulas and Toschlog founded Parallax Software in June of 1993, six months before DOOM ignited a craze for immersive 3D action that would remake much of the industry in its image over the next few years. Luckily, Parallax was well-equipped to capitalize on the trend, what with the founders’ experience with 3D graphics and the passionate young sparks they were able to recruit from the nearby university. Descent, their very first game, put you behind the controls of a small flying vehicle and set you loose inside a series of 3D-rendered outer-space mining complexes, filled with robots gone haywire. It was different enough to stand out in a sea of DOOM clones, yet felt very much in step with the times in a broader sense. Upon its release in March of 1995, Descent became a surprise hit for its publisher Interplay, whose marketers were left scrambling to catch up to the buzz on the street with a port to the Sony PlayStation and television campaigns starring mid-tier celebrities. Made for less than half a million dollars, the game was one heck of a debut for Parallax. It and its almost-as-successful 1996 sequel were enough to make them think that winning fame and fortune in the games industry was actually pretty easy.

Matt Toschlog had never been happy in Champaign. Flush with all of that Descent cash, he wanted to move Parallax somewhere else. Mike Kulas, on the other hand, preferred to stay put. Unable to find any other way out of the impasse, the founders agreed to split the company between them. In late 1996, Toschlog moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to start Outrage Entertainment. Kulas decided to rename his half of the company Volition — “an intense act of will to accomplish something” — after stumbling across the word in a book. Outrage’s first project was to be the inevitable Descent³; Volition’s was to be Freespace, a space sim that would, as its name implied, take the player out of the asteroid mines and into the limitless inky-black freedom that lay beyond.

Freespace isn’t shy about displaying its influences. Created by a bunch of guys who adored LucasArts’s X-Wing and TIE Fighter sims, it hews unabashedly to their template. After the requisite flight training, you’re tossed into an interstellar war between your Terran Alliance and an alien race known as the Vasudans. Then another group of aliens shows up, a shadowy enigma that comes to be called the Shivans, who are so powerful that the old antipathies are quickly forgotten, and Terrans and Vasudans unite to face the greatest threat either of their races has ever known.

Although neither its core gameplay model nor its fiction is remotely revolutionary, Freespace stands out for how well it executes on this derivative material. The graphics are exceptional for their era, the possibility space behind the controls expansive, the mission design uniformly solid. Inspiration in game design is wonderful, but we should never forget the value of perspiration. The people who made Freespace loved what they were doing enough to sweat every small detail, and it shows. The only place where the game fell down a bit back in the day was a somewhat under-baked multiplayer mode.

Interplay insisted on calling the game Descent: Freespace (“From the creators of Descent!”) in the hope of riding the coattails of the publisher’s biggest hit in recent memory. Whatever else you can say about it, it certainly wasn’t their worst exercise in Descent branding. (That would be Descent to Undermountain, an ill-advised attempt to use the old Parallax engine for, of all things, a Dungeons & Dragons-licensed CRPG.) And who knows? Maybe the branding even did some good. Upon its release in June of 1998, Freespace sold well enough to be modestly profitable for its studio and publisher and convince Interplay to fund an expansion pack and a sequel. The only catches were that Volition had to turn both out quickly, without spending too much money on them.

The expansion pack, which they called Silent Threat, ended up being short and perfunctory, the definition of inessential. The full-fledged sequel, however, was a minor miracle. It defied every cynical expectation raised by its abbreviated development cycle when it shipped on September 30, 1999.

Freespace 2 — Interplay allowed the cleaner name this time, perhaps to avoid confusion with the recently released Descent³ — did everything its predecessor had done well that much better, then added a finishing touch that it had lacked: a real sense of gravitas, provided largely by the one significant addition to the development team. Jason Scott (not to be confused with the archivist and Infocom documentarian of the same name) was Volition’s first dedicated writer. He made his presence felt with a campaign that was sometimes exhilarating, sometimes harrowing, but always riveting. The outer-space kitty-cats of Wing Commander, even Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine, paled in comparison to the Shivans after Jason Scott got his hands on them. “The universe is very impersonal,” he says. “Your character is referred to only as ‘Pilot’ or ‘Alpha 1,’ and you’re up against countless waves of a seemingly unbeatable, genocidal adversary that never communicates its goals or motives. In the briefings, we tried to convey the sense of a much larger conflict unfolding in multiple systems, while at the same time hinting that your commanders weren’t telling you the whole story.”

Freespace 2 was never going to single-handedly rescue the space-sim sub-genre, but it did ensure that it went out on a high note. It’s a demanding game even by the usual standards of its kind, one that uses every key on the keyboard and then some, one that is guaranteed to leave you wishing you had more buttons on your joystick, no matter how nerdily baroque it might already be. Some of its more counter-intuitive commands, such as “target my target’s target,” have become memes in certain circles. Yet the developers are unapologetic. “We wanted players to feel like pilots in control of a complex, powerful, responsive, and technologically advanced machine,” says Jason Scott. “Complexity was a virtue.”

I’m almost tempted to write here that this was a shame, in that it put such a high barrier to entry in front of what was actually one of the more sophisticated ludic fictions of its era. My experience with the game probably isn’t unique: I struggled with it for a while, reached a point where I couldn’t seem to hit any enemy that I shot at even as said enemies had become all too good at hitting me, and wound up watching the rest on YouTube, as you do these days. On the other hand, though, why shouldn’t unabashedly demanding games that aren’t quite for me have good writing too?

Because you deserve to hear from someone other than a dabbler like me before we move on, I’m going to take the liberty of quoting Lee Hutchinson, who is a good friend of this site, a stalwart voice of reason in these increasingly unreasonable times of ours through his day job as a senior editor at Ars Technica, and, most importantly for our purposes, a hardcore space-sim junkie in all the ways that I am not. He can explain better than I can what Freespace 2 came to mean to its biggest fans, how it melded gameplay and narrative into an unforgettable roller-coaster ride.

If you’ve seen one of those simplified “evolution of man” charts, showing a chimp-like predecessor far at the left and an upright tool-using human all the way at the right, you’ve got a good idea of how Freespace 2 capped off the genre. It was the culmination of everything that had come before it, and every single gameplay element was refined and polished to a razor-sharp gleam.

Freespace 2 lets players experience a tremendous variety of missions in different fighters with a gamut of capabilities. Each mission is connected by an overarching plot: you may be ambushed while escorting some capital ships in one mission, and then in the next mission you might switch to flying a bomber and be assigned to take those capital ships out. You might be temporarily attached to a special-operations wing flying a prototype starship, or have to fly captured Shivan fighters in a deep-cover mission to scope out an enemy staging point, or deal with total mission failure and objective changes right in the middle of doing dozens of other things. Capital ships fire ridiculously large, ridiculously powerful beam weapons at each other, slicing each other to ribbons and providing a fantastic Babylon 5-esque backdrop while the player duels enemy fighters.

The targeting system is complex and rich; the wingman and escort system is complex and rich; the comms system is complex and rich. Everything about Freespace 2 shows care, love, and craftsmanship — from the chatter going back and forth between your wingmen as you blindly scout a nebula looking for a lost frigate, to the amazingly well-acted mission briefings. In practically every way, it is the Platonic ideal of a space-combat sim.

Starting at about the halfway point, Freespace 2 drops the hammer on the player with a series of tightly linked missions that absolutely do not let up. The war against the Shivans isn’t going well. A faction of Quisling-like humans is trying to defect to the Shivans’ side, taking a large chunk of the human military with it. At several points throughout the long campaign, it feels like the game is about to come to a crashing climax — only it doesn’t end. Things just get worse, and it’s an absolute rush to experience — flying your guts out, desperately trying to fight a rear-guard action against an unknowable enemy that seems to be totally unable to feel remorse, pity, or even fatigue.

I’ve never felt quite the combination of awe, fear, and eagerness I felt as I pushed through to Freespace 2’s endgame. There are lots of gaming experiences I wish I could relive for the first time, but playing Freespace 2 tops the list. That’s as good a way as any to judge a game as the best in its genre.

In the short term at least, Volition wasn’t rewarded very well for creating this game that Lee Hutchinson and more than a few others consider simply the best story-driven space sim ever made, the evolutionary end point of Chris Roberts’s original Wing Commander of 1990. Mike Kulas insists that Freespace 2 didn’t actually lose money for its studio or publisher, but it didn’t earn them much of anything either. Plans for a Freespace 3 were quietly shelved. Thus Freespace 2 came to mark the end of an era, not only for Volition but for computer gaming in general: while not quite the last space sim to be put out by a major publisher, it was the last that would go on to be remembered as a classic of its form.

What with there being no newer games that could compete with it, those who still loved the space sim clung all the tighter to Freespace 2 as the months since its release turned into years. They were incredibly lucky that Volition was staffed by genuinely nice, fair-minded people who felt their pain and were willing to “pay it forward,” as the saying goes. In 2002, Volition uploaded the full source code to Freespace 2 to the Internet for non-commercial use.

They couldn’t possibly have envisioned what followed. As of this writing, 23 years after that act of spontaneous generosity, the Freespace 2 engine has been improved and modernized almost beyond recognition, with support for eye-bleedingly high resolutions and all of the latest fancy graphical effects that my humble retro-gaming computers don’t even support. You can use the updated engine to play Freespace 1 and 2 and the Silent Threat expansion pack, in versions that have been polished to an even shinier gleam than the originals by the hands of hundreds of dedicated volunteers. Even more inspiringly, folks have used the technology to create a welter of new campaigns — effectively whole new space sims that run off what remains the best of all engines for this type of game.

The people who made Freespace 1 and 2 all those years ago are themselves awed by what their pair of discrete boxed computer games have been turned into. Freespace proved to be as much a new beginning as an ending. Long may the space sim fly on in the hands of those who love it most.

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

Sources: Sierra On-Line’s customer newsletter InterAction of Spring 1999; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of September 20 1996 and February 14 1997; Computer Gaming World of October 1994, February 1995, July 1997, April 1998, October 1998, November 1998, February 1999, July 1999, and January 2000; Retro Gamer 204.

Online sources include interviews with Jack Nichols and Randy Littlejohn on B5 Scrolls, “Growing Up Gaming: The Five Space Sims That Defined My Youth” by Lee Hutchinson at Ars Technica, an interview with some of the core members of the Freespace 2 team by the Space Game Junkie podcast, and a Game Informer documentary about Volition’s history.

Where to Get Them: Wing Commander I and II, Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, Wing Commander: Prophecy, X-Wing, TIE Fighter, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, X-Wing Alliance, Descent: Freespace, and Freespace 2 are all available as digital purchases on GOG.com.

I strongly recommend that you run the Freespace games through the Freespace Open engine, even if you’re primarily looking for a retro experience. Both on native Windows 10 and running through WINE on Linux, I found the original Freespace to be subtly broken: I was given only a fraction of the time I ought to have been given to complete the last training mission. (This was not good at all, considering I’m rubbish at the game anyway.) Freespace Open is quite painless to install and maintain using a utility called Knossos. It will walk you through the setup process and then deliver a glitch-free game, whilst letting you select as many or as few modern niceties as you prefer.

Last time I wrote about Polynesian Adventure, an entry into the Falsoft contest for Tandy CoCo adventure games. It was written by an older couple, whereas today’s selection was written by a 15-year old. The REM statements in the code mention this was written in “early 1982” so we have an idea of the lag on this one (the game was written before the contest was announced).

Justin Paola, a 15-year-old high school student living in Berkeley, Calif., is a frequent caller of his local computer bulletin board systems with his 64K, 2 disk Color Computer bulletin board system. His interests include computer graphics, movie special effects, and adventure games.

I’m assuming the blurbs are honest (unlike the Captain 80 Book which made biographical details up) as this was part of a running magazine as opposed to a one-shot book.

This game has some similarity with the previous game (being set on an island) but also strong contrast (being much more dangerous). Our goal is to land on a jungle island and find a ruby chalice deep underground, avoiding “head hunters” along the way. It’s like if Invincible Island didn’t have as many biomes (and was smaller and easier to solve).

The plane that we land on can be used for escape with the chalice (just type FLY here) although there’s a completely different method of escape available as well. I don’t know why. Playing a weird prank on our pilot?

You start, helpfully, with some supplies. The gun is useless, but not for the typical reason in adventure games (that it is meant as a red herring and violence isn’t the answer). Rather, sometimes at random you’ll get attacked by a WILD CAT and need to SHOOT CAT, but the game doesn’t bother to check if the gun is in your inventory when you do this.

I suppose finger pistols were sufficient.

The SNAKE BITE KIT is for moments where you might randomly get bitten by a snake, although I’ve gone through an entire trip without the bite happening (it’s rarer than the cat, at least). The MAGNIFYING GLASS as far as I can tell is 100% useless, and the MATCHES are used for lighting a torch which happens to be just west of here.

Weird the torch is out on the island, not in your supplies. For the cloth: THE CLOTH IS VERY INTERESTING – YOU BETTER KEEP IT.

The map is wide open from here.

There isn’t much in the way of empty space: it’s one object or interesting thing per room. Just nearby you can scoop up a GOLD NUGGET, JADE NECKLACE, COIL OF ROPE…

…TRANSLATION BOOK, KIWI FRUIT, a WATER JUG (as long as you have the torch lit, it is in a dark part of the jungle) and a SPEAR WITH STRANGE LETTERING.

For the spear, if you are carrying the translation book you can read the spear.

Remember, our only goal is to get the ruby chalice. That might make the jade necklace and gold nugget seem puzzling — there’s not even a score — but one room as “head hunters” and they demand a treasure if you wander in.

The bizarre thing is this isn’t a real obstacle — the map is wide open and you just can avoid this room. Essentially, the game includes a method of preventing death as long as you are trying to get as far as possible without reloading, but via the normal practice of playing adventures there’s no reason someone wouldn’t just mark the map square and never go to the spot again.

To the far north there’s an AIR CYLINDER and a RAFT; holding both lets you INFLATE RAFT (we’ll come back to that). There’s also a ROCK SLAB which “LOOKS LIKE IT HAS SLID OPEN AND CLOSED MANY TIMES” but is too heavy to move.

Solving this took a moment of cross-genre thinking. Maybe we’re in a fantasy game, or at least one where there’s much higher technology than it appears? Using the word XYKO from the spear opens up a cave.

This is the only other section of the game.

Just to the south of the entrance are some hieroglyphics; with the translation book in hand you can read that you ought to be carrying that ancient cloth from earlier before going east of the vipers.

The “written recently” aspect is interesting and puts more credence into the idea that the voice recognition was high tech rather than “magic”.

The aforementioned vipers are hanging out at a pit with a conveniently placed hook.

You can TIE ROPE in order to snag the hook, the SWING ROPE to go across.

There’s a boring corridor next, at least boring if you are holding the ancient cloth. If you aren’t, then you die.

And finally … the chalice! No more tricks, you can just take it and go.

You can then make a beeline back to the plane and win.

Alternately, for reasons I don’t understand, you can inflate the raft, use it on the river at the start, and float out to the ocean.

It’s clear the author (Justin Paola) was thinking of this more as “simulate a region using my computer” rather than a tightly threaded narrative. (A good comparison is Johnson’s Castle Dracula which was designed as a series of scenes fishing for particular reactions from the player.) The editors of Rainbow Magazine had enough fun that they gave it a co-award as runner-up (in the non-graphical category) with a game called Lighthouse Adventure we will play sometime in the future.

There’s a tree you can climb purely for the scenery.

If you’re thinking of your text adventure as world-simulation more than a series of scenes, it makes more sense to have gratuitous mechanics like the head hunters and the raft. (And technically also the water jug — if you’re fast enough you don’t need to bother, but the game comes with a thirst timer.) A scene-minded author like Peter Kirsch would never allow loose ends like that.

From the Falsoft book, an image printed with the source code.

Oddly enough, this may have manifested in Mr. Paola’s later career. After graduating high school, he went to Berkeley (Electrical Engineering, Computer Science) and then to the University of Arizona (remote sensing). He then worked on imaging-related projects like LANDSAT and other geographically linked technologies.

I developed multiprocessor image processing algorithms in a UNIX environment. These included terrain data algorithms such as slope, shadowing and incidence from elevation, and land-use classification from multispectral and SAR imagery. Responsible for terrain delimitation overlay production for large aerial regions in support of DARPA contract efforts.

Thus, his game reflects “simulate a geographic area” more than “create a story”. “Authors whose text adventures reflected on their later careers” might be a bit too niche, but we can also toss the recent Crypt of Medea in there with Arthur Britto’s tricky copy protection and maybe … Strange Adventure and the author going into astronomy? I’m drawing blanks here.

Coming up: Ringen returns.

(Continued from my last post.)

I’ve finished the game. Given it was a 7k-byte type-in, it seemed inevitable, and it turns out there are almost no puzzles, but I had trouble anyway due to a particular decision by the authors. (And it is authors, plural, I’ll get into that later.)

The general pattern, from the starting point, is to hop on the Love Boat, then visit six islands in sequence, then go back to the start. If you ride the boat yet again you’ll go through the sequence as many times as you like. This pattern of a treasure-hunt where you rotate through the destinations has shown up in Alaskan Adventure but given that was in a December issue of Softside it is unlikely to have had an influence. (Also, unlike that game, this game doesn’t necessarily require a repeat, although for the one puzzle there is a good chance you’ll need to loop around.)

The main destinations are marked, although it is unknown where the player starts. I also didn’t work out exactly where the Maori village of the game might be in New Zealand.

Before plunging ahead, I should also highlight that the treasure hunting feels uncomfortable this time around. “You are in Maori Museum. You see: *valuable relics*.” Taken in a literal sense, this is a story of visiting some islands on a tourist boat and stealing their stuff. However, I don’t think the authors designed it in that sense. Rather, this is meant to be a light visit to some destinations and the presence of “treasures” in an abstract way of making it a game. (Think of them as replicas being found as part of a scavenger hunt, if that helps.) If the game was written later when puzzle-less was established more as a genre, I suspect they might instead make something like The Cove from 2000, which is purely all about exploring an environment and finding neat animals.

Picking up from last time, I was stuck with the parser command for filling a car with gas. It turns out that the game is fishing for a noun not mentioned in the text: FILL TANK. The really big issue is that if you try FILL CAR the game says you don’t have everything you need yet, leading players down the wrong path. This is a strong demonstration of how important unambiguous errors messages can be in making a parser game manageable.

The trick I was thinking of last time would have worked — you can jump to the boat with the PICK command, where it chastises you for picking flowers and teleports you to the boat. However, you do need to move the Trans Am in order to get back to the start.

READ PASS (from the boarding pass in the car) gets the message

YOUR CABIN NUMBER IS G7 AND YOUR TABLE NUMBER IS A1

and while at the tables, you can GO A1 to arrive at a table; while at the cabins you can GO G7. (Again, the error message you get otherwise isn’t super helpful, and I just took a shot in the dark at the specific letter/number being odd to mention.)

The table, A1, has some *silverware* which is the first treasure. (Again, the treasure collecting is super odd if we try to imagine it’s a “real” narrative.) I used this place as my stash point for treasures as I collected them whilst traversing the six islands.

By entering the cabin, G7, the boat starts to move. When you disembark you end up on the next island in the sequence. Here’s all of them, and the sequence is left to right then top to bottom:

At the first destination, Samoa, you can:

• try to take the pink hibiscus you see and then get kicked back on the boat for breaking rules
• go to a “Council House” which has a “basket full of pearls” you can freely take
• see a fire knife dancer; there’s no text message, just a musical ditty which implies you are watching the dancing

I have the music in the clip below. Note that the “beep” that happens upon entering a room happens upon entering every single room of the game, every single time.

There are no obstacles other than avoiding the flower-based rules. The combination of parts is why I say it doesn’t seem like you’re doing a robbery; it’s showing off brief elements of place like it was a virtual travel tour or the clues of a Carmen Sandiego game (although baskets are associated with more islands than just Samoa).

Next is a Maori Village where you scarf valuable relics from a museum, and visit a Meeting House and a Lagoon while you are at it. (The closest I could find to this description is Whakarewarewa, video below.)

Next is a Fiji Village where you can find some Tongan coins (used later automatically — I never figured out where, they just disappeared) and a “diamond headed spear” in a “chief’s house”.

Next comes Tahiti, where the *Tahitian orchid* and *carving of a fish* count as the two treasures, and you find Boy Scouts singing for some reason.

Via Tripadvisor.

Then comes Tonga, with a tropical waterfall…

…a Tongan festival with free hula lessons…

…a Queen’s Bedroom (with a bird of paradise) and a Queen’s Bed (with a *beautiful woven mat*).

Last comes the Marquesas Village, which lands the player at an “active volcano” and has a guest house…

…a warrior’s house (with treasure)…

…and a cooking house, with a knife that is too hot.

The knife is the only real puzzle in the game (past the pesky parser business at the start). I realized the can that held the gas might hold water too, but got stuck for a while because I assumed the “waterfall” was the right place to fill up. Hence I started trying more and more outrageous parser messages, before finally realizing the “lagoon” from earlier could also have water. FILL CAN worked there; then I was able to POUR at the knife.

Then the remainder of the game was ferrying the remaining treasures back to the start.

I tried to check if the words earlier (like HA’E TOA for WARRIOR’S HOUSE) were from some actual indigenous language. If the only option was Marquesan, the answer seems to be no, but there’s multiple languages and dialects to account for and this is the sort of thing online resources are pretty bad at. It’s worth checking because this might represent the first time an indigenous language is represented in a computer game. (It is also of course possible the authors made those parts up, but that seems like an odd thing to make up.)

Earlier I mentioned there were two authors. The REM statements of the BASIC source mention Don and Linda Dunlap of Reynoldsburg, Ohio. The contest book only mentions Don Dunlap. I’m not sure if there was some one-person rule they were using but I’m going to change my links to mention both people.

From the perspective of the Falsoft people running the game, I could see how they perceived this as a “cute” sort of game which is a bit different from the norm so worth printing (“It is an enchanting land of adventure, charm and intrigue that seems apart from the rest of the world.”); they maybe also realized the HELP function worked to mention the FILL TANK issue that I was stuck on. Maybe they were more impressed with the sound than I was (at least, there are tiny bits of music throughout that substitute for visuals, albeit in a crude-old-computer-speaker way — the Boy Scouts singing and the Hula section are both included).

Coming up: another contest game from the book, followed by the recently-unearthed Tolkien game in Norwegian which has long been one of my Holy Grails.

This continues the story, more or less, from Rainbow Adventure (1982). I knew I had this particular set of games looming, and since the results of IFComp 2025 were announced a few weeks ago it seemed like the appropriate moment to start.

Congrats to Ben Jackson who wrote the IFComp 2025 winner, Detritus, which received the highest voting average of any game entered in any of the years of the competition (as far back as data exists).

To recap from that post about Rainbow Adventure, text adventure creation competitions have long been a feature of the computing world (the previously mentioned IFComp has now run every year starting in 1995); the very first one came from publishing company Falsoft for their platform of choice, the Tandy Color Computer. While there had been plenty of adventures for TRS-80 (with Scott Adams leading the charge) there were less out for Tandy’s color machine (with less text resolution). Scott Adams hadn’t made it yet to CoCo, so when Lawrence C. Falk of Falsoft went to play an adventure game on his own system after seeing one on others, he didn’t have any choices.

I had just finished reading Byte’s Adventure issue of December, 1981, and seen one of Scott Adams’ famous Adventures on an Apple computer at my not-too-friendly local computer store. Just the day before I had discovered how to get by the snake in the Colossal Cave. But I wanted to play an Adventure on my CoCo.

The gaping hole led him to writing his own, but it was a private game, not a published one.

When Falk started publishing the Rainbow, there were some adventure submissions, and it led him wanting to have an entire book of them: hence, a contest. There were thirteen winners declared (that were printed in a compilation book); results were announced in the January 1983 edition of the Rainbow. As confirmed by L. Curtis Boyle, the Rainbow’s cover month matched the publication month, so January is correct (no shift back by a month); it does mean also that likely all the Falsoft contest games were written in 1982, even ones that don’t have a date listed in their comments.

Scott Adams and Infocom did finally make it to Tandy CoCo, but not until later in 1983 (Release 30 of Zork I was compiled in March). So at this point in time, the adventure universe was still very small for this system, and the book added a substantial new library.

Based on the magazine copy this seems to have been an honest to goodness contest and not just a situation where they published everything that was sent: “We’ve painstakingly whittled down the numbers to settle on a baker’s dozen.” (This may have been exaggerated.) Other than the two winners (one text game and one graphical game, which landed in that January 1983 issue of Rainbow on top of being in the book) the entries were not sorted but instead listed by alphabetical order.

GREGORY CLARK of Syracuse, New York, for Sir Randolf of the Moors
DON DUNLAP of Reynoldsburg, Ohio, for The Polynesian Adventure
CHRIS HARLAND of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, for The Deed of the York
ROBERT W. MANGUM. II of Titusville, Florida, for Horror House
JORGE MIR of New Berlin, Wisconsin, for Dreamer
JORGE MIR of New Berlin, Wisconsin, for Oneroom
JUSTIN PAOLA of Berkeley. California, for Search for the Ruby Chalice
GREGORY RICKETTS of Columbus, Ohio, for Dungeon Adventure
JEAN ROSEBOROUGH of New Berlin, Wisconsin, for Door
STEVE SHERRARD of Normal, Illinois, for Dungeon Adventure
SCOTT SLOMIANY of Downer’s Grove, Illinois, for Dr. Avaloe
RICK TOWNSEND of Bettendorf, Iowa, for Escape from Sparta
CHRIS WILKINSON of Larchmont, New York, for Lighthouse Adventure

The order is different in the book, and I’m starting with the first one in the book, Polynesian Adventure. The winners are in the middle, so again, no “ranking” logic. I’m not playing fully in sequence because some games group well together, but the start of the book seemed as logical a place to begin as any.

Each game includes a brief biography; here’s Don Dunlap’s:

Don Dunlap has been a professional programmer for 17 years. He is president of his employer-based computer club with nearly 350 members. He teaches BASIC, and also serves as a volunteer computer consultant and speaker for area schools, libraries, and civic groups.

This presents a puzzle if all 17 years were from Ohio (which may not be a correct assumption). The first computer science department in Ohio didn’t even start until 1969, with Bowling Green. My guess would be he worked for Nationwide Insurance and commuted to Columbus; although I don’t know what their computing was like, insurance companies did get on the programming bandwagon early. (If he moved or even just changed companies, there are other options out of Ohio in 1983, the most prominent being Compuserve.)

Color seems to be a major feature of the game so I didn’t switch to black-and-white this time. All that really happens is that colors switch randomly every few turns.

Our goal is to go over to a boat and find treasures, bringing them back to the Polynesian House at the start. I have found zero treasures, and you’ll see why in a moment.

Gameplay starts in a small set of rooms (seen above) where the goal simply seems to be to get in your car (a Trans Am) and drive over to where you’ll find the boat. The car is lacking in gas.

To the west is a discount store with an empty gas can (you can just grab it) and to the east is a gas station (FILL CAN works) but then try as I might I can’t put the two things together. Nor does DRIVE CAR work (I assume because of the gas). There’s a GLOVE COMPARTMENT with a BOARDING PASS for the boat, but in this area that’s as far as I’ve gotten. FILL CAR while at the car holding a filled gas can just gets the response YOU’RE MISSING SOMETHING.

I did my usual verb list…

Incredibly small, and I’ll go into SMELL and PICK in a moment.

…to which I can add DRIVE, but not REFUEL or SIPHON; I suspect FILL really is the right verb, but what could I be missing given the absolutely minimalist constraints? There’s no descriptions. The discount store is just YOU ARE IN DISCOUNT STORE with nothing else implied.

From here I might be tempted to hit the source code already, but I made some progress in a bizarre way. While testing my verb list, and reaching SMELL, I had a strange response about being stung by a bee and being sent back to the boat. This wasn’t replicable either. (Maybe some bug put me in proximity of the “flowers”?) I also had a weird reaction with PICK, which usually says I DON’T UNDERSTAND (verb known, but doesn’t make sense in the room) but I was able to (while in the car) get it to give me a response about not being allowed to pick the flowers, and I got sent back to the same boat.

Love, exciting and new / Come aboard, we’re expecting you

I hoped this would open up the main part of the game so I could play (with the caveat that maybe return is impossible) but alas, this only opens up another small four-room area.

I took some stabs in the dark, like GO TABLE in the dining room or GO CABIN in the cabin area, but no dice.

Again, by now I’d normally be plunging into source code, but the weird glitch has me interested enough to try stabbing at the problem a while longer. If anyone wants to take a shot themselves, you can download the game here and then use XRoar Online (link in the upper right) to run the file.

I'm on the schedule for ThinkyCon 2025!

Towers of Pen: puzzle experiences that zoom out and out

• Me!
• Thursday, November 6th
• 4:00 - 4:30 pm (Eastern time)

What does it mean to take a puzzle to the next level? In Hadean Lands (parser IF, 2014) I designed a game where every solved puzzle "collapses" to become a single move in a larger puzzle. And larger still, and so on... Other games have taken a similar tack, notably Baba Is You.

What does it mean for a game to "scale up" in this way? Is it different from the familiar concept of the metapuzzle? (Spoiler: yes.) What kinds of puzzles are amenable to this scaling idea? And why is it so awesome, anyway?

ThinkyCon is a free online three-day event for and by puzzle game developers. There's lots of other great speakers, including FLEB, Patrick Traynor, and Tonda Ros. I hope you can drop in.

On Tueday, October 28, 2025, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of interactive fiction at Patreon and Ko-fi.

The Wizard Sniffer (2017) by Buster Hudson

In this fantasy game, you play as a female pig who was sold to a dim-witted knight as a wizard sniffer. You cannot actually sniff out evil wizards, but here you are, outside the Impenetrable Keep you escaped from only two nights ago. You think it’s in your best interest to play the part as best you can. For now.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2017 where it won 1st place overall and also the Miss Congeniality award. At the 2017 XYZZY Awards, it won the Best Game, the Best Story, the Best NPCs, the Best Individual Puzzle, and the Best Individual NPC awards; it was also the finalist in a sixth category (Best Puzzles). In the 2019 edition of the Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time, this game ranked at 13th place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Frankenfingers (2025) by Charles Moore, Jr.

Inside this game, beware the name of Victor Frankenstein.
His secret arts use body parts, and one of them is mine!
I move and see and hear and yet I’m just a severed hand
Reanimated in this crypt without my wedding band.
Where can I go, what should I do with this strange borrowed life?
Can I escape? Can I go home and find my grieving wife?

This game was written in Dialog and was an entry in IF Comp 2025 where it took 31st place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Phobos – A Galaxy Jones Story (2025) by Phil Riley

In this sci-fi espionage game, you again play as the hero Galaxy Jones. Sirius Syndicate cyborgs have turned Phobos into a giant missile and intend to smash Mars with it. Your mission is to sneak into their secret base on Phobos and stop them. And don’t kill anyone unnecessarily. Save who you can.

This game is an entry in IF Comp 2025 where it took 10th place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Willy’s Manor (2025) by Josh Hetzel

In this mildly-silly puzzle game, you play as a producer who wants to get Willy, the eccentric billionaire owner of an international novelty company, on his TV show. Willy will do it if you pass a “test” in his manor first.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2025 where it took 62nd place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Dreadwine (2006) by Eric Eve

In this retelling of a dream, you find yourself in a crowded yet strangely-quiet café with O’Brien and Sandra. O’Brien tells you that people are taken to the castle and turned into wine. Sandra knows she’s next and has lost all hope. But there must be a way to escape this town and save Sandra! Isn’t there?

This game was an entry in the MC Dream mini-comp, also called the IF Dreams 2006.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

The Gate (2004) by Owen Parish

In this tiny one-room game, you are the eternal guardian of the Gate, armed with a sword and appointed by the Ultimate. Behind the Gate is all of reality, the Ultimate itself, and the other intelligences. Out of the chaos, Harbinger approaches you and asks to be let inside. Which decision will you make?

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

In The End (1996) by Joe Mason

In this puzzleless story about suicide, you play as a moody man attending the funeral of your friend Jon. He wasn’t the type to ever give up and die, no matter how down he was. At least, you hadn’t thought so. Yet he chose his own time to go. With dignity. As he had a right to. Damn. You never were one for philosophy. Jon’s death must have affected you more than you thought.

This story was an entry in IF Comp 1996 where it took 15th place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

The job (2021) by Fredrik Ramsberg

In this small game, you borrowed money from Ricky, so now you have to do this job for him. You were searching the broom closet of The Red Anchor when someone pushed you over. Seems like Ricky left a note: “Return with the necklace, or don’t return!”

This game was an entry in PunyJam #1, but unplaced; the game was not voted on nor ranked.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

(Continued from my previous post.)

“Toffee!” said every one in surprise, “What do you want toffee for?”

“To eat, of course,” said Moon-Face. “I just thought if you had any toffee to give me I’d let you slide down my slippery-slip — you get down to the bottom very quickly that way, you know.”

“A slide all the way down the Faraway Tree!” cried Jo, hardly believing his ears. “Good gracious! Whoever would have thought of that!”

“I thought of it!” said Moon-Face, beaming again just like a full moon. “I let people use it if they pay me toffee.”

— From The Enchanted Wood

The Folio Society version of The Enchanted Wood. That’s Moon-Face on the center bottom, a little less sinister-looking than in the original art.

Fairytale has the relatively unique condition of being not only a private game for family and friends, but one meant to be played under very particular conditions with groups; it only occurred to the author to publish later. This means that the author (who originally played Adventureland with his family) knew a reference to The Enchanted Forest would be understood and the puzzle of dealing with Moon-Face by using the exact moment from the book (see the top) was not only reasonable but a nice gesture at shared knowledge. As I already mentioned, I tried giving items to Moon-Face and he simply took each one (softlocking the game in the process) but my next step was to try every item available, and that included the candy items from outside the house (toffee, sugar barley, marzipan). So it was technically solvable but still unfortunate design; making it so giving the wrong item is a softlock combined with the book knowledge (pointed out by Matt W. in the comments) is certainly not polite.

To end on a compliment, I do find satisfying “cross-lore” type of puzzles, in this case where a piece of candy from Hansel and Gretel is used to satisfy a character from The Enchanted Wood. They’re both just stories, there’s no reason one can’t be a walk-on extra on the other.

Before plowing ahead with the next big obstacle I resolved, I should point out that one of the other items from candy-house (the marzipan) is special. If you just examine it while first encountering it the game just says “you see nothing special”, but if you examine it while the item is being held you find out it is really an emerald.

Just like how in Leopard Lord and in Crypt of Medea the mechanic that EXAMINE and SEARCH are treated differently is important to notice (and not something at all consistent between adventure games!), here, the fact you see something different when an item is being held vs. not-held is important (and again, not consistent between adventure games). The CRPG Addict recently had a post where he examined a set of standard things to look for in Ultima clones (how do secret doors work? do guards care if you steal things?) and it reminded me of that: while these adventure games are all “clones” in a sense, there are small important differences where it can be easy to be tripped up, and just like with Ultima clones you might go 5 games in a row where secret doors are either non-existent or “illusionary walls” but get tripped up by number 6 which goes back to a system where you have to hit the Search key in every suspicious tile.

By which I mean, I know I’ve played adventures where items have different results of EXAMINE when held and not-held, but it’s been a while.

Just to the east of candy-house is the empty chest: this is where the treasures go.

Once I had confirmed that GIVE ITEM really does help somewhere and doesn’t just swallow up all your inventory, I decided to try that with every inventory item on every other character. Fortunately the connections aren’t too obscure, although the first one I found was truly arbitrary.

Jo shook his head. “No, Saucepan isn’t mad. He’s just deaf. His saucepans make such a clanking all the time that the noise gets into his ears, and he can’t hear properly. So he keeps making mistakes.”

Saucepanman came from even before The Enchanted Wood, as he makes an appearance in The Book of Brownies from 1926. His main attribute is misunderstanding what people say (see above) and in Fairytale he’s on the lower level of the Faraway Tree, below Moon-Face.

He wants the oats. I just started handing over everything until I found the response above. HELP in the game (which I checked after solving the puzzle) just says that he “likes gifts”. I searched about the text and couldn’t find a connection with the character that made this work. I also searched about in adjacent rhymes/fairy tales but no luck, so I’m open to suggestions from the audience.

(The saucepan you can get from all this will be helpful later.)

Fortunately, my next discovery was a little less obtuse:

The witch wants the dead bat that was just lying around the forest. I admit I had this on my list to try before I started even rapid firing items. This opens up multiple things: a.) you can GO CAVE now while in this location; b.) you won’t get locked in the oven any more in the candy-house, so you can grab the silver key from within; c.) you can access the cauldron, although it is initially too hot and you have to take care of that first. We’ll tackle the items in that order, starting with the cave:

The book is an ad for either DRAGONQUEST ADVENTURE (if you’re playing the BBC version) or GOBLIN ADVENTURE (if you’re playing Stott’s Archimedes port). It just counts as a treasure, alas. The mortar and pestle get stored along with the saucepan for use later.

From the oven you can now grab the silver key…

…and then use it to unlock the hut to the southeast of the map, finding a grisly scene within.

I like the detail the axe is a “bloody” axe and remains that way for the rest of the game. Both get stored along with the saucepan and mortar/pestle, although I admit I haven’t found where the pliers get used yet.

The axe, on the other hand, I could use right away. To the west of the hut is an annoying prickly bush, so I immediately tried CHOP BUSH.

This opens a secret path over to a waterfall.

With the saucepan you can GET WATER while at the waterfall, then take it over to the cauldron and put it out. This lets you find some ancient bones within.

If you’re wondering about the varying inventory items, some of it is juggling to keep under the limit of 5, some of it is because I made multiple runs through the game trying to put everything together.

I made the discovery rather later (but I’ll disclose now) that you can be holding the mortar/pestle and bones and type GRIND BONES, getting “bone manure”.

The manure suggests some sort of planting-type use, so I’m going to jump over to another GIVE puzzle: the pedlar. I had him next on my list of “try GIVE on everything” people but quickly found the money (from the king in the palace and the pie) worked, and he handed over a ruby seed.

With ruby seed, garden trowel, bone manure, and some more water from the waterfall, it seems like I ought to be able to plant the seed. I even found the right place to do it: by the shed (with the spiders inside), where HELP says

Maybe the ground is too dry or infertile.

suggesting an optimal planting place. However, all my attempts at PLANT SEED or the like have failed; the game responds I can’t do that yet. I admit this might be a case where items X and Y need to be on the ground and A and B need to be held, in some confusing combination, but I haven’t tried all possibilities yet. I also may simply be using the wrong verb.

Rotating around the next character, the northeast corner has the castle with the sleeping girl at the spinning wheel. I realized even though I was actively thinking of Sleeping Beauty I hadn’t tried the Sleeping Beauty specific action:

I’m pretty sure the silver needle is just a treasure and that’s that; I can’t get anything from the spinning wheel. Given I haven’t finished the game yet anything is possible.

Finally we can rotate back to the Faraway Tree and the two “worlds” that you can visit by going UP from Moon-Face, the moon/bowl/spoon etc. scene and the palace. The choice of place is entirely a coin-flip and sometimes I went to the same place 6 or 7 times in a row (RNG strikes again); I could easily see someone simply not realizing there’s another destination there! (Maybe there’s a third place to go with some specific parameters?)

So with the scene above, I had observed you could nab nearly everything but the moon. What I hadn’t tried is simply taking the fiddle and playing it without picking up anything. The idea is to set up the whole Hey Diddle Diddle rhyme:

Hey diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed
To see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.

I had played the fiddle but had already picked up the dish and spoon so they couldn’t do the “ran away” line, messing up the whole scenario. This idea of creating the conditions to re-enact the rhyme will come up again.

The whole purpose seems to be to get the “fiddle” to turn into a “Stratovarius” which is a treasure, but the cow might also be useful too.

Now on to the other destination:

I don’t have this fully worked out, but at least I got one of the really wild (in a game-design sense) parts. Let me give the entire relevant nursery rhyme, which I admit I had only partly remembered.

Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened,
The birds began to sing.
Wasn’t that a dainty dish
To set before the king?

The king was in his counting house,
Counting out his money.
The queen was in the parlour,
Eating bread and honey.

The maid was in the garden,
Hanging out the clothes,
When down came a blackbird
And pecked off her nose.

I kept trying to do things with the pie at the king. I admit I still have had no luck. EAT PIE lets you just consume it, no birds. OPEN PIE just says the word “open” isn’t even recognized.

My suspicion is that the birds aren’t even in the pie yet and we’re supposed to put them there. If you recall from way back at the start you can see “blackbirds” in the tree, so somehow they combine with the pie? (I tried a bunch of verbs with the pie in the location, no dice.)

Even without that there’s a secret, though. The room just says you can go OUT, but if you study the rhyme, it mentions “The queen was in the parlour”. What parlour? Well, you can just GO PARLOUR and find it.

This is outrageous at a level I don’t have much comparison with; maybe the book references of Ring Quest where you could ask an elf (who wasn’t even visible in the room) for a ring, only guessing they have to be there and making a leap of faith.

You can’t take the bread or interact with the Queen (that I could find). You can take the honey but I don’t know where that is useful.

Oh, one last thing: back at the maid, you can look at the laundry to find an “ebony clothes pin” which counts as a treasure, and you have wet trousers left over. Not sure if they’re useful for anything.

King and blackbirds, from an 1877 Mother Goose collection.

To summarize:

• I’m still likely missing some action in the palace/parlour akin to what happened with the fiddle, although maybe the whole purpose is to take the items. I still suspect you need to make a “scene” with the pie by somehow stuffing birds into it, but while you can see the birds from the top of the opening tree I don’t know where to get at them.
• I still can’t plant the ruby seed, even though it seems like I have everything I need to do so. This may just be parser-struggle.
• I haven’t done anything with: pliers, the spinning wheel, or some of the treasures (like the silver needle) although of course the treasures I haven’t “used” may simply be points.
• It is possible I’m still missing a one-shot secret kind of treasure like the marzipan/emerald one unrelated to the larger puzzles. I am missing 3 treasures. The ruby seed counts as one, so I suspect after using it to grow a beanstalk (probably beanstalk, right?) it will be retrievable.

Given the need to know external references I’m happy to field any suggestions to try to get this to the end. Maybe there’s a nursery rhyme I blithely skipped over without realizing it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Smith, as shown in the article.

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

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

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

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

Via Tumblr.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some interesting details with the instructions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This means north is the only option.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, you just plow ahead with SOUTH.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s 38% off until Oct 30th!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting back into the gameplay…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

East then is a web blocking further passage:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please take a moment to fill out this brief questionnaire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luddites vs. the Environment-Destroying Plagarism Bot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just stop. All of it.

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

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

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

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

Your Opinion Is Important to Us

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

Please complete this brief survey.

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Moonmist.

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

2025 IFComp Results & Survey

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

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

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

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