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Planet Interactive Fiction

Friday, 13. June 2025

The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction

June 2025 PR-IF Post Mortem

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday, June 2, 2025 over Zoom. JP Tuttle, Doug Orleans, Mike Stage, zarf,  anjchang, Josh,  Matt Griffin (with special guest Gussie), and Hugh,  welcomed newcomer. Alice. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just a log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories. T

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday, June 2, 2025 over Zoom. JP TuttleDoug Orleans, Mike Stage, zarf anjchangJosh,  Matt Griffin (with special guest Gussie), and Hugh,  welcomed newcomer. Alice. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just a log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories. This meeting notes are short due to the notetaker having run off early.

July is Narrascope month. In the tradition of PR-IF we typically take a hiatus to encourage everyone to attend Narrascope (virtual registration open until 6/18). On our Boston IF group, there is a discussion about IFTF @ Narrascope. https://narrascope.org/

Narrascope happening June 20-22nd! There’s a special online performance announced for registered attendees. 10/10 would recommend!

Also worth checking out the IFTF showcase:
https://itch.io/jam/narrascope-showcase-2025

Looking forward to seeing you at Narrascope, and let us know on the Boston IF group if you’re giving a talk!!!

FYI from the discussion group– A blog. post by Emily Short about running IF meetups.

Thursday, 12. June 2025

Choice of Games LLC

The Soul Stone War 3—Face the storm with a Dragon at your side!

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play! Reunite with familiar faces, forge new bonds, and continue growing into the legend you are meant to become. The Soul Stone War 3 is the thrilling 260,000-word sequel to the interactive fantasy novel The Soul Stone War 2 by Morgan Vane.  The Soul Stone War 3 is 30% off until June 19th! And you can get The Soul Stone War and The Soul Stone War 2 for 4
The Soul Stone War 3

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Reunite with familiar faces, forge new bonds, and continue growing into the legend you are meant to become. The Soul Stone War 3 is the thrilling 260,000-word sequel to the interactive fantasy novel The Soul Stone War 2 by Morgan Vane. 

The Soul Stone War 3 is 30% off until June 19th! And you can get The Soul Stone War and The Soul Stone War 2 for 40% off as well!

You stand triumphant. After successfully infiltrating Cnamh Briste, you have freed your captured companion and dealt a blow the Lord of All won’t soon forget.

The power of the Soul Stones is growing. Now free from Manerkol’s influence, you align yourself with an unexpected force: The Resistance. Together, you will uncover long-buried secrets, unravel Manerkol’s true ambitions, unite a fractured land—and decide the fate of Dragonkind itself.

The war for the fate of the Soul Stones now rages in full swing. The time to retreat back into obscurity lies far behind you. Every action you now take will impact the fate of all. Rise or fall, Soul Stone Wielder,  your name will be written in legend.

  • Play as female, male, or nonbinary—with options to be straight, gay, bisexual, or aromantic.
  • Continue your romance or try to find love in two new, unexpected places.
  • Forge your relationship with the Dragon God inhabiting your thoughts.
  • Discover one of the best-kept secrets of the Dragons.
  • Figure out the purpose behind Manerkol’s machinations.
  • Nurture the bonds of kinship among your group and grow into a power to rival the Lord of All.
  • Find new and epic ways to tackle problems, utilizing the new powers granted to you by the Soul Stones.
  • Immerse yourself in a rich world full of magic, sacrifice, and love where every choice has unexpected consequences for everyone.

Will you rise to the challenge and shape the course of history, or will you be swept away by the tides of fate? 

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


In the Halls of Asgard—Hold Asgard together, or walk away from it.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play! Play as a Norse god living in Asgard. Will you hold your home together with a silver tongue—or walk away and leave the other gods to their quarrels?  In the Halls of Asgard is 30% off until June 19th! In the Halls of Asgard is a 300,000-word interactive novel by Eleanor Cooke. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fu
In the Halls of Asgard

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Play as a Norse god living in Asgard. Will you hold your home together with a silver tongue—or walk away and leave the other gods to their quarrels? 

In the Halls of Asgard is 30% off until June 19th!

In the Halls of Asgard is a 300,000-word interactive novel by Eleanor Cooke. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination. 

As a god of Asgard, you’ve dealt with your fair share of difficulties, from Loki’s mischief to Odin’s machinations. Still, Ragnarök looms. Will you work with the other gods to prevent it or form your own team and try to win it instead? Either way, you’ll need allies. And power.

Find both as you navigate Asgard’s political waters and deal with its enemies, from the World Serpent, Jormungandr, to the giants in Jotunheim. Send them off with clever words and charm or ride to war with magical weapons.

  • Play as a god; gender and sexuality are unspecified.
  • Choose from five godly domains.
  • Befriend Fenris Wolf—or betray him.
  • Wield Thor’s hammer.
  • Fight against the giants—or join them.

Ragnarök is coming, and Asgard is starting to fracture. Can you keep it together, or will you fall on the final battlefield?

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

Wednesday, 11. June 2025

Zarf Updates

How long will Intel Mac software work?

When Apple shipped the first ARM ("Apple Silicon") Macs, they came with Rosetta 2: a tool which allowed existing Intel apps to run on ARM. One day, Rosetta 2 will go away, and Intel apps will die. (Just like 32-bit apps died in 2019.) When? ...

When Apple shipped the first ARM ("Apple Silicon") Macs, they came with Rosetta 2: a tool which allowed existing Intel apps to run on ARM.

One day, Rosetta 2 will go away, and Intel apps will die. (Just like 32-bit apps died in 2019.) When?

This is a boring question. You don't need to read this post. I'm only writing it because I've put together this chart at least twice. Maybe three times. Next time I wonder, I'll just re-read this post.

TLDR: The answer is probably 2028 or 2029.


The common rag is that Apple doesn't do backwards compatibility, but that's wrong. They do backwards compatibility. They just consider it a time-limited phenomenon. They're surprisingly consistent about it.

Here's what I mean. I was most active in iOS development in the early years -- iOS 3 to 10-ish. That's when iOS was changing most rapidly. (Particularly the big UI redesign of iOS 7.) It was notable that Apple kept old apps working, with the old UI, when you upgraded iOS on a device.

Once you recompiled the app (with the latest Xcode), you were in the new world. That was the time to redesign your app UI to match the new OS.

Yes, that was extra work for developers. But I'm making a point: Apple put in a lot of work to ensure that OS upgrades didn't break apps for users. Not even visually. (It goes without saying that Apple considers visual design part of an app's functionality.) The toolkit continued to support old APIs, and it also secretly retained the old UI style for every widget.

But, as I said, this was a time-limited thing. After a few years, Apple started to drop the old UI style from the toolkit. Old apps got weird mis-sized buttons and so on. I particularly noticed this with My Secret Hideout, which I never recompiled beyond iOS 5. When iOS 10 came around, Apple started to drop old apps from the store (including Hideout) because they looked like ass. You can debate whether booting them was a good policy, but my app did look like ass. I hadn't touched the code in five or six years.

Five years is, as it turns out, Apple's unspoken time limit.


Here's Apple's first architecture transition:

  • Last 68k Mac discontinued: 1996 (PowerBook 190, Performa 630)
  • OS support for 68k Macs discontinued: 1998 (MacOS 8.5)

In other words, you might have bought a 68040 PowerBook in 1996. It got two years of OS support; then it was orphaned in 1998. That's way under the five-year limit I mentioned. Early days.

(EDIT: I originally wrote "discontinued in 1999", but it turns out it was 1998.)

On the other hand, the software support lasted longer:

  • First PPC Macs: 1994
  • 68k emulator discontinued: 2001 (MacOS X 10.0)

Developers started building apps with PPC support in 1994. (Those were the CodeWarrior years.) But non-updated 68k apps were supported via an emulator. That was retained through the Classic MacOS era; it was dropped when OSX hit. So seven years of backwards support.

(EDIT: I am corrected; the "Classic environment" kept supporting 68k Classic apps through MacOS 10.4 "Tiger", at least for PPC hardware. So more like twelve years.)

Moving on to Intel, the window is exactly five years:

  • Last PPC Mac discontinued: 2006 (Power Mac G5)
  • Xcode support for building PPC apps discontinued: 2011 (Xcode 4)
  • Rosetta discontinued: 2011 (MacOS 10.7 "Lion")

What about the 32-bit software cutoff? That's the one everybody screamed about (in 2019). It's a bit difficult to nail down how long the transition was, though. 32-bit Mac hardware was only sold for a couple of years: 2005-2007, the "Core Solo" and "Core Duo" processors. After 2007, all Macs sold had 64-bit CPUs. Thus:

  • Xcode support for building 64-bit Mac software added: 2006 (Xcode 2.4)
  • Last 32-bit Mac discontinued: 2007 (2006 Mac Mini)
  • Xcode support for building 32-bit Mac software discontinued: 2018 (Xcode 10)
  • 32-bit Mac software support discontinued: 2019 (MacOS 10.15 "Catalina")

Twelve years! That's longer than Microsoft supported Windows 7.

Looking at it, I'm surprised that there still was 32-bit-only software out there. I don't mean "software left over from 2006"; obviously there was some but you knew it was ancient. I mean developers who had just kept on building 32-bit versions of their apps -- never shifting to "fat" (32/64) builds.

You can get into a deep well of reasons why adding 64-bit support was hard. Most of them boil down to dependencies: old libraries, frameworks, game engines. (I'm not even getting into the Carbon-Cocoa business.) I guess the real question is why this transition was slower than the PPC-to-Intel transition, which was nailed down in five years.

Some of that was Apple's own transition, which itself took a few years. The MacOS kernel jumped from 32-bit to 64-bit around 2010. Then there was the Finder, iTunes, and other Mac first-party apps. If Apple is behind, they can't really put pressure on third-party developers.

I suppose there was a lot written on the subject circa 2012 or so. I don't recall any specific articles, though, so I'll let it go.


I'm not providing much support for my "exactly five years" claim, am I? Sorry! It's easier to see in the year-to-year OS updates.

  • I buy a 21-inch iMac (Intel Core i5): 2011
    • MacOS 10.13 "High Sierra" is the last OS that supports it: 2017
  • I buy a first-gen iPad Pro: 2015
    • iPadOS 16 is the last OS that supports it: 2022
  • I buy a 13-inch MacBook Pro (Intel Core i5): 2016
    • MacOS 12 "Monterey" is the last OS that supports it: 2021

I'm cherry-picking devices that I owned, because I kept a list. But the general pattern is consistent: five to seven years.

I don't think Apple is arbitrarily applying a five-year cutoff. (If they did, it would be exactly five years!) I feel like there's generally a hardware requirement, whether that's RAM or a GPU feature or some other motherboard element. But since Apple doesn't advertise hardware details, you have to dig into third-party sites to draw a complete chart. I'm not doing that.

The point is: Apple does the compatibility work for a five-year horizon. Maybe that winds up covering a six- or seven-year-old model; if so, great. If not, oh well.

Thus we can return to the original question:

  • Last Intel Mac discontinued: 2023 (2018 Mac Mini, Mac Pro)
  • Rosetta 2 discontinued: probably 2028 or 2029

They'll announce the deprecation at a WWDC in May (2028 or '29), then ship the de-Rosetta'd MacOS in the fall. Don't wait for the news, of course. Get your ARM builds in gear right now if you haven't.

Footnote: Obviously this post assumes "business as usual" over the next five years, which is, you know, a hell of an assumption. If Apple stops making computers in three months because there are no more CPUs, forget this whole post.


UPDATE, June 10th

The whistle has been blown! News from WWDC, reported on arstechnica:

macOS Tahoe will be the last new macOS release to support any Intel Macs. All new releases starting with macOS 27 will require an Apple Silicon Mac.

(Necessary footnote: Tahoe is "MacOS 26", releasing this fall. "MacOS 27" will appear in the fall of 2026. This will be confusing forever.)

Rosetta will continue to work as a general-purpose app translation tool in both macOS 26 and macOS 27. [...]

A shorter window than I predicted above; Rosetta will stop working in "MacOS 28", meaning the fall of 2027. Also we're getting more advance warning than I expected. I guess Apple realized everybody was doing the same math as me!

But wait, there's a footnote...

[After 2027], Rosetta will be pared back and will only be available to a limited subset of apps — specifically, older games that rely on Intel-specific libraries but are no longer being actively maintained by their developers.

That's a weird footnote. (Michael Tsai agrees.) Why only old games? How will the OS know what a game is? If the Rosetta framework is still installed, can we chivvy it into working on any old app?

...Is this some sort of regulatory requirement? The "Stop Killing Games" idea is popular among gamers. It doesn't have any legal force, though, as far as I know. And while I have some sympathy, I wish even more for developers to stop killing editors and development tools.

(Limited sympathy, I'm afraid. A lot of this boils down to gamers wanting other people's labor for free. Sorry. It's an ongoing thing.)

Tuesday, 10. June 2025

Zarf Updates

Predictions in the Apple-sphere

A couple of months ago, I wrote: [...] It may become impossible to launch a new programming language. No corpus of training data in the coding AI assistant; new developers don't want to use it because their assistant can't offer help; no critical ...

A couple of months ago, I wrote:

[...] It may become impossible to launch a new programming language. No corpus of training data in the coding AI assistant; new developers don't want to use it because their assistant can't offer help; no critical mass of new users; language dies on the vine. --@zarfeblong, March 28

I was replying to a comment by Charlie Stross, who noted that LLMs are trained on existing data and therefore are biased against recognizing new phenomena. My point was that in tech, we look forward to learning about new inventions -- new phenomena by definition. Are AI coding tools going to roadblock that?

Already happening! Here's Kyle Hughes last week:

At work I’m developing a new iOS app on a small team alongside a small Android team doing the same. We are getting lapped to an unfathomable degree because of how productive they are with Kotlin, Compose, and Cursor. They are able to support all the way back to Android 10 (2019) with the latest features; we are targeting iOS 16 (2022) and have to make huge sacrifices (e.g Observable, parameter packs in generics on types). Swift 6 makes a mockery of LLMs. It is almost untenable.

[...] To be clear, I’m not part of the Anti Swift 6 brigade, nor aligned with the Swift Is Getting Too Complicated party. I can embed my intent into the code I write more than ever and I look forward to it becoming even more expressive.

I am just struck by the unfortunate timing with the rise of LLMs. There has never been a worse time in the history of computers to launch, and require, fundamental and sweeping changes to languages and frameworks. --@kyle, June 1 (thread)

That's not even a new language, it's just a new major version. Is C++26 going to run into the same problem?

Hat tip to John Gruber, who quotes more dev comments as we swing into WWDC week.


Speaking of WWDC, the new "liquid glass" UI is now announced. (Screenshots everywhere.) I like it, although I haven't installed the betas to play with it myself.

Joseph Humphrey has, and he notes that existing app icons are being glassified by default:

Kinda shocked to see these 3rd party app icons having been liquid-glassed already. Is this some kind of automatic filter, or did Apple & 3rd parties prep them in advance?? --@joethephish, June 10 (thread)

The icon auto-glassification uses non-obvious heuristics, and Joe's screenshots show some weird artifacts.

I was surprised too! For the iOS7 "flatten it all" UI transition, existing apps did not get the new look -- either in their icons or their internal buttons, etc -- until the developer recompiled with the new SDK. (And thus had a chance to redesign their icons for the new style.) As I wrote a couple of months ago:

[In 2012] Apple put in a lot of work to ensure that OS upgrades didn't break apps for users. Not even visually. (It goes without saying that Apple considers visual design part of an app's functionality.) The toolkit continued to support old APIs, and it also secretly retained the old UI style for every widget.

-- me, April 9

Are they really going to bag that policy for this fall? I guess they already sort of did. Last year's "tint mode" squashed existing icons to tinted monochrome whether they liked it or not. But that was a user option, and not a very popular one, I suspect.

This year's icon change feels like a bigger rug-pull for developers. And developers have raw nerves these days.

This is supposed to be a prediction post. I guess I'll predict that Apple rolls this back, leaving old (third-party) icons alone for the iOS26 full release. Maybe.

(I see Marco Arment is doing a day of "it's a beta, calm down and send feedback". Listen to him, he knows his stuff.)


But the big lurking announcement was iPadOS gaining windows, a menu bar, and a more (though not completely) file-oriented environment. A lot of people have been waiting years for those features. Craig Federighi presented the news with an understated but real wince of apology.

Personally, not my thing. I don't tend to use my iPad for productive work. And it's not for want of windows and a menu bar; it's for want of a keyboard and a terminal window. I have a very terminal-centric work life. My current Mac desktop has nine terminal windows, two of which are running Emacs.

(No, I don't want to carry around an external keyboard for my iPad. If I carry another big thing, it'll be the MacBook, and then the problem is solved.)

But -- look. For more than a decade, people have been predicting that Apple would kill MacOS and force Macs to run some form of iOS. They predicted it when Apple launched Gatekeeper, they predicted it when Apple brought SwiftUI apps to MacOS, they predicted it when Apple redesigned the Settings app.

I never bought it before. Watching this week's keynote, I buy it. Now there is room for i(Pad)OS to replace MacOS.

Changing or locking down MacOS is a weak signal because people use MacOS. You can only do so much to it. Apple has been tightening the bolts on Gatekeeper at regular intervals, but you can still run unsigned apps on a Mac. The hoops still exist. You can install Linux packages with Homebrew.

But adding features to iPad is a different play! That's pushing the iPad UI in a direction where it could plausibly take over the desktop-OS role. And this direction isn't new, it's a well-established thing. The iPad has been acquiring keyboard/mouse features for years now.

So is Apple planning to eliminate MacOS entirely, and ship Macs with (more or less) iPadOS installed? Maybe! This is all finger-in-the-wind. I doubt it's happening soon. It may never happen. It could be that Apple wants iPad to stand on its own as a serious mobile productivity platform, as good as the Mac but separate from it.

But Apple thinks in terms of company strategy, not separate siloed platforms. And, as many people have pointed out, supporting two similar-but-separate OSes is a terrible business case. Surely Apple has better uses for that redundant budget line.

Abstractly, they could unify the two OSes rather than killing one of them. But, in practice, they would kill MacOS. Look at yesterday's announcements. iPad gets the new features; Mac gets nothing. (Except the universal shiny glass layer.) The writing is not on the wall but the wind is blowing, and we can see which way.


Say this happens, in 2028 or whenever. (If Apple still exists, if I haven't died in the food riots, etc etc.) Can my terminal-centric lifestyle make its way to an iPad-like world?

...Well, that depends on whether they add a terminal app, doesn't it? Fundamentally I don't care about MacOS as a brand. I just want to set up my home directory and my .emacs file and install Python and git and npm and all the other stuff that my habits have accumulated. You have no idea how many little Python scripts are involved in everyday tasks like, you know, writing this blog post.

(Okay, you do know that because my blogging tool is up on Github. The answer is four. Four vonderful Python scripts, ah ah ah!)

If I can't do all that in MacOS 28/29/whichever, it'll be time to pick a Linux distro. Not looking forward to that, honestly. (I fly Linux servers all the time, but the last time I used a Linux desktop environment it was GNOME 1.0? I think?)


Other notes from WWDC. (Not really predictions, sorry, I am failing my post title.)

  • Tim Cook looks tired. I don't mean that in a Harriet Jones way! I assume he's run himself ragged trying to manage political crap. Craig Federighi is still having fun but I felt like he was over-playing it a lot of the time. Doesn't feel like a happy company. Eh, what do I know, I'm trying to read tea leaves from a scripted video.

  • I said "Mac gets nothing" but that's unfair. The Spotlight update with integrated actions and shortcuts looks extremely sexy. Yes, this is about getting third-party devs to support App Intents so that Siri/AI can hook into them. But it will also be great for Automator and other non-AI scripting tools.

  • WWDC is a software event; Apple never talks about new hardware there. I know it. You know it. But it sure was weird to have a whole VisionOS segment pushing new features when the rev1 Vision Pro is at a dead standstill. My sense is that the whole ecosystem is on hold waiting for a consumer-viable rev2 model.

  • I think the consumer-viable rev2 model is coming this fall. There, that's a prediction. Worth what you paid for it.

  • I'm enjoying the Murderbot show but damn if Gurathin isn't a low-key Vision Pro ad. He's got the offhand tap-fingers gesture right there.

  • I'm excited about the liquid glass UI. I want to play with it. Fun is fun, dammit.

  • I hate redesigning app icons for a new UI. Oh, well, I'll manage. (EDIT-ADD: Turns out Apple is pushing a new single-source process which generates all icon sizes and modes. Okay! Good news there.)

Monday, 09. June 2025

Gold Machine

Leather Goddesses of Phobos 3/3: Joy and Mischief

By investing equally in man and woman protagonists, Leather Goddesses of Phobos neither exploits nor objectifies. Leisure Suit Larry and the Graphical Gaze The history of games containing sexual content has interested critics greatly. Jimmy Maher’s writeup on Leather Goddesses of Phobos is prefaced by several paragraphs about games like Softporn Adventure, Dirty Old Man, […] The post Le

By investing equally in man and woman protagonists, Leather Goddesses of Phobos neither exploits nor objectifies.

Leisure Suit Larry and the Graphical Gaze

The history of games containing sexual content has interested critics greatly. Jimmy Maher’s writeup on Leather Goddesses of Phobos is prefaced by several paragraphs about games like Softporn Adventure, Dirty Old Man, and Farmer’s Daughter. What makes these games so interesting? I think the answer will vary critic to critic, that that answer will likely be “a lot” or “nothing.” I’ll qualify my answer: they are interesting as important evolutionary building blocks that contribute to the foundation of narrative gaming. They are not, in my opinion, very interesting to play.

Smart people can disagree, of course. I hope we can agree on that! I never liked Seirra’s Leisure Suit Larry games by Al Lowe, for instance, but many people did and do. The LSL series began as an in-universe follow up to Chuck Benton’s Softporn Adventure and featured graphical production values that small or individual authors could not easily replicate. This was a corporate and mainstream product offering laughs via sexual innuendo and satire of the 1970s-style male “ladies’ man.”

What makes these games so interesting? I think the answer will vary critic to critic, that that answer will likely be “a lot” or “nothing.”

Recalling previous discussions here, I assert that both Leather Goddesses of Phobos and Leisure Suit Larry set out to create joy rather than arousal. Isn’t that what laughter signifies within a comedic context? Joy? This important similarity aside, though, these games differ significantly in terms of gameplay, presentation, and, ultimately, in the way they offer up their “sexual” content. How so? let’s begin with the wrong answer, which I recently retrieved from Wikipedia:

Larry aimed for laughs rather than pure titillation, setting it apart in a landscape populated by titles like Strip PokerSex Vixens from SpaceLeather Goddesses of PhobosMacPlaymate and Cobra Mission.

People who have played Leather Goddesses of Phobos, must, I’m sure, feel differently. In fact, and this is ultimately what separates Leather Goddesses of Phobos from the rest of the erotic and/or sex comedy oeuvre: there is no essentially male perspective or cultural baggage weighing down the humor of Meretzky’s work. Rather, sex is a source of comic mischief. Leather Goddesses of Phobos is about the joy of harmless transgression. Its protagonists do not go to bars where women characters are essentially locked doors or chests concealing sexual treasure.

Leather Goddesses of Phobos is rather unique among 1980s games with sexual content in that its problems are not problems of conquest. As a final observation regarding Leisure Suit Larry, consider this quote from the MacWorld’s Keith McCandless:

On the reference card supplied with Leisure Suit Larry, under Talking to Women, it says: “Women can be loads of fun…. Women are also fickle. Do not take ‘no’ for an answer.”

And while there are numerous (usually sophomoric) traditional-male laughs, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards could have been funnier and somewhat more contemporary if Larry encountered (humorously rendered) women of the eighties. If the fun here suffers in comparison with the raunchy and humorous Leather Goddesses of Phobos or Space Quest games, it is mostly because of the retrograde subject matter.

There are two very important elements of the erotic adventure game that are missing in Leather Goddesses of Phobos. The first is the “gaze,” in which a subject is reduced to sexual object. Leather Goddesses of Phobos never objectifies. There are no exhaustive descriptions of body parts or sexual acts. Characterization of bodies–even sexual partners–typically ape the language of pulp science fiction. They are, in other words, parody. The second missing element, already mentioned above, is the design trope of reducing a human character to sexual treasure object or “prize.”

In fact, and this is ultimately what separates Leather Goddesses of Phobos from the rest of the erotic and/or sex comedy oeuvre: there is no essentially male perspective or cultural baggage weighing down the humor of Meretzky’s work here.

These differentiations are reached via more than one path, but the most important method is Meretzky’s artful use of gender selection. I’ve already written about the significance of gender choice in Jeffrey O’Neill’s Ballyhoo, where I called the choice primarily an “existential” one. That is, very little changes about the game, regardless of the player’s choice. Some critics have said that gender choice in Leather Goddesses of Phobos has similarly little impact. I cannot agree, because a chief effect of incorporating both man and woman protagonists is that the treatment of sex emphasizes pulp mischief over simulation or visual representation. Rather than emphasize quote-unqote “transgressive” behavior, Mertetzky creates a world and tone that celebrates transgressiveness generally. A chief pleasure of Leather Goddesses of Phobos is naughtiness for its own sake, and it doesn’t need CGA images of blonde women in bars to get us there.

Wow, Cool Future

I do not wish to overemphasize comments I’ve already made regarding Steve Meretzky’s post-Infocom graphical games, not only Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X!, but also the Spellcasting 101 series published by Legend Entertainment. It is inevitable that some or many of my readers might enjoy them. So be it! I am not the enjoyment police. However, I believe it is worth considering what, if anything, Leather Goddesses of Phobos possesses that those later games lack. The most obvious answer is already provided: the visual elements of these games can foment an objectifying gaze–even if that is not intended (it’s hard to imagine that the Spellcasting 101 series presents a case of accidental objectification).

These differences are hard to miss. Consider the cover art, for instance.

While I will not busy up the page with it, here is a link to a print ad for LGOP 2. It features a woman in lingerie. Please note that I have no moral objection this sort of box art or promotional artwork. I am hopefully demonstrating that the rhetorical position of the later Meretzky games is different: radically different, in fact.

Ultimately, this is another case in which a text adventure game can only reach the heights it has reached because it is a parser game. In Leather Goddesses of Phobos, the author has complete control over that which is or is not visualized. They can imply that which an image would render explicit. They can drive a wedge between the protagonist’s perception of the beautiful and erotic and our own real-life ideas about what is and what is not attractive. The protagonist, likewise, is freed from the burden of appealing to some other’s gaze. Leather Goddesses of Phobos is ultimately about joy for its own sake, about laughter and pleasure without exploitation or harm or consumption. Now that is a real fantasy! I’m reminded of that Kurt Vonnegut quote: “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”

That’s not all: given its penchant for surrealism, Leather Goddesses of Phobos is really, really suited for the text game medium. Consider the odd names for the docks, or the mouse, or rabbit, the hole at the south pole, or, of course, the famous tee remover. The bottomless dust at the mall. This is a world of wordplay, half figurative and half real. What other medium could realize it? I think many critics and players misunderstand the significance of the tee remover. As I recently wrote, yes, it ultimately turns up–sort of–in that beloved Emily Short game Counterfeit Monkey, but I find it equally significant that LGOP is a game in which the tee remover can exist at all.

I’m reminded of that Kurt Vonnegut quote: “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”

That is, it occupies a world so pleasantly surreal that many of us are willing to follow wherever things go. Leather Goddesses of Phobos is a game in which a word is, in fact, the essence of the thing it describes. An angle, which has no physical manifestation, is made real by the power of language alone. We players control the world with words, and words alone can make it turn.

That is another joy on display here: the joy of written language.

Afterword

As delightful and effective as Leather Goddesses of Phobos‘s use of gender choice is, we should acknowledge that it narrowly construes gender and attraction in a way that is both a) innovative and forward-looking for its time and b) not in any sense inclusive or representative for all.

I say this as a fan.

Next

Over at the Interactive Fiction Community Forum, I’ll soon be doing a playthrough of Emily Short’s classic storylet game, Bee. I’ll follow that up with a podcast summary! Please look forward to it. I’ll be sure and link the thread on Bluesky and Mastodon, so follow me if you want news about upcoming criticism and game writing projects. If you’re a member at intfiction, please consider joining the discussion!

Hope to see some of you there.

The post Leather Goddesses of Phobos 3/3: Joy and Mischief appeared first on Gold Machine.

Friday, 06. June 2025

Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian

The Last Adventures of Legend

The early days were the best. We had successes, we had fun, and we had a good business model. As the industry changed, everything became more complicated and harder. — Bob Bates This article tells part of the story of Legend Entertainment. The history of Legend Entertainment can be divided into three periods. When Bob […]

The early days were the best. We had successes, we had fun, and we had a good business model. As the industry changed, everything became more complicated and harder.

— Bob Bates


This article tells part of the story of Legend Entertainment.

The history of Legend Entertainment can be divided into three periods. When Bob Bates and Mike Verdu first founded the company in 1989, close on the heels of Infocom’s shuttering, they explicitly envisioned it as the heir to the latter’s rich heritage. And indeed, Legend’s early games were at bottom parser-based text adventures, the last of their kind to be sold through conventional retail outlets. That said, they were a dramatic departure from the austerity of Zork: this textual lily was gilded with elaborate menus of verbs, nouns, and prepositions that made actual typing optional, along with an ever increasing quantity of illustrations, sound effects, music, eventually even cutscenes and graphical mini-games. At last, in 1993, the inevitable endpoint of all this creeping multimedia was reached. Between Gateway II: Homeworld and Companions of Xanth, the parser that had still been lurking behind it all disappeared. Thus ended the text-adventure phase of Legend’s existence and began the point-and-click-adventure phase.

Legend continued happily down that second road for a few years. Its games in this vein weren’t as flashy or as high-profile as those of Sierra or LucasArts, but a coterie of loyal fans appreciated them for their more understated aesthetic qualities and for their commitment to good, non-frustrating design — a commitment that even LucasArts proved unable or unwilling to match as the decade wore on. Legend’s games during this period were almost universally based on licensed literary properties, which, combined with in-gaming writing that remained a cut above the norm, still allowed the company to retain some vestige of being the heir to Infocom.

By 1996, however, another endpoint seemed to be looming. One of Legend’s two games of the year before had been the biggest, most expensive production they had yet dared to undertake, as well as a rare foray into non-licensed territory. Mission Critical had been made possible by a $2.5 million investment from the book-publishing giant Random House. The game was the brainchild and the special baby of founder Mike Verdu, a space opera into which he poured his heart and soul. It filled three CDs, the first of which was mostly devoted to a bravura live-action opening movie that starred Michael Dorn, well known to legions of science-fiction fans as the Klingon Lieutenant Worf on Star Trek: The Next Generation, here taking the helm of another starship that might just as well have been the USS Enterprise. But there was more to Mission Critical than surface flash and stunt casting. It was an astonishingly ambitious production in other ways as well: from the writing and world-building (Verdu created a detailed future history for humanity to serve as the game’s backstory) to the multi-variant gameplay itself (a remarkably sophisticated real-time-strategy game is embedded into the adventure). I for one feel no hesitation in calling Mission Critical one of the best things Legend ever did.

But when it was released into a marketplace that was already glutted with superficially similar if generally inferior “Siliwood” productions, Mission Critical got lost in the shuffle. The big hit in this space in 1995 — in fact, the very last hit “interactive movie” ever — was Sierra’s Phantasmagoria, which evinced nothing like the same care for its fiction but nevertheless sold 1 million copies on the back of its seven CDs worth of canned video footage. Mission Critical, on the other hand, struggled to sell 50,000 copies, numbers which were actually slightly worse than those of Shannara, Legend’s other game of 1995, a worthy but far more modest and traditionalist adventure. The consequences to the bottom line were devastating. After hovering around the break-even point for most of its existence, Legend posted a loss for 1995 of more than $2 million, on total revenues of less than $3 million. Random House, which despite its literary veneer was perfectly capable of being as ruthless as any other titan of Corporate America, decided that it wanted out of Legend — in fact, it wanted Legend to pay it back $1 million of its investment, a demand which the fine print in the contract allowed. (Random House was certainly not making any friends in the world of nerdy media at this time; it was holding TSR, the maker of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, over another barrel.)

Beset by existential threats, Legend managed in 1996 to put out only one game, an even more radical departure from the norm than Mission Critical had been. Star Control 3 had the fortune or perhaps misfortune of being the sequel to 1992’s Star Control II, an unusual and much-loved amalgamation of outer-space adventure, action, and CRPG that was created by the studio Toys for Bob and published by Accolade. As it happened, Accolade also served as Legend’s distributor from 1992 to 1994. (RandomSoft, the software arm of Random House, took up that role afterward.) It was through this relationship that the Star Control 3 deal — a licensing deal of a different stripe than that to which the company had grown accustomed — came to Legend, after Toys for Bob said that they weren’t interested in making another game in the series right away. Michael Lindner, a long-serving music composer, programmer, and designer at Legend who loved Star Control II, lobbied hard with his bosses to take on Star Control 3, and was duly appointed Lead Designer once the contract was signed. Being so different from anything Legend had attempted before, the game took a good two years to complete.

Again I have to save the galaxy? Even the box copy seemed determined to undermine Star Control 3.

Star Control 3 received good reviews from the professionals immediately after its release in September of 1996. Computer Gaming World magazine, for example, called it a “truly stellar experience” and “the ultimate space adventure,” while the website GameSpot deemed it “one of the best titles to come out this year.” It initially sold quite well on the strength of these reviews as well as its name; in fact, it became Legend’s best-selling game to date, their first to shift more than 100,000 units.

Yet once people had had some time to settle in and really play it, an ugly backlash that has never reversed itself set in. To this day, Star Control 3 remains about as popular as tuberculosis among the amazingly durable Star Control II fan base. In the eyes of many of them, it not only pales in comparison to its predecessor, but the non-involvement of the Toys for Bob crew makes it fundamentally illegitimate.

Whatever else it may be, Star Control 3 is not the purely cynical cash-grab it’s so often described as; on the contrary, it’s an earnest effort that if anything wants a little bit too badly to live up to the name on its box. And yet it’s hard to avoid the feeling when playing it that Legend has departed too much from their core competencies. The most significant addition to the Star Control II template is a new layer of colony management: you have to maintain a literal space empire in order to produce the fuel you need to send your starship out in search of the proverbial new life and new civilizations. Unfortunately, the colony game is more tedious than fun, a constant nagging distraction from what you really want to be doing. The other layers of the genre lasagna are better, but none of them is good enough to withstand a concerted comparison to Star Control II. The feel of the action-based starship combat — Legend’s first real attempt to implement a full-on action game — is subtly off, as is the interface in general. For example, a hopelessly convoluted 3D star map makes navigation ten times the chore it ought to be.

In the end, then, Star Control 3 is a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Where it’s bold, it comes off as ill-considered: it represents the aliens you meet as digitized hand puppets, drawing mocking references to Sesame Street online. Where it plays it safe, it comes off as tepid: the writing — usually Legend’s greatest strength — reads like Star Control fan fiction. Still, Star Control 3 isn’t actively terrible by any means. It’s better than its rather horrendous modern reputation — but, then again, that’s not saying much, is it? There are better games out there that you could be playing, whether the date on your calendar is 1996 or 2025.

In its day, however, its strong early sales allowed Bob Bates and Mike Verdu to keep the lights on at Legend for a little while longer. A shovelware compilation of the early games called The Lost Adventures of Legend, whose name consciously echoed Activision’s surprisingly successful Lost Treasures of Infocom collections, brought in a bit more much-needed revenue for virtually no outlay.

Nevertheless, Bob Bates and Mike Verdu were by now coming to understand that securing Legend’s future in the longer term would likely require nothing less than a full-fledged reinvention of the company and its games — a far more radical overhaul than the move from a parser-based to a point-and-click interface. Everything about the games industry in the second half of the 1990s seemed to militate against a boutique studio and publisher like Legend. As the number of new games that appeared each year continued to increase, shelf space at retail was becoming ever harder to secure, even as digital distribution was at this point still a non-starter for games like those of Legend that filled hundreds of megabytes on CD. Meanwhile it was slowly becoming clear that the adventure genre had peaked in 1995 and was now sliding into a marked decline; there were no new million-selling adventure games like Phantasmagoria to be found in 1996. The games that sold best now were first-person shooters and real-time strategies, two genres that hadn’t existed back when Legend had been founded.

Mike Verdu, whose gaming palette was more diverse than that of the hardcore adventurer Bob Bates, hatched a plan to enter the 3D-shooter space. Three years on from the debut of DOOM, he sensed that John Carmack’s old formulation about the role of story in this sort of game — “Story in a game is like the story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” — no longer held completely true in the minds of at least some developers and players; he sensed that the world was ready for richer narratives and more coherent settings in its action games. His thinking was very much on trend: LucasArts was in the latter stages of making Jedi Knight at the time, and Valve had already embarked on Half-Life. Verdu believed that Legend might be able to apply their traditional strengths — writing, storytelling, aesthetic texture, perhaps even a smattering of adventure-style puzzle-solving — to the shooter genre with good results.

To do that, however, he and Bob Bates would need to drum up a new investor or investors, to stabilize the company’s rocky finances, pay Random House its $1 million ransom, and, last but by no means least, fund this leap into the three-dimensional unknown. As they wrote in their investor’s prospectus at this time, “Legend’s strengths in storytelling and world creation will be used to craft a unique game experience that combines combat, character interaction, exploration, and puzzle solving.” They had already secured what they thought was the perfect literary license for the experiment: the Wheel of Time novels by Robert Jordan, which were currently the best-selling epic-fantasy books in the world from an author not named J.R.R. Tolkien.

After months of beating the bushes, they found the partner they were seeking in GT Interactive, an outgrowth of a peddler of home-workout videos that had exploded onto the games industry in 1994 by publishing DOOM II exclusively to retail stores. (The original DOOM had been sold via the shareware model, with boxed distribution coming only later.) Now, GT was to be the publisher of Epic MegaGame’s Unreal, a shooter whose core technology was, so it was said, even better than id Software’s latest Quake engine. GT was able to secure the Unreal engine for Legend’s use long before the game that bore its name shipped. Even with that enormous leg-up, Legend would need every bit of their new publisher’s largess and patience; The Wheel of Time would prove a much bigger mouthful to swallow than Bob and Mike had ever anticipated, such that it wouldn’t be done until the end of 1999, more than two and a half years after the project was initiated.

As you’ve probably gathered, these events herald the beginning of the transition from the second to the third phase of Legend’s history, from Legend as a purveyor primarily of adventure games to a maker of 3D shooters that retain only scattered vestiges of the company’s past. Yet this transition wasn’t as clean or as abrupt as that from parser-driven to point-and-click adventures. While most of Legend was chasing reinvention in the last years of the 1990s, another, smaller part was sticking to what they had always done. There would come two more traditionalist adventure games before The Wheel of Time made it out the door to signal to the world that Legend Entertainment had become a very different sort of games studio.

So, we’ll save The Wheel of Time and what came after for a later article. I’d like to use the rest of this one to look at that those last two purist adventures from Legend.


Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon is one of those games that I would love to love much more than I actually do. It’s warm-hearted and well-meaning and wants nothing more than to show me a good time. Unfortunately, it mostly just bores me. In all of these respects, it has much in common with its literary source material.

Said source is the Callahan’s series by the science-fiction journeyman Spider Robinson, the first volume of which shares its name with the game. Born in the 1970s as loosely linked short stories in the pages of Analog magazine, it’s written science fiction’s nearest equivalent to the television sitcom Cheers; the stories all revolve around a convivial bar where everybody knows your name, owned and operated by a fellow named Mike Callahan in lieu of Sam Malone. The tone is what we like to call hyggelig here in Denmark: cozy and welcoming, both for the patrons of the bar and for the reader. A sign that Mike Callahan keeps hanging on the wall behind his post says it all: “Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased.” The stories manage to qualify as science fiction — or maybe a better description is urban fantasy? — by including elements of the inexplicable and paranormal: aliens drop in for a drink, as do time travelers, a talking dog, and plenty of other freaks and oddities. If you read long enough, you will begin to realize that Mike Callahan himself is not quite what he appears to be. But never fear, he’s still a good guy for all that.

It’s very hard even for a curmudgeon like me to work up any active dislike for a series that so plainly just wants to make us feel good. And yet I must admit that I’ve never been able to work up the will to read beyond the first book either. Even when I first encountered Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon in the stacks of my local library at the ripe old age of twelve or so, it felt so slight and contrived that I couldn’t be bothered to finish it. When I picked the first book up again as part of my due diligence for writing this article, I wound up feeling precisely the same way, thus illustrating that I either had exceptionally good taste as a twelve-year-old or that I am a sad case of arrested development.  (The child is the father to the man, as they say.)

Still, none of this need be the kiss of death for the game. I’ve played a fair number of games, from Legend and others, that are based on books that I would never choose to read on my own, and enjoyed a surprising number of them. But, as I noted at the outset, the game of Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon isn’t in this group.

Callahan’s was the second Legend adventure game to be masterminded by a former Sierra designer, after Shannara, by Corey and Lori Ann Cole of Quest for Glory fame. This time up, we have Josh Mandel, a former standup comedian who had once been a regular on the same circuit as such future stars as David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Jerry Seinfeld. His own life took a very different course when a close encounter with Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards caused him to seek a job with the company that had made it. His design credits at Sierra included Pepper’s Adventures in Time, Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, and Space Quest 6: The Spinal Frontier. Having left Sierra in the middle of the Space Quest 6 project because he was unhappy with the company’s direction, he was available for Legend to sign to a design contract circa late 1995.

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon is a very well-made game by any objective standard. The graphics and sound, created by a stable of out-of-house free agents to whom Legend returned again and again, are attractive and polished and perfectly in tune with the personality of the books. If the overriding standard by which you judge this game is how well it evokes its source material, it can only be counted a rousing success. Hewing to the series’ roots as a collection of short stories rather than anything so ambitious as a novel, the game uses Callahan’s Bar as a jumping-off point for half a dozen largely self-contained vignettes, which take you everywhere from Manhattan to Brazil, from outer space to Transylvania. (Yes, there is a vampire.)

The worst objective complaint to be made about it is that, if you were to hazard a guess, you might assume it to be two or three years older than it actually is. Barring the addition of a 360-degree panning system, the interface and presentation of the game aren’t very far removed at all from what we were seeing at the beginning of the point-and-click phase of Legend’s existence in 1993. For example, there’s still no audible narrator guiding the show, just lots and lots of textual descriptions of the things you click on. (The characters you speak to in the game, on the other hand, are fully voice-acted.) Its dated presentation may have represented a marketing problem when Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon made its debut in the spring of 1997, but there’s no reason for it to bother tolerant retro-gamers like us unduly today.

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon was the last hurrah for Legend’s original adventure engine, which had been steadily improved since their very first game, 1990’s Spellcasting 101.

So much for objectivity. Subjectively, this is my least favorite point-and-click Legend adventure game, with the possible exception only of Companions of Xanth, for which my distaste is driven more by the pedophiliac overtones of the books on which it is based than by anything intrinsic to the game itself. I can’t accuse Spider Robinson of so serious an offense as that, only of a style of humor to which I just don’t respond. Alas for me, Josh Mandel chooses to ape that style of humor slavishly. This game is a hall of mirrors where every pane of glass hides a wretched pun or a groan-inducing dad joke or a pseudo-heart-warming “I feel you, man!” moment. It sets my teeth on edge.

And the thing is, you just can’t get away from it. Josh Mandel has chosen to implement every single thing you see in the scenery as a hot spot. And because this is a traditional adventure game, any one of those hot spots could hide the thing or the clue or the action you need to advance. So, you have to click them all. One by one. And it’s absolutely excruciating. The words just run on and on and on… so many words, vanishingly few of them funny or interesting, a pale imitation of a writer I don’t like very much in the first place. I get tired and fidgety just thinking about it. For me at least, Callahan’s is proof that it’s possible to over-implement an adventure game, with disastrous effects on its pacing — a problem that tended not to come up in the earlier years of the genre, when space constraints served as a natural editor.

Sigh…

But of course, it’s well known that comedy is notoriously subjective. You might respond very differently to this game, especially if Spider Robinson happens to be a writer you enjoy, or perhaps if the humor in Sierra’s comedy adventures is more to your taste than it is to mine. I’d be lying if I said I finished it — dear reader, there came a point when I just couldn’t take it anymore — but what I did see of it gave me no reason to doubt that it’s up to Legend’s usual standards of meticulous, scrupulous fairness.

Okay… every once in a while, a joke does kind of land.

Sadly for Legend, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon sold like a Popsicle in the Arctic. And small wonder: whatever its intrinsic merits or demerits, it’s hard to imagine a game more out of touch with the way the industry was trending in 1997. In light of this, that could very well have been that for Legend Entertainment as a maker of adventure games. Instead, the company ponied up for one last adventure while the drawn-out Wheel of Time project was still ongoing. It was permitted only a limited budget, but it seems like a minor miracle for ever having gotten made at all. Best of all, John Saul’s Blackstone Chronicles: An Adventure in Terror is really, really good.

This project was an unusual one for Legend, in that for once the author behind the literary work that was being borrowed from showed an active, ongoing interest in the game. John Saul was riding high at this point in his career, being arguably the most popular American horror writer not named Stephen King. He was also, as he said at the time, “an old computer gamer, going back to the days of Zork when the adventure was all in text.” He first began to speak with Bob Bates about some sort of collaboration as early as 1995. The two initially discussed a book and game that would be released at the same time, to serve as companion pieces to one another. When that became too logistically challenging — a book tends to be a lot faster to create than a game — they decided that the game could come out later, to serve as a sequel to the book. Even so, Bates was already sketching out a design at the same time that Saul was writing his manuscript.

In the midst of all this, the aforementioned Stephen King tried out a unique publication strategy for his story The Green Mile: in an echo of the way the Victorians used to do these things, it appeared as six thin, cheap paperbacks, one per month over the course of half a year. The experiment was a roaring commercial success, convincing John Saul that it would serve his own burgeoning Blackstone Chronicles equally well. Thus the latter too was published in six parts, one at the end of 1996 and the other five in the first half of 1997 (after which the inevitable omnibus volume which you can still buy today appeared).

The Blackstone Chronicles revolves around an old, now abandoned asylum that looms physically and psychically over the New Hampshire town of Blackstone. In each of the first five installments, a resident of the town receives a mysterious gift of some sort, an object that once belonged to one of the inmates of the asylum. Strange events ensue on each occasion, until it all culminates in a showdown between a dark past and a hopefully brighter future in the sixth installment. The Blackstone Chronicles isn’t revelatory — creepy asylums in bleak New England towns aren’t exactly the height of innovation in horror fiction — but I found it to be a very effective genre piece nonetheless, one that’s wise enough to understand that shadows in the mind are always scarier than blood on the page. It was also a commercial success in its day to rival its inspiration The Green Mile, with each of the installments reportedly selling in the neighborhood of 1 million copies.

Sales figures like that do much to explain why Legend decided to continue with their game of The Blackstone Chronicles despite the headwinds blowing against the adventure genre. The project marked the first time that Bob Bates had taken on the role of Lead Designer since Eric the Unready back in 1993. Designing games was what he had started Legend in order to do, but navigating the shifting winds of the industry had come to demand all of the time he could give it and then some. Now, though, the situation was a bit more settled, thanks to GT Interactive stepping in with a long-term commitment to The Wheel of Time. Not being an FPS gamer, Bates wasn’t sure how much he could contribute there. Meanwhile his loyal friend and partner Mike Verdu felt strongly that, if Bates wanted to take a modest budget and make an adventure game with John Saul’s help, he had earned that right. The way things were going for Legend and the industry as a whole, it might very well be the last such chance he would ever get.

Bob Bates looks back on the time he spent making this game about madness, sadism, and tragedy as a thoroughly happy period in his own life. The constant stress over how Legend was to make payroll from month to month had, at least for the time being, abated, allowing him to do what he had really wanted to be doing all along: designing an adventure game that he could be proud of. It was gratifying as well to be working with such a literary partner as John Saul, who was, if far from a constant presence around the office, genuinely interested in what he was doing and always available to answer questions or serve as a sounding board. The contrast with most of the authors Legend had worked with in the past was stark.

The game takes place several years after the last of John Saul’s novellas, casting you in the role of Oliver Metcalf, the son of Malcolm Metcalf, the Blackstone Asylum’s last and most infamous superintendent. With a plan to demolish the old building and erect a shopping center in its place having backfired in the books, the town council now wants to make a museum of psychiatric history out of it. Before the museum can open, however, Malcolm’s malevolent spirit kidnaps your — Oliver’s, that is to say — flesh-and-blood son and hides him somewhere in the building. You go there to rescue him, which is exactly what your father wants you to do, having hatched a special plan for your soul. It’s a classic haunted-house setup, no more original in the broad strokes than the premise of the books, but executed equally well. The museum conceit is indicative of the design’s subtle cleverness: the exhibits you find in each room fill in the backstory of what you’re seeing, making the game completely accessible and comprehensible whether you’ve read the books or not.

Instead of pulling out Legend’s standard third-person adventure engine for one more go-round, Bob Bates opted for a first-person perspective with node-based movement through a contiguous pre-rendered-3D space — i.e., the sturdy Myst model, which Legend had previously used only for Mission Critical. With most of the small company busy with The Wheel of Time, the majority of the graphics and much of the programming were outsourced to Presto Studios, who were just wrapping up their third and final Journeyman Project game and were all too eager for more projects to take on in these declining times for the adventure genre. The end result betrays that the budget was far from expansive, but the sense of constrained austerity winds up serving the fiction rather than detracting from it.

Indeed, the finished game is something of a masterclass in doing more with less. The digitized photographs that drift across the screen from time to time serve just as well or better than full-fledged expository movies might have. Then, too, The Blackstone Chronicles uses its sound stage as effectively as any adventure game I’ve ever played; when I think back on the experience, I remember what I heard better than what I saw. Artfully placed creaks and groans and grinds and drips keep you from ever feeling too comfortable as you roam, as does the soundtrack, all brooding minor chords that swell up from time to time into startling crescendos.

And then there are the disembodied voices you converse with as you explore the asylum, who are sometimes deeply unsettling, sometimes downright heart-wrenching. In the category of the former is an all-American boy who talks like a cast member of Leave It To Beaver, but who has found his true calling as the operator of the asylum’s basement torture chamber, where iron maidens are only the tip of a sadistic iceberg. (“When I was a teenager, I killed a few animals and skinned them. People got upset. They said something was wrong with me. I guess what tipped the balance was when I cut up my best friend and put him in my closet…”) In the category of the latter is a little boy who prefers to wear dresses. Following the theories of the real psychiatrist Henry Cotton that such “disorders” of the mind reside in an organ of the body, Malcolm Metcalf proceeded to dismantle the boy piece by piece, beginning by pulling out his teeth and proceeding on to liver, spleen, kidneys, eyes, ears, and finally limbs. Standing there in a bare little room, surrounded by the remnants of the boy in Mason jars, listening to him tell his story… well, I found it fairly shattering. I’m not scared of werewolves or vampires, but I can be scared by monsters who appear in the guise of ordinary humans.

The fact is that many of the horrors The Blackstone Chronicles unveils really did happen inside mental institutions, and not all that long ago. During Medieval and Renaissance times, convents were the places one used to hide away embarrassing or inconvenient family members — usually women. (When Hamlet tells Ophelia to “get thee to a nunnery,” it isn’t meant as a tribute to her religious devotion.) So-called “lunatic” asylums took over this role during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When in The Blackstone Chronicles you meet the spirit of an unmarried young woman who tells you she is pregnant, you don’t know whether to believe her own words or to believe her official admission record, which says that she is suffering from an “hysterical pregnancy.” You just know that your heart goes out to her.

The puzzles you encounter as you explore the asylum and engage with its inmates and their persecutors aren’t exceptionally memorable in and of themselves, but they do their job of guiding your progress through the drama; in an echo of the books, they’re mostly object-oriented affairs, with most of the objects being intimately connected to the people who once lived here. Every once in a while, Oliver gets tossed into a situation that led to the death of an inmate: he might get locked inside the “heat chamber,” get hooked up to an ECT (“electroconsulsive therapy”) machine, or find himself strapped down underneath a swinging pendulum straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. If you don’t escape in time, you die — but never fear, the game gives you a chance to try again, as many times as you need. These sequences are as minimalist as the rest of the game, doing much with a few still frames and the usual brilliant sound design. And once again, the end result is more unnerving than a hundred blood-drenched videogame zombies.

The Blackstone Chronicles definitely isn’t for everyone; some might find it traumatizing, while others might simply prefer to play something that’s a little bit more cheerful, and that’s perfectly okay. But if it does strike a chord with you, you’ll never forget it. It’s one of only a few games I’ve played in my life that I’m prepared to call haunting — not haunting in a jump-scare sort of way, but in the way that can keep you up at night, wondering what on earth is wrong with us that we can do the things we do to one another.



If anyone had thought that being tied to such a successful series of books would make the game of The Blackstone Chronicles a hit in its own right, they were destined to be disappointed. GT Interactive saw so little commercial potential in Legend’s side project that they didn’t even want to distribute the game. Released in November of 1998 under the auspices of Red Orb Entertainment, a division of Mindscape, it performed only slightly better than Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, offering up no justification whatsoever for Legend to continue to make adventure games even as a sideline to their new direction. The future of the studio founded as the heir to Infocom lay with first-person shooters.

What was there to be said about that? Only that it had been one hell of a transformative decade for Bob and Mike’s most-excellent adventure-game company, as it had been for gaming in general.



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



Sources: The books Masters of DOOM: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner, Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine by Andrew Scull, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson, and The Blackstone Chronicles by John Saul. Computer Gaming World of August 1996, December 1996, February 1997, September 1997, January 1999, and February 1999; Retro Gamer 180; PC Gamer of December 1995. and May 1996

Online sources include GameSpot’s vintage review of Star Control 3 and an old GA Source interview with Michel Kripalani of Presto Studios.

I also made extensive use of the materials held in the Legend archive at the Strong Museum of Play.

In addition to the above, much of this article is based on a series of conversations I’ve had with Bob Bates and Mike Verdu over the last ten years or so. My thanks go to both gentlemen for taking the time out of their still busy careers to talk to me.

Where to Get Them: Star Control 3 is available for digital purchase at GOG.com. Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon and The Blackstone Chronicles can be downloaded as ready-to-run packages from The Collection Chamber; doing so is not, strictly speaking, legal, but needs must.

Thursday, 05. June 2025

Choice of Games LLC

Our 2025 Pride Sale is happening now!

Pride isn’t just for a month! All year, we work to bring you games that offer a diverse and expansive view of love, family, and identity. But we’ll take any excuse to celebrate, and so we’re putting fifteen games on sale this week that showcase and explore that diversity. You can get ten Choice of Games titles and five titles from our Heart’s Choice romance imprint for up to

Pride isn’t just for a month! All year, we work to bring you games that offer a diverse and expansive view of love, family, and identity. But we’ll take any excuse to celebrate, and so we’re putting fifteen games on sale this week that showcase and explore that diversity.

You can get ten Choice of Games titles and five titles from our Heart’s Choice romance imprint for up to 40% off until June 12th! Or get them all in the Choice of Games Pride Bundle and the Heart’s Choice Pride Bundle, both on sale now on Steam!

Heart's Choice rainbow landscape


IFComp News

IFComp Seeking an Artist for the 2025 Logo

We are looking for art for this year’s IFComp logo! We will pay a $250 commission.Artists should express interest by sending us a link to their past work/portfolio via email: [email protected] by June 30 (incl.); the artist will be selected by the end of July.More info:We will request one rough draft for review / edit before the final logo is produced.We must have the final art in hand by August 25

We are looking for art for this year’s IFComp logo! We will pay a $250 commission.

Artists should express interest by sending us a link to their past work/portfolio via email: [email protected] by June 30 (incl.); the artist will be selected by the end of July.

More info:

  • We will request one rough draft for review / edit before the final logo is produced.
  • We must have the final art in hand by August 25th.
  • We will need three versions of the logo: one with no text, one that says ‘IFComp’, and one that says ‘IFComp 2025’.
  • The final image file will be created or scanned at 3600 x 3600 px, and the design should still be clearly legible when reduced for display at 250 x 250 px for the web.
  • If you incorporate a person (optional) we ask that you make the person’s gender ambiguous.
  • We ask that you integrate the IFTF logo into the art in some way.
  • The IFComp logo should imply / be inspired by the many genres of games people make.

We will also request an invoice from the artist that the includes the following terms:

The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation has the right to use the image in whole or in part, in world-wide publishing, print, or on any merchandise for an unlimited time. The artists reserves the right to use or edit the work to be used in their portfolio. The artist will be paid $250 US dollars, sent by PayPal or Venmo, upon receipt of final image file. IFComp will cover currency conversion fees charged by PayPal.

If you are an artist thinking about making something for this year’s competition (e.g. cover art or a game), the logo may not be or have an obvious reference to an entry submitted this year. We are still open to artists participating in any way, whether it be submitting a game or doing art for an author, in this year’s competition.

Here are the last few years’ logos, just to give you an idea of what we’re looking for…

Please feel free to share this info far and wide - and with any great artists you know! The artist does not have to be part of the interactive fiction community.

Wednesday, 04. June 2025

Renga in Blue

Tiny Adventure (1981)

Today’s story is complicated, as it involves multiple threads converging at a central moment during the history of computing. THREAD 1: Edmund Berkeley You might think the first personal computer in history would be a moment of deep significance. Not exactly. There is, first off, what even “counts” as a personal computer; if we bypass […]

Today’s story is complicated, as it involves multiple threads converging at a central moment during the history of computing.

Also, this image via NASA of the “Pillars of Creation” (aka M16, Eagle Nebula, NGC 6611) is relevant; we’ll get back to it later.

THREAD 1: Edmund Berkeley

You might think the first personal computer in history would be a moment of deep significance. Not exactly.

There is, first off, what even “counts” as a personal computer; if we bypass all that argument to the minimum, the first personal computer was Simon, which could not be purchased in a store but where plans for making one were printed in the magazine Radio-Electronics starting in October 1950. It was the brainchild of Edmund Berkeley (co-founder of the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery) and cost north of several hundred dollars to make (in 2025 currency, at least $3500). It only had 32 bits of memory.

Based on the price, having the plans be meted out in a magazine, and having the entire thing require self-manufacture: it did not have much historical impact. It was, however, only Berkeley’s first attempt bringing something resembling computing to the home, as he had a much better price point with the Geniac (co-designed with Oliver Garfield) of $20 in 1950s money.

Eventually, this sort of “physical computer” was made even cheaper at $5 with the Digi-Comp I, a finite state machine powerful enough it also has been dubbed “the first personal computer”.

Certainly both devices could be programmed as if they were real computers; both devices included guides to programming Nim, an obligatory rite of passage for any 50s/60s computer.

These later devices had relatively widespread use — the Digi-Comp I had an estimated 100,000 in sales — unlike the Simon which remained a novelty. All these products were the logical outgrowth of Berkeley’s attempts to reach the masses with computing, which started even before Simon, in 1949, with his book Giant Brains, or Machines that Think.

These new machines are important. They do the work of hundreds of human beings for the wages of a dozen. They are powerful instruments for obtaining new knowledge. They apply in science, business, government, and other activities. They apply in reasoning and computing, and, the harder the problem, the more useful they are. Along with the release of atomic energy, they are one of the great achievements of the present century. No one can afford to be unaware of their significance.

This is all relevant for today’s story…

THREAD 2: Joseph Weisbecker

…as one of the people who read the book was Joseph Weisbecker, where (according to his daughter Joyce), “he saw for the first time what an electronic computer could do, but, more importantly, how it worked. Binary logic, flip-flops, switching circuits – very simple elements combined in subtle, clever ways resulted in surprisingly sophisticated behavior from a machine.”

Joseph Weisbecker was only a teenager when he read the book; by age 19 (in 1951) he had built his own Tic-Tac-Toe machine. During the 50s he joined RCA, not only working on chip and memory design projects but making lower-end educational toys (akin to the Digi-Comp) intended to bring computers to the masses. He had a special contract with RCA that let him sell his inventions to outside companies, like Think-a-Dot (sold by E.S.R, same company who made the Digi-Comp).

He was in the odd position of being involved with a vast number of the RCA computing initiatives all the way through the 1970s but also being ideologically opposite in a way; RCA cared mostly about large business where Weisbecker kept the flame alive for smaller computing. He put forward a proposal for mini-computers in 1960 (a level between giant mainframes and personal-computers) that was ignored (when this market emerged with the DEC PDP-8 in 1964, it became huge). Where this really became clear is when he went on to make his own personal computer system called FRED, developing it from his home in New Jersey.

Picture of FRED, aka Model 00. Source.

Knowing RCA’s apathy to the idea, he didn’t even bother pitching FRED (which eventually became the basis of the 1802 chip) until after RCA had a collapse of their mainframe computer business in 1971; according to Joyce Weisbecker he’d already been working on it for two years on the side. Later in the 70s he bypassed RCA entirely and wrote a series for Popular Electronics in 1976 and 77 that laid out the design for a personal computer, the Cosmac Elf, with the full 1802 chip design. This computer was essentially the fully-developed version of the FRED.

Via Jim Kearney‘s recent build of a Cosmac Elf.

It isn’t like the 1802 would have gone to waste without the personal computer connection; the chip was the first CMOS (Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) chip and consequently had low noise and low power consumption. Both are essential aspects in spacecraft and so an 1802 has found its way both in the Galileo probe launched in 1989 (giving a close-up view of Jupiter and its moons) as well as the famous Hubble space telescope launched a year later (see image at the top of this post).

Mosaic of Europa, from the Galileo probe.

The 1802 also found its way into the short-lived RCA Studio II console, off and on the market in a year. It is notable for having none other than Joyce Weisbecker (as quoted earlier) implement some games, making her one of the first female programmers in videogames.

For our purposes, the important thing to take away is that despite RCA being heavily corporatized, the Cosmac Elf was in a way “liberated” from it, as part of the movement to bring computing to the masses. Speaking of bringing computing to the masses…

THREAD 3: Tom Pittman

…we now need to move from New Jersey to California and the Homebrew Computing Club of Menlo Park.

Are you building your own computer? Terminal? T V Typewriter? I/O device? or some other digital black-magic box?

Or are you buying time on a time-sharing service?

If so, you might like to come to a gathering of people with likeminded interests. Exchange information, swap ideas, talk shop, help work on a project, whatever…

Invitation to the first Homebrew Computer Club meeting

They were founded quite shortly after the launch of the Altair computer, another candidate for “first personal computer” (more properly here, first commercially successful personal computer). While plenty of hobbyists had already made their own systems through arcane means, here was a computer kit that seemed to break things open, 256 bytes of default memory and all–

If it was even possible to get a set. The makers, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) out of New Mexico, had a story featured in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics; it was a Hail Mary by the founder, Ed Roberts, after they got their calculator business destroyed by Texas Instruments and friends (it cost more to make a ship a calculator than it did to buy it). They were not prepared for the influx of orders, some made to products mentioned that didn’t even exist yet.

Steve Levy’s book Hackers mentions how one person (Steve Dompier) drove all the way to Alberqueue and “had left the office only after Roberts had given him a plastic bag of parts he could begin working with, and over the next couple of months more parts would arrive by UPS, and finally Dompier had enough parts to put together an Altair with a serial number of four.”

This atmosphere of just touching the edge of the technological revolution was when the Homebrew Computing Club kicked off in the garage of Gordon French, co-founder of the group with Fred Moore. They both had links through the People’s Computing Company which for a brief time had one of the only working Altairs at the time (sent directly to the director, Bob Albrecht, who sang its praises in their newsletter) and that Altair landed in the garage for the first meeting.

We arrived from all over the Bay Area — Berkeley to Los Gatos. After a quick round of introductions, the questions, comments, reports, info on supply sources, etc., poured forth in a spontaneous spirit of sharing. Six in the group already had homebrew systems up and running. Some were designing theirs around the 8008 microprocessor chip; several had sent for the Altair 8800 kit.

Even with hardware there was the problem of software; coding in assembly was quite error-prone and slow, and the PCC already had good experience with using BASIC. Salvation seemed to come in the form of a version of BASIC made by Paul Allen and Bill Gates (with Monte Davidoff) which was sold by MITS…

Via the Computer History Museum, paper tape provided by Bill Gates.

…but it started selling at $397, and eventually landed on (after price reduction!) a price of $200, far more than what many of the computer enthusiasts were used to paying for software ($0).

A “Caravan” also known as the “MITS-Mobile” was travelling from town to town demonstrating the wonders of the Altair, and in June 1975 the Caravan arrived in Palo Alto, California.

The Homebrew Computer Club visited and there was an (early, buggy) version of Allen/Gates/Davidoff BASIC running on one of the computers, expanded to 4K. “Someone” swiped a paper tape which turned out to be a copy, which eventually landed in the hands of Steve Dompier, and from there this copy spread to the community.

All this led to this to the “Open Letter to Hobbyists” printed in the newsletter of the Homebrew Computing Club, February 1976, written by Bill Gates, outlining how it seemed nearly everyone had the pirated BASIC, and given the numbers of how with royalties paid, their time spent developing the product was “worth less than $2 an hour”.

Many hobbyists groused about this; a follow-up letter in a later issue opined that perhaps Gates was directing his ire at the wrong people, and that

I’m sure that if I were MITS, I’d be chuckling all the way to the bank over the deal I got from you.

Some of the Homebrew Computer Club decided the best response was to make their own BASIC. Tom Pittman, in particular, had been a member since the first meeting, and he was one of those who had made his own computer prior to the Altair — using the Intel 4004 chip, with only 4 bits as opposed to the 8-bit chips that came after (the 8008 which was used in the Canadian MCM/70 and the French Micral N, and the 8080 used in the Altair). He took up the challenge. While not the first to do so, Tom Pittman wanted to try charging for it, but a nominal fee only:

Gates was moaning about the ripoffs, and people were saying, ‘If you didn’t charge $150, we’d buy it.’ I decided to prove it.

Tiny BASIC was a variation of BASIC developed to be as simple as possible to fit in small-capacity computers; Pittman made his BASIC conform to the Tiny BASIC standard (and then added in some extra just because he could), and importantly, only charged $5. Rather than for the Altair this was for a different chip (the Motorola 6800) and he eventually sold the interpreter to a company for $3,500 (while retaining the rights to sell to $5 to hobbyists).

The 6800 wasn’t his passion, though, nor the MOS Technology 6502 he also wrote Tiny BASIC for (even though the 6502 showed up in everything from the Apple II to the BBC Micro to the Nintendo Entertainment System). The chip he truly loved was the 1802.

…the microprocessor is even more elegant than Joe Weisbecker intended. This microprocessor is so good that even RCA is not really aware how good it is. The 1802 is a complete and symmetrical microprocessor.

He liked the computer so much he eventually wrote a short course in programming for the commercial-kit follow-up, the Elf II. When he wrote his First Book of Tiny BASIC Programs in 1981 he clearly had his beloved Cosmac Elf in mind.

The Elf II was the commercial-kit version of the original Cosmac Elf design, sold a year later for $100. Source.

And now we finally get to why the threads all tie together, and why they are here on All the Adventures. Pittman’s book of Tiny BASIC programs includes Tiny Adventure, source for a full adventure game.

The instructions specifically mention Crowther/Woods Adventure “provided the inspiration”, but this game has significant differences. It feels very alien to play.

INTERLUDE

Some quick notes if anyone else wants to try this out in an “authentic” way. You need a Cosmac Elf emulator; I used Emma 02. Under File -> Configuration -> Load I picked Netronics Tiny Basic -> Serial I/O and then bumped the clock speed up slightly before starting the emulator (I used 6.5, any farther and BASIC has trouble loading).

I then took the source code for Tiny Adventure, copied the whole thing to clipboard, and pasted it to the emulator screen. This is very slow. I let it run in the background for 15 minutes before it was finished, and then played. There’s some “save” buttons on the emulator which I would assume makes the process faster thereafter but I was getting corruptions trying to get them to work, so I had to cut and paste every single time I was starting the emulator anew (which given this game took me multiple days to beat … well, let’s just say I feel like I was getting the authentic 70s/80s experience).

I tried finding another BASIC interpreter that would work, but even the one marked as TinyBASIC compatible gave me issues. I think there are some unique aspects to the Elf implementation of BASIC that haven’t been ported over. (Despite there being a “standard”, there are quite a few variants as discussed here.) I have no doubt there’s ways to clear up the issue but playing on a historical emulator gave the 1981 flavor, and so worked for my purposes.

THE GAME

Tiny Adventure is set in a fantasy world. There is no quest given. (“…unlike the original game, TA keeps no score; you play for the pleasure of exploring, or set your own goals.”) There isn’t even a specific treasure goal mentioned. We are just told to wander.

So far that’s unusual but not shockingly so, although if you study the instructions above carefully, they also specify you are only allowed to carry one item at a time in your hands. You can store items in your knapsack, but you have to juggle items and put them in and out again if you are trying to use something that’s stored.

Commands are not given in a regular parser fashion. Initial letters are used instead of words. (Usually. Often the game gets fussy if you go past one letter, sometimes it doesn’t.) There’s Take, Putdown, Keep (put in knapsack), Go, Look, Inventory, Help, Open, Close, Attack, Drink.

Look and go do not work like you normally expect. This game involves relative direction. Not only that, it involves relative direction where the paths you travel along don’t necessarily go straight back and forth. This is absolutely unprecedented so let me clarify.

In a game we played recently, The Maze, while it had relative direction, it also gave a first-person view of a maze so it wasn’t confusing. Still, it meant that rather than going north, south, east, or west, the directions were generally left, right, and forward (with “A” for “turn around”). The “tank controls” that happened in the late 90s for some games like Resident Evil were a similar concept.

There’s also been relative direction with text-only games but it has been much rarer. Mystery Mansion had the inside of the mansion start out with relative directions until you found a compass; you’d see in the room description what was to the left, forward, and right, and if you turned to the right and went forward, you would expect to return the way you came by turning around 180 degrees and moving forward again.

Map from Mystery Mansion, showing turning right and going forward, followed by turning around and going forward. The design on this part of the map is in a grid to make this a little easier to manage. It still was a hassle to play.

Tiny Adventure has relative direction, and one-way exits, and directions that turn. It took me a very long time to work out what was going on. An example from the very start of the game:

Essentially, what happened above is

a.) I went forward from the starting room. (G F = “go forward”, and the game requires you to use letters like that)

b.) I used LOOK to turn to the left twice. (L L = “look left”, which both turns the player and describes what is ahead of them, it took me a long while to even realize LOOK doubled as a turn command)

c.) I went forward again, landing me in an entirely different room (G F), except it doesn’t appear to be that way and the only way to realize this issue is to rotate around all four directions and spot something is different.

You might also expect the turning-passage to rotate the direction the player is facing, but no, if you’re facing “north” you’ll still stay facing north no matter what when you arrive at the next location. In the end this makes things easier to map but it was difficult for me to realize this was how the game was working. (You can imagine a player sashaying sideways as their head stays fixed in the same direction.)

To make a map, upon arriving at a new room I would “L R” (look right) four times to get a description of what was in each direction, notating all four on the map. To move around, in order to be careful, I always looked in the direction I wanted and did G F (“go forward”); while you can go back, left, etc. and essentially skip a step, I found it extremely easy to get disoriented if I did any shortcuts.

Perhaps the issue could be mitigated with dropping items? Alas no: there is, for example, a rock to the “west” of the start, where the same rock is in two rooms at once. I think the idea is the rock is equidistant “between” them so the rock could be taken at either place, but goodness the game is already confusing enough as it is. For extra inconsistency, there’s also items you can also see while looking in a particular direction.

I tried my best to map the outside but I honestly gave up trying to make it accurate and just made it accurate enough for me to get through. The really important object on the outside is the sword, which you can use to whack at the two enemies (dragon and troll).

The “fall” drops you in a dark place and I never got around to experimenting with the lantern there.

There’s a cottage with a locked door; the way to get inside is to open the window.

I gave up here on any kind of tracking of left/right. Only the connectivity is accurate. I was making full spins every time I stepped in a new room.

The starting room (bedroom) has a chest with keys, as shown in an earlier screenshot. You can also go in farther to find a flask of “dragon’s tears” and a “lantern”. (The dragon’s tears turn the player invisible. I never found a good place to use them, but since this game is a language tutorial with no set goal the author likely was just tossing in what he thought was neat.)

Down some stairs is a wine cellar with a locked door; using the keys from the bedroom on the door leads to a tunnel. (I’m making this all sound straightforward, but I didn’t find the keys right away because of the look-relative-position issue — I didn’t realize until very late it applied to a chest that could hold an object.)

At the far end of the tunnel is a dragon. If the dragon is sleeping it is easy to dispatch with a sword. According to the source code the dragon can be awake (and wander between rooms) but I never experienced that.

Part-way up the tunnel is another locked door leading to a “troll’s den”. There is a “maiden” in the den that you can rescue.

Another exit in the tunnel leads to a cave with an axe (presumably an alternate weapon — again weird for a regular game but not for a tutorial one), and then out to an island with a boat. When I reached the island the game crashed.

Again, the game gives no specific goal; I figured killing the troll and rescuing the maiden was good enough for me, but the book gives some interesting suggestions:

Can you rescue the maiden and her jewels without killing the troll (leave him locked in his den)? What is the least number of turns to do this?

There are two ways into the dragon’s lair, but you cannot get back out by one of them. Can you find it?

Can you discover what the “magic dragon tears” do for you? Can you undo it? Can you get more, after you use them up?

This is a hard one: If you get lost in the forest, can you get out? Hint: You need to head off in the direction of the ravine, but you must get your bearings before you get lost. Crashing through the underbrush of the forest tends to get you turned around, and you usually end up going around in circles.

Once you solve the forest problem, you might want to take the maiden on a moonlight boat ride around the island. Watch out for the riptide!

How many turns does it take you to visit every place? There are 17 places in all, counting both ends of the tunnel as one place. Usually you can tell you’re in a different place if the scenery is different, or if something you Putdown is no longer visible.

The troll will under certain circumstances, wander around on his own. Can you coax him into the bedroom? Harder yet, can you lock him in the bedroom without the maiden being there to look on?

The relative-movement system is so much like wading through sludge I’m not going to make an attempt at these, but others are welcome to try. That does leave one open question I am intrigued by…

How did this happen?

…by which I mean, why did what is essentially tutorial code in a book end up being designed like it was from an alternate universe? (Not just the movement style, but the lack of goals, and the inventory where you can only hold one item at a time and need to specifically say you want to stuff items in your backpack.) I think there’s some flavor of The Hobbit here (made by a quartet of computer scientists) where seeing how systems play out was considered more interesting than any kind of destination. Regarding relative movement, though, there’s a strong hint in the book:

One common complaint I’ve heard from several people who played this game is that it does not follow standard Euclidean geometry. That is not true. A map (on a flat piece of paper) was drawn of the area before a single line of code was written, and it is faithful to the map. What happens is that in crawling, climbing, or otherwise moving from one place to another, you got turned around, and the way out may not be behind you. Or, the divisions between places (such as rooms) may not fall on cartesian boundaries. This is true to life, and the game is consistent.

That is, the author was trying to create a modeled universe, again with an engineer/computer science bent, and if the player doesn’t have a compass, of course they would be confused and turned around sometimes! And of course you realistically wouldn’t be holding that much, just like a real person! This game was written with the realism-model approach without the consideration that because we are being conveyed the model via text, no matter what happens there is an element of unrealism anyway. Certainly my stumbling around a tunnel felt very different than any kind of being lost in real life I’ve ever experienced; this game is what would be like if you completely bypassed all thought of player convenience. As he states on his own webpage, he “doesn’t play games”; this was a true outsider work.

Which is interesting! I feel like I stumbled across a microcosm of innovation that started and ended where it landed. Pittman is still around and working in computers, but after one more game (Grand Slam Tennis for the Emerson Arcadia 2001) he went on to teach and write about compiler design, work on an automated Bible translation project, and finally (in the present day) teach programming to middle and high school students.

Coming up: I’m taking a break for the remainder of June! Sort of. I have a number of behind-the-scenes things to finish, including some posts that won’t show up until a future date (mystery!). I can say for now the game I have next on my list when I return is a graphical game for Apple II.

CREDITS NOTE: Very special thanks to Kevin Bunch, who is working on a book on RCA and graciously shared some of his research. If you’d especially like to hear him talk about the RCA Studio II at length, he did an interview with the Hagley Museum you can find here.


Zarf Updates

AI web scrapers: a data point

We all know that the Web is currently under attack by AI companies trying to turn scraped data into venture capital. I'd link to the early article I saw sounding the alarm, but I can't find it because there are hundreds of search hits on "ai ...

We all know that the Web is currently under attack by AI companies trying to turn scraped data into venture capital. I'd link to the early article I saw sounding the alarm, but I can't find it because there are hundreds of search hits on "ai bot scraper problems". I guess this article (arstechnica, March) was a big one.

This hit home for me when IFWiki started to show intermittent errors from server load. The server admins for IFTF and IFWiki are currently looking into solutions for that, so I will say no more about it. (I'm not the IFTF tech guy any more!)

However, I am still the IF Archive guy, so I took a look at its logs. Turns out the Archive is getting hammered in the same way. It's just not causing any problems. The IF Archive is entirely static files (except for the search widget). Cloudflare over Apache on static files can handle this load without breaking a sweat.

But I spent a bit of time analyzing the log data. Here's 15 hours of user-agent strings from yesterday:

count from
111784 hits total
48050 Scrapy
16211 GPTBot
15097 (misc strings containing "bot")
11782 ClaudeBot
7530 Amazonbot
4377 (no user-agent string)

That leaves 8737 hits that are human or even vaguely bothering to pass. Not great! I'm not differentiating between LLM scrapers and old-fashioned search crawlers, but it's obviously mostly LLM stuff.

(Note that Cloudflare is set up to cover a lot of the site, but not the index pages, which change frequently. I know this is imperfect practice but it's been okay. Apache and static pages! So the above numbers are representative of our traffic, but they're not all of our traffic.)

But the interesting thing is, they're mostly not bothering to pass. Half of them are openly Scrapy, which is an open-source tool. So the question is, how much of this traffic is well-behaved? I know the common wisdom is "none of it" but it's worth checking, right?

So I added a simple robots.txt file that explicitly blocked Scrapy and a couple of the other top user-agents. What do we find? Another 15-hour block, one day later:

count from
146434 hits total
38009 (one common version of Safari)
34123 Scrapy
26825 (randomized versions of Safari)
9243 Amazonbot
4079 ClaudeBot
5374 (no user-agent string)
699 GPTBot

When I say "randomized version of Safari", I mean like

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 15; zh-CN; V2364A Build/AP3A.240905.015.A2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/123.0.6312.80 Quark/7.8.0.751 Mobile Safari/537.36

...but with the build numbers randomized and other strings jammed in.

In other words, a lot of these bots are checking for a robots.txt file. When they see one, they jumble up their user-agent and keep going. Yesterday's user-agent file had 641 unique user-agents. Today's had almost 18000. It would be hilarious if it weren't assholes destroying the Internet for speculative profit.

The numbers also imply a lot of bots that don't do this -- they ignore the robots.txt entirely. (Which is what I expected.) Looks like Scrapy and Amazonbot are most prone to ignore. In contrast, the appearance of GPTBot and ClaudeBot dropped way off.

(Going by the user-agent strings! I have no reason to think "ClaudeBot" hits are really from the company Anthropic, or "GPTBot" from OpenAI. I haven't made any attempt to geolocate IP addresses.)

I guess you could ask why the bots don't always randomize or hide their user-agent strings. Maybe the CPU cost of string randomization is noticeable at the scale they're running.


As I said, the IF Archive doesn't have a load problem right now. So I don't need to change anything. The robots.txt file was an experiment. The only practical change (since yesterday) is that total hits went up 30%. No clue if the robots.txt caused that, but it certainly didn't help any, so I deleted it.

The numbers imply a possible strategy where you don't use robots.txt, but instead configure your server to block the worst user-agent strings. This isn't a simple fix though. I gather that if you throw a 403 error, the bots will retry with different strategies until they get through. So you need to provide some fake-real content. I haven't tried this.

At the high end, this turns into the "AI labyrinth" strategy, which gets a lot of attention these days. I am faintly skeptical -- it seems like an arms race which will waste CPU time on both sides. I don't have AI VC money to burn on that race. However, I haven't tried any of those solutions. We might; Cloudflare is pushing such a feature, and like I said, we use Cloudflare for some things. We shall discuss it.

The other anti-bot strategy that comes up is the client-side proof-of-work challenge, like Anubis. (Aka "force your browser to solve sudokus for heroin access.") That one is going to hose me in particular, because I do a lot of browsing with Javascript turned off. And the IF Archive is committed to serving content without requiring Javascript. That's not an IFTF policy, though -- other services have different requirements.

We'll see if the proof-of-work strategy gets widely adopted. The Anubis docs say "In most cases, you should not need this and can probably get by using Cloudflare to protect a given origin." Again, I have no practical experience here.

More mitigation news as it happens.

Monday, 02. June 2025

IFTF Blog

Announcing the IFTF Patreon

Hello to everybody in the IFTF Community (and beyond!) The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation’s board of directors is thrilled to announce the creation of a new way that you can help support our mission and get some fun perks in the process. This initiative has been in process for many months and we are delighted to finally launch it for the public. You may now support IFTF on the Patreon

Hello to everybody in the IFTF Community (and beyond!)

The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation’s board of directors is thrilled to announce the creation of a new way that you can help support our mission and get some fun perks in the process. This initiative has been in process for many months and we are delighted to finally launch it for the public.

You may now support IFTF on the Patreon platform, at the following URL:

https://www.patreon.com/IFTF

Backing IFTF on Patreon provides an additional, accessible route to helping us continue to serve the community of narrative game lovers and its ever-evolving needs. By becoming a member of our Patreon, you can unlock various perks, such as:

• A special role and access to an exclusive channel in the IFTF Discord ($5/month tier)
• A unique profile badge on the Intfiction forums ($5/month tier)
• A scaling discount on NarraScope admission ($10/month tier or higher, after 6 continuous months)
• Access to the Secretest Discord channel ($100/month tier, for you wild and wacky folks!)

We plan to continue to expand the perks over time as each of IFTF’s committees hooks into the system. We also are open to suggestions about additional things we can offer, so if you have ideas, please feel free to contact IFTF.

IFTF Patreon Q & A

Q: I already financially support IFTF another way. Is that changing or being eliminated?

A: No! This is simply another option for helping out.

Q: If I support IFTF via PayPal, it’s considered a tax-exempt donation. Is that still true with Patreon?

A: We advise checking with a tax advisor with expertise in your specific jurisdiction, but Patreon states that “if the creator is a legally recognized not-for-profit company and you receive nothing of value in return for your payment to them, then some jurisdictions allow the patron to take a tax deduction.”

For more information, this is a good place to start: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/207099326-Is-my-payment-to-a-creator-tax-deductible

Q: I have an idea for a perk or feedback about the Patreon!

A: That isn’t a question, but you can still get in contact with us via the many routes outlined on our website: https://iftechfoundation.org/contact/

The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation is registered in the United States as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.

Friday, 30. May 2025

Renga in Blue

Caveman Adventure (1983)

Dave Carlos is another one of our authors who transitioned from teaching to computers, like Peter Smith or the authors of Dragon’s Keep. Peter Smith went on to make educational software and Dragon’s Keep was educational software, so it isn’t a shocking transition; Dave Carlos, similarly, had a foot in educational software, culminating with a […]

Dave Carlos is another one of our authors who transitioned from teaching to computers, like Peter Smith or the authors of Dragon’s Keep. Peter Smith went on to make educational software and Dragon’s Keep was educational software, so it isn’t a shocking transition; Dave Carlos, similarly, had a foot in educational software, culminating with a co-written book in 1985 titled Writing Educational Programs for the BBC & Electron.

This book is not meant to be for a child directly; the aim is to teach and encourage parents, teachers and other interested people to write worthwhile and appropriate educational programs. We hope the book will be appropriate to those involved in every sphere of educational enterprise, from nursery level to postgraduate, from special to public schools, and in all disciplines from arithmetic to zoology. This may seem a daunting task but we have made life a little easier by presenting a text which not only contains programs which are ready to run and may be used as they stand or adapted in any way you wish, but also contains the building blocks from which other such programs can be constructed.

Carlos first caught the computer bug in 1980, when a parent asked if he could teach his children about programming his new ZX computer; the article says ZX81, but that wasn’t out until 1981, so either the date is off or the computer is off. Either way, the result was that Carlos bought a ZX computer for himself followed by a BBC Micro, eventually taking a computer job over the weekends while still teaching at Micro Power (a company we’ve explored the history of before).

Meanwhile, he started writing articles for magazines (A&B and Home Computing Weekly), with general advice columns (“This month we consider the important – and difficult – decision of which disc drive to choose”, “How to format discs to work on 40 and 80 track disc drives”) and also printed source code, like Stupid Cupid printed in February 1984.

1984 was also the year he quit teaching altogether, being disillusioned with recent changes in education with the reforms of Margaret Thatcher.

I felt that I couldn’t be the kind of teacher I wanted to be, and I didn’t want to be the kind of teacher that turned up every day, took his pay, and went home with no further thought.

Not long after this he founded his own PR firm, Mediates Ltd, using his publishing connections to aid companies in networking; this company eventually turned into the mail-order company Special Reserve, selling games throughout the 1990s.

Dave Carlos on the left giving out an oversized novelty check as part of a contest for the company Domark.

For adventure game fans, the company is of special interest as they had the Official Secrets adventure game club, and one of the Magnetic Scrolls games was only released as a promotional to members of the club.

Although you now can play it on the official Magnetic Scrolls site.

All this is much farther along than today’s game, which is marked on the source code as being “Version 10” and completed on “12th January 1983”; in other words, this was written when he was still a teacher, and had just started getting deeper into the computer industry.

Caveman Adventure was published by Micro Power / Program Power, the original company Carlos took a part-time job at. Similar to how the author of Eldorado Gold (Dave Elliot) neglected to include his weird early text adventure while discussing his work, Caveman Adventure doesn’t get mentioned in any of the histories including Dave Carlos; his work in publishing, PR, and advertising have been far too significant in comparison.

Via the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History. For fans of the history of weird box art, there’s a blog post by an artist (Chris Payne) who worked to try to make the Program Power art less Weird.

And … I’m going to be honest, I understand the omission. This is an erratic game. I was originally going to chalk elements up to him being a teacher and trying to write something for students, and maybe that was the goal, but: this is both too simple and too hard at the same time.

You are a caveman. You have been alone, but your goal is now to find your old tribe, while gathering treasures on the way. You can drop treasures in the starting cave or carry them with you.

As a caveman, the player’s commands are quite limited: TAKE, LEAVE (drop), DESCRIBE (examine), and USE. I’m being handwavy about whether the player is “roleplaying a caveman” or “controlling a puppet that is a caveman” because the game takes things both ways at once. You are prompted for the name of your caveman (I used “Bob”) and then start in your cave.

Notice: “this is the cave you have lived in for many months” followed by “What should Bob do now?” The closest comparable game I can think of that has been featured here so far is Mad Martha, which talks about “you, as Henry Littlefellow” and then asks what you (using your own name) want to do; it’s clearly a “role-play” situation in the text. That seems to be what the author was going for here but having both “you” and “Bob” emphasizes the disjoint between player and avatar even more.

To explain what’s going on with the game (and another aspect that’s highly unusual) I’m going to start with a “reduced” map which only shows what’s accessible without solving any puzzles.

Again, very reduced verb-set: walking, picking stuff up, looking at stuff, and using. The structure is such that some rooms will have death-exits, and it made me think possibly these were exits that could never be entered; that is, the game was going to be more of a labyrinth where you avoid certain exits rather than a heavy puzzle game. This isn’t actually the case.

To the west, there’s a room with a mouse and a roof that looks like it is about to collapse. If you go west, and then back east again, the roof does indeed collapse.

Heading west says “you need something sharp”. You would think the spear would work, but USE SPEAR gets no reaction. I’ll return to this puzzle later, but I do want to observe right now that this is a game where the obstacles are in the connections between rooms, rather than in the rooms themselves. We’ve seen this before with the game Seek … and that’s pretty much it. Seek was also published by Micro Power so almost certainly was an influence. (Seek additionally had the only-USE system for objects this game does.)

To the south is a bend where there are “flying creatures” blocking the path west; to the east there is a trickling sound of water followed by death.

Turning north from the starting cave, there’s a bearskin just coming out (just treasure, but every single item in this game counts as a “treasure”), followed by a plain with a “bone”.

Try to head north and the game says you’re too thirsty. (This is the problem with the Seek-style obstacle exits; why would Bob be thirsty specifically right there? Bob can wander about with no thirsty issues otherwise.) Going west gets Bob killed in a stampede.

Heading to the east from the plain, you pass by a deadly lion…

…and then going farther you can veer north to the top of a mountain and then die of starvation, as any exit from the mountain is death.

Veering south instead, there’s a waterfall (if you have sound on, there’s a water sound) with a “woman” there. I met the woman before I knew about the restricted verb set so tried TALK WOMAN and ended up taking her instead.

DESCRIBE WOMAN gets “She seems friendly and kind.” Using TAke on her is the right thing to do as she counts as a “treasure” and you can leave her at the cave for points.

There’s one more encounter going east, where you can land in a “raging river” and get a whole “cutscene” of described actions, but I think this might be either randomized or a bug because usually Bob would get “lost” and then inevitably die. (Getting “lost” as a method of death is also fairly unique but shows up in Seek.)

I’ll discuss this more later when it’s actually supposed to happen.

One last element early in the game is that there’s a thunderstorm, and about seven moves in the player’s items will get randomly scattered around. The most effective method of handling this I found is starting the game by wandering back and forth until the storm happens so you don’t lose any items at all.

This doesn’t move the player from the room they were in, although you have to LOOK to confirm this.

With that done, I fruitlessly tried to use the spear on various things — not realizing it was a complete red herring yet — and somehow neglected to DESCRIBE the BONE, which is

A very sharp bleached old bone.

That is, this is exactly what the first puzzle in the game needed. What, exactly, we are doing with the sharp object is unclear; I assume removing undergrowth somehow? (….with a bone?)

Hard work doing… something. This screenshot was taken during an iteration where I had items scattered from the storm.

Moving on…

…there’s simply a sequence of items to scoop up: log, vine, stick, dog, and net, while avoiding the one exit that makes the player/Bob “lost”.

This opens the previous obstacles, although some brute force use of USE may still be required (I still kept trying to use the spear until near the end of the game). Via lawnmowing, while adjacent to the lion, you can USE NET:

This shares Seek’s problem of uncomfortable treatment of space. There is no lion described in the room, yet you can catch one because it is in the next room over.

With the lion caught, you can do the mighty caveman thing and TAKE LION. He’s now your buddy! You can carry the lion and the woman and the log and the burning stick all at the same time. (I know infinite inventory has long been a thing, but not in this era.)

Going back over to where you would normally get stampeded, you can pre-emptively create a stampede, Lion King style, and clear out what turn out to be buffalo.

You don’t find out they’re buffalo until this very moment.

A map update:

While also doing USE STICK to scare off some vultures, you can scoop up a carcass, a tusk, and a coconut; note that if you re-enter the buffalo area from the west you have to scare them off again with the lion.

The coconut is sufficient to quench thirst in order to head north from the plain (still a mystery while taking that route is when it triggers, and you somehow pre-emptively know about the thirst). This enables a side route up the mountain picking up a “skin”, although you still need to deal with getting hungry at top of the mountain.

Uncooked vulture-tested carcass, yum! This admittedly felt caveman-ish. The whole point of getting here is to pick up the flint.

With all that done, we can get back to that raging river. I still am not sure how I got in early (random or bug?) but you’re supposed to USE LOG while at the waterfall that the woman was at (who at this point I had stored at the cave because I needed to inventory space, along with the lion). The river is a series of messages narrating the trip, with no interactivity.

At the end you can arrive at “shallows” where you can USE VINE to get to dry land. I am unclear how this works (are you lassoing something?) but USE can work with the power of brute force.

A dense jungle after requires cutting with the flint. (What were we doing with the bone, then?)

Finally you can reach an “open area of scrub” and get speared and die.

I mean, USE TUSK, which turns into a gift to guards that you can’t see without being killed by them.

I appreciate how the game tried to do something different with Seek’s “exit obstacles”. (It even repeats Seek’s issue where you need to repeat an action every time you go through an exit, but having buffalo and vultures and lions return to their original spots didn’t feel quite as weird as murdering a whole crew of dwarves over and over.)

The one contemporary review I’ve found (Micro Adventurer, November 1983) noted a bug I didn’t spot — the item-dropping from the storm does not reset your inventory counter, so you can end up being unable to carry anything after it happens. (“CAVEMAN Adventure is intended as an introduction to adventuring, and is therefore not too arduous a trial. But it is very well presented, and pleasant enough to play.”) Otherwise the review was fairly positive and mainly gets annoyed at the number of sudden deaths.

A rather more recent review by Gunness just states

What a dreadful, dull game…

and I am inclined to agree the whole thing felt narratively stilted and awkward, although I appreciate the attempt to do something different with the tone, setting, and somehow writing in second and third person simultaneously.

A crucial aspect of living and its enjoyment is the ability to use the senses that we find at our disposal. The ability of a computer to involve a human being in an interactive way depends upon those senses also. This tends to mean the full involvement of sight and sound in the programs we like and use.

Educational programs have a place for such considerations. We sometimes glibly say that a computer is a wonderful motivator for children, especially those who have experienced failure using traditional methods of learning and teaching. What we mean is that a computer can be a motivator if the programs being used are carefully written and involve the child totally in the experience of using the machine. Poor programs can have the opposite effect upon the child, making them as reluctant to use the computer as they may be to use other learning methods. There is nothing inherently motivational about a computer at all; in fact you could argue that a ‘QWERTY’ keyboard is a huge disincentive to use one. If we want to have a positive effect on a child, it is up to the software writers to take this into consideration at the time they plan their programs.

— From Writing Educational Programs For The BBC & Electron by Dave Carlos and Tim Harrison

Thursday, 29. May 2025

Choice of Games LLC

Major update to “Unsupervised”: Defeat the villain!

Today, we’re announcing a major update to Unsupervised, making the game 20% bigger and adding satisfying endings where the original game ended on cliffhangers. Today’s update is available at no additional charge, and we’re putting the entire game on sale, 40% off until June 5! Former friends make the worst enemies. They know your secrets, your scars, your soft spots—but you know theirs, too. Will y
Unsupervised

Today, we’re announcing a major update to Unsupervised, making the game 20% bigger and adding satisfying endings where the original game ended on cliffhangers.

Today’s update is available at no additional charge, and we’re putting the entire game on sale, 40% off until June 5!

Former friends make the worst enemies. They know your secrets, your scars, your soft spots—but you know theirs, too. Will you seek reconciliation… or deliver retribution?

Enemies gather within and without. The odds are against you. It’s time for the ultimate cosmic gamble.
Nothing will ever be the same.

• Face hundreds of foes at once. Will you be a sword-wielding maelstrom of death, the most efficient mass murderer the world has ever seen, or the voice of reason cutting through the carnage?
• Become the climate change you want to see in the world. Will you abandon the warmth of the living flesh and be reborn in heat death or join a transcendental triumvirate that threatens to ignite the very atmosphere?
• Every crisis hides an opportunity. Will you seize it to quietly eliminate those you despise—or do everything in your power to save them?

Wednesday, 28. May 2025

Renga in Blue

Nosferatu: TREES ARE RESERVED FOR COFFINS

I have finished the game, and my previous post is needed for context. Solving turned out not to be a matter of thinking about objects or puzzles or places, but thinking about verbs. cut, dig, climb, read, open, drink, wait, light, throw, tie, say, give, leave, scream, chop While we’ve had games with excess verbs […]

I have finished the game, and my previous post is needed for context.

Solving turned out not to be a matter of thinking about objects or puzzles or places, but thinking about verbs.

cut, dig, climb, read, open, drink, wait, light, throw, tie, say, give, leave, scream, chop

While we’ve had games with excess verbs that don’t do anything in the game, this didn’t seem like the sort of game to do that. I might normally say such verbs “put space to waste”, but it isn’t necessarily a waste; Countdown to Doom at least accepted EAT and SWIM to let the player know they weren’t going to be doing this on an alien planet, and sometimes in a modern Inform game it comes off as restrictive and awkward not to be able to THROW something even if it turns out throwing isn’t useful.

Speaking of throwing, that is one verb (other than wait) that hasn’t been used yet! I had already found the axe worked last time and went through all the other objects in the game and found none of them wanted to be thrown: “I can’t throw (insert item here)”.

The message in the forest about TREES ARE RESERVED FOR COFFINS seems to be here to explain why CHOP only works on the thicket but not here.

So what could we throw an axe at? The locked door had resisted my attempts at violence with CHOP DOOR — which you think would be the right way to bust in (especially given the lack of being able to HIT / SMASH / etc. even though the player has a mallet) — but I hadn’t tried THROW AXE.

Not “moon logic” exactly but the game should have accepted some alternate hitting methods. Limited space on a 8K VIC-20, though!

The inside has a sharp stick and a spade.

We now have and mallet and a wooden cross in addition to a sharp stick, but it doesn’t seem like there’s any “stake a vampire” verb in the set; what’s going on here? You’ll see in a moment. To recap, we also have the magic word unused (OVYEZ) as well as the lamp and the gold coins.

The spade, as I suspected, goes over to the sunny field.

I was storing my items here because of the “Crusifix”.

DIG is a little hard to operate; you can’t DIG CRUSIFIX but rather need to DIG HOLE, at which point a pit will appear you can go in.

Going out requires the ladder, but be careful because the ladder follows similar rules to the rope and will collapse if you have too much in your inventory.

The tunnel leads to a “subterranean cavern” and a seeming dead-end…

…but the THROW AXE is useful again (at least this time throwing seems the most natural thing!) This opens up a cave and nearly the last part of the game.

I had the lamp lit by this point; I don’t know the exact threshold it is needed.

Nosferatu! If I hadn’t spent my time investigating my verb list beforehand, I would have spent a while here uselessly trying to stake the vampire; he’s active rather than fully asleep and if you don’t have the wooden cross, he “rises from the altar, and bites my neck!”

The stick and mallet are complete red herrings. (The presence of a red kipper earlier at least hinted at the possibility.) The right thing to do here is to use magic.

According to the author’s web page, this doesn’t kill Nosferatu, it just gets him out of the way.

We can then grab the Bloodstone and retreat (being careful to drop most everything but the Bloodstone to climb up the ladder without it breaking).

This still isn’t quite the end of the game. The gold coins come in handy, as well as the very last unused verb: wait. You can go over to the bus stop and wait for a bus, and then pay for a ride in gold (!!). I guess he didn’t need exact change.

The author seemed somewhat down on this game…

If all of this leaves you with the impression that I don’t think much of the game, I suppose that’s true. But I still regard it with affection because, well, I was fourteen. Cut me some slack.

…and yes, there were a fair number of irregularities I already pointed out. I enjoyed myself more than some of our other games marked “haunted house” just because it did feel incredibly earnest; also, the fact we were not here to defeat the big bad racked up a few points on my imaginary scoreboard. I will say I could see a player getting incredibly frustrated by the ending and the useless mallet and stake. Although it makes perfect sense to me in a narrative sense why they wouldn’t work, it still would be better a design to acknowledge attempts at using them (along with textual hints suggesting that they’ll never work). This would have made a better overarching theme — sometimes the goal shouldn’t be destruction — that would go along with what happened to the witch (who we didn’t have to beware at all).

Some questions to the author, since he’s been in the comments:

1. What was the logic behind the fake-out with the stick and mallet?

2. Which puzzles were from Myles Kelvin, in the previous co-written game? (Also, was it such that you feel like you should both be on the credits?) What elements carried over and what changed?

3. What happened to the “HIDDEN GROVE” from your original working map?

…we [Myles Kelvin and Mike Taylor] went together to a conference in Manchester organised by Terminal Software. That made us feel very grown up at the age of fourteen or fifteen! Ah, the thrill of being allowed to drink beer!

This will be the last we’ll see of Taylor for 1983. He did have another game (The Final Challenge, aka Cornucopia) but it is lost:

Unlike the other games in this series, it required a VIC-20 with not 8k but 16k expansion – and since I didn’t own a 16k board, I had to borrow one from a school-friend, Richard Monk, in order to write it. Seems strange in these days when 4M of memory is considered woefully inadequate. [Meta-note: I wrote that last sentence in 1997 or ’98. As I write now, in 2001, 4M is truly laughable – most people now consider 64M unusable. No doubt by the time you read this, people will look sniffily on any computer whose memory is so tiny as to be measured in something as piddly as megabytes. Plus ca change.]

Of all my games that have been lost to posterity, this is the one that I would most like a chance to play again. I remember it somehow being invested with a strong sense of atmosphere, and having more-interesting-than-average puzzles. I have often tried to recapture elements of the plot to Cornucopia, as it rather bizzarrely ended up being called, but I have never succeeded to my own satisfaction. I particularly remember a tricky initial portion, necessary to get into the caves where the game took place, and a huge underground cavern with trees growing in it.

He’ll return in 1985 with the ambitious multi-player adventure Causes of Chaos.

Tuesday, 27. May 2025

Key & Compass Blog

New walkthroughs for May 2025

On Tuesday, May 27, 2025, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of interactive fiction at Patreon and Ko-fi. The Time Crystals of Cythii (2025) by Garry […]

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


The Time Crystals of Cythii (2025) by Garry Francis

In this adventure, you play as a young guardian of the Time Crystals of Cythii and the unthinkable has happened. Someone stole the Crystals and now time warps are appearing everywhere. Explore five historical disasters and get the Crystals back before your parents come home!

This game was an entry in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam (TALP) of 2025, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps


Eurydice (2012) by Anonymous

In this game inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, you play as a young Oxford man mourning Celine, your friend and housemate. Friends are downstairs, if you feel brave enough to socialize. Or, if you’d rather, take the mysterious lyre from your room to nearby Hinksey Park.

This game was an entry for IF Comp 2012 where it took 2nd place. At the 2012 XYZZY Awards, it was a finalist in two categories (Best Writing and Best Story).

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Crash (2022) by Phil Riley

In this sci-fi adventure, you play as a member of the repair corps of Space Station Omicron-5. Your last job of the day is on the SS Usagi, a Space Marines fighting ship. You just need to fix their microwave and a jammed locker door. But soon after you board the ship, the space station explodes, knocking you painfully to the floor and sending the ship adrift. And now the ship’s computer wants a full reboot. Your To-Do list just got a bit longer.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2022 where it tied for 22nd place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps


Iceweb (2016) by Gil Williamson

In this espionage game, you play as an experienced agent of the Department. Your mission is to retrieve an iceweb device from Pol, a spy in enemy territory. The sub drops you off in a Rigid Inflatable Boat (RIB) with an assortment of gadgets and a can of shaving foam.

This game was written for the e-zine Mythaxis (issue 17 Feb 2016).

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps


A D R I F T (2022) by Pinkunz

In this short survival game, you play as a cosmonaut and a victim of accidental explosive decompression. By good fortune, you were wearing your spacesuit at the time. But now you’re adrift in the void, facing a sun, unable to even turn around. Find a way back to the space shuttle or you’re going to die out here.

This game was an entry in Spring Thing 2022’s Back Garden.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


The Crew (2021) by Olaf Nowacki

In this short horror story, you’re the captain of a spaceship. You had to ration the last of the supplies, but soon you and your crew will reach Nostreperes, the pale planet, and you’ll have the last laugh.

This story was an entry in Le Grand Guignol (English) division of Ectocomp 2021 where it took 4th place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Mammal (2012) by Joey Jones

In this game, you play as a lowly human slave, suffering beneath the squamous toes of your new lizard overlords. Patrisnake Kssshsss has charged you with getting rid of all trace of mammals in the back rooms of the Don Quixote Memorial Museum.

This game was track 5 in the Apollo 18+20 IF Tribute Album event.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Witch Hedwig and The Magic Berries Brew (2025) by Robert Szacki

In this minimalist fantasy game, you play as Witch Hedwig. You need to brew a magic berries brew for your ill son. First, find the brew recipe.

This game was written in AdvSys. This was an entry in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam (TALP) of 2025, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Renga in Blue

Nosferatu (1982/1983)

Terminal Software was started, in a sense, by accident. RW Stevens, aka Reg Stevens, was working at ICL in Manchester (the business computer company, home of Quest). He had started writing games for the VIC-20 over Christmas 1981: …I wrote my first game, which was a computer version of [the tabletop game] Connect 4. I […]

Terminal Software was started, in a sense, by accident.

RW Stevens, aka Reg Stevens, was working at ICL in Manchester (the business computer company, home of Quest). He had started writing games for the VIC-20 over Christmas 1981:

…I wrote my first game, which was a computer version of [the tabletop game] Connect 4. I wrote it in BASIC and I made it look at the board and work out every possible combination and choose the best move from the criteria I’d coded in… which meant it could take five minutes to make a single move! Any player would get fed up waiting so I did the algorithm which worked out the computer’s next move in machine code. That made it as immediate as a human opponent.

He took it to show a colleague of his at work, Andy Hieke. Hieke thought the game was good and that Stevens should sell it, but Stevens replied he couldn’t be bothered; Hieke offered to do it instead. This would become what was published as “Line-up 4”, and it had only very modest success, Stevens at first getting a check for 20 pounds. However, Hieke got interviewed for a piece that landed in The Times and as part of the interview he mentioned an upcoming version of Scramble for the VIC-20.

There was no upcoming version of Scramble for the VIC-20, or at least not yet. Hieke called Stevens and said he needed to write one. This is the first he’d heard of the game’s existence (Stevens was 40 of the time and did not frequent arcades).

I did have my little computer, though, and was finding it fun to program, so I suppose I saw it as an intellectual challenge and rose to the bait. I said I’d have a go, so I took the kids to Blackpool one day to do some research and see what the arcade game looked like.

The game was successful enough to be well-remembered after; the author wrote that

Skramble! was probably my finest moment, although Super Gridder on C64 was probably at least as addictive. The amazing thing about that VIC20 Skramble! was that it was entirely hand assembled.

I wrote it in machine language, but had no assembler or machine language monitor- so I converted the instruction codes into numbers (using the data book for a 6502 CPU) and ‘poked’ them into memory from Basic!

The game got licensed by MicroDigital out of Webster, NY…

…although I’m not seeing the company at New York’s corporation registration site and I don’t have any information how that licensing agreement worked. Stevens did write a text adventure later for Terminal (Rescue from Castle Dread) so we’ll see him again, but today’s game involves a different author, Mike Taylor, who we previously saw here with Magic Mirror.

Nosferatu was written a different process; Taylor had based it on an “unnamed and unpublished game” he’d written with a friend (Myles Kelvin) the year before. Nosferatu was written from scratch with some of the same puzzles as the previous game, and was originally, like Magic Mirror, a “private” game. Once Magic Mirror was published he offered it Terminal and it became his second published game.

He was familiar with (but had not yet played) The Count by Scott Adams, and had not heard of any of the other vampire games we’ve seen here already. The goal is much different than the usual “kill Dracula” goal, as the printed instructions just say we need to “get home from Nosferatu’s castle with the precious bloodstone.”

I made my usual verb list, and none of them suggest we are killing the vampire, although I may be missing some special case.

cut, dig, climb, read, open, drink, wait, light, throw, tie, say, give, leave, scream, thread, chop

Kill, stab, stake, and hammer are not included. (Note, no violence at all! Although there’s an axe you can THROW.) As my ambiguity above suggests, I’m not done with the game yet, although as a VIC-20 game (using the 8k expansion) it surely can’t be too much larger than what I’ve seen?

It starts with a mysterious in medias res moment:

How did end up here? Did we somehow get smuggled into Nosferatu’s castle this way? Did we get attacked and deposited here? I thought briefly (before checking the manual’s objective) that we were playing as the vampire, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The opening areas yield up a “bottle of whisky”, a “rope”, and a “7-pound mallet”. In the same room as the rope there is a locked door. A bit farther is a Graveyard with a “newly dug grave” and a warning about needing to BEWARE THE WITCH…

I’m unclear why it turns from a grave to a cave.

…followed by a … bus stop? Hey, there was one in Haunt. Turning south, there’s a sarcophagus that is too heavy to open, although drinking the whisky will give a boost of strength and allows the player to open it.

Inside is a corpse that turns to dust if you touch it (no idea if the dust is helpful) and a wooden cross (which I haven’t used yet).

Heading east from there is a library, with an Atlas, book of Magic, and book of Games.

The book of Magic has a word that seems like it’d be helpful (see above) but I’ve tried it in every accessible room so far to no effect. The atlas mentions a cesspit near a oak forest (which you find anyway even without the atlas) and the book of Games just says:

Bored with this game already, huh?

I mean, it could have booted up Skramble? On an 16K VIC-20?

Moving on, heading north there is a rail at a balcony, and you can tie the rope to go down, finding a brass key and a red kipper. The author is sheepish that a similar puzzle shows up in The Count, and indeed two other vampire games also have this moment, but it almost doesn’t seem like a puzzle as much as a natural action; at least I didn’t feel like there was anything stale going on.

If you carry too much down the rope it snaps and you die.

With the brass key you can unlock the door back up north and open a large new area.

Up first are a “sharp axe” and a “ladder”; this is followed by a pond with a shark and I have no idea if you can do anything with the shark. I’m not even sure how to die from the shark.

What I am sure you can die from is a little farther where there is a “flimsy bridge” and it will collapse if you have too many items. Past the bridge is a hut that is locked and the brass key doesn’t work; I have yet to get in the hut.

I guess it’s implied the shark gets us?

Past that is a “sunny field” with a “crucifix” on the ground (spelled wrong) and I suspect the DIG command goes here but I don’t have any digging tool yet (which might be in the hut! which I haven’t gotten in yet!) What I can do is go around to a “cesspit” which has some gold coins, and use the ladder from earlier to climb out.

An easy softlock. This doesn’t have a save game feature.

There’s a “cliff” with a backwards sign….

…which indicates you’re supposed to use the axe to chop the thicket.

Past this are two rooms at the edge of a chasm, a “safety match”, and a “fountain of youth”. You can use the bottle from earlier (with the strength boost) to scoop up the water from the fountain of youth and take it back to the witch, trading it for a lamp.

(I kind of like how I was expecting some sort of battle confrontation but this was just a trade puzzle!) The match works to light the lamp but I haven’t found anything dark enough for it to have an effect. To recap:

a.) I’ve got a hut I can’t get in

b.) I don’t have a way of digging

c.) I don’t have a way past the chasm (if that’s even supposed to be a thing)

I’ve already visited both sides of the brick wall so I’m not sure if it’s really meant to be a puzzle.

I get the intuition this is going to be the sort of game where I just have to resolve one puzzle and then the rest will be a straightforward progression. But I have to find that one puzzle first!

Saturday, 24. May 2025

Renga in Blue

Cauchemard-House: VOUS AVEZ GAGNE

(Continued from my last post.) I have won the game, by some relativistic value of “won” — I needed to check the walkthrough a few times due to communication issues, but also one wildly unfair spot. I will try my best to convey first what any future potential players might need to have a better […]

(Continued from my last post.)

I have won the game, by some relativistic value of “won” — I needed to check the walkthrough a few times due to communication issues, but also one wildly unfair spot.

I will try my best to convey first what any future potential players might need to have a better chance before getting deep into spoilers. Before any of that, a little more detail on how the game was discovered:

Specifically, this happened on the Sinclair ZX World forums. A user named “willinliv” posted about a set of his father’s collection of “about 30” ZX81 tapes, some of them commercial and some of them hand-made.

One of the tapes from the collection, “GMSave”.

Our tape of particular interest was marked “Jeux 16k” (Games 16k).

I have been trying to get a better capture of the tape ‘Jeux 16k’, which seems to be a collection of software that my Dad traded with a ‘pen pal’ from France. Some of these are pirated copies of mainstream releases but some I kind find any info about or copies online. Unfortunately there are audio drop-outs recorded into the tape, particularly on Side B, and also my expertise is minimal.

Nightmare House was on the side B and did suffer damage. As XavSnap writes…

The wav file is broken and i had to rebuild the Basic file in binary (Bits rotations, bad basic length…).

…also pointing out the source code was explicitly based on the Trevor Toms code.

All objects, conditions and moves are located in the VARs memory segment, but this part don’t match in the P file [that’s the file used by the emulator]

After some significant work after the code was reconstructed. This is important in that it is faintly possible one of the odd behaviors you are about to see was related to the reconstruction, but after thorough enough testing I don’t think so: the game is really meant to be very linear with lots of death options.

If you plan on playing the game yourself, note that:

a.) On the two occasions where there are multiple things — the buttons on the recorder and the three trains — you’re supposed to refer to them by digit. So PUSH 1 or PUSH 2 or ENTER 1 and so forth.

b.) INSERT is used for both putting a thing in another thing as well as for typing.

c.) The way to wait is NOTHING. This might seem rather cryptic from the Apple version which just says “Command?” but the original more explicitly asks “what do you do?” As a conversational response, NOTHING (RIEN) makes sense, but I’ve almost never seen this before in an adventure game, where quite typically there’s an implicit “I WANT TO…” placed before the command; this gets fiddled with on rare occasion (DON’T PANIC from Hitchhiker’s Guide, for instance). The “almost” never is because this command also shows up in Folibus, which I think makes it pretty clear the author was deriving their code directly from Brégeon’s magazine article rather than from the Trevor Toms book.

With that out of the way, here’s the entire map.

Not large, yet somehow it manages many many ways to die. From where I left off last time, I had trouble with an acid bottle (just ignore it) and some trains. As I hinted at earlier, you’re supposed to ENTER one of them; trains 1 and 3 kill you (either by explosion or electrocution). This is hinted at in the previous room, which had an unplugged speaker; if you PLUG SOCKET (not the speaker, and no, the socket isn’t in the room description, even in the French version) you’ll get a hint about “always taking the second”.

With ENTER 2 you enter into darkness and where I got stuck again:

The train here has stopped in darkness. You can’t go any of the cardinal directions, and going down kills you (falling down). This is the moment where you need to do NOTHING.

The train moves along farther and ejects you into the room seen above. There is a beam going from north to south (the little squares in a column), an “electronic eye” next to a door to the west, a “black box”, and exits otherwise to the north and south. Trying to exit either way — at least my first time through — disintegrated me. I checked the verb list and there was nothing along the lines of sliding under the beam or jumping over it (like I did recently in the German game Geheimagent XP-05).

This was the part that I wasn’t stuck on due to the parser, but just being generally unfair. At the very start, there were some tools and a laser gun; you’re not supposed to pick up the gun.

That’s the only difference! You can’t even drop the gun once you’ve arrived at the beam room, you have to have left it behind. There is no indication that the weapon is the issue.

From here, you can go north into a room that looks fairly tantalizing, which has a “hole with a riveted ladder”, and a “window overlooking the sea with a lever”.

You’re supposed to ignore both those things (unless you want to die) and instead pick up the bottle (GOURDE) and cassette (CASSETTE). The bottle can be drunk but there’s a fun death later if you don’t drink it so let’s save that, and take the cassette back to the player at the intersection.

Putting the cassette in the player and using PUSH 2 (again I had to look up the interaction mode here) causes the previously-closed door to the west to open.

Inside is a lamp and a door with a keypad.

There’s also UNE MACHINE QUI RONRONNE, where “ronronne” can be either purring or a hum. I think purring is funnier.

You can’t open the door yet, but you can grab the lamp, turn it on, and jump back on the 2nd train. You will see a code for the keypad in the darkness.

It doesn’t give an explicit number, it just says there is one.

Circling back to the intersection you can then INSERT CODE (or rather, INTRODUIRE CODE) and reach the final room of the game.

There’s a mummy, a lever, a button, and a screen; there’s also a “controller” (or as the Apple game says, “stick”) to the west. The lever, button, and screen are all tantalizing, but again, death maze: push the button and the mummy wakes up and murders you.

If you haven’t drunk the bottle before entering:

You catch the plague. You die.

If you are holding the black box from the room with the beam.

The bomb explodes. You too.

You should ignore everything except for the stick, and pull it:

x

This gives the message

UNE TRAPPE S’OURVRE

VOUS VOUS RETROUVEZ DEHORS. VOUS AVEZ GAGNE.

which translates to

A TRAPDOOR OPENS

YOU FIND YOURSELF OUTSIDE. YOU HAVE WON.

I do want to emphasize that this exact style is fairly specific; we’ve had plenty of games with multiple options to die, but the sheer overwhelming preponderance of death-options here is high enough to form its own mood, akin to a Choose Your Own Adventure where more than half the options lead to a BAD END.

Be an Interplanetary Spy: The Red Rocket, from 1985. Source.

Eventually in 1983 we’ll reach The Manor of Dr. Genius for the Oric, by a known company (Loriciels) but with the same general flavor as Folibus.


Cauchemard-House (1982/1983?)

We’re back in France with this game; the most relevant prior game to read about is La maison du professeur Folibus. As observed in my posts on Folibus, the ZX81 had a stronger impact in France than in its country of origin (the UK); while the competition landscape was one likely factor, a major one […]

We’re back in France with this game; the most relevant prior game to read about is La maison du professeur Folibus.

As observed in my posts on Folibus, the ZX81 had a stronger impact in France than in its country of origin (the UK); while the competition landscape was one likely factor, a major one was the French SECAM format for televisions worked with the UK’s hardware in black and white (ZX81) but was a pain for color (ZX Spectrum). (SECAM’s main difference from PAL and NTSC is that PAL and NTSC have color signals sent by amplitude modulation — how “tall” the electromagnetic waves are — whereas SECAM uses frequency modulation — the “width” of the waves.)

This ramification of this was that the French-translated version of the The ZX81 Pocket Book by Trevor Toms had more an impact than the English original, and La maison du professeur Folibus became the “origin adventure” of France even though it literally wasn’t the first.

Interior of a French ZX81 box, via Sinclair Collection Site; the two tapes came with the set.

Just like how Omotesando’s early status led to further Japanese adventures in building break-ins, the “death-maze house” design of Folibus had a little cloning. By death-maze I am not just meaning a game with lots of ways to die (like, say, Time Zone) but rather that the plot follows a restricted path where one action is right and most others lead to death.

Today’s game is such a clone, and we don’t have a year or even an author.

Via the ZX81 France Facebook group. See the fourth game in column B.

It was rescued by French ZX81 enthusiast XavSnap off an old tape and may have been a “private game” originally meant for family and friends. It seems extremely likely is was made somewhere within a year of Folibus but there’s no way to be certain.

Plot: the protagonist has been kidnapped by a maniac and put in a house full of traps.

The title, as shown above, is Cauchemard-House (Nightmare-House) so that’s what I’m using, but the “d” is a typo; when the good folks at Brutal Deluxe Software ported the game recently to Apple II they not only added an English version, they also changed the title to Cauchemar House.

While this is a Folibus offshoot, there’s one innovation straight away:

That’s a top down view! That’s us (the “o”) with two arms (“(” and “)”). The text just says

YOU ARE IN AN EMPTY ROOM

THERE’S ALSO:
– LASER GUN
– TOOLS

WHAT DO YOU DO?

Scooping up the items and heading north, er, NORD:

No death yet! But soon. There’s no “room description” (I suppose the image is the description.)

THERE IS AN UNPLUGGED SPEAKER
A TROLL APPEARS.
TO THE EAST THERE IS A DOOR WITH A TAPE RECORDER WITH TWO BUTTONS AND TO THE SOUTH THERE IS A RED BUTTON

THERE’S ALSO:
– SUIT

Trying to go NORD results in

UNE FLECHE VOUS TRAVERSE

that is, “an arrow goes through you”; the same result happens in any other direction (other than west, where you just get stopped). You can push the button and the game says it’s just a “projection”; push it again and then the arrows stop happening, although only east is available.

This is a mini train station with three wagons, and an acid flask. Guess what happens if you pick up the acid?

The bottle was leaking, your hands are eaten away, you immediately catch leprosy (LA LEPRE).

For a game to be a death maze it needs death with this kind of frequency. Catching leprosy somehow from a flask of acid is optional.

And … now I’m stuck because of the parser. I’ve been alternating between the French ZX81 version and the translated Apple version (both are on Github) and I haven’t been able to refer to any of the wagons, and I’m still puzzled by the room with the tape recorder (it refers to the recorder having buttons, but I haven’t been able to press either). I also can’t find a way to refer to the troll (although the troll is gone if you go in the wagon room and then come back).

There’s a walkthrough provided by the Apple version so I can certainly muscle through but I’d like to try to puzzle things out a bit longer. While I suspect this is more a parser battle than an object-based one, I’ll still take suggestions in the comments if anyone has one.

Friday, 23. May 2025

Choice of Games LLC

The 2025 Spy Video Game Rendezvous starts today!

Choice of Games is participating in this year’s Spy Video Game Rendezvous, hosted on Steam by Sunny Demeanor Games! Four of our most suspenseful thrillers are on sale as part of the festival! Get them on Steam for up to 40% off until May 30th!

Choice of Games is participating in this year’s Spy Video Game Rendezvous, hosted on Steam by Sunny Demeanor Games! Four of our most suspenseful thrillers are on sale as part of the festival!

Get them on Steam for up to 40% off until May 30th!


Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian

The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 4: Chainsaw Monday

This article tells part of the story of Sierra On-Line. In 1825, in Paris, France, a man named Charles-Louis Havas set up an agency to translate foreign news reports into French for the benefit of local newspapers. At that time, his country along with the rest of the Western world stood on the cusp of […]


This article tells part of the story of Sierra On-Line.

In 1825, in Paris, France, a man named Charles-Louis Havas set up an agency to translate foreign news reports into French for the benefit of local newspapers. At that time, his country along with the rest of the Western world stood on the cusp of far-reaching changes. Over the next few decades, the railroad and the telegraph remade travel and communications in their image. This led in turn to the rise of consumerism, as exemplified by the opening of Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche, the world’s first big-box department store, in Paris in 1852. And with consumerism came mass-market advertising, a practice which was to a large extent invented in France.

The Havas Agency rode this wave of change adroitly. Charles-Louis Havas’s two sons, who took over the company after their father’s death, reoriented it toward advertising, making it into the dominant power in the field in France. Havas went public in 1879. During the twentieth century, it expanded into tourism and magazine and book publishing, and eventually into cable television, via Canal+, by far the most popular paid television channel in France from 1984 until the arrival of Netflix in that market in 2014.

The creation of Canal+ marked the point where Havas first became intertwined with another many-tendriled French conglomerate: the Compagnie Générale des Eaux, or CGE. The name translates to “The General Water Company.” As it would imply, CGE had gotten its start when modern plumbing was first spreading across France, all the way back in 1853. It later expanded into other types of urban service, from garbage collection to parking to public transportation. Veering still further out of its original lane, CGE invested enough into Canal+ to be given a 15-percent stake in the nascent channel in 1983, marking the start of a new era for the formerly staid provider of utility services. Over the next fifteen years, its growth outstripped that of Havas dramatically, as it became a major player in cable television, in film and television production, in telecommunications and wired and cellular telephony.

By 1997, CGE had acquired a 29.3-percent stake in Havas as well. In May of the following year, it completed the process of absorption. The new entity abandoned the anachronistic reference to water and became known as Vivendi, a far catchier name that can be roughly translated as “Of Life” or “About Life.” Having expanded by now to the point that it was running out of obvious growth opportunities inside France, it looked beyond the borders of its homeland. In the next few years, it would buy up a wide cross-section of foreign media.

This impulse to grow put the software arm of Cendant Corporation on Vivendi’s hit list just as soon as Henry Silverman, that troubled American company’s boss, made it clear that said division was on the market. For, of all sectors of media, gaming seemed set for the most explosive growth of all, and Vivendi was eager to grab a chunk of that action. It was not alone in this: a deregulation of the French telecommunications industry that had been completed on January 1, 1998, was spawning a foreign feeding frenzy among actual and would-be French game publishers. Conglomerates like Ubisoft, Titus, and Infogrames would soon join Vivendi as new household words among American gamers. The days of the “French Touch” being the mark of games that were sometimes charmingly, sometimes infuriatingly off-kilter would fade into the past, as French publishers would come to stand behind some of the biggest mass-market hits in the field.

Seen through this prism, there can be no doubt about the main reason Vivendi chose to take Cendant’s games division off Henry Silverman’s hands: Blizzard Entertainment, whose games Warcraft 2Diablo, and Starcraft had combined with the Battle.net matchmaking service to become a literal modus vivendi for millions of loyal acolytes. For its part, Sierra was on the verge of scoring a massive, long overdue hit of its own with Half-Life, but that had not yet come to pass as negotiations were taking place. As matters currently stood, Sierra was merely the additional baggage which Vivendi had to accept in order to get its hands on Blizzard.

The deal was done with remarkable speed. On November 20, 1998 — one day after the release of Half-Life, four days before the release of King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, and eighteen days before that of Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire — it was announced that the now-former Cendant software division had become a new subsidiary of the Vivendi empire, under the name of Havas Interactive. The price? A cool $1 billion in cash — cash that was, needless to say, much-needed by the beleaguered Cendant. The current Cendant software head David Grenewetzki, who as far as the French financiers could see had done a pretty good job so far of cutting fat and improving efficiency, would be allowed to continue to do so as the first boss of Havas Interactive.

The folks in Oakhurst had been through such a roller-coaster ride already that they were by now almost numb to further surprises. First had come the acquisition by CUC and the sidelining of Ken Williams, who looked a lot less like a soulless fat cat in comparison to what came after him. Then the merger with HFS, then the shock and horror of the revelations of accounting fraud and the plummeting share price, which had cost some staffers dearly — especially the ones who had signed onto the plan to replace some of their salary with Cendant stock. Al Lowe of Leisure Suit Larry fame, for example, says that almost overnight he and his wife lost “the equivalent of a really nice home.” So, the news of this latest sale, to yet another company that no one had ever heard of, was greeted mostly with resigned shrugs. Everyone had long since learned just to take it day by day, to hope for the best and to try to ignore the little voice inside that was telling them that they probably ought to be expecting the worst.

For three months, sanguinity seemed justified; not much changed. Then came February 22, 1999.

The first sign the Oakhurst employees encountered that something was out of the ordinary on that Monday morning were a few Pinkerton Security vans that they saw parked in front of the building as they arrived at work. Not knowing what else to do, they shrugged and went about their usual start-of-the-week routines. An all-hands meeting was scheduled for that morning at the movie theater next door, the latest installment in a longstanding quarterly tradition of same. If anyone felt a premonition of danger — the mass layoff of 1994 had been announced at another of these meetings, at the same theater — no one voiced their concerns. Instead everyone shuffled in in the standard fashion, swapping stories about the weekend just passed and other inter-office scuttlebutt, a little impatient as always with this corporate rigamarole, eager to get back to their desks and get back to work making games.

They soon learned that they would not be making games in Oakhurst, today or ever again. The instant they had all taken their places, the axe fell — or rather the chainsaw, as it would later be dubbed by Scott Murphy, a designer of Sierra’s Space Quest series. The Oakhurst office was closing, the staffers were told matter-of-factly. While they were still struggling to process this piece of information, they were each handed an envelope with their name on it. Inside was a short note, telling them whether they had just lost their job entirely or whether they were being offered the opportunity to relocate to the Bellevue office, to continue making games there.

As of February of 1999, Yosemite Entertainment had three major projects in development; in an indubitable sign of the changing times in gaming, none was an adventure game. One was a “space simulator” in the mold of Wing Commander and TIE Fighter, based in this case on the Babylon 5 television series; one was an MMORPG, a far more ambitious successor to The Realm that was to take place in J.R.R. Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth; and one was a shooter powered by the Unreal engine that was being created in consultation with a former Navy SEAL commander. The first two projects were to resume production in Bellevue; the last was cancelled outright.

When all of the support staff who are needed to run an office like this one were added to the chopping block, the number of people who lost their jobs that day came to almost 100 — almost two-thirds of the total number of Sierra employees remaining in Oakhurst. The ranks of the newly jobless also included a small team that had been working with Corey and Lori Ann Cole to make an expansion pack for Quest for Glory V, which was to add to the base game some form of the multiplayer support that had once been the whole thrust of the project as well as some new single-player content.

Sierra’s new management had left nothing to chance. While the meeting had been taking place at the theater, the Pinkerton hired guns had been changing the security codes that employees used to access the office building. The victims of the layoff were now led inside in small groups under armed guard, where they were permitted just a few minutes to clean their personal belongings out of their desks.

The shock of it all can hardly be overstated. No one had seen this coming; even Craig Alexander, the manager of Yosemite Entertainment, had been given no more than a few minutes warning on the morning of the layoff itself. With cataclysmic suddenness, the largest employer in Oakhurst had simply ceased to be. Come the day after Chainsaw Monday, the old office building and its previously bustling parking lot looked like a movie set after hours. The only people left to roam the halls were a few support personnel for The Realm, whose servers were to remain in Oakhurst for lack of anyplace better to put them while Havas Interactive sought a buyer for the building and if possible the MMORPG as well. (The Realm had just enough players that its new mother corporation hesitated to piss them off by shutting it down, but neither did Havas Interactive want to invest any real money in a virtual world built around the creaky old SCI engine.)

As an ironic capstone to the brutal proceedings in Oakhurst, both the Babylon 5 game and the Middle-earth MMORPG were themselves cancelled just six months later in Bellevue, as part of another round of “reorganizing.” The folks who had relocated to a big city 1000 miles further up the coast to continue these projects learned that the joke was on them, as they were left high and dry there in Seattle. The emerging new business model for Sierra was that of a publisher and distributor of games only, not an active developer of them. In other words, Sierra was deemed by Vivendi to be of further use only as a recognizable brand name, not as a coherent ongoing creative enterprise. Had he been paying attention, Henry Silverman, Wall Street’s king of outsourcing and branding, would surely have approved.

In the years that followed, surprisingly few of the prominent names who had built Sierra’s original brand, that of the biggest adventure-games studio on the planet, continued to work in the industry. What with the diminished state of the adventure game in general, the skill sets of people like them just weren’t so much in demand anymore.

Corey and Lori Ann Cole did find employment in the industry at least intermittently, but did so in roles that no longer got their names featured on box covers. Corey worked as a consultant on such unlikely projects as Barbie: Fashion Pack Games (to which he contributed a Space Invaders clone that replaced spaceships and laser guns with hearts and lipstick). Both Corey and Lori Ann worked on a virtual world called Explorati, which, had it ever come to fruition, might have been the missing link between Habitat and Second Life. Later, Corey worked on online-poker sites. Eventually, the Coles did come home again, to make Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, which is Quest for Glory VI in all but name, and the more modestly scaled but equally warm-hearted Summer Daze: Tilly’s Tale. Corey told me recently that he and Lori Ann have some other ideas in the pipeline that might come to fruition someday, but he also told me that they “are pushing 70, and spending more time on ourselves.” Which is more than fair enough, of course.

Embracing the spirit of the late 1990s, when you couldn’t toss a dead rat into the air without hitting five different dot.com startups, Ken Williams initially envisioned a second act for his career, as an Internet entrepreneur. He passed up a chance to get in on the ground floor with Jeff Bezos’s Amazon.com in favor of a venture of his own called TalkSpot, which aimed to bring talk radio online. Born, one senses, largely out of Ken’s longstanding infatuation with Rush Limbaugh, a hard-right AM-radio provocateur of the old school, TalkSpot can nevertheless be read as prescient if you squint at it just right, a harbinger of the podcasts that were still to come. But it was just a little bit too far out in front of the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure; almost everyone was still accessing the Internet over dial-up at the time, which made even audio-only streaming a well-nigh insurmountable challenge. An attempted pivot from being a public-facing provider of online talk radio to providing streaming services to other companies, under the name of WorldStream, couldn’t overcome this reality, and the company closed up shop — ironically, not all that long before the DSL lines that might have made it sustainable started to roll out across the country.

Then again, it may be that Ken Williams’s heart was never really in it. Realizing that he had achieved his lifelong dream of becoming rich — he had all the money that he, Roberta, and their children could ever possibly need — he didn’t become a third-time entrepreneur. Instead he and Roberta threw themselves into an active and enviable early retirement. They sailed a boat all over the world, blogging about their travels to a whole new audience who often knew nothing about their previous lives. “We somehow achieved a second fifteen minutes of fame as world cruisers and explorers,” writes Ken in his memoir, exaggerating only slightly.

In 2023, they made a belated return to game development, via a graphical remake of the game that had started it all, for them as for so many others: Will Crowther and Don Woods’s original Adventure. It struck many as an odd choice, given the rich well of beloved Sierra intellectual property from which they might have drawn instead, but it seemed that they wanted above all to pay tribute to the game that had first prompted them to create their seminal Mystery House all those years ago, and to create Sierra On-Line in order to sell it. Having accomplished that mission, they have no plans to make more games.

And as for little Oakhurst, California, the strangest place at which anyone ever decided to found a games company: it weathered the turbulence of Sierra’s departure surprisingly well in the end, as it had so many changes before. There was a brief flicker of hope that game development might again become a linchpin of the town’s economy when, about six months after Chainsaw Monday, the British publisher Codemasters bought Sierra’s old facility, along with The Realm and its servers and the rights to the Navy SEAL game that had been cancelled when the chainsaw fell. Codemasters tried to assemble a team in Oakhurst to complete the SEAL game, which would seem to have been as prescient as Ken Williams’s TalkSpot in its way, anticipating the craze for military-themed shooters that would be ignited by Medal of Honor: Allied Assault in 2002. But most of the people who had once worked on the project had already left town, and Codemasters had trouble attracting more to such a rural location. The winds of corporate politics are fickle; within barely six months, the SEAL game was cancelled a second and final time, the Realm servers were finally moved out, and the now-empty building was put up for sale once again. These events marked the definitive end of game development in Oakhurst, barring the contracting jobs that the Coles did out of their house.

The loss was a serious blow to the local economy in the short term. But, luckily for Oakhurst, Yosemite National Park abides. After a brief-lived dip, the town started to grow again, thanks to the tourists who were now streaming through the “Gateway to Yosemite” in greater numbers than ever. Oakhurst’s population as of the 2020 American census was just shy of 6000 souls — twice the number counted by the 2000 census, when the community was still reeling from Sierra’s departure.

Today, then, Sierra On-Line’s sixteen-year stay in Oakhurst has gone down in local lore as just one more anecdote involving the eccentric outsiders who have always been drawn to the place. Still, among the hordes of families and hardcore hikers who pass through, one can sometimes spot a different breed of middle-aged tourist, who arrives brimming with nostalgia for a second-hand past he or she knew only through the pictures and articles in Sierra’s newsletters. Such is the nature of time. What is passed but remembered, if only by a few, becomes history.

Oakhurst in 2022. Life goes on…

I’d like to share with you a eulogy for Sierra — one that you may very well have seen before, written by someone far closer to all of this than I am. Josh Mandel was a writer and designer who worked at Sierra for several years. Just three days after Chainsaw Monday, he wrote the following.

On Monday, the last vestige of the original Sierra On-Line was laid to rest in Oakhurst, California. That branch, renamed “Yosemite Entertainment,” was shuttered on February 22nd, putting most of its 125-plus employees out of work.

You may not care for what Sierra has become since the days when dozens of unpretentious parser-driven graphic adventures flowed, seemingly effortlessly, out of Oakhurst. But there’s no denying that, back then, Sierra On-Line was the life’s blood of the adventure-game industry.

Maybe the games were a little more rough-hewn than those of its competitors — not that there were many competitors at that point. But Sierra kept adventure gamers happy and fed, gamers who would’ve otherwise starved to death on the arguably more polished, but frustratingly infrequent, releases of Lucasfilm Games (as they were once called).

Sierra alone grew the industry in other ways, too. It was Ken Williams who, almost single-handedly, created the market for PC sound hardware by vigorously educating the public [on] the AdLib card and, shortly thereafter, the breathtaking Roland MT-32. He supported those cards in style while other publishers wanted nothing to do with them. It was Corey and Lori Cole who invented the first true hybrid, replayable adventure/RPG. It was Christy Marx’s lump-in-the-throat ending to Conquests of Camelot that reminded us that not every computer game had to have a group hug at the end. It was Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy who made us want to kill off our onscreen alter ego, to see what inventive, gooey death had been anticipated for us. It was Roberta, before anyone else, who invented strong female heroines. It was Al Lowe, bringing up the rear (literally and figuratively) by creating Leisure Suit Larry, the most popular, pirated game of its decade. We knew this because we sold far more Larry hint books than we sold of the actual software.

It was the Sierra News Magazine (later InterAction) that let us feel like we knew the people making these games, that they were a family-run business, staffed by people who lived an isolated life, surrounded by idyllic, ageless beauty and creating games that were a labor of love. That was, at least for a while, an accurate picture. This was a family we wanted to feel a part of, for good reason, and people came from thousands of miles away to take a tour and see how real it all was…

Some may argue that Sierra lives on in Bellevue, Washington, where Al Lowe, Jane Jensen, Roberta Williams, Mark Seibert, and a handful of [other] Oakhurst refugees still labor diligently on games side-by-side with scores of newer talent. But games like King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity and Leisure Suit Larry 7 have a distinctly different flavor than the seat-of-the-pants, funny, touching adventures that Oakhurst once produced. They are commercial.

Invariably, in a company that grows the way Sierra grew, innovation gives way to emulation. Whereas Sierra’s management once strove to make it solid, profitable, and yet fun, they now strive to dominate other companies, force annual growth in the double digits, and (like so many other companies) cut jobs mercilessly to improve the bottom line and thrill the stockholders. Yet the Ghost of Sierra Past still walked the halls in Oakhurst. The rooms were adorned with the art of glories past, the artists and programmers who helped to create those glories were, in fair measure, still living and working there. Now that spirit has been exorcised by scrubbed, glad-handing executives who don’t know, or don’t care, what those artists and programmers could do when they were motivated and well-managed.

People, living and working closely together in the pursuit of shared joy, were what made Sierra games great. Thank you, Ken, for creating something utterly unique, something warm, fun, and beautiful. Damn you, Ken, for allowing others to tear it down.

Whether you were a Sierra fan or not, we are all diminished by the loss of history, talent, and continuity within the gaming industry. Rest in peace, Sierra On-Line.

The skeptical historian in me hastens to state that this eulogy is very sentimentalized; whatever else they may have been, Sierra’s games were always at least trying to be deeply commercial, as Ken Williams will happily tell you today if you ask him. On the other hand, though, it’s rather in the nature of eulogies to be sentimental, isn’t it? This one is not without plenty of wise truths as well. And among its truths is its willingness to acknowledge that Sierra’s games “were a little more rough-hewn than those of its competitors.”

I, for one, have definitely spent more time over the years complaining about the rough edges in Sierra’s adventure games than I have praising their strong points. I’ve occasionally been accused of ungraciousness in this regard, even of having it in personally for Ken and Roberta Williams. The latter has never been the case, but, looking back, I can understand why it might have seemed that way sometimes, especially in the early years of this site.

Throughout most of the 1980s, the yin and yang of adventure gaming were Infocom and Sierra, each manifesting a contrasting philosophy. As Ken Williams himself has put it, Infocom was “literary,” while Sierra was “mass-market.” One Infocom game looked exactly the same as any other; they were all made up of nothing but text, after all. But Sierra’s games were, right from the very start, the products of Ken’s “ten-foot rule”: meaning that they had to be so audiovisually striking that a shopper would notice them running on a demo machine from ten feet away and rush over to find out more. (It may seem impossible to imagine today that a game with graphics as rudimentary as those of, say, The Wizard and the Princess could have such an effect on anyone, but trust me when I say that, in a time when no other adventure game had any graphics at all, these graphics were more exciting than any ultra-HD wonder is to a jaded modern soul.) Infocom had to prioritize design and writing, because design and writing were all they had. Sierra had other charms with which to beguile their customers. It’s no great wonder that today, when those other charms have ceased to be so beguiling, Infocom’s games tend to hold up much better.

But I’m not here to play the part of an old Infocom fanboy with a bad case of sour grapes. (Whatever we can say about their respective games today, there’s no doubt which company won the fight for hearts and minds in the 1980s…) I actually think a comparison between the two is useful in another way. Infocom was always a collective enterprise, an amalgamation of equals that came into being behind an appropriately round conference table in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Strong personalities though the principals may have been, one cannot say that Infocom was ever Al Vezza’s company or Joel Berez’s company, nor Dave Lebling’s or Marc Blank’s. From first to last, it was a choir of voices, if sometimes a discordant one. Compare this to Sierra: there wasn’t ever an inch of daylight between that company and Ken and Roberta Williams. Sierra’s personality was theirs. Sierra’s strengths were theirs. And, yes, Sierra’s weaknesses, the same ones I’ve documented at so much length over the years, were theirs as well.

I’ll get to their strengths — no, really, I will, I promise — but permit me to dwell on their weaknesses just a little bit longer before I do so. I think that these mostly come down to one simple fact: that neither Ken nor Roberta Williams was ever really a gamer. Ken has admitted that the only Sierra game he ever sat down and played to completion for himself, the way that his customers did it, was SoftPorn — presumably because it was so short and easy (not to mention it being so in tune with where Ken’s head was at in the early 1980s). In his memoir, Ken writes that “to me, Sierra was a marketing company. Lots of people can design products, advertise products, and sell products. But what really lifted Sierra above the pack was our marketing.” Here we see his blasé attitude toward design laid out in stark black and white: “lots of people” can do it. A talent for marketing, it seems, is rarer, and thus apparently more precious. (As for the rest of that sentence: I’m afraid you’ll have to ask Ken how “marketing” is different from “advertising” and “selling…”)

Roberta has not made so explicit a statement on the subject, but it does strike me as telling that, when she was given her choice of any project in the world recently, she chose to remake Crowther and Woods’s Adventure. That game was, it would seem, a once-in-a-lifetime obsession for her.

Needless to say, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with not being a gamer; there are plenty of other hobbies in this world that are equally healthy and stimulating and satisfying, or quite possibly more so. Yet not being a gamer can become an issue when one is running a games company or designing games for a living. At some very fundamental level, neither Ken nor Roberta had any idea what it was like to experience the products Sierra made. And because they didn’t know this, they also didn’t know how important design is to that experience — didn’t understand that, while the ten-foot rule applies for only a limited window of time, writing and puzzles and systems are timeless. Infocom scheduled weekly lunches for everyone who wished to attend to discuss the nature of good and bad design at sometimes heated length, drafted documents full of guidelines about same, made design the cornerstone of their culture. As far as I can tell, discussions of this nature never took place at Sierra. Later, after Infocom was shuttered, LucasArts picked up the torch, publicizing Ron Gilbert’s famous manifesto on “Why Adventure Games Suck” — by “adventure games,” of course, he largely meant “Sierra adventure games” — and including a short description of its design philosophy in every single game manual. Again, such a chapter is unimaginable in a Sierra manual.

For, like everything else associated with the company, Sierra’s games reflected the personalities of Ken and Roberta Williams. They were better at the big picture than they were at the details; they were flashy, audacious, and technologically cutting-edge on the surface, and all too often badly flawed underneath. Those Sierra designers who were determined to make good games, by seeking the input of outside testers and following other best practices, had to swim against the tide of the company’s culture in order to do so. Not that many of them were willing or able to put in the effort when push came to shove, although I have no doubt that everyone had the best of intentions. The games did start to become a bit less egregiously unfair in the 1990s, by which time LucasArts’s crusade for “no deaths and no dead ends” had become enough of a cause célèbre to shame Sierra’s designers as well into ceasing to abuse their players so flagrantly. Nevertheless, even at this late date, Sierra’s games still tended to combine grand concepts with poor-to-middling execution at the level of the granular details. If I’m hard on them, this is the reason why: because they frustrate me to no end with the way they could have been so great, if only Ken Williams had instilled a modicum of process at his company to make them so.

Having said that, though, I have to admit as well that Ken and Roberta Williams are probably deserving of more praise than I’ve given them over the fifteen years I’ve been writing these histories; it’s not as if they were the only people in games with blind spots. Contrary to popular belief, Roberta was not the first female adventure-game designer — that honor goes to Alexis Adams, wife of Scott Adams, who beat her to the punch by a year — but she was by far the most prominent woman in the field of game design in general for the better part of two decades, an inspiration to countless other girls and women, some of whom are making games today because of her. That alone is more than enough to ensure her a respected place in gaming history.

Meanwhile Sierra itself was a beacon of diversity in an industry that sometimes seemed close to a mono-culture, the sole purview of a certain stripe of nerdy young white man with a sharply circumscribed range of cultural interests. The people behind Sierra’s most iconic games came from everywhere but the places and backgrounds you might expect. Al Lowe was a music teacher; Gano Haine was a social-studies teacher; Christy Marx was a cartoon scriptwriter; Jim Walls was a police officer; Jane Jensen and Lorelei Shannon were aspiring novelists; Mark Crowe was a visual artist; Scott Murphy was a short-order cook; Corey and Lori Ann Cole were newsletter editors and publishers and tabletop-RPG designers; Josh Mandel was a standup comedian; Roberta Williams, of course, was a homemaker. At one point in the early 1990s, fully half of Sierra’s active game-development projects were helmed by women. You would be hard-pressed to find a single one at any other studio.

This was the positive side of Ken Williams’s mass-market vision — the one which said that games were for everyone, and that they could be about absolutely anything. There was no gatekeeping at Sierra, in any sense of the word. For all of LucasArts’s thoughtfulness about design, it seldom strayed far from its comfort zone of cartoon-comedy graphic adventures. Sierra, by contrast, dared to be bold, thematically and aesthetically as well as technologically. I may have a long list of niggly complaints about a game like, say, Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within, but I’ll never forget it either. Despite all of its infelicities, it dares to engage with aspects of life that are raw and tragic and real, giving rise to emotions in this player at least that are the opposite of trite. How many of its contemporaries from companies other than Sierra can say the same?

And as went the production side of the business, so went the reception side. Perhaps ironically because he wasn’t a gamer himself, perhaps just because one doesn’t get to be Walt Disney by selling to a niche audience, Ken understood that computer games had to become more accessible if they were ever to make a sustained impact beyond the core demographic of technically proficient young men. He strove mightily on multiple fronts to make this happen. Very early in his time as the head of Sierra, he was instrumental in setting up distribution systems to ensure that computer games were readily available all over the United States, the way that a new form of consumer entertainment ought to be. (Few Sierra fans are aware that it was Ken who founded SoftSel, the dominant American consumer-software distributor of the 1980s and beyond, in order to ensure that Sierra’s games and those of others had a smoothly paved highway to retail stores. Doing so may have been his most important single contribution of all from a purely business perspective.) A little later, he put together easy-to-assemble “multimedia upgrade kits” for everyday computers, and made sure that Sierra’s software installers were the most user-friendly in the business, asking you for IRQ and DMA numbers only as a last resort. If some of his ideas about interactive movies as the future of mainstream entertainment proved a bit half-baked in the long run, other Sierra games like The Incredible Machine more directly anticipated the “Casual Revolution” to come. If his wide-angle vision of gaming seemed increasingly anachronistic in the latter 1990s, even if it was wrong-headed in a hundred particulars, the fact was that it would come roaring back and win the day in the broader strokes. His only real mistake was that of leaving the industry which he had done so much to build a little bit too early to be vindicated.

So, let us wave a fond farewell to Ken and Roberta Williams as they sail off into the sunset, and give them their full measure of absolution from the petty carping of critics like me as we do so. In every sense of the words, Ken and Roberta were pioneers and visionaries. Their absence from these histories will be keenly felt. Godspeed and bon voyage, you two. Your certainly made your presence felt while you were with us.



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


Sources: The books Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line by Ken Williams and Vivendi: A Key Player in Global Entertainment and Media by Philippe Bouquillion.

Online sources include “How Sierra was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud” by Duncan Fyfe at Vice, “Chainsaw Monday (Sierra On-Line Shuts Down)” at Larry Laffer Dot Net, Ken Williams’s page of thoughts and rambles at Sierra Gamers, and an old TalkSpot interview with some of Sierra’s employees, done just after the second round of lay-offs hit Bellevue.

I also made use of the materials held in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play. And once again I owe a debt of gratitude to Corey Cole for answering my questions about this period at his usual thoughtful length.


Zarf Updates

Last day for in-person NarraScope registration

A quick reminder: today is is the last day to register for NarraScope 2025 if you want to attend in person. (Remote attendance will be open until June 18th.) If you want the conference rate at the University City Study hotel, you need to grab ...

A quick reminder: today is is the last day to register for NarraScope 2025 if you want to attend in person. (Remote attendance will be open until June 18th.) If you want the conference rate at the University City Study hotel, you need to grab that today also.

Friday workshops are up on the schedule, too. As always, workshops are free, but you must be registered for the conference (remote or in person) to sign up for the workshops.

See you in Philadelphia in, yikes, four weeks!


Renga in Blue

The Final Countdown (1982/1983)

(This continues, more or less, from my previous post.) In 1974, Donald Sherman ordered a pizza on the phone, making history. Not that it was the first delivery pizza ordered by phone — pizza delivery had been around for many years by then and Domino’s had popularized it — but Donald Sherman couldn’t talk, having […]

(This continues, more or less, from my previous post.)

In 1974, Donald Sherman ordered a pizza on the phone, making history.

Not that it was the first delivery pizza ordered by phone — pizza delivery had been around for many years by then and Domino’s had popularized it — but Donald Sherman couldn’t talk, having a type of facial paralysis from Moebius syndrome. He used a system at Michigan State University which pronounced words for him, and we have the moment caught on camera.

His first call (Domino’s) hung up, thinking this was a prank call, but he finally got cooperation on his fifth call, this time to Mike’s Pizza, ordering a large with pepperoni and mushrooms.

For this to work, a Control Data 6500 computer nicknamed “Alexander” was paired with a Votrax synthesizer. The Votrax was originally developed by Richard Gagnon of Troy, Michigan (about an hour east of Michigan State) in 1970. He was working for Federal Screw Works at the time but had developed a talking chip in his basement, and when he showed his prototype to his bosses the put him in charge of a new Vocal Interface Division (eventually spinning off to its own company). Just like Sherman he used it for accessibility, having it dictate words from a computer monitor as his eyesight had trouble.

This all resulted in the commercial SC-01 chip unveiling by the end of the decade from the newly dubbed Votrax, and you might have heard one before if you’ve played Gorf or Q*Bert. While Gorf used the chip for taunting the player with a well-timed “got you, space cadet”…

…Q*Bert used it for its own unique language.

The SC-01 was licensed out to companies to make voice synthesis hardware in the early 80s like the Mockingboard, the Alien Group Voice Box, and — relevant for today — the Spectrum Voice Pak for TRS-80 Color Computer.

The Spectrum Voice Pak ($70 for CoCo 1 and $80 for CoCo 2) does not seem to have made much a splash as I have found very little software that’s used it, but page 16 of the catalog for Spectrum Projects — in addition to the Spectrum Adventure Generator and a bingo game — has The Final Countdown. While The Final Countdown had the same JARB Software and Dragon Data releases as S.S. Poseidon, it also had an extra one later specially designed for the Votrax.

From World of Dragon.

I unfortunately do not have a copy of the talking version of the game, nor do I have an emulator that supports the chip. Here’s one more video to give an idea what it sounded like, applying a table of 64 phonemes encompassing units like “the oa sound of board” or “the tt sound of butter”.

Hence, I’m just going to load up the Dragon version again, which like last time, has easy, medium, and hard difficulties (affecting the turn limit).

The JARB ad also credits both Bill and Debbie Cook but I do have an early 1982 version of the game with no difficulty levels that just mentions Bill Cook, and the Talking version of the game also only mentions him in the credits.

Also like last time, the game is relatively straightforward, but with two curveballs thrown in.

There is an insane general who wants to launch a nuclear missile, and your job is to stop him from destroying the world.

You start near a van with a 2-way radio and a uniform; examining the uniform also reveals a stun gun and some PAPERS.

Heading south gets you in a desert with a rattlesnake and there’s no point in going there (it doesn’t have a puzzle this time, but just like Poseidon it feels like a “side scene” rather than a typical red herring).

To get inside you go by a camera at the front gate and show the papers from the uniform.

You’d think they could detect a fake general. Maybe we’re a real general and this is our actual uniform and we’re here to slap some sense into the wayward lower-star upstart.

Once inside, if you veer left into the C.O. Office, you can have one of those “side scenes” I just mentioned but this time with a minor puzzle. There are monitors and three buttons; if you press the second one it starts showing I Love Lucy, and if you press the third it sets everything on fire.

A “fire bottle” is in the room next door but you need to have picked it up first. This essentially identical to the Poseidon scene, and there’s no reason to press any of the buttons.

I wandered around the map after that. There’s a BULLETIN BOARD warning about tripping on stairs, and a message about an evacuation being complete, and a direct phone to the White House that’s very unhelpful…

…but other than that I was unclear. To the northeast there’s a cabinet that’s locked — no key yet — and intuition struck me given the mention of stairs so I tried moving it.

I have no concrete logic here but I did ratiocinate myself into doing this rather than hitting the interaction via brute force, like I did with Time Warden.

This leads to the second (and only other) part of the game.

The passage goes through a “command center”, “radar tracking” (with wire cutters), and a “strategy room” before arriving at a “maze of hallways”.

In the meantime, THE GENERAL starts showing up, kind of like the dwarves in Crowther/Woods, and you can use a charge from your stun gun to chase him off. This is clearly on the Dr. Strangelove end of the spectrum.

It’s not really a maze, though, because going through a loop enough times eventually reveals a secret passage.

Heading west from here goes to an elevator that you can take as a one-way trip back to the first floor (this is very much like Poseidon’s structure) whereas going south leads to a LAUNCH CONTROL CENTER.

Of the three buttons, ONE does just a click, TWO is not recognized by the parser even though it gets mentioned, and THREE is described as doing nothing. It does something, just not yet. (I was expecting an accidental premature launch, but apparently not; the rocket countdown is already happening).

The way to win is slightly cryptic. To the north, where there’s the observation window, you can BREAK WINDOW using the FIRE BOTTLE (the same one that was used before in the “scene” — interesting moment of intercross there!)

For reasons I’m unclear about, if you now go south and press THREE this reveals a panel.

This reveals a wire, and while CUT WIRE doesn’t work, USE CUTTERS does and you can win the game.

I regret not being able to find out how the voice sound gets used. Does the wandering general taunt you, perhaps? I’ll get another chance to find out when I get to 1984 as that’s the release year of the Spectrum Adventure Generator which also uses the same chip.

Unfortunately that’s the last we’ll see of the Cooks; they didn’t drop off the map as Bill Cook later wrote wrote the application Write III for the CoCo 3, but this was their only experiment with adventures. They do feel like they were written from an outsider perspective, and I am especially wondering why they had the “scenes” with very light puzzles as part of their games.

Thursday, 22. May 2025

Zarf Updates

Counting the wreckage

It happened that I was looking back on my old game reviews, and I hit a link to a game web site, and the site was gone. Not a shock. Web sites vanish. It made me sad, though. I like those single-game, single-message web sites! I doubt anybody ...

It happened that I was looking back on my old game reviews, and I hit a link to a game web site, and the site was gone.

Not a shock. Web sites vanish. It made me sad, though. I like those single-game, single-message web sites!

I doubt anybody loves building them. There's this sense of capitalist obligation. If you're shipping a game, you need to grab a vaguely suited domain name and put up (a) screenshots and (b) links to all the store platforms and (d) a press kit in case a journalist notices. Once the game ships, you go back and fill in (c) adulatory press quotes. That's how you get any google juice there is to get.

I did this for Hadean Lands, and now every time I mention Hadean Lands on my blog I can link to hadeanlands.com. That's great. Search engines dig it.

But of course I am on board with keeping my web site alive over decades. I registered eblong.com in 1997, I believe. It will run as long as I pay the bills. When I registered hadeanlands.com in 2010, I put it on the same hosting service and the same bill. No extra effort.

(Yes, my will allows my beneficiaries to keep my web sites running. I said decades, I meant decades.)

Not everyone can; not everyone does. How many sites have we lost?

You might ask whether these single-game sites are meant to last. (Leaving aside weirdos like me.) They exist solely for rando gamers to google. Commercial games media sites never ever link to them. I suppose I should put that in past tense, since there may not be any commercial games media left soon, but even nu-indie rags like Aftermath are inconsistent about linking to the developer site.

Weirdos like me will do it, though! Since 2019 or so, I've been using a standard tag for my game reviews:

Hadean Lands • by Zarfhome Software -- game site

But what is the "game site"? I don't want to link to the Steam page! Why should Valve get my precious link energy? I should support the developer, right?

So every time I post a review, I try to hunt down the real game site. My order of preference:

  • A dedicated game site domain -- the kind I've been describing.
  • A game page on the developer's web site.
  • A game page on the publisher's web site.
  • The Steam page.
  • The Itch page.

(Sorry, Steam is above Itch -- for this purpose. I love Itch. But if a game is on both platforms, then Steam is where they're making their money, and I want to support that. Obviously, if a game chooses to fly Itch-only, then I'll link there.)

Therefore, I have a good five-year history of links to game sites, game developer sites, and so on. I can poll them and count!


This is of course an extremely unscientific sample. It is almost entirely indie narrative, adventure, and puzzle games. A lot of it comes from the IGF lists, so it's relatively timely -- but I play some games a year or two after they come out. For IGF judging, I review some games before they come out.

I am testing whether the original URL, which I found for my review page, still works. No fair re-googling! This is about maintaining old links. An old URL is "alive" if it still shows you good game info, or redirects to a site that does. (Sometimes a developer takes down the game-specific site but keeps the domain as a redirect to their company site. That's fine.) A URL is "dead" if the server is down, or shows an error, or the domain has been taken over by an ad squatter. (Rearranged your studio site and the original URLs are 404? Sorry, that's a dead link.)

The links are categorized as dedicated game pages, company game pages, and platform (Steam/Itch) pages. This is fewer buckets than my list above, but it roughly describes how much effort goes into the upkeep.

This logic bakes in some assumptions about how web pages die. It's rare for someone to explicitly withdraw a game from circulation. (I don't think any of the games on my list did that.) Almost always the problem is an expired domain. Sometimes it's broken server tech (expired SSL cert, web framework busted, etc.) That's why it's useful to distinguish between "game-specific site" and "company site". If you have a lot of domains, your company site is probably worth keeping up, but you might stop thinking about old long-tail games.

And now, the numbers. Rotate the board!

Year Game-specific Studio Platform
2024 22 — 2 dead 15 6
2023 15 — 2 dead 19 7
2022 21 — 2 dead 15 11
2021 21 — 5 dead 19 — 2 dead 1
2020 17 — 7 dead 21 — 6 dead 7

(Totals are links in my review blog posts. Counted by hand; mistakes are likely. I didn't try to track 2019 or earlier years because I didn't have enough greppable links.)


I thought the wrap on this post would be "Don't make game-specific sites; they die quick. Create a studio site instead." But the numbers don't really support that conclusion. Yeah, game-specific sites die a bit faster, but only by couple excess deaths per year.

What this looks like is that indie studios have a death rate. When they go, the game page dies, whether it's a separate domain or part of the studio site. But the Steam/Itch page stays up -- presumably because it brings in a bit of money, and somebody is still happy to collect that.

(And you don't have to renew anything to keep the Steam/Itch listing up. Apple is its own can of worms, obviously, but let's not go there today.)

The death rate is low for studios that released something (that I played) in 2022, but heats up beyond that point. I don't have enough data for a real curve, but you can see the bump.

Also, for some reason, in 2021 everybody had a game or studio page. I only had to go to the Steam link once. Why? Say "COVID", why not.

Anyhow. I still think studio sites are easier to maintain than game-specific sites. When I registered hadeanlands.com, that was a fit of optimism! All my later games (Meanwhile, Leviathan, etc) have been pages on zarfhome.com.

(HL will never have a sequel, but... I'm holding the hermeticlands.com domain. You know. Just to have it handy.)

But then, I'm a tiny solo outfit, and I have to watch my action points like a hawk. If you're any larger -- even a smallish indie -- you probably want the extra visibility of the dedicated game site. Just remember that it does take effort, over the years. Budget accordingly.