Planet Interactive Fiction

I don’t think people realize how much tactical and strategic forethought goes into their daily lives. There’s a whole subconscious time-efficiency layer in our lives. In essence, real-time strategy is our lives.

— Will Wright

On the morning of October 19, 1991, two weeks after writing his last bit of code for SimAnt, Will Wright climbed out of bed and smelled smoke. Looking out the window of his home in the Oakland Hills of California he saw a dense black cloud blowing in from the east. He called emergency services, who informed him that the culprit was a grass fire that was under control.

But after his morning shower, the smoke was worse than ever; great acrid plumes of the stuff were engulfing the house and seeping past the window frames, making it hard to breathe. The emergency-services number now yielded only a busy signal.

Wright gathered up his wife Joell and their five-year-old daughter Cassidy and bundled them into the family car along with a neighbor couple. They shot down the road under a rain of ashes and cinder, choking on smoke so thick that it was all Wright could do to keep the car’s tires on the pavement. Finally, they burst out of the maelstrom into blessedly clear air. Wright continued holding the accelerator down until they were well away. He guesses that, had they been five minutes slower getting away, their names would all have been added to the list of 25 victims of the Oakland Firestorm of 1991.

A week passed before the family could return to the charred remnants of their house, still smouldering there under a glowering autumn sky. There was virtually nothing left — except for the ants, that is. (Wright was rather primed to notice them…) “The interesting part was to find that I wasn’t really attached to much,” Wright says. “I started assessing my material needs: a toothbrush, underwear, a car, a house… I was surprised how I didn’t miss stuff. The fact [that] we got out and none of our family was hurt seemed much more important.”

Wright found himself asking,

What is life made of? Rarely do you do that in your real life. When something like this happens you get a big picture. Where do I want to live? What sort of things do I need to buy? You see your life almost as a project in process. When you’re embedded in your day-to-day life, you don’t get that perspective. I started to wonder about all the things we have and how we purchased them for a reason. Why do we need X or Y or Z? Why do we think something will make [us] happier? It almost comes down to Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs.

A period of reassessment like this might end for some people in a decision to climb a mountain, walk a camino, quit a job, write a novel, join a charity, or move into a monastery. But Will Wright wasn’t that sort of man; he was someone who thought in systems and algorithms. He wondered if there was a game — no, a simulation, or maybe just a software toy — lurking in the prospect he was now facing in the real world, that of assembling the material components of day-to-day life from scratch. Back at work at Maxis, he sat down in front of his computer to find out. His first three games since co-founding the company — SimCity, SimEarth, and SimAnt — had been simulations of complex systems with thousands of incidental living actors. Could you simulate the spaces and clutter of individual lives instead?

It would take him eight and a half years to answer that question affirmatively. The belated result of his close encounter with the Oakland Firestorm would be The Sims, the best-selling line of boxed computer games in history. Some would celebrate the series for offering a whole new vision of what games could do and the subject matter they could tackle, drawing in tens of millions of new players who would never have given SimCity — much less Diablo or Starcraft or any of the other hardcore standard bearers — a second glance. Some would condemn it for being just another empty monument to conspicuous consumption and shallow egotism, of a piece with the “reality” shows that were suddenly inescapable on American television screens. In the final reckoning, of course, it was a little of both.

Stories of how The Sims came to be have a tendency to fall into some well-worn patterns. We are told how Will Wright, the brave and pioneering creator, had to fight for his dream against the unimaginative suits who surrounded him for the better part of a decade, until he finally got to enjoy sweet validation as he watched it turn into the biggest game ever. There is something to this telling of the tale, but it’s missing a lot of nuance. First and foremost, it commits the fallacy of assuming that the version of The Sims which Wright conceived in late 1991 was essentially the same as the game which was released in early 2000. In truth, it went through a protracted process of evolution, from which it emerged with a radically different focus. Along the way, several other people became almost as instrumental as Wright himself in shaping it into a game with such extraordinary mass appeal. This is not, in other words, another case of a single genius auteur imagining and implementing something unprecedented, as Wright did when he made the original SimCity. The creation of The Sims was a more organic, at times almost accidental process. For Wright specialized in systems, not in people. To make an appealing simulation of the latter, he had to draw on folks whose strengths were very different from his own.

But all of that was still in the future when Wright was contemplating the altered nature of his existence in the wake of the Oakland Firestorm. At that time, it was accurate enough to say that no one else at Maxis knew quite what to make of his new hobby horse. That he could so thoroughly flummox even this bunch, the makers and publishers of some of the most esoteric games in the world, really says something. Indeed, it may very well say that he himself wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing. Some game designers are like military strategists, speccing out every element of a campaign beforehand. Some are more like mad scientists, mixing a bit of this with a bit of that to see what turns into a useful synergy and what just blows up in their face. Wright is the poster child for the mad-scientist school.

For a long time, he called his idea Dollhouse. As the name would imply, it was all about architecture and interior design. He had become enamored with an odd and obscure book called A Pattern Language, written in 1977 by a Berkeley architecture professor named Christopher Alexander and several colleagues. It can be read as an attempt to define a Western version of the ancient Chinese concept of feng shui, explaining how our living spaces can be arranged so as to bring a sense of peace and harmony to our lives. It defines everything from the amount of green space a city should have to how many floors a building should contain to how high a windowsill should be, all based on universal and eternal “archetypes” that are “deeply rooted in the nature of things.” “You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family,” wrote Alexander. “You can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building.”

Wright wanted to use it to design a computer game, one that would bring Alexander’s theories to the masses, in the same way that his earlier games had promoted those of Jay Wright Forrester, James Lovelock, and E.O. Wilson. As in those games, the dolls in this dollhouse would be purely supporting players to the real star of the show, the physical environment itself. Their reaction to the spaces you put them in would provide a way of “scoring” how well your layout conformed to the principals of Christopher Alexander. This was their one important function.

Jeff Braun couldn’t have been thrilled at seeing his partner going down this rabbit hole, an abstruse one even by Maxis’s usual standards; SimCity this was not. But as always, he did his best to support Wright, whom he unabashedly regarded as a “genius.” He arranged for Wright to explain his concept to a focus group, just to gauge their reaction. Setting something called Dollhouse in front of a bunch of self-identified gamers circa 1992 was always destined to be a fraught endeavor, but Wright and Braun were nonetheless taken aback by the vehemence of the rejection. “This was probably the most negative focus-group experience I have ever seen,” says Wright. “It was actually quite remarkable. They universally hated it.”

Soon after, Braun wheedled his partner into agreeing to lead the development of SimCity 2000, pulling him away from his living-spaces simulation for a year. After that, the concept got muddled up with SimWorld, this attempt to make all of Maxis’s games interoperable so that they were all essentially one big game in the end. So, you would be able to pick a building in a SimCity city and zoom in to tinker with the fine details of its exterior and interior using Dollhouse. Part of the reason that Wright was so enamored with Yoot Saito’s SimTower was that it was already blurring some of the lines between SimCity and Dollhouse. (The Sony PlayStation port of SimTower even let you explore your skyscraper from a crudely implemented first-person perspective.)

That said, the people around Wright still didn’t entirely get what he was trying to do with Dollhouse. “It just felt kind of peculiar, you know?” says the Maxis researcher, writer, and producer Chris Trottier, whose first assignment as a new hire was to travel to real tropical islands and take pictures for SimIsle. (Nice work if you can get it…) “Will’s goal for it was that it was about efficiency and architectural layout and that the people were just there as a byproduct. The people were what measured your success in setting things up efficiently.”

But in trying to model the behavior of the people well enough to measure the quality of the player’s architectural and interior-design efforts, Wright would wind up inadvertently discovering a whole different, more immediately appealing game.

It began in 1995, when Jeff Braun agreed to bring on a bright young Stanford graduate named Jamie Doornbos to help program the dolls in Wright’s dollhouse. Doing that well enough to properly grade the player’s layouts proved to be far more difficult, complex, and time-consuming than Wright and Doornbos had thought it would be. Luckily, it was also more fascinating than they had ever imagined. Together they realized that the fun of the game may not be where Wright had thought it was. Wright:

We were trying to figure out how we could simulate an open-ended system where the behaviors [of the people] were expandable and they had the level of intelligence that we would require for the game, so that they could basically live out their whole home life and we could simulate it reasonably. So Jamie and I spent about a year and a half just working on the behavior model, as a little research project. At some point it just started really working out, and really looking pretty good.

It turned out that controlling the little people was actually more interesting. It was still fun designing houses for them, but controlling their lives actually turned out to be far more compelling, so the whole project took a turn toward the people. I kept the architecture tools in there, but then I just really started focusing more on the people and objects and their behaviors and relationships — all that sort of stuff.

Thus the stars of Dollhouse became the dolls, with their houses as supporting players, instead of the other way around.

As they did so, the simulation came more and more to resemble an oddity from the previous decade called Little Computer People. Designed by Rich Gold and programmed by David Crane, the mind behind the iconic Pitfall!, Little Computer People was published by Activision in 1985 in the midst of that company’s artsy-fartsy period, when the warehouse full of cash it had collected on the pre-crash Atari VCS market gave it the luxury of venturing down a number of such avant-garde, high-concept alleyways. The “game,” if that’s what you chose to call it, was a bit like the Maxis-published El-Fish aquarium simulator, but with a human in the fishbowl. A little man lives in a little house inside your computer, and you can watch as he and his dog go about their day on a realistic albeit compressed schedule, with 24 hours inside the computer passing for every six outside of it. Depending on the time of day and his personality and mood, the fellow might prefer to relax with a book in his favorite armchair, make music on his piano, exercise, chat on the phone, wrestle with his dog, watch television, listen to his record collection, or play a game of cards with you — when he isn’t sleeping, brushing his teeth, or showering, that is.  You can try to get him to do your bidding via a parser interface, but if you aren’t polite enough about it or if he’s just feeling cranky the answer is likely to be a big fat “No!”

Little Computer People.

The most unique aspect of Little Computer People was that all of the little people were, well, unique. Each floppy disk that shipped had a different personality magnetically encoded on its sectors. You might wind up with a sluggard or an athlete, a Pigpen or a neat freak, according to the luck of the draw. Rich Gold and David Crane envisioned Little Computer People becoming merely the beginning of a whole product ecosystem which would let you watch and nudge your little people in all sorts of different environments: at school, at work, during a night on the town, etc. Maybe you could even put your little person together with someone else’s to see how they got on! All of those plans were scrapped when sales were not up to snuff — but they were an uncanny reflection of the direction that Will Wright’s game would later go.

This was probably not completely coincidental. Wright has stated that he himself played Little Computer People in the mid-1980s; thus his early habit of referring to the characters in his own game as “little people.” During an online chat hosted by CNN in 2001, he said that “I’ve since gotten to know several who were involved with that project, and many of them gave valuable feedback, especially Rich Gold.” The most obvious differences between the two projects had to do with resources. Whereas Little Computer People had to run on an 8-bit Commodore 64, Dollhouse was implemented for a 32-bit Mac or Windows machine with a thousand times the storage and processing power. And whereas Little Computer People was made by two men in a handful of months, Wright had the privilege of tinkering for years, and would have a team of several dozen at his disposal before all was said and done.

For right now and quite some time to come, though, it was just Wright and Doornbos. They rechristened Dollhouse “Project X,” reflecting the reality that its goals were becoming more open-ended rather than less so, even more of a “little research project” than a coherent game. Which isn’t to say that the tech wasn’t cool and innovative. At bottom, Wright and Doornbos strove to create a simulation of the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. This was a huge leap into the wild blue yonder for a project that had begun as a simulation of architecture and interior design. “I spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the behavior of these people very robust, interesting, and plausible, no matter what kind of environment you put them in,” says Wright. Chaim Gingold described the approach in his (highly recommended) 2024 book Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine.

Wright crafted a simulation of a person’s needs. A simple prototype showed [how] a person’s hunger, bladder, and other needs evolve over time. If the person peed in their pants or fell asleep, a dialog box popped up. Doornbos incorporated this “motive engine,” a concise set of equations and coefficients, into a new Project X prototype focused on imbuing the people and things of this dollhouse world with behaviors.

“SimAntics,” as the language came to be known, went through many iterations, but from the start it had a graphical editor inspired by the diagrams Wright drew to explain how people would do things like go to the bathroom, brush their teeth, and make breakfast. These behavior scripts, which were compiled into a compact bytecode, told people and objects how to do things like select activities, walk around, animate, and, in the case of insensate objects like appliances, break. As in SimAnt, intelligence emerged from the coupling between agent and environment. Objects broadcast advertisements that claimed to service a person’s changing motives. A toilet, for instance, would advertise its ability to relieve the bladder motive. Crucially, the custom language scaffolded the design conversation between Doornbos and Wright, who could discuss its limitations. As a result, SimAntics was highly extensible; new objects could easily plug into Project X’s dollhouse world and describe both why and how a person might use them.

In a sense, then, the system worked by inverting the expected order of things, by making the people dumb and the objects smart. “This all happens behind the scenes,” Will Wright said, “but basically the fridge yells at [a person], ‘I can satisfy Hunger Five!’ and the chair says, ‘But I’m all about Comfort Four!’ and the bath says, ‘Hygiene Seven right here!'” This approach was rather brilliant in that it meant that you could add new objects without touching the core “needs” simulation, and have the inhabitants of the world respond believably. As we will see, this modularity, and the nearly infinite extendibility it brought with it, would be key to what Project X would become; stated in terms of filthy lucre, it was capable of turning one product into a potentially limitless line of same. In the meanwhile, notes Chaim, “Doornbos wasn’t sure if Project X would be fun, but he loved working for Wright.”

For a while, the two men were allowed to tinker in peace; again, Jeff Braun always prided himself on letting his resident genius do his thing without outside interference. Yet Wright and Doornbos would only be able to ignore the clouds that were gathering outside their blue-sky bubble for so long. As Maxis’s financial situation began to look worrisome, the now publicly-traded company’s board could hardly fail to note that its star designer hadn’t finished an original game since SimAnt almost five years ago, hadn’t contributed anything tangible to the bottom line since leading the SimCity 2000 effort. Nevertheless, it was Braun rather than Wright who was dismissed in August of 1996. Wright was then more or less forced by new CEO Sam Poole to take a hiatus from Project X and help out on SimCopter, the long-delayed proof of concept for SimWorld. Pressed to focus on something more realizable and practical than his people simulator even after SimCopter was finished, he spent time drawing up plans for a simulation of, of all things, the infamous German airship Hindenburg. He gave that up, he admits, only because “the Hindenburg had a swastika on the tail. And even if we took the swastika off, a lot of people have this association in their mind of the Hindenburg as a Nazi symbol.”

In June of 1997, the struggling Maxis was purchased by Electronic Arts. One might have guessed at the time that this event would represent the final kiss of death for Project X. Luc Barthelet, the manager whom the new corporate overlords sent in, was not at all a blue-sky type. On the contrary, he sounded almost like a caricature of a soulless gaming executive when he insisted that the time of Maxis as a maker of quirky little simulations of unusual things was well and truly over: from now on, he said, they would make only “top-ten” games.

And yet Barthelet surprised everyone by recognizing that Project X could be just that — recognizing it far better, in fact, than anyone had during Maxis’s years of independence, including Will Wright himself. He saw that all of the computers that were being sold in the wake of Windows 95 and the dot.com craze were being bought by new demographics with wildly divergent interests from conventional gamers. If you could give those people something fun and engaging to do on the computer when they weren’t surfing the young Web over creaky dial-up connections, you could open up and own a whole new market. So, rather than cancel Project X, he put roughly half of Maxis’s resources into it, while the other half worked on the safer and more predictable bet known as SimCity 3000. With the injection of employees and resources came a new focus on turning the research project into a product that could be sold; Will Wright says that it was “probably Luc more than anybody else [who] was responsible” for turning Project X into a proper game. It was rebranded simply The Sims, a name that had been used for the anonymous, interchangeable people in the company’s simulations since the days of the original SimCity. They would be anonymous and interchangeable no more; they would be the whole point of this latest game.

Whatever else they may have been, Will Wright and Jamie Doornbos weren’t touchy-feely guys. They had been and remained all about their algorithms, which had the potential to become the plumbing of a game, but were nothing like the sum total of one. The colleagues who joined them had the assignment of turning a research project into a playable, saleable game.  Claire Curtin and Roxana Wolosenko, two women who joined the project in co-designer roles, strove to humanize the algorithms. Ditto the aforementioned Chris Trottier, another woman, who came aboard as an associate producer. The ranks of the team came tantalizing close to gender parity, in an industry that was at least 90 percent male outside of Maxis’s offices. This surely had much to do with how appealing The Sims would become to a wide and divergent swath of folks, gamers and non-gamers alike.

As Maxis’s later promotional materials would advertise, the principal facets of the game were building, buying, and living. You made a place for your Sim to dwell, filled it with stuff, then helped her to deal with the fallout of your choices. It quickly became clear to the team that they needed to dial back some of Wright and Doornbos’s behavioral algorithms in order to give the player something to do during the living phases. In fact, in the finished game, Sims don’t do much of anything on their own volition other than eating. You have to tell them when to go to bed and when to get up, when to wash the dishes and water the plants — and yes, even when to go to the bathroom. If you fail to send them to the toilet in a timely manner, a messy and embarrassing accident will follow. Some future players would find this elevation of the mundanities of life to the heart of the gameplay loop weirdly riveting; others would find it mind-numbingly boring. But no one could deny that it was daringly different.

The Sims would be a lonely experience if it was, like Little Computer People, all about one person alone in a house. It ought to be possible to have friends and families living together, ought to be possible to have outsiders come over for a visit, for barbecues and pool parties — both kinds of pool — and even romantic trysts. At bottom, the game would remain a nesting simulator — there was no possibility for leaving the house and its environs — but at least there would be relationships inside the nest. Indeed, these would become the real heart of the game in the eyes of most of its players. This was no small achievement. Games tend to be good with structured fictional genres like mysteries, the kind that have goals which are never in doubt and are achievable by taking logical, concrete steps. Relationship drama is the opposite of that. Maxis pulled it off well enough to mimic a frothy sitcom or soap opera if not deathless literature — which was more than anyone else had managed.

The first and trickiest problem to solve in this context was the question of how the Sims should communicate with one another. Maxis wanted to create the impression of conversations without delivering literal meaning; as Will Wright noted, even if they included five CDs worth of voice-acted stock phrases, the conversations would soon start to sound repetitive and moronic, pulling the player right out of the fantasy. Maxis’s first idea was to use a language that few of their players would be able to identify, much less understand: they toyed with such tongues as Ukrainian, Estonian, and Navajo. But with them too, familiarity bred contempt, when it became clear that the Sims were repeating the same stock phrases over and over, even if the player didn’t know what they meant. Maxis finally settled on a gibberish that has become known as Simish. Manipulated to suit the mood of an encounter, a fairly small amount of formless mumbling, provided by just two talented improv actors, could be stretched a surprisingly long way.

The speech bubbles convey the broad contours of what is being discussed. Here the topic is swimming.

Maxis created a look and personality for The Sims that were familiar from other forms of media but new to games. In place of the tacky-looking digital Arnold Schwarzeneggers and Pamela Andersons who dominated hardcore gaming, they offered up relatively normal-looking people — idealized to some degree, yes, but possessed of normal proportions and normal sartorial instincts. The people and environments were given an airbrushed sheen that was, if not quite realistic, sanguinely adjacent to real life in the turn-of-the-millennium United States. The aesthetic and the vibe of the game were of a piece with those of a “hangout” television show like Friends or Dawson’s Creek. The Sims too was real life, only better, with no truly intractable tribulations to suffer through, with stakes that were big enough to engage but not big enough to make anyone uncomfortable. We might go so far as to call it the first hangout game.

The music contributed as much as the visuals to making The Sims stand out from the gaming crowd. In place of the bombastic John Williams-inspired orchestral soundtracks and jackhammer metal tunes of other games, it featured perky, pleasant, melodic tracks with a range of inspirations spanning from Antonio Vivaldi to Keith Jarrett. Created by a whole stable of professional composers and musicians, herded by Maxis’s in-house sound man Jerry Martin, at its best the music of The Sims transcends the artifact to which it has been attached to become something pure and lovely in its own right. A surprising number of players would go so far as to buy EA’s official soundtrack CD, so that they could listen to the music without playing the game; many considered it a fine accompaniment to household chores, which seemed thoroughly appropriate. As Alex Robert Ross wrote in an article for Vice, “it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that more people have heard Jerry Martin’s minimal jazz than Thom Yorke’s measured howls on ‘Everything in Its Right Place.’” (This is a reference to Radiohead’s Kid A, arguably the most critically acclaimed album to be released in the same year as The Sims.)

In the spirit of being a welcoming space — real life with the sharp edges sanded off — The Sims broke ground by not just permitting same-sex romantic relationships but thoroughly normalizing them, treating them as just another thread in the fabric of humanity. This makes quite a contrast to Maxis’s swift backpedaling the moment the kissing lads of SimCopter were discovered. Gay relationships wound up in this game more by accident than any premeditated effort to stand up for equal rights. Then, once they were there, no one had the heart to take them out. It strikes me that a lot of positive change in the world happens in exactly this way.

The story in this case involves a programmer named Patrick J. Barrett III, who was himself gay. Unlike his predecessor Jacques Servin, who had deliberately inserted kissing men into SimCopter as an act of provocation and been fired for his trouble, Barrett really did do so accidentally, according to his own telling. He joined Maxis in October of 1998, after the decision had already been quietly made not to allow homosexual relationships; this was still a dismayingly commonsense one in the late-1990s United States. But nobody ever told Barrett about it. So, when he was asked to implement some algorithms found in a planning document for handling romantic relationships, he gave them equal weight for everyone. And once they were in the game, it seemed to all of his colleagues too sad and cowardly to even contemplate going back and taking them out. Nobody made a big deal out of it. Everyone “just pretty much ignored” that the rules had been changed, says Barrett. “The topic didn’t come up again.”

Under the new rules, every Sim started out in the dead center of a spectrum. If you prodded her to direct toward the opposite gender actions that were tagged as “romantic,” she would drift toward the heterosexual end; vice versa if you pointed her toward her own gender. If you played your cards just right, you could even keep her poised right in the middle of the spectrum — effectively, bisexual, or asexual if you preferred.

The low-key way in which the game tackled the subject would wind up being more powerfully validating to some of its players than a box festooned with rainbow flags and Pride regalia would have been. Patrick Barrett:

At the time, it wasn’t considered “normal” to be gay or lesbian. Some even saw it as dangerous. But in The Sims it was normal and safe to be a gay person. It was the first time we could play a game and be free to be ourselves within. It was a magical moment when my first same-sex Sims couple kissed. I still sometimes wonder how in the world I got away with it.

In keeping with the law of the land at the time, gay Sims could do everything except marry one another and have children. The picture of happy domestic cohabitation the game presented was enough to make you wonder why not — and that, of course, was a potent statement in itself.

The Sims had its coming-out party at the E3 trade show in May of 1999. It caused a buzz there that belied its modest booth in a back corner of the show floor. That E3 took place in the heart of Hollywood, and seemed to many attendees to mark the opening of a new chapter in gaming culture’s relationship with the rest of pop culture. Rock star David Bowie was there, exuding relaxed cool as he signed autographs, gave interviews, and even put on a concert, all to mark the inclusion of his songs, voice, and visage in the upcoming Omikron: The Nomal Soul. Despite bearing no surface resemblance whatsoever to Omikron, The Sims seemed somehow to be part and parcel of the same trends that had landed Bowie at this gathering. Indeed, taken purely as games, The Sims actually stood out far more than Omikron. It had no dragons, no spaceships, not even any guns. It struck many as an argument for the vitality and relevance of the medium that was even more convincing than cameos from an aging rock star.

Chris Trottier’s memories of the show are of near-pandemonium: “There were just rows of people, and we were just trying to project our voices. We were completely hoarse. That was the turning point.” Two female Sims kissed there on the screen in front of the assembled crowd on the very first day of the show. This provoked more excitement than controversy: “You might say that they stole the show,” says Patrick Barrett. Given the demographics of the attendees, it was probably for the best that the kissers were two women rather than two men: “I guess straight guys that make sports games loved the idea of controlling two lesbians.”

After that E3 show The Sims, which had heretofore received little outside attention, became a fixture in the gaming press. Some of the hardcore set reflexively kicked against it for watering down their hobby in some amorphous way, but most looked forward to seeing how it would turn out.

Just as had happened the previous year to SimCity 3000, The Sims wasn’t quite ready to go in time for that Christmas buying season. For the second year in a row, Luc Barthelet had the unenviable task of convincing his bosses at EA to choose quality over timing. And for the second year in a row, he succeeded.

The Sims shipped in February of 2000, exactly one year after SimCity 3000. It immediately became clear that, while SimCity 3000 had been a massive success by all of the usual metrics, The Sims was going to blow all of those same metrics right out of the water. It was exactly the right game at exactly the right time, feeding a latent demand from all of those new purchasers of personal computers for something absorbing and engaging, but also lighter, more approachable, less zero-sum, and less “gamer dark” than the industry’s standard fare. In many ways, it was the fulfillment of a dream that the games industry had been flirting with since Trip Hawkins founded EA back in 1982, with only localized and intermittent signs of success. This was the moment when digital games went fully and irrefutably mainstream, the moment when mothers and sisters, shopkeepers and hairdressers joined their nerdy brothers, sons, and husbands in the hobby. Most of these folks would never self-identify as gamers, but they played. Boy, did they play.

You start out by creating your Sim, giving her an appearance, a gender, and a personality profile defined along five continuums. In keeping with a game that is proudly goalless, the emphasis is not on making the best character, as in many CRPGs; it’s on making the character that you want to play.

Next you need to build a house for your Sim to live in. You only have $20,000 to start with, so you have to economize. Note the bar graphs of her current needs. These lie at the heart of the gameplay loop. Your goal is to never let them drop any lower than they have to. Yes, this means that going to the toilet is as important as love and friendship. Perhaps this is more true to life than most of us would like to believe…

Now you need a job. You can advance along ten different career tracks in the original game, more if you’ve installed expansions. You don’t actually follow your Sim to work, but her performance on the job is dictated by how well her needs are being met at home. Send her to work tired or hungry, and she’ll under-perform and eventually get fired; send her out in tip-top condition, and a promotion could soon be coming, with the requisite higher salary attached. (This is where criticisms of the game as a consumption simulator can begin to take root…) In one of the game’s more baffling omissions, there are no weekends. Your Sim needs to go to work every single day. How’s that for a capitalist treadmill?

The Sims may have seemed like a kinder and gentler game by the standards of its time, but it’s much more unforgiving than its sequels. Your Sims can die in a housefire or even starve to death. Public assistance doesn’t exist in its dog-eat-dog economy, but one type of social worker does — the type who can carry off your Sims’ crying children if they aren’t being properly cared for. Predictably enough, some players found their fun after they got bored with being nurturing in making life hell for their Sims, from bulldozing their houses to killing their pets.

Naked Sims are discreetly blurred out, and there is no explicit sex.

Sex is certainly implied, however, through home accessories like a “vibromatic heart bed” well-suited to “play.” This is contrasted with the more conventional “mission bed”; the folks at Maxis were winking and nudging so hard they must have developed permanent twitches. Sims can have extramarital affairs, or even engage in openly polygamous relationships. In retrospect, it’s a wonder more people didn’t notice and complain about this stuff.

The commercial trajectory of The Sims was unprecedented in the history of computer games. It shifted a million units within its first few months. It duplicated the achievement of SimCity 3000 by becoming the best-selling computer game of its release year; then it duplicated that feat again in 2001, all in an intensely novelty-driven industry where most titles went in and out of print in well under a year. In 2002, the two-year-old The Sims officially snatched the title of best-selling computer game of all time away from the nine-year-old Myst. It just kept on keeping on from there. Its total sales reached 16 million copies by 2005, numbers comparable to those an upper-echelon pop star could expect to put up with a hit album, a product with a far cheaper price tag and a far lower technological barrier to entry. Only four albums released in 2000 managed to sell as many or more copies than The Sims (and no, the critics’ darling Kid A was not among them.)

But that first boxed games was only the beginning of the marketplace story. Will Wright’s decade-old idea for an interoperable universe of games finally bore proper fruit now, as Maxis turned their hands to creating expansion after expansion, to add more environments, more stuff, more relationship options… just more, more, more. Take your Sims out on dates; take them on vacation; give them pets; even teach them to cast spells. The Superstar pack let you turn them into celebrity-tabloid fodder, which felt like closing a circle; as I noted earlier, The Sims had always had some of the same appeal and even many of the same visual cues as a fishbowl reality show like The Real World. The expansions packs included cameos by hot stars of the day like Avril Lavigne, Christina Aguilera, and Drew Carey, further blurring the lines between gaming culture and generalized pop culture. There were seven of them in all released between 2000 and 2003. Will Wright has confessed to some discomfort with the sheer quantity of them, but Maxis kept the quality just high enough, and they too sold in the tens of millions. Needless to say, lots of people — most prominently among them Will Wright and Luc Barthelet — got very, very wealthy in the process.

One can go so far as to say that Maxis, alongside the makers of early MMORPGs such as EverQuest, invented the modern approach of treating games as services, to be kept alive almost indefinitely by a steady stream of fresh content and a serious focus on community. By no means has this been an unmitigated positive for gaming — DLC and loot packs have deservedly garnered a terrible reputation in some corners, and that’s without even discussing such grift-adjacent boondoggles as Star Citizen and Shroud of the Avatar — but in this early, comparatively innocent age it worked a treat. As a supplement to the expansion packs, Maxis put up a lots of fresh content on The Sims website, which also gave fans the opportunity to share their own mods, objects, screenshots, and stories. Importantly in an era when CD burners had become commonplace, you needed a valid serial number to access all of this and become a full-fledged member of a community that was, estimated Will Wright, half of the reason people played the game. As he said, “If you register the game, you get more than a pirate would get.” This too doubtless drove sales.

The knock-on effects were enormous. The Sims essentially created the casual-game aesthetic that persisted throughout the aughts and beyond on portals like Big Fish Games and in series like Diner Dash: bright, colorful, pleasant environments and people, coupled to fictional premises with personal rather than epic stakes. Like The Sims itself, these games were the polar opposite of the ones preferred by the hardcore set, with their demanding, ultra-violent quests to save one more dark-fantasy world or other. You could dismiss the casual scene as Hallmark Channel pablum if you liked, but the fact remained that many people — especially women, who came to make up well over half of the casual player base — felt they had more than enough stress in their day-to-day lives already, and didn’t feel a need to seek out more of it in their interactive entertainments. Meanwhile, for publishers like EA, whose acquisition of Maxis had paid off beyond its wildest expectations, The Sims and what it spawned became the ultimate validation of the premise with which I opened this trio of articles: that the real money in games does not come from targeting gamers. By many reckonings, casual games would be outselling and out-earning hardcore games by a considerable margin by 2010.

A game this huge was bound to attract journalists, columnists, and academics. And did it ever. The Sims was SimCity times ten in that respect. It was widely lauded for finally cracking the puzzle of how to make a game with genuinely broad appeal, long after other misbegotten attempts like the “Siliwood” movement had been cast into the dustbin of history.

Other aspects of the game were perchance less laudable. It was hard for some to ignore how it restricted the simulated inhabitants of its world to conformist, bourgeois lives, in which happiness was derived from having the right interior accessories and a mate with a suitable income. In a contemporary journal article, Russell W. Belk pointed out how conventional and even retrograde — gay marriage excepted — the assumptions and expectations built into the game really were.

Many elements in this game represent a morality that is centered in the suburban America of the 1950s. Characters must get a job, get up early to catch their carpool (no telecommuting allowed), advance through a career path, earn more money, buy more things, clean house, and practice good personal hygiene. The Sims manual recommends having one spouse in a family stay at home and keep house. If possessions are bought on credit and the credit bills go unpaid, they are repossessed. The dating model of Hot Date is also retro in this age of hanging out and hooking up. Among the ways to impress a date (with greater intimacy being the payoff) are to bring flowers, go shopping together, give gifts, and take the date to more expensive bars and restaurants. The one who asks the other out does all the paying, and those with more money have a distinct advantage. Children must get enough sleep and food so that they don’t get picked up by the welfare worker or sent to military school. Maids and gardeners are also throwbacks to an earlier era when such pseudo-slavery was more democratized.

“A look at the homes and people uploaded by players onto The Sims’s website,” notes Belk, “will show much that mimics what is and has been and little or nothing that anticipates what might be.”

The Sims trivializes or ignores most of what really matters in human existence. Friends and romantic partners are interchangeable, a matter of changing numbers on a graph which you can see right there on the screen. Philosophy and religion and spirituality are nowhere to be found. Your Sim will never have her life changed by a book, sit at the bedside of a dying loved one, have an epiphany while out on a long walk, serve a country or a cause, create a work of art (even though she can learn to paint), commit a flagrant act of kindness, attend a funeral, or become the victim of a crime and have to choose whether to forgive or hate the perpetrator. The life the game presents is a plastic pantomime of the real thing.

There are no such things as social problems in The Sims. If your Sim has a problem, it’s her — or rather your — own fault. The only way to get ahead in its picket-fence world is to play the game of life according to the rules of the day. Some folks called it thinly veiled propaganda for the American consumer economy, of a piece with the hollow words of President George W. Bush when he said that the best way to be a patriot in the wake of the September 11 attacks was to go spend money at Disney World. (Never fear, Maxis had you covered with the Vacation expansion…)

Personally, I don’t get too up in arms about this commoditization of the human experience. I’m not even inclined to get too upset about the way the game places the needs of your Sim’s bladder on a level footing with her social needs; after all, it really is pretty darn hard to focus on anything else when you desperately need a toilet. I presume that few of the people who bought or played The Sims did so expecting life-changing epiphanies. Yet I can’t quite bring myself to ignore the perhaps uniquely American emptiness that yawns at the center of it either. In the end, it’s a social-status simulator in which everything and everyone are transactional. I’m sure that this is more an artifact of its algorithmic nature than any conscious or even unconscious attempt to inculcate a set of values, but it still leaves me with an uncomfortable feeling.

Setting questions about values aside, many old-school gamers responded to The Sims by asking why they should want to take out virtual trash and water virtual plants when they do plenty of that sort of thing in real life. In this case, too, I kind of find myself agreeing with the critics. Is it worth taking time out from your real life to lead a mundane virtual one? Will Wright said to Computer Gaming World shortly after The Sims’s release that, based on Maxis’s early playtesting, six out of every ten people loved it, two were lukewarm on it, and two hated it. I lie somewhere between the second and third groups, for reasons that were pinpointed by reviewer Chris Lombardi in the same issue.

The fundamental challenge of The Sims, as in life, is to find the time to meet all of your Sim’s basic needs and still have time to boogie. Each day, you face questions like: Do I spend my two hours of free time tonight playing pool with my friends or studying for a promotion? Computer games until the wee hours or a good night’s sleep? A bath tonight or in the morning? It’s the juggling act that each of us performs every single day, each in our own way and to varying degrees of success. It’s life in all of its drab, humdrum detail, as well as in the little victories and achievements that make it all worthwhile.

What can I say? These do not strike me as Interesting Decisions in a ludic sense, any more than “life in all of its drab, humdrum detail” strikes me as an overly compelling ludic premise. For me, The Sims is a fiddly, relentless minutiae simulator. The problem is doubtless compounded by my genetic difficulty with games that don’t give me concrete goals to work toward. (This same difficulty is the reason that I struggle with the entirety of Maxis’s catalog, SimIsle excepted.) Sheepish as I am to admits this, if The Sims gave me a to-do list, maybe I would suddenly feel differently about it.

But having said all that, I’m well past the stage of life where I judge people for their entertainment preferences or try to convince them to like the things that I do. So, by all means, play The Sims if you enjoy it, subject only to the one caveat that I attach to all games: don’t do so too much, to the point of neglecting your real life that is filled with all of those other, more ineffable experiences that The Sims does not and cannot include.

Whether you happen to be a fan or not, there is no denying that The Sims changed the face of gaming forever, possibly even more so than Will Wright’s previous masterstroke SimCity. In so doing, it opened up what had become a dismayingly homogeneous industry to fresh aesthetics, themes, and approaches, paving the way for other games that I do enjoy more than this one. For this reason alone, Wright must be considered one of the most important — not to mention commercially successful — people ever to work in his field. It may be that the only person whose games have reached more and more diverse people and created more change in their image is his old friend Shigeru Miyamoto. That’s not bad for a man who never really wanted to be a game designer at all, who preferred the label of software toy-maker. Under either heading, Will Wright transformed the way that people play.

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 Games That Sell! by Mark H. Walker; Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine by Chaim Gingold; Game Design Theory & Practice (2nd ed.) by Richard Rouse III; Time, Space, and the Market: Retroscapes Rising, edited by Stephen Brown and John F. Sherry Jr.; A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, and Shlomo Angel. Computer Gaming World of May 2000; Retro Gamer 115.

Online sources include Tristan Donovan’s interview with Will Wright for the old Gamasutra site, “SIMply Divine: The Story of Maxis Software” by Geoff Keighley for GameSpot, “Will Wright Inspired to Make The Sims After Losing a Home” by Tracey Taylor for Berkeleyside, “The Kiss That Changed Video Games” by Simon Parkin for the New Yorker website, “The Untold Story of The Sims, Your First Favorite Jazz Record” by Alex Robert Ross for Vice, and an online chat with Will Wright conducted by CNN on January 20, 2000.

Where to Get Them: The Sims and all of its expansions can be purchased as a “Legacy Collection” on Steam.

It has been exactly 27 days since I began designing and building the Chord language. In that time Sharpee (now referred to as the platform) has been scrubbed of many of its early cruft because creating Chord repeatedly exposed those seams. There were embarrassing event handlers that never acted and errors swallowed in places. Luckily, nothing major and the architecture supported Chord rather easily.

But it wasn't enough to create just the language. I want to actually start writing IF games and I like using good tools like Inform 7 to do that. So the Chord Writer application was a natural evolution from the language. Note: I have moved from using Windows on a daily basis to using MacOS and the Chord Writer will be a MacOS ARM download for now. I have a handful of followers, so I'm not too worried about coverage, but if there is a squeaky request for other platforms and chipsets, I will do my best to accommodate it.

Chord Writer has very similar features to Inform 7's IDE including an Index (not as pretty or detailed), a Build log, a Play tab, a Diagnosis tab (runtime errors), and a Testing tab (branched automated play-testing with intelligent programmatic capabilities).

The Project Pane, opened by default, shows Chord-specific folders for Story, Transcript Tests, Assets (audio and images), Web Template (the build index.html used to compile the story), and Other (uncategorized files in the project folder). I do have an ADR for Web Extensions, but that's on the TODO list. Story type extensions would just be .chord Chord language files you can import into a .story. I do not have the editor arranged to specifically create/edit/manage extensions, but that's certainly somewhere in the future.

The Testing tab runs the transcript tests listed in that folder in the Project Pane. The root test has a seed to pin all randomized outcomes and other testing tools to choose variations to test all branches of a story. Transcript test files use a parent-child syntax where all children document their parent.

I still have to integrate documentation into the IDE, embed a sample story, add a publish feature, a transcript editor, and a handful of other tasks to "button down" version 1, but the editor and testing tools are 99% complete.

Note the website https://sharpee.net/ has a live Chord playground to run ad-hoc stories.

For now, I'll take requests for testers because it's not ready to be a public download quite.

Here are more screenshots of the Chord Writer...

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Navigate unknown waters, deadly politics, and ancient magic to save your clan!

Diaspora is 33% off until August 13th!

Diaspora is a one-million-word interactive novel by Vincent Cunningham and JJ Laurier. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Forced out of your ancestral home, your people must sail to the south, where only your vanished father has ever been. But even after you’ve found a place to live, your problems are far from over. A mighty empire controls the nearby coastal city, and the local raiders want it back. You’ll need to find your place in the conflict, seal an alliance, track down an ancient artifact, and fight for your right to belong. 

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, bi, or asexual.
• Lead your refugee people to a new home.
• Command your crew in deadly sea battles and land raids.
• Fight an ancient sea monster to find a lost island.
• Navigate a storm in search of ancient magic.
• Forge an alliance with a mighty empire or magical, seafaring raiders.
• Find companionship or love among your closest companions, old and new.
• Shape the values and destiny of your clan as you sail into a new age.

Will you hold fast to your clan’s traditions, or will you plunge headfirst into a new future?

Vincent and JJ 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.

A follow-up to the previous post about seeding and RNG madness. That work is done, but then I needed to figure out how an author creates tests in the IDE.

My first reach was to copy Inform 7, but that doesn't really align with how I see testing. So after several iterations, the clear path was branching transcripts. The idea is that testing starts from the beginning and at some point forks into 2 or more branches. Now in Sharpee/Chord, the author can build those branching transcripts by starting with naming its parent.

And the test runner will run every end-branch in parallel.

Still working my way to the Explorer feature, which is going to so awesome.

People are going to buy these things and then after six weeks or so they’re going to put them up on a shelf in their closet and ignore them … we saw that there was a need for something that helped people to both socialize with other people and get practical life use out of these really significant investments.

— Stacy Goff, president and co-founder of Atari Computer Enthusiasts

Before getting to our author today, I need to revisit one of the prior games from this blog, Max’s Adventure. Max’s Adventure (or just Adventure) was given by the author Max Manowski to a shop in Seattle, and from there it distributed far enough across the US Northwest to catch the attention of the Atari Computer Enthusiasts club in Oregon. The club helped distribute the game farther before it eventually got the attention of Atari and was packaged as Wizard’s Revenge as part of their APX program; it became the first text adventure that Atari published.

The same issue that talks about Max’s Adventure (April 1981) also discusses a San Francisco event where ACE members visited Atari, with pictures, so it’s possible the game was handed to Atari directly.

There was an effect beyond just getting Atari’s attention, as ACE had an unusual distribution plan, which they describe as a contest.

The offer was: send a disk to ACE (with some programs if you have some, blank if you don’t) and you’ll get a copy of Max’s Adventure. Write your own adventure based on it and send it back (prizes to be announced later, John Bell of Crystalware was interested). Even given the loose nature of the “contest” and their explicit mention “this is for fun” this does beat (in terms of being earliest) the Falk contest for Tandy CoCo. However, the contest does not get mentioned in later issues, so I think it ended up as vaporware.

At least one person picked up the challenge of modifying Max’s Adventure into a new game, even if it didn’t end up in the “contest”: George Schultz of New Jersey.

Schultz helpfully included his address in the source code as well so I was able to cross check on a few sources (1, 2, 3, 4) to get his biography. He was born in 1941 and after a stint with the Navy he went to Rutgers to get a degree, graduating in 1973. He moved to New Jersey as a journalist with the Newark Star Ledger before switching to being editor of Fuel Oil News in 1982; he stayed with oil business journalism until his death in 2002 from a heart attack.

This means he was in his 40s when he wrote Sherlock Holmes, which is the first fully Sherlock-Holmes branded text adventure for this blog. (Two Heads of the Coin from 1979 was clearly meant to be Holmes, but doesn’t mention his name, nor does it get into any lore — it’s a pure conversation with one person.)

As far as why it took this long to get a straight “you are Holmes” game, with text adventures of this era it has been rare to have major characterization at all. Usually “you” has been “you” in some sense, maybe with some extra conditions (like in Cyborg being merged with a robot) but not with a background that might justify a full 30 pages in a LARP session. Exceptions have included The Hobbit, Robin Hood Adventure, Sherwood Forest, and Aldebaran III; so while we have had developed characters, relative to the large number of adventures up to now it’s a short list.

Roughly when Schultz was working on his game there was all sorts of Holmes media being made, like this BBC adaptation of Hound of the Baskervilles. There was also a Soviet adaptation from 1981 and animated films from 1983.

The reason I know the code is derived from the ACE game is that it says so; I’ve pulled out both pairs of source code alongside and can definitely say it uses the same unusual system where you can edit the game from within the game. These lines of code are identical amongst the two, even with the same line numbering:

3220 IF INPUT$(1,3)=”NEW” THEN 3400
3225 IF INPUT$(1,4)=”GOTO” THEN 7600
3228 IF INPUT$(1,4)=”LIST” THEN 8000
3230 IF INPUT$(1,5)=”PRINT” THEN 3800
3240 IF INPUT$(1,6)=”CHANGE” THEN 3600
3250 IF INPUT$(1,6)=”EXTEND” THEN 4000

The only comparable game that’s been on this blog is ZOSC based on the GROW system, and that was just repurposing a system intended more for learning applications. I theorize that having a system that emphasizes adding text content on the fly rather than programming might appeal to someone with an English/journalism background. Unfortunately, the parser is miserable in the way you might expect from a GROW-style game, as you’ll see in a moment.

You are casually hanging about your study at Baker Street when Mrs. Hudson brings in a letter. You determine quite quickly it must be a forgery and Dr. Watson is in trouble.

At this point you can try running off to at least Scotland Yard, but let’s hang out in the study for a while.

The various investigatory tools suggest you might be able to do something to trace the note, but unfortunately, I immediately ran into a stumbling block here trying to get anything to happen. Keep in mind this is a GROW-style game where it doesn’t really keep track of “world state” in a normal way; it’s jumping between nodes and fishing for particular prompts. In this case, it wants you to EXAMINE DESK, and then immediately use something from the desk on the note; if you examine the rest of the room first, the desk ceases to exist (this is roughly the behavior of The Phantom Ship, but this game has it even worse). There’s no world model storing the fact there’s a desk and a bookcase, just some central place where EXAMINE DESK and EXAMINE BOOKCASE work, and I found myself sometimes just in a labyrinth of “YOU FIND NOTHING TO HELP YOU” responses.

You also need to jump to this being a multi-word parser here.

The note reveals a watermark which you can investigate further with the books; remember there was a book about trademarks. Well, actually, just remembering it is bad, you need to EXAMINE BOOKCASE immediately before using something on it.

You can also follow this up with EXAMINE IMPORTS to find out that inks coming in from China are imported by Dihn Imports, in Limehouse.

Finally, you can EXAMINE WEAPONS mentioned on the bookcase. Somehow that gets interpreted as opening the bookcase and finding a secret revolver, which you’ll need for the end of the game. (It’s faintly possible the game keeps so little track of state you could skip taking the revolver and you’d still be able to use it at the end, but I haven’t tested that.)

I’ll pause and say in a conceptual way this is an impressive segment; we have an item that we apply both detection tools and research to in order to learn more. The parser simply isn’t able to sustain what’s going on (again, this seems to be a combination of the node system with the author’s perspective, thinking like writing from an author’s perspective rather than modeling a world).

The game is afoot; you can nab your famous outfit on the way out, and then hail a cab. As seems to be the standard for investigation games, you need to tell the cab-driver where to go, so this is a matter of hunting down key-words. So far other than 211 BAKER STREET (no “B”) we can do SCOTLAND YARD, PICADILLY (with that exact spelling), and LIMEHOUSE. Let’s try Scotland Yard first, since the visit is short.

The “La Strade” spelling suggests to me the author was watching the stories recently on TV/film as opposed to reading them.

Regarding Pic(c)adilly, hinted at from Imperial Paper…

…it’s not clear at all this is the way to do it, but EXAMINE IMPERIAL PAPER will let you enter the closed building. There you can find some files about the Savoy Hotel. This is entirely an optional section; I actually went over to the Hotel first and didn’t find out about this area until beating the game.

Leaving the hotel and going “LEFT” you can find the hotel (no north/south/east/west).

I’d like the in-character chastising more if it matched the character of Sherlock Holmes.

Going ahead, Holmes notices a hat (Watson’s) left behind on a couch; going forward and examining the desk reveals a guest register, which the clerk refuses to let you look at.

I ended up needing the walkthrough for this one. Trying to TALK TO CLERK didn’t work. While Holmes is not described as holding money, I tried BRIBE CLERK anyway and got “HUH?” The right command is to PAYOFF CLERK, shooting the puzzle to being at least in the top 5 Hardest Adventure Game Verbs to Figure Out Ever.

This process lets you go upstairs and find the room Watson was allegedly in, unearthing a key.

Again notice the stumbling parser. I tried to EXAMINE CLOSET but the node here just assumed I was examining the bed further and found the key. I’ll take a parser issue making the game easier over one making the game harder.

You can then take the key back to Baker Street to study it and find out what’s on it… maybe. I really had immense trouble here; there must be something exceedingly specific in how the nodes are implemented.

Even with checking the walkthrough it took me two tries to get something out of the key.

Back here in a moment: time to visit Limehouse.

Files indicate a dinghy on a pier. With a little bit of parser struggle I arrived there. The pier also has Dr. Watson’s medical bag (his items are being left suspiciously out in the open); you can row the dinghy over to the main boat, and find some matches with writing in Chinese.

West End represents the last destination, but we should probably translate that matchbook text first. Back in Baker Street there’s a dictionary on the pile of research items which reveals a set of directions.

I again want to emphasize, in a conceptual way doing research on clues is extremely neat; in practice it was extremely painful to get anything to work.

Time for the West End…

…and a serious… bug?

GO REAR reaches the next part of the game, but often it doesn’t work. It doesn’t seem to be a “random” flip; when it isn’t working, you have to leave and come back and try again. I tried various phrasings of GO and ENTER and IN and OUT and so forth to see if that would make any difference. I don’t know if it does; the walkthrough doesn’t know either.

There’s a wine rack you can PUSH to find a secret entrance to some sewers.

The sewers are where you apply the directions from the matchbook.

Following them properly leads to a crack in the wall where you can INSERT KEY.

Driving off Moriarty is a simple matter of trying to SHOOT him with your revolver; however, he’s left a trap for you if you try to just go in afterwards. You’ll fall into a trap door and die.

You need to JUMP OVER TRAP DOOR to get by.

Twist ending with the fish and chips! If this was “canon” I’d be more annoyed.

The artificial set of obstacles works as a set of challenges by Moriarty; it gets taken up by at least one author later. The presence of the hat and the medical bag especially felt like a trail-of-Moriarty plot element. The moment-to-moment action held at least some interest, and the research aspect was genuinely a good idea. Unfortunately, the parser was miserable all the way through. The author tried his best to implement his ideas with the system; honestly, it’s impressive how far he got, but there still wasn’t enough world model support and parser implementation to make the game work. In a big-picture sense, this reflects the technical barriers for making adventure games at this time, and why so many toolkits like The Quill became popular.

Coming up: back to Japan, and a famous anime movie.

So you want to build a game building platform. You're cruising along and your test games have the usual randomness that adds a little spice to your games, usually combat scenarios. Then other things get a random kick. Then another. You ignore the orthogonal nature of randomness because hey, you can just create a new Random() any time and seed it with the DateTime() object.

I went so far to avoid normalizing Sharpee's RNG issues that I designed the testing capability around it.

# Enter troll room
> east
[OK: contains "Troll Room"]
[OK: contains "troll"]

# ===== Melee interceptor combat test =====
# RETRY handles player death from counter-attacks — restores and retries
# DO/UNTIL loops attack until troll death message or player death
# RNG: the troll can disarm us (unarmed attacks are blocked as suicide) or
# knock us out — recover the sword before each swing, and accept the
# disarm/knockout lines ("sword"/"hands"/"unconscious") as attack-turn output.

[RETRY: max=10]
[DO]
[WHILE: not inventory contains "elvish sword"]
> take sword
[SKIP]
[END WHILE]
> attack troll with sword
[OK: contains_any "troll" "staggering" "sword" "hands" "unconscious"]
[UNTIL "slumps to the floor dead" OR "removes his head" OR "He dies" OR "You are dead"]
[ENSURES: not entity "troll" alive]
[END RETRY]

At the time (February - ish) I thought this was super clever and expanded these looped gates to "handle" RNG (random number generator) outcomes.

Fast-forward to this past week working on the IDE for Chord and wanting deterministic testing similar to Inform 7's Skein. No bueno.

So I had Claude go through the code to assess the situation. There were RNG entry points in multiple areas including base code and extensions. Double no bueno.

I had run out of my Fable 5 usage for the week so was using Opus 5 and I gotta tell ya the difference is significant. I iterated three ADRs for a day to try to get the changes and the sequence of changes correct and Opus 5 flat out failed and it even admitted it: "I have rewritten whole sections 4x and circled back to the same questions, so I think I need help."

This is the LLM asking ME for help. But I had already anticipated the Opus 5 fiasco and as soon as I got Fable 5 usage back I asked it to look at the problem, purely from code, ignore the Opus 5 research, and ignore Chord (which I mistakenly kept as a seam in the Opus 5 research).

Fable 5 came back with just an assessment. No ADR, no plan. I shared the assessment with Opus 5 and it loved it. We abandon two of the ADRs it had designed and wrote a new ADR. Two follow-ups with Fable 5 landed a completed and well-designed ADR to re-implement randomness in Sharpee that had a testing deterministic entry point that would cross save boundaries.

The implementation is in-progress and this is a very invasive orthogonal change to Sharpee, so it's likely going to be hours of Claude Fable 5 work. Once that's completed and thoroughly tested, the IDE will have its version of a Skein and blessed output with some extra capabilities like "search" where you can say, "Play until Troll dies" or "Play until Thief dies" and then run tests. Anything associated with alternate paths will be testable and the platform will know ahead of time where all of those paths sit because when it inflates the World Model, it builds a Map() of everything. And yes, it handles combinatorial explosion by gating each vortex of multiple outcomes. (The Troll is just dead. We never need to test Troll-Alive -> xxx or Troll-injured -> yyy).

So a little advice from your Uncle Dave. Make randomness a centralized service with a seeded escape hatch for deterministic testing. You'll thank me.

August brings us Suspended, Michael Berlyn's cryogenic nightmare.

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license.

Suspended surely had the most inspired package concept of Infocom's early years. The Starcross flying saucer was more eye-catching; the Witness newspaper was more detailed. But Suspended's serene cryo-death-mask was a genuine shock when you brought it home and eagerly tore off the shrink-wrap.

The gameplay was a shock as well. No bold explorer or diligent detective this time! You play a silent corpsicle controlling six quirky repair robots in a devastated underground complex. No single robot is capable of much. You have to coordinate their movements to get a handle on the problems facing you.

Or, I should say, facing the entire planet. The Complex is the nerve center for Contra's weather control, transit system, and other vital functions. Your "score" measures thousands of deaths on the surface as conditions deteriorate. Better get those repairs queued up, or an irate delegation will swap you out for a clone.

The game is a mix of Infocom's usual story-world with a simulationist time-management challenge. First, figure out how to complete the repairs. Then figure out how to do that and monitor and minimize the surface death total. Once you've got that nailed down, there's an ADVANCED mode which worsens the initial damage to the Complex.

(Then there's IMPOSSIBLE mode, which is a joke. My game The Dreamhold has an IMPOSSIBLE mode which was directly inspired by Suspended.)

The package included a map and tokens to help you track your bots' locations. I loved fantasy maps as a kid; I can still reach that sense of awe when I look at the bold, colorful layout. Naturally, I've integrated the original map and robot markers into Visible Suspended. No boxes and lines this month...

The in-game map is arranged slightly differently but it's the same art. Bonus feature: if a robot is moving, you can see its current destination (grey marker) as well as its current location (black marker).

If you want to see photographs of the original map and packaging, visit the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History or my high-resolution scans at the Internet Archive.

More readings on Suspended:

• The Digital Antiquarian
• Drew Cook
• Jason Dyer
• Aaron Reed

Other goodies:

I've been on a scanning binge. New high-res scans now available at the Internet Archive:

• Planetfall (folio edition)
• Infidel (folio edition)
• Sorcerer (folio edition) (includes Infotator!)

Planetfall is my original copy that I played when I was a kid. The Infidel and Sorcerer feelies were scrounged off Ebay, but they're in good condition.

However, I kept my original copy of the Sorcerer manual. Which means I now have two copies. Guess what? They're slightly different. Yes, they're both folio-edition, but at some point Infocom changed the color treatment of the pages.

As for the Infotator, this may be the first 600dpi scan that shows all twelve monsters. Although someone uploaded a nice interactive version a few years ago.

Upcoming work:

The Visible Witness will be the next public release on September 1st. Enjoy your visit to 1938.

Patreon supporters got access to The Visible Witness a month ago, and Visible Planetfall today. Please remember that the Visible Zorker is a Patreon-supported project! Your donation is immensely appreciated. (And credited in each game's "About" page, of course.)

Dr. Bongo’s plan is to destroy the World, with only hours before his devastating missiles are launched you locate his position. Your mission is to stop him and be the World’s No. 1 hero.

— From Sinclair User, March 1983

Custom Software is another company from the UK that picked such a generic name it’s like they wanted to get lost in history (although to be fair, “Dr. Bongo’s Safari Park” is a pretty distinctive name and doesn’t show up much in periodical searches either). The main gimmick behind the company was not the two adventure games they sold but that they wrote programs “to your specific requirements i.e. EDUCATION, BUSINESS, HOME RECORDS, ETC. Please write stating your exact needs for a FREE estimate. Our prices will astound you.”

Sinclair User, March 1983 issue.

Salvage and Dr. Bongo are advertised for Spectrum, ZX81, VIC-20, and Commodore 64. We don’t have any copies of Salvage; Dr. Bongo has been rescued in both Spectrum and ZX81 form.

Via Sinclair User, June 1983 issue. I like how the review talks about the slowness of the program being a feature since it gives “a certain amount of time for thought.”

One point to highlight here is that there was a 16k model of the Spectrum, and a 48k model; this was written for the 16k model, derived certainly from the ZX81 game.

Much of the ZX81’s firmware was taken over to the Spectrum unmodified. We had to get the machine out quickly so the ZX81 code was altered as little as possible. That is why the Spectrum is comparatively slow—the ZX81 was always designed to save bytes, not time.

— Quoting Richard Vickers who did the ZX81 firmware based on John Grant’s work for the ZX80; Vickers went on to do the Spectrum firmware as well

This means we’re still talking about very tight space for BASIC code; no chance for an Urban Upstart.

Via eBay.

You might think I might normally gravitate to the Spectrum version of the program, but allow me to compare the opening screenshots (no title screen!):

That color is tough to read! The ZX81 shows things much cleaner and it doesn’t have the screen-glitch pain some of the ZX80/ZX81 games suffered. Unfortunately, I hit a crash bug early enough (OPEN DOOR at a cafeteria) that my confidence level dropped.

I played enough to also notice that based on the map (which has a lot of empty rooms) it was sometimes easy to miss objects with them buried with the other text in monochrome.

On with the game! As the ad blurb indicated, we’re looking for Dr. Bongo’s missiles where he threatens to DESTROY THE WORLD. They are hidden somewhere in his safari park. Everything is outdoors with no directions other than N/S/E/W, and the map is entirely “regular”; no cases where an exit turns or only goes one way.

The map is more or less completely open, arranged in a big loop. There’s lots of red herrings but I’m leaving them off the map; for example, the room just to the east of the start has a radio that you can’t even examine.

Other red herrings include a table/stool pair, an empty wrapper, a wallet where a moth flies out, and a map where there are glasses nearby that let you read it but the map is useless.

The glasses help to read something else, though.

Animals you can find are an elephant, bear, gorilla, tiger, and kangaroo. The kangaroo is a red herring; the tiger is the only one of the animals that actively blocks an exit (and will kill you if you try to go by).

One of the items just lying about the map is honey. It is near some bees and a hive but not in the same room; if you get the honey, the bees will bear a lifelong grudge and no longer let you pass by.

Since the map is generally a loop it still makes everything accessible, just it means that if you grab the honey early (as I did) you’re going to be plodding back and forth quite a bit, especially as there’s also an inventory limit of four. With the honey in hand you can reach a bear den in the northwest and resort to a little bribery.

Besides fixing the boat, finding the right bribe for each animal is the general goal of the game.

This leaves behind a hat (a chef hat, if you examine it) which you can wear to go into a nearby cafeteria.

CAFETERIA

YOU SEE
banana
bun
doorway

GO DOORWAY

KITCHEN

YOU SEE
dustbin
chef
steak

These two rooms were the most problematic in the game. For the outside, I could not GET BUN or GET BANANA for unclear reasons (the game just says you can’t) and it was only much later I found I could get some COINS from out in a forest area north of the beans and BUY BANANA / BUY BUN. This is despite no active shopkeeper or vending machine being mentioned.

Perhaps even worse, while the steak was easy to grab, the dustbin was resistant to all my efforts to do anything with it; given the number of red herrings the game has, I concluded it was a red herring. It is not. You’re supposed to LIFT DUSTBIN and find some keys. (Which are needed for the very end! I ended up needing the walkthrough of Exemptus for this one, and I have zero regrets spoiling the puzzle.)

The banana, bun, and steak make together bribes for other animals. The banana goes to the gorilla who leaves behind some gloves; the steak goes to the tiger (who will let you pass by safely); the bun goes to the elephant. Not as obvious as the other two but at least the game was establishing a pattern. The elephant moves and reveals a REPAIR MANUAL.

The manual (readable with the glasses) reveals you need wood, nails, and a hammer to fix a boat. Fortunately all these are either in the open or easy to find (the game gives you an axe rather than wood, but there’s trees in the next room over). The main annoyance is the trekking back and forth to gather everything and bring it over to the boat. (Also to find the command REPAIR BOAT, but that’s less teeth-grinding than LIFT DUSTBIN.)

With the tiger cleared out of the way and the boat in hand, you can make it over to a riverbed past the tiger where you can DROP BOAT and ENTER BOAT. There’s no real reason I had to try the boat there other than there’s otherwise no reason to get rid of the tiger.

Using the boat, you come across a gate (the gloves from the gorilla work) and then a CONTROL ROOM.

You have to EXAMINE the notice, not READ it.

Even having extracted the key from the dustbin (finally, I had ditched the chef hat too and had to get it back) I found getting the key to do anything a parser struggle, and I was losing my patience so I checked the walkthrough again. This was a wise choice because you’re supposed to ENTER KEY (!?!?!???).

No PUT or INSERT. At least TURN was reasonable to come across once I had ENTER.

What was most interesting or perhaps “interesting” about the game is, looking back, every single puzzle was theoretically simple (give food to a corresponding animal, use axe on tree to get wood, wear a chef hat to get in a kitchen) but the slightly askew parser made things a bear to get through. There isn’t any reason why the dustbin should have resisted giving out its secrets, but if you miss checking it, you can lose 20+ minutes of time. Neither the minimalism nor the plot bothered me, and even the red herrings were essentially fine (except for the radio and the dustbin, they were obvious) but the whole experience I found more irritating than it seems like it should looking back. I still would like to try Salvage sometime (the other Custom Software game) but it isn’t rushing to the top of my list.

Coming up: one more pure-random pick, and then a Japanese game based on an anime film.

Hello, friends.

We are just about a month away from this year’s IFComp entries being released. We’re getting excited, and we hope you are as well!

While we eagerly await all the new stories, we’d like to ask for your help with the Colossal Fund. If you already know about the fund and are able to contribute, please head on over to ifcomp.org and donate.

Zeffy

Heads up that we’re using Zeffy for donations this year. Zeffy works for us as a nonprofit by not charging us any processing fees. That means more funds for authors and the other great work that IFTF does. Zeffy will ask you to make an (optional) additional payment to cover their costs. It’s completely optional, and you can easily reset that amount to whatever you’d like, including $0.

About the Colossal Fund

The Colossal Fund raises money for the cash prizes that are awarded to the top two-thirds of IFComp entries. We use 80% of the funds for that, and the remaining funds are used to provide support for the programs and projects of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, including the Interactive Fiction Competition, the IF Archive, the IFDB, the forums at intfiction.org, and other projects.

This year, we are shooting for $8K.

We’re now accepting donations for 2026!
Head on over and donate at IFComp.org. See your name listed on our donor page (or listed as “anonymous” if you prefer)!

Our fundraising deadline is October 15th, the last day of competition voting. 80% of the proceeds (~$6.4K if we hit our goal) will be distributed among the top two-thirds of IFComp finishers. 

What does this mean for authors?
Because we’re dividing the money among the top two-thirds of entries, the exact numbers depend on how many entries there are. If we have 75 entries, then we will divide the money among the top 50. If we hit our goal, that would mean that the winner of the competition will be offered a prize of $357, second place will be offered $343, third prize $329… and so on and so forth until 50th place, which will be offered $10. Our goal is to distribute prizes across a broad range of IF styles and ideas. Any entry which does even moderately well is offered a decent prize. (If you wanna get nerdy, there’s information about the formula, along with a link to a Python script, here.)

How do I donate?
Please go to https://ifcomp.org, enter an amount that works for you, and hit Continue. You’ll be asked a few optional questions about your interest in interactive fiction, make your donation, and then be sent a receipt.

Is my donation tax-deductible?
Yes, to the extent allowed by law. (Consult a tax professional.)

Does the Colossal Fund replace the usual IFComp prize list?
Nope! These cash prizes will be in addition to the usual IFComp prize list. We do need more of those non-cash prizes as well! Please visit our prize page to see what objects and services others have donated, get ideas from donations given in previous years, and see how you can contribute.

How will the cash prizes be distributed?
Via PayPal or Venmo. (The IFComp entry form has a field for your PayPal address.) If you can’t accept PayPal or Venmo, we can mail a US check to a US address. If that doesn’t work for you, or if you wish to decline the cash prize, we will roll the money into next year’s prize fund, which means it will continue to support authors and IFTF programs.

On Wednesday, July 29, 2026, 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.

Christminster (1995-1996) by Gareth Rees

In this alchemical mystery set on a Sunday in the university town of Christminster, you play as Christabel, attempting to visit your brother, Doctor Malcolm Spencer, who teaches chemistry at Biblioll College. His telegram said he made an amazing discovery, but he’s nowhere to be found and there’s evidence of foul play. What could have happened to him?

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

The Most Valuable Card in the World (2026) by DC and Mathbrush

In this game, you play as Talia Robin, an avid collector of Vigenere cards like almost everyone else you know. You soon learn that that the very rare and very valuable Toyotomi Typo was stolen from Jay Donovan, owner of Donovan’s Cards. Trade up your cards and find out who did it! It’s a quest!

This game was an entry in ParserComp 2026, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

The Woodcutter’s Quest (2026) by Shaun McClure and Garry Francis

In this fantasy game, you play as a woodcutter named John. While you were in the forest with your axe, an evil wizard destroyed half your village and kidnapped everyone. You vow to destroy the wizard in his castle and rescue the villagers.

This game was an entry in ParserComp 2026, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Like a Sky Full of Locusts (2024) by Ryan Veeder (writing as “Rattlesnake Yates, as presented by Harlan Ellison”)

In the framing story, you are Harlan Ellison’s guest at the 1969 Convocation at Castle Balderstone, where authors of terror tell their tales of horror. Rattlesnake Yates, who specializes in western horror, reads “Like a Sky Full of Locusts”, wherein you play as Noah White, an army man who returns to a Fort Hugh occupied by demons and destruction.

This game was an entry in the Le Grand Guignol (English) division of Ectocomp 2024, where it took 12th place. It is also part of the author’s Castle Balderstone series.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

19 Once (2024) by Yvonne Jeagon and Larissa Jemmy

In this short, minimalist, conversation game, you play as Paige, a 19-year-old university student, home for the summer. Back when you were 16, you and your friends saw all the Checkered movies. But now that everyone’s gone their separate ways, getting together once more for the newest Checkered film will take some persuasion.

This game was an entry in ParserComp 2024’s Classic Class where it took 6th place. It is also the first game in the authors’ Checkered Series.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

A Normal Morning (2025) by Damon L. Wakes

In this short horror story, you play as someone having a normal morning in your barely-furnished apartment. On the sofa is the corpse, a concrete block lashed clumsily to its ankles with baling twine. Three endings.

This story was an entry in the La Petite Mort (English) division of Ectocomp 2025, where it took 8th place. It was also an entrant in the Short Games Showcase 2025.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Prodly the Puffin (2000) by Craig Timpany and Jim Crawford (writing as “Wilber Nooseworthy and Incontinent Pineapple Van Buren”)

In this wacky, surreal, and comedic adventure, you say, “I AM PRODLY THE PUFFIN OF ANTARCTICA!! THE MISSION IS A SET OF INTRICATELY CONTRIVED MISBEHAVIOURS!! PHASE ICHI: RETRIEVE THE PITCHFORK. PHASE NI: CARNAGE!!”

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2000 where it took 35th place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

SchoolAdventure (1985, 2026) by Jon Wätte and Mikael Gajecki

In this small, amateur, sparsely-implemented old-school game, you play as someone who needs to escape from a school before the mad chemistry teacher blows the place up. You have 40 minutes. Good luck!

This work was originally called SkolAdventure written in BASIC in Swedish and published in 1985. This English version was ported to Inform by Fredrik Ramsberg in 2026. See credits for more details.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

We’re excited to announce that the free demo for our upcoming game Hunter: The Reckoning — Day for Night is available now on Steam!

These monsters aren’t just in the movies! Will you hunt the vampires, werewolves and others stalking Hollywood, or will you become a monster instead?

Hunter: The Reckoning — Day for Night is an interactive novel by Josh Labelle set in the World of Darkness. It’s entirely text-based, 1,000,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Hunter: The Reckoning — Day for Night will be available September 17th. If you enjoy playing the demo, we encourage you wishlist it today on Steam and tell your friends about it. (The more wishlists we get before release day, the more Steam will feature us.)

Hollywood is full of monsters. From the greedy studio heads to the desperate hopefuls out for their big break, nobody gets out without sin. Once, you were one of those hopefuls, barely scraping by trying to make your dreams come true—scrambling to land auditions or hustling to get your screenplay read.

Then a chance encounter with the supernatural showed you that Hollywood is ruled by another kind of monster. You’ve dedicated yourself to hunting down the beasts who stalk the back alleys of Los Angeles, and doing everything in your power to stop the ones who rule the boardrooms.

It’s been a blockbuster summer for the supernatural, full of inexplicable phenomena and monstrous incidents. There are fires in the hills, ghosts in the theaters, and a beast threatening pets in Beverly Hills that is definitely not a coyote. Could it have something to do with EVRLST, the hottest new self-help and wellness cult run by a washed up ‘80s superstar? Is it true what they say about him never being seen in the daylight and not having aged a day in the last three decades? And what about the woman they call the Baron of Hollywood? What kind of power does she have—and can it possibly compare to the studio execs?

Fortunately, you’re not alone. Others have seen the truth in the shadows, including a retired special-effects wizard, a mortician to the stars, a theater manager, and more. You’ll need all the allies you can get as you drive through the seedy supernatural underbelly of Tinseltown, where chaos reigns, and blood and money flow. There’s no telling who will get top billing, and who will end up slashed on the cutting room floor.

Or will you shirk your hunting duties to pursue your Hollywood dream? Make connections, land jobs on movies, or even make a deal with the devil to get cast in a major blockbuster. Maybe the best way to defeat the bloodsucking monsters is to join them. Or is that Hollywood’s biggest lie, the lie you tell yourself?

• Play as male, female, nonbinary; gay, straight, bi, asexual, or poly.
• Choose your weapon to blast through supernatural threats, and upgrade it for even greater firepower; and visit your local garage to find your perfect getaway vehicle.
• Stop a hot new celebrity from literally sucking the life out of their fans—or succumb to their charms and plunge into a romance.
• Solve a decades-old murder and set an unquiet soul to rest—or drive out the ghost with arcane force!
• Uncover the secrets behind a cult that preys on young vulnerable actors, and stop the monster behind it!

Redeem lost souls in the city of angels—or lose your own soul trying.

Try it now!

The rest of my 2026 Mysterium report. (See part 1 for the Cyan news.)

All the videos are currently available on Mysterium's Twitch channel. They will be archived on their Youtube channel pretty soon.

Documentary Update

Philip Shane gave his usual progress report on the Myst documentary. It moves forward.

We have been in serious conversations with some pretty influential people in the entertainment world. And I am not allowed to say more than that.

"Serious conversations" are cheap coin in the business, but we'll take it.

Philip introduced collaborators Randy Woods (writer), David Van Taylor (consulting producer), Joshua Reinstein (editing, history cataloging), Ben Reichman (editing), John Clark, Hollister Starrett (music), Elana Bogdan (web design), and Khatie Postma (community manager).

He showed several completed and edited scenes:

• "The House that Myst Built": Footage of the original construction of the Cyan office.
• "Riven: Behind the Scenes": Assembled from outtakes from behind-the-scenes "Making of Riven" footage.
• "The Origin of Myst": Puzzle design discussions between Rand and Robyn, back at the beginning.
• "Launching Obduction": In-office footage from 2016 leading up to Obduction's release.

John Clark talked about tagging and cataloging all the VHS footage that was extracted by the VGHF. Apparently there was a plan for a Coke-Myst-Online co-branded ad? It was never released, but there's footage.

Joshua Reinstein talked about digging through acres of ads and articles that were released.

Myst Online news

Jalargura

A new fan Age was released a couple of weeks ago: Jalargura, created by Semjay. It was originally created for an Age-writing jam in early 2025 and then polished for public release. It's an observation-pod Age in a ruined desert city. No puzzles, no interactivity, but you can get out of the pod and poke around the city square. I thought the audio cues were particularly well done.

Descent

Robert Murry introduced a presentation on the Restoration of the Great Shaft. That is: progress on the "Descent" areas that lead from the desert caldera down to the D'ni city. Myst 5 had a version of this sequence, but the Uru fan community is in the process of completely revamping it for Myst Online. A long-running process, to be sure, but it continues.

(Previous Mysterium reports on Descent progress: 2021, 2023, 2024.)

Doobes, the original fan developer of Descent, is no longer involved in the Myst community; see 2025. The project is now run by Harley, Ametist, and Tweek, with many other contributors chipping in.

Harley gave a remote demo of an up-to-the-minute dev build. They explained that the Descent has been through a lot of iterations, from Cyan's original DIRT prototype (2000) to the Myst 5 version (2005) to the tiny glimpses visible in Myst Online. The sequence is also described in the novels. Those books are somewhat out of continuity these days, but the current version of Descent is closer to them than it is to Myst 5.

(Note: this area is not yet available in Myst Online. Harley was playing on a test shard.)

You arrive in the familiar Caldera area, with brand-new music by Semjay and Maurus. The area looks almost the same as in Myst 5; the new feature is a rough wooden elevator platform. It looks like it's intended to take you up (not down!) to the lip of the volcano, but the cables are broken.

As in Myst 5, a crack in the ground and a rope ladder allows you to climb down into a natural tunnel. (Or you can just jump down, since the Uru engine doesn't have falling damage as such.) The descending passages have been greatly extended since the Myst 5 version. This is both to match the books better, and to ensure that the top of the Shaft doesn't technically protrude above ground level -- a mapping flaw of earlier versions.

The tunnels run along an underground stream down to a cave, which is Ti'ana's cave from the books. The cave areas are fully modelled, but not fully textured, and the lighting work is still in progress.

You then break out into the D'ni passages and chambers that lead to the top of the Great Shaft. The spiral staircase running down the Shaft is now fully connected, and you could run all the way down on foot. That takes about two hours, real-time. Or you could take the elevator, which is rigged with excellent music and camera animations as you zoom down and down and down.

In the lower regions, you will find the Tomahn (rest chamber) which is already visitable in MOUL, the one with Watson's journal. This has been moved around the shaft; but it will be replaced with a second Tomahn, for an interesting reason. MOUL supports player-made marker-hunting games, and people have made many marker sets which use the original Tomahn coordinates! If that volume was replaced with solid stone, those markers would be unreachable. So it will remain open; but that area is still under construction.

Then of course there's the big elevator puzzle at the bottom of the Shaft. This is fully functional. The areas beyond are still preliminary, but Harley showed a teaser of a "bug cave". (Semjay is reworking this from the original DIRT demo. I could make out distant fireflies.)

When will this be available? No planned date. They talked about several "phases": phase 1 and 2 are the tunnels and the shaft, phase 3 is the "bug cave", then perhaps more. This collides somewhat confusingly with the older DRC terminology (see the Archivists page), where Ages go through five phases of modelling, testing, and release. So I'm not sure what the exact plan is. But clearly things are moving forward.

The intent is to release Descent as a public shared area on MOUL. As a shared area, presumably everything would be unlocked from the start.

In the future, you might also be able to reach Descent at the end of Uru's "Journey" storyline. You'd complete the Journey, reach the Rainy Cleft, and then climb up the volcano to the crater. You'd find an elevator platform; but when you step on it, it breaks. You black out for a moment (covering the level load!) and then wake up in the caldera. Thus the broken elevator mentioned above. You could then explore a private instance of Descent and solve the puzzles yourself.

However, this is very hypothetical and wouldn't be tackled until after the public release. Whenever that is.

Next year

Spokane in 2027! It's an anniversary year. Riven will be thirty years old; Cyan as a company will be forty years old. It's had a few different names, but the original Rand-and-Robyn basement team-up began in 1987.

So they're bringing the con back home. Furthermore:

Hannah: We were recently approached by a local cultural institution about a possible exhibition...

Spokane's Museum of Art and Culture? That's just a guess. I visited there in 2019; good museum. Regardless of which institution they're talking about, the idea is to have the exhibition live for Mysterium time.

I will certainly be there -- despite all uncertainty. Not like 2023, when I slept through my flight-change announcement and showed up at the airport three hours late! Whoops.

See you there.

As a child I was obsessed with making stuff, it started with cardboard boxes and moved on to wood by the age of 5. By 10 I was constantly visiting rubbish dumps to find broken electrical stuff I could use to build what ever my imagination could imagine. Space ships, cars, satellite dishes to search for aliens – Of course all of this failed.

— Martin Webb, writing in a 2020 forum post

Tenterden, in Kent.

For all the games we’ve seen so far by teenagers, even when commercialization has happened, parents have either been standing by the sidelines or supportive. Software Innovations, founded by four 16-year olds, included “$100 investment donations from parents”. Greg Hassett, who wrote his work between the ages of 12 and 14, had his initial publisher contact (Mad Hatter Software) through the Boston Computer Society (founder, 13-year-old Johnathan Rotenberg). Alex Kreis’s parents sold their family upright piano to get him a computer and his initial publishing was through direct personal contact with the editor of CLOAD. We have a picture of Tim Gilberts (of later Quill fame) selling software with his parents and by his account it was a happy time.

This is in contrast to, say, child movie stars; Shirley Temple famously earned over $3 million during her film career but only had $44,000 in her trust fund, and horror stories about mental pressures abound. I would theorize that computers (and the idea of making a career selling software) were so new that parents didn’t understand enough to try intervening; the parents that did understand tended to be of the “engineering” slant so they were more interested in the technology than exploiting it for money.

Martin Webb is an exception to this; he was the programmer/artist behind Intrigue Software starting in 1983 (at age 13), and his father Dennis was the company manager. They started with producing games for the TI-99 computer.

It was a good money spinner. I had become pretty proficient at rolling out TI-99 games and that was good for business and keeping dad happy. When I made a game the orders followed.

When the TI-99 started to slack:

Dad kept dragging me to the bank telling the bank manager I was a whiz-kid, and the bank manager increased the overdraft. It was that easy. Dad would just tell them I was making a new game, roll off some sales figures and the money was given.

Source.

This seems to be a case where the parent was driving the production, rather than the teenager. Speaking of 1987 (the same year the teenaged prodigy produced the US Gold port of Outrun for C64, cover above):

Up until now dad came up with the game ideas. I would sit in my bedroom while my dad was in the spare room running the business, and of course trying to keep a 17-year-old on track to get the games finished. I’m a total perfectionist so I can’t imagine how hard that must have been. That said, teenagers and parents are not a good brew and we had a fair few problems, usually resulting in me running off into the Kent countryside and my dad driving around looking for me. I’m smiling now but back then it was really bad. The arguments started off verbally and soon turned to marginal fights and later got worse.

The family finances behind the scenes were be part of the issue; in other accounts of teenagers publishing the families seem to be relatively well-off (or even outright rich in the case of The Desecration) whereas Martin talks about money as an active motivator:

For some reason seeing the coloured tape cover of SANTA and the GOBLINS brings back the most Nostalgia – I think that time was very difficult at home when I made this game and as a child (14 or 15?) I guess i had dreams of making $$$ and solving family money issues.

The text adventures from Intrigue were

▸ Alpine Quest (1983?)

▸ Adventuremania (today’s game, 1983)

▸ Santa and the Goblins (also 1983)

▸ Mania (1984, and sequel to Adventuremania)

Alpine Quest is mentioned here by “Firefly” but not in a 1985 catalog so I’m unclear what’s going on:

The parser was a strange one; you couldn’t just type EAT FOOD … it wasn’t even a two-word parser, you had to type EATFOO so three letters of first word, no spaces, and three letters of last word …. I now realize why i couldn’t get off the first part of Alpine Quest because that would have been the same.

Maybe it was non-graphical, and consequently the Webbs wanted to prune it from the catalog? A different forum thread mentions going to someone’s basement to buy the game so maybe it had esoteric distribution. It isn’t mentioned on any of the usual archive sites, including the TI-99 Italian User Club which has a thorough collection of materials on Adventuremania.

As the quote from the forum implies, this has a deeply odd parser. You’re essentially typing clumps of six letters, like TAKREV for TAKE REVOLVER. What I believe is the first printing (see above) doesn’t give much help in understanding this; fortunately, the game went through multiple printings, so we have more details. Specifically, we get a full verb and noun list:

verbs: tak(e), use, loo(k), res(t), ope(n), eat, bri(be), say

nouns: bin(oculars), bla(ck key), mem(bership card), pet(rol), mat(ches), lad(der), com(puter), rev(olver), bul(lets), mon(ey), foo(d), tap (water), tic(artridge)

“Say” gets its own special syntax examples; the game gives passwords and this is the specific case where you type more than six letters:

saynelson
saymaster key
sayqueens key

The initial goal is to FIND THE HIDDEN COMPUTER TO DISCOVER YOUR ULTIMATE QUEST although I’ll spoil right now the actual final goal is to steal the Crown Jewels of London.

From the TI-99 Italian User Club.

The game has a bit more of a “strategic” layer than is usual, tracking “energy”, “money”, and “bullets”, and having “food” distributed across the map you can eat (and can’t take, I mean, “tak”). You start at Trafalgar Square, with a TI-99 graphical rendering of Nelson’s Column.

You would think using the binoculars here (“takbin”, “usebin”) would show something useful due to the Column, but the game just says “everything looks bigger” which is the default message for using the binoculars anywhere. The instructions include a hint that the binoculars will show one of the passwords somewhere but I never did see it.

The corner markings are all rooms that have food in them; remember you can’t take the food. Your energy bar goes down each step you take, and the main obstacle to the game (other than getting thrown in the dungeon, which I’ll talk about in a moment) is just running out of energy. It feels a little bit like strategic Pac-Man, and when I eventually worked out my route I was using I had particular foods to eat in mind in order to keep energy reasonably high.

Often a room will have a “guard” or “security man”; there seems to be no difference between the two. For a while I thought the “revolver” plus “bullets” might do something but as far as I can tell the revolver is yet another gun-as-red-herring. There’s no command for shooting it and “use” on it isn’t understood.

You can just try to walk on by when you see a guard; a fair amount of the time (maybe 80%) they’ll do nothing. The other 20% of the time they’ll toss you in the dungeon.

You keep all bullets etc. when this happens; thankfully the game doesn’t scatter your objects across the map.

After some fiddling I chanced upon OPEn TAP as starting to fill the room with water; it then asks what you want to do next, and if you type the wrong thing you drown. You’re just supposed to type “n” as in “go north”, but the game doesn’t make it clear that north represents a way out!

This means, theoretically, you can ignore all the guards, but I did still find it annoying to leave them un-dealt with; fortunately there’s another option: bribery. Two spots on the map have money you can pick up, and if you “brigua” or “briman”, you are prompted to ask for how much you want to bribe for.

Checking source code (before winning, although only this element in particular), I found that the chance of success is based on the fraction of your wallet you’ve given out. So if you have only 1 pound, bribing 1 pound has a 100% chance of success. If you have 100 pounds, bribing for 80 will have an 80% chance of success. There likely is some interesting mathematical strategy to optimize this, but I found just going for 90%+ each time (and grabbing the money in the second spot it shows up in) was enough to get through the game.

The TI cartridge goes in a computer which tells you your mission, but I never saw the computer. (Still won the game, though.)

To summarize, the strategy elements are:

a.) an energy bar that goes down, and you have to eat food to replenish it; you cannot pick up the food, you can only eat the food as it lies in particular location, like you were Pac-Man eating power pellets

b.) guards that are randomly in particular spots, and will sometimes toss you in the dungeon when you leave

c.) the guards can be bribed; the revolver makes it look like they can be shot as well, but that seems to be a red herring

Ignoring various items that seem to be red herrings (like the petrol, which only serves to explode if you light some matches in an adjacent room), the goal is to first nab a black key out in the fields, then take it back to the “treasure” and unlock it.

The membership card is technically not a red herring, but it just lets you enter a casino if you “usemem” at Mayfair. The casino game has you pick a random number from 1 to 6 and if you get it right you get your stake back. It’s not worth it.

You can ignore the membership card and the ladder in the treasury (no idea what the ladder does); what you need are the silver key and the yale key. The yale key can be used to get back outside (incidentally, the guards don’t toss you in the dungeon if you exit a room with a key), so you don’t have to bother with a bribe in such cases.

You can then make a beeline for a bridge to the east.

This is the Tower of London. A reception room is at the center.

There may or may not be a guard. The food here was one of the ones I would always eat.

To the north there’s a “dark room” where if you use matches (without holding the petrol) you see a message about the password MASTER KEY, which I never used anywhere. There’s also an object which is just the digit 7.

I don’t know what this is all about. I assume a typo in the BASIC?

To the south there’s a locked door where you need to use the silver key (which is why we needed the treasury run), then some guard rooms followed by another locked door. None of the keys work.

I went to the three words in the instructions, even though I only saw MASTER KEY. QUEENS KEY suddenly warped me to the jewels:

Take the crown jewels, and you get a “you win” screen.

I admit I was not bowled over enough by the game’s quality to want to work out where the other two words were, or where the computer was hiding. I did check through the source code and it didn’t seem like I was missing anything; my assumption is MASTERKEY gets used somewhere to find the computer…

1153 PRINT TAB(8);”congratulations”: : : :
1156 PRINT: : : :”your mission is to steal thecrown jewels.”
1159 PRINT “on nelsons column is the keyto the vault.”
1162 PRINT “go sightseeing in whitehall.”

…and related to Nelson’s Column is the QUEENS KEY password, except all three passwords were in the instructions (on the back of the green one I showed earlier) so there isn’t really a need? If someone wants to noodle around in the comments they’re welcome to, but I can say I feel sufficiently wrapped up.

I do think the strategy elements ended up being more interesting than I expected once I understood what the rules were; I first thought guards were blocking particular passages before I realized they were acting truly at random. Certainly knowing the bribery was relative to how much the player had at that particular moment was useful.

That’s part of the reason the casino is rubbish and you shouldn’t bother. Also the odds are rubbish and there’s no way to savescum (there’s no saved game feature).

The food-lying-around may have broken verisimilitude hard but at least the logic to planning a route (while simultaneously being unclear what actions are needed to beat the game) made gameplay sense. At least I’m not horrified at the thought of eventually going back to the sequel (Mania, in 1983).

From the 1985 Intrigue Software catalog.

Thanks to gschmidl for helping me past some technical issues; if you want to play the game, I’ve dropped a package here that has it configured.

Another Mysterium has arrived and then faded silently away. Or, I suppose, faded away with its characteristic reverb-y "vrrrwww-WONK-wonk-wonk" noise.

This year's event was in Portland, Oregon. I did not attend in person; cross-country travel feels like too much of a stretch right now. (And I visited Portland just a couple of years ago for XOXO.) But of course I watched all the streamed talks and presentations. Now I bring you the annual report -- in two parts.

Part 1 is the stuff about Cyan itself and what they're doing. Part 2 will be fan activity and community contributions, including the Myst documentary.

All the videos are currently available on Mysterium's Twitch channel. They will be archived on their Youtube channel pretty soon.

EDIT-ADD: The State-of-Cyan video is now up on Cyan's Youtube channel.

State of Cyan

I'll start with the big finale wrap-up event of the conference. Cyan has posted their own news post. This went up simultaneously with the Mysterium talk. But I have more detail, mwah hah hah.

Hannah Gamiel and Eric A. Anderson, the studio co-heads, attended in person! This may be the first time Cyan head honchos have travelled to a non-Spokane Mysterium.

They apologized for not giving a State-of-Cyan talk last year. Here's the two-year news catch-up:

• Lots of awards for Riven.
• Released the age of Rime in March 2025.
• Two rounds of layoffs. Suck.
• Firmament on PS4/PS5/PSVR2 in July 2025.
• Console ports of Myst and Riven.
• Myst novel trilogy re-released as an ebook.
• Updates for classic titles, plus Steam Deck verification: Myst Masterpiece Edition, Riven (1997), Myst 3. ("We are not officially the people maintaining the source code for Myst 3", but they were able to make the update happen.)
• Obduction updates and ports are sadly roadblocked by being on a very early version of UE4. Updating to a modern engine release will take more work. No announcements there.
• Set up Steam promo bundles with Blue Prince, Outer Wilds, and other cool games.
• Office cleanout drive! There was thirty years of cruft behind some of those tantalizing locked office doors. Junk junk, not historic junk. "Think chili pepper flakes from 25 years ago." They had a dumpster party and cleared it all out.

Also, an account named "spyder" posted recently on the #riven channel of Cyan's Discord, hinting about a link to an ARG teaser page. Cyan does this now and again. I'll be honest: I don't follow these discussions. I prefer to wait for actual announcements. But you can catch up on the #cipher discussion channel if you like.

So what's next?

Cyan never announces anything big at Mysterium; it's too small a crowd. In fact -- remember my 2019 report? When Rand gave a whole planned timeline for the next five years? Promises that got rearranged and overturned within a year?

EAA: [In 2019] Hannah and I had just stepped into our new roles... you can see me standing off to the side with my jaw open, like, "Rand, what are you doing?"

So Eric and Hannah didn't try to make any promises this year. Instead, they gave a presentation called "Paths Not (yet) Taken: Scraps from Cyan's Development Past." Or, as Eric joked, "You guys wanna see a dead body?" They showed concept art and prototype shots from all sorts of projects that never saw the light of day.

This was fascinating. I enjoy trying to guess what's behind Cyan's curtain, but they really don't let much of hard info slip out. This was a first glimpse at many, many things that I had no idea existed.

They were very clear that none of this stuff was in active development. (With small exceptions which I'll get to.) But of course Cyan never cancels a project. As you'll see, even the most moribund proposal goes on the shelf. That which is shelved shall eternal lie. Who knows what form it might reappear in someday.

Latus (2004): (Pronounced "lattice", btw.) An experiment by Rand and Ryan Miller in linear narrative. An episodic spy series. The concept sounds like a mosaic story; you could browse many woven-together storylines about many characters, but it wasn't interactive in the game sense. Only got as far as storyboards.

Obduction v.1 (2005): Pitched as "Myst meets Halo". Concept art is a creepy alien and a guy in a storm-trooper breath mask. "Rand really wanted to take a swing at a shooter-style game with a Cyan twist." The point was to sneak narrative twists into a shooter game. Something about the player's breath being toxic to the aliens...?

EAA: Over time, the idea morphed into a more light-hearted game about a farmer named Lemon rescuing his dog (named Jake) who was abducted by aliens.

From there it morphed even further into a scenario where the whole thing was a televised intergalactic game show where aliens would kidnap humans and make them compete for prizes.

All of this was just pitch documents; there was never a playable prototype. The Obduction Kickstarter, of course, reworked the concept from scratch.

DiSC v1 (2006): Apparently the Cyan crew were big into disc golf. (Apparently all the back windows of the office have scrape marks from stray Frisbees.) They started planning a disc golf game for the Wii, with powerups and wacky Cyan-style environments. Again, no prototype.

Lift / Lyft (2007): Ambitious adventure game about flight and exploration. A huge game world with massive floating islands. You'd switch between third-person exploration on the ground and first-person flying combat. Customizable characters and customizable vehicles.

EAA: This actually did get very far along in discussions with a publisher, but thankfully the deal never closed, because in 2008 the financial crisis happened. Had [the deal] gone forward it would have been disastrous.

Origami (2007): This was a much smaller scope. Top-down action game about fighting paper monsters. Screenshot is subtitled "The Seven Daughters of Origami".

Both Lift and Origami were built in a Plasma 3.0 engine. At this point Cyan still saw Plasma as a strategic asset. (Later they dropped Plasma and pivoted to Unity, then settled on Unreal.)

Latus v.2 (2010): Reworked the Latus story into a timeline game in a 3D world. You move up and down the timeline, making small changes and seeing their ripple effects.

EAA: The idea was to build a literal exploration game inside of a short-form branching narrative. New locations would open up as you progressed through the game, and new options would combine with previous ones, forming a super-complex possibility space... I did some light prototyping for this around 2016 as a VR game.

(Eternal Threads tried a similar timeline concept in 2022, although not that complex. I thought it was pretty good.)

Goldfish (2011): An adventure game in the D'ni setting, but not about Atrus and his family. "A love letter to the D'ni cavern." Some of the Age concepts (the "Chain Age" and "Caustic Age") were later reworked into Obduction and Firmament areas.

DiSC v2 (2016): Revived the disc-golf concept for VR! This did start turning into a prototype, but it didn't go anywhere.

Goldfish v.2 (2023-4): Revived the concept, made lots of design progress. This one is not entirely inactive but there's nothing to announce either.

EAA: I'm not letting go of this one. While it might not be in full-blown development, it's smoldering. Someday.

Adjacent to that, Eric said he'd been trying to construct a full-scale Unreal model of the entire D'ni cavern, including both Ae'gura and the main city. There's been lots of conflicting game maps, and then "reams" of further maps and designs that never got built in Uru. Reconciling them is a fun project. ("Backburner side project", he emphasizes. "Because it might come in handy someday.") This is only about layout, not texturing or visuals. He showed a few brief fly-mode clips.

Minnow: DarkPath (2025): A micro-prototype of a puzzle game under time pressure. You're on a runaway tunneling machine blasting through the earth at high speed. "Kind of like a high-energy escape room."

Minnow: WhoD'nit (2025): Another micro-prototype, a murder mystery visual novel. Screenshot shows a seven-day timeline. "Phoenix Wright crossed with Myst." Kadish appears (at least as a prototype character).

Anglerfish (2024-2025): This is the big one. You may already have seen the trailer which was posted this weekend. This was a D'ni-era game with a darker tone. Cyan was heavily developing it towards the end of Riven production. (It was teased as "PREFALL" in early 2025, before the layoffs hit.)

EAA: I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it a horror game, but it's certainly a Myst thriller.

The concept is that you're sent to fetch a Linking Book by an untrustworthy and possibly unstable Guildmaster (named Damreus in the pitch). As the plot progresses, he tries to manipulate you by editing the Age you're exploring. So you're trapped in a world that's being turned against you.

They spent four months building a fully playable prototype. Note that the trailer above is a publisher pitch trailer. It has more storyline and gameplay spoilers than you'd expect from a Steam game trailer.

Anglerfish is not currently in production; they could not get it funded. But obviously everybody wants to see it someday. (The enthusiasm in the Mysterium event room was palpable, even over stream.)

Mudfish (2026): This is the project that is in current development, albeit in a very early stage and with a small team. They didn't give any specifics; they just said it was a first-person adventure in the Myst setting. Eric's description made me think of The Room:

EAA: Expect denser, more intricate game spaces... We're really trying to focus on the tactility of things.

Is that "Mudfish" codename intentionally connected to "Mudpie"? (As in "multi-user...") Yes, says EAA, yes it is.

They noted that they're not focusing on VR for the moment. Just not enough of a team to target all the VR platforms. (I always got the impression that Rand was the VR booster. Now he's retired so maybe that changes the balance.)

So that brings us to the present. What is coming? (These are promises, or at least announced products.)

• Boxed editions of Myst and Riven for PS5, Xbox, and Mac/PC. The PS5 and Xbox boxes will have actual spinny disks. The PC box will just have a Steam code, or a "digital code" anyhow.

• Myst novel trilogy reprints. Boutique hardcover editions of the three books. More information to come this fall.

Harrison Pink (who has been working on the book re-releases) answered a question about the Book of Marrim, a fourth novel which has been a running joke at Mysteriums for decades.

HP: So the reality of it was that we had found the manuscript for The Book of Marrim, and we were real excited! Wow, we have it! It turns out that it was very incomplete [maybe two-thirds missing]. It was a first draft written in 1999, and the lore and story just didn't match the lore of the past twenty years. [...] So that particular Book of Marrim is a dead end at this point.

The other notable audience question was about going back to Kickstarter. Hannah said "TBD". Eric said "TBA". Which is a nice distinction!

The truth is, I think Kickstarter would be a rough road for Cyan at this point. As I understand it, they've never gotten enough funding out of a Kickstarter to do a complete game. It's always been a way to get into pre-production and then pitch publishers by pointing to a ready audience.

Now, publishers know what the audience is. Firmament and Riven sales figures are a better guide than Kickstarter results. Cyan is, like it or not, back on the board.

Plus, everybody's on the rocks at this point. I mean not everybody. A few rich people are rich. But not me. In 2013, I was thrilled to throw a few hundred dollars into a new Cyan Kickstarter. 2019? Sure, no problem. 2026? Um...

Look. I have a steady contracting gig. (Not just the Patreon, although I'm happy about the Patreon too.) I am not hurting right now. But in no way do I feel secure. Any spare dollar needs to be saved up for possible future catastrophes, and we believe in future catastrophes in a way that was unimaginable ten years ago.

(Which is one reason I started the Patreon. And one reason I decided not to fly to Portland this year.)

I don't mean to end this on a downer. I want to see Cyan succeed. I want there to be sources of funding for a forty-year-old creator-owned studio which has been doing genre-defining work that whole time. I just don't think that the fans can make it happen this time.

But look you, this isn't the end of the report. More tomorrow.

The whole concept of versioning software that is built using GenAI is that things change fast and in large ways. In the before times, large feature additions would be considered, designed, and took a long time to deliver. With the models progression from Opus 4 in December of '25 through Fable and Opus 5 today, building complex software is simply getting faster (and better).

But it's not just Claude Code. I've worked hard to wrap Claude with my own "engineering harness" that significantly reduces the chaos and mistakes from raw LLM output. That harness is being used by developers and one enterprise today (https://devarch.ai/).

All that leads to the announcement that Sharpee is now at Version 4 and the new modeling language Chord is Version 2.

The changes to Sharpee are maintenance related and were exposed by upgrades to Chord. Chord is bumped because the grammar capability is fully in parallel with Sharpee. You can extend and replace everything in the standard library from Chord.

That said, the world-model remains purely Sharpee/Typescript.

The new Chord capabilities are documented on the website: https://sharpee.net/.

I need to give a shout out to Nathaniel Lindell who made a very small comment about Chord and the Standard Library and that led to a huge rathole. More than ten ADRs and 72 hours of nonstop updates to the platform and to Chord. I take comments very seriously and this is perfect example of what happens when someone says something even marginal about Sharpee.

Hopefully I can get back to the IDE before I get another marginal comment. 😄

I’ve finished the game; this is continued from my previous post.

Portion of the ad from Softside’s January 1983 issue announcing that Adventures of the Month are now being moved to the disk/cassette version of the magazine.

Just to get it out of the way first, we’ve got headhunters again, something I’ve written about before. Since this is set in India and vaguely Indiana Jones-shaped I checked in case it was making a reference, but Temple of Doom came out in 1984. Perhaps Indiana Jones was making a reference to it, or at least stereotypes like it; the movie has an infamous “monkey brains” banquet, and as Roshan Seth (who plays one of the villains, Chattar Lal) explained to Empire magazine:

The banquet scene was a joke that went wrong. I got a great deal of flak for it because people kept saying, “How does an intelligent man like you agree to be in a film which shows Indians dining on beetles and eels?” Steven intended it as a joke, the joke being that Indians were so fucking smart that they knew all Westerners think that Indians eat cockroaches, so they served them what they expected. The joke was too subtle for that film.

The original script had a line from Indy that Hindus wouldn’t touch meat and this prompts an additional line about being suspicious of who the hosts are; it never made it to the film.

Still from the relevant scene.

Moving forward, I was stuck last time on a bear, or at least a bear was stuck on what I thought was likely an oar, but the bear was sleeping and wouldn’t move. What I had neglected to do is LOOK TREE.

(Nevermind climbing the tree doesn’t mention the nest, even though you’d think it would.) Throwing the apple at the nest resolves the bear issue. You can throw the knife instead but it loses whatever item you throw (and you can go back and get another apple; you’ll need it in just a moment).

THROW APPLE

At what?
(Example: AT NATIVE)

AT NEST

Hornets emerge from nest
and bear runs for his life
far off into the jungle

With that resolved, it was time to take care of the canoe. The stalling for time with the bear puzzle led me (via a comment of Voltgloss) to realize I could CUT ROPE twice and take the rope with me that was holding the canoe; it gets used multiple times later. I then hopped in the canoe, applying the previously-found PADDLE verb.

I find it interesting it doesn’t understand PADDLE, but does understand PADDLE ACNOE with my typo there.

You can LOOK CANOE to see the previously-unmentioned hole filling with water. You need to PLUG HOLE; the only item that works is the apple. Which is kind of absurd but at least the game has it come out mid-paddle.

The lost gun (and fact it gets you just killed earlier) puts this as yet another data point in my list of games where weapons are red herrings>. The knife doesn’t get used for violence, either.

More jungle! This time it’s a small set piece, where to the southeast there’s some quicksand; you can CLIMB TREE (every single jungle room has a “tree room”, I’m leaving them off) and find there’s a sturdy branch. Assuming you remember to take it off the canoe, you can tie the rope to the branch, then go down and SWING ROPE across the quicksand.

To the northeast are some headhunters; if you try to pass by to the northeast, one will throw a spear (if you don’t, they’ll leave you alone, which suggests a structural-solving puzzle solution you’ll see shortly).

With the spear thrown the headhunters will go in hot pursuit and follow you around. If you haven’t guessed yet, the right action is to circle back to the quicksand, and swing over using the already-prepared rope.

You then can retrieve the spear, except the game insists on having some kind of obstacle.

After much gnashing of teeth with PULL SPEAR and JUMP SPEAR I finally came across PULL HARD; applying a verb modifier is extraordinarily rare and downright abuse of the system (given the author-player contract generally has established it as a verb-noun form at nearly all other times, even disallowing PADDLE by just itself earlier).

Past the headhunter section is a chasm; you need to tie the rope to the spear, then tie the rope to a tree on the side you’re on, then throw the spear before finally climbing the rope across the chasm. Strangely, it works intuitively well; ropes are infamous for having implementation issues, but it helps the rope refuses to let you do anything other than the right actions for solving the puzzle.

You can retrieve the spear (although you need to cut the rope to do so). It gets used one more time on the section right after: another maze.

I get what the author was after; he wanted the jungle to feel tangled but didn’t want a full Crowther/Woods style tangled mess, but this still was a tangled mess to map out. Kirsch really wanted you to not bother mapping at all, because he added in a native who wants something valuable. You can hand over the spear, getting directions out of this area in the process:

I had my map already complete before I got this hint.

The southwest exit hinted at leads to another small area with a waterfall and wall of fire close to each other. You can GO WATERFALL first to get wet, then go back and go through the fire, where being wet is enough protection to pass through.

This leads to a northeast path with another LONG ROPE (always fun when you lose an item, only to find another version of the same item later; of course in code, it really is literally the same item). You can CUT ROPE to make two short pieces of rope, which will sort-of become important in a moment.

The “sort-of” is because you next come across a tent (see above) with the kidnapped daughter inside. Climb a tree and wait and eventually you’ll see a bandit come out; JUMP BANDIT to do a knockout. (As far as I can tell, this also works the same if you just go southwest for a while, wait, and come back to the tent.) You can then try to subdue the bandit via TIE BANDIT, and things go wrong.

Dale Dobson couldn’t get the tying to work. He didn’t discover what I found, which is you can TIE HANDS AND FEET as one command (no longer even being a two-word parser) but even though the game seems to understand that it still breaks and the bandit kills you (“You didn’t tie me good enough”).

Dobson studied the source code and found the relevant line never gets called, so he (and I) continued playing via the command NT=3 followed by GOTO 300 (this changes a variable disabling the bandit, and then resumes the game).

After all that nonsense was through, I was able to enter the tent and untie the daughter, who now follows the protagonist for the rest of the game.

The first obstacle is the two bandits that had left the tent earlier start chasing; you can fortunately get past a bridge where cutting the ropes seals off your escape.

This is the other reason I checked the year Temple of Doom came out, although the bridge-cutting scene in the movie was much more dramatic.

Unfortunately, you’re not done with natives yet. A bit more jungle in and you’re blocked by MAD NATIVES; there’s a skunk nearby, but the way to handle it is via the command HOLD NOSE (not even pretending the parser is reasonable any more).

I think this is the first Kirsch game where you need to refer to a body part?

The actual scientific name is “Mephitis mephitis” although I like the “Stinkerus americanus” joke.

This lets you get by but then the natives go in pursuit. If you just try to outrace then they’ll catch you, and there’s no obvious obstacle like a bridge to stop them.

You do pass by some quicksand (not blocking the path) and this ended up being the most clever puzzle of the game (or at least it would be if there wasn’t parser struggle in getting the command to work). You need to put your hat on the quicksand so the natives think you fell in.

Then it’s a clear shot to the ending except for another maze. There’s a mountain you can climb where you will see the embassy is “west” of a cedar tree so the idea is to wander until you find cedar (LOOK TREE everywhere, that is), then keep going west. I already caught on earlier so I did not map the maze this time.

And that’s a wrap! Kirsch is still going full steam in terms of imagining scenes and then trying his best to enact them in the parser; they don’t always survive contact with the implementation which results in things like PULL HARD and whatever mess was happening with the rope and the bandit. I do think the presence of mazes weakened this considerably over his prior games with the same general weaknesses; while he twice gave hints for getting out and clearly did the layout thinking it was more of a “tangled map” than a maze, in practice I still had to deal with the same annoyances as most maps from this era have.

We’ve still got enough Kirsch games to go I don’t want do tier-list them out, but as a general observation, it doesn’t seem like he’s had an “experience arc” like you might hope; there isn’t continual improvement, just the same template being repeated in multiple ways where sometimes it sticks and sometimes it misses. I think the best Kirsch games so far have been

Kidnapped: early game, with building floors being a clever way to set out a series of mini-adventure games

Jack the Ripper: an extended preparation puzzle, including a very clever part with the killer’s knife

Around the World in Eighty Days: the source material is more or less just like a Kirsch game, so this meshes reasonably well

Dateline Titanic: recontextualizing the treasure hunt as rescuing passengers

Arrow One: conceptual sci-fi with a better setting than usual for Kirsch and a clever language puzzle

As far as Kirsch’s own favorite, I’m going to guess he liked Jack the Ripper, because he produced two sequels (which we’ll see in 1983 and 1984, respectively).

I do think his rapid pace may be part of the issue on the lesser games — certainly at least the bugs and lack of polish show — but I’m not sure if just going bi-monthly would fix the issue; I don’t know if introspection would help. At the very least, there’s now a gap until the next Kirsch game. It doesn’t show up until March! That’s because February has an RPG instead, by a totally different author.

Both The CRPG Addict and El Explorador de RPG have played it, if you want to see what it’s like.

Coming up, we’re going to stick with random 1983 games, and I’m making my next pick truly at random (I’m not using the next item on my list, I’m using random.org and having it choose a number) so who knows what will happen?

I'm embarrassed about this one.

The Witness will be September's release for the Visible Zorker project, but it's already done for Patreon supporters. So I've scanned my Witness feelies for the app already. (You can see the high-res scans here at the Internet Archive.) It's a classic package. The 1938 newspaper is probably Infocom's high point for pure immersive scene-setting.

But the matchbook caught my attention.

That's a curious symbol. It's sort of a generic "look at this Chinese symbol" symbol. But is it actually Chinese? The Witness has this uncomfortable schtick of "obviously Asian, but no definite nationality". The Linder house is full of Orientalist tat; some of it is Japanese style, but only the "small Shinto shrine" in the entry betrays an actual tradition.

So I immediately suspected that the symbol is a fake. After all, everything else on the matchbook is some variety of joke. "Brass Lantern", come on. The street names are Joel Berez and Al Vezza, two Infocom execs. The phone number "Chandler-1729" refers not only to Raymond Chandler, but to the best-known anecdote about the mathematical prodigy Ramanujan.

I did a quick image search to try to verify (or disprove) my theory. There are certainly a lot of symbols like that one:

But they all seem to be bilaterally symmetric, or nearly so. None of them have those squiggly bottom inserts.

Well, what about those inserts? They look awfully suspicious, especially upside down:

Surely the right side is the Latin letter A. The left side is less obvious, but maybe an S? Or an E, or... this isn't really coming together. If it were SG, for "Stu Galley", then I'd buy it; but I can't make that work.

Maybe more context would help. Infocom's delightful packages were designed by G/R Copy, aka Giardini/Russell, aka the demon Jeearr. Did they have an "SA" on staff? ...How would I know?

At this point I started asking around, hoping someone would be smarter than me.

You know what happened next. Someone replied that it was an actual Chinese symbol. The character 壽 (shòu) really does mean "long life". I was barking up the wrong tree entirely.

(Two people, in fact. Thank to David Goldfarb and BoysenberryCider.)

壽

If your browser doesn't render that Unicode character, here's a image version, with serifs:

(Apparently there's a Unicode character specifically for the rounded version, but I don't have a font that displays it.)

Wikipedia has a whole page of examples of shòu used in art. And guess what? Nearly all of them are bilaterally symmetrical!

Except for the ones that just go to town...

I would be hard pressed to describe these symbols as having anything in common, beyond "a lot of horizontal lines around a vertical axis". Which just goes to show that I'm not looking at them right. This is decorative lettering (ideographing?). It's meant to convey the basic idea to someone who's familiar with the symbol. Someone who's already seen it zillions of times in different decorative forms already.

For laughs, I spent some time trawling Ebay for "vintage Chinese matchbooks". Quite a few listings, but none in the style of the Witness one. One did have the shòu character:

Of course, the designers at G/R didn't have Ebay to trawl. They must have had some design source but I have no idea what. Not that 1867 Chinese Ornament book, certainly.

Arguably they fell into a trap of making the Chinese character look too much like itself. They should have gone for decorative rather than readable! Live and learn.

Unlock the secrets of Gigantea! Today, we are thrilled to release a major, free expansion to Spire, Surge, and Sea, the Nebula Award Finalist post-apocalyptic science fantasy novel by Stewart C. Baker.

Today’s update to Spire, Surge, and Sea is available at no additional charge. To celebrate, both of Stewart’s Nebula Finalist games are on sale for 40% off until July 30!

• Spire, Surge, and Sea (40% off): The King lies. The gods live. In humanity’s last city, floating in a worldwide seascape, will you tear it all down to protect your own memories?
• The Bread Must Rise (40% off): In this magical baking contest, you’ll team up with the Queen Undying to bake your rivals into an early grave—or out of the grave, with necromancy!

Whether you are a returning voyager or braving the Worldsea for the very first time, there has never been a better time to play Spire, Surge, and Sea.

What’s New in the Free Update?

• New Minigames in Chapter Five: Try your hand at one of four brand-new minigames to get closer to the game’s NPCs and discover what life is really like on Gigantea.
• A Frozen Expedition in Chapter Six: Set sail to a mysterious island in the far, frozen reaches of the Worldsea. Uncover tantalizing clues about the King’s former life and secure critical help for your final confrontation.
• In-Game Hint System: Worried about making a wrong move at a crucial moment? Toggle the new hint system to see exactly which stat is tested in each choice—or take out the guesswork entirely and view the exact score you need to succeed.
• More Immersive Roleplay: We’ve expanded action and choice outcomes throughout the entire book for a more reactive, deeply personal player experience.

Over the last two weeks I have aligned Sharpee with a new parser-IF modeling language called Chord. This effort was not to adhere to one side or the other. It was a true alignment where both sides were required to maintain their "way", be elegant, and in their own way provide a path for an author to create parser-based IF that publishes to a browser. There were changes across the Sharpee packages to enable this alignment and Chord matured into what I consider a highly readable and usable interactive fiction modeling language.

Chord is a declarative pseudo-code styled language. It compiles to IR (intermediate representation) and can be deployed to a framework-less web application the same as a standard Sharpee story. It has the same features as the Sharpee Typescript API and a few additional wrinkles.

The details for Chord are on the Sharpee website. I posted the work-in-progress syntax last week and today it's a complete and working new IF language.

The GenAI created sample story is listed at the end and that hits all of the Sharpee capabilities. I use the Typescript version for regression testing changes to Sharpee and now this version will also be used to regression test Chord.

Full documentation for Chord is on the website and in the GitHub repository on main.

I call it a modeling language because it is not a programming language. It does not have if-then-else blocks or boolean flags. It asks the author to find the correct domain meaning and implement its parts accordingly.

As in Sharpee, Chord also adheres to the post-turn text emission process in Channel-IO. Every piece of text is within a definition or defined as a phrase. Phrases can be listed in named phrasebooks with predicates to differentiate when they apply to the world. A Chord story can be one .story file or a .story file with .chord imports (though a .chord cannot also import other .chord files).

An author can replace the index.html template and add their own components to be filled with additional custom channel data. The template still has to follow a contract for its named styles and required components like the command line.

The website also has a sandbox/playground where you can try Chord live. I encourage you to give it a try.

##
## The Folly at Fernhill — one winter night to find the deed.
##

story "The Folly at Fernhill" by "The Sharpee Project"
  id: fernhill
  version: 0.1.0
  blurb: One winter night to find the deed that keeps Fernhill in the
  family.
  states: evening, midnight
  use state-machines

  on every turn while one chance in 12
    phrase distant-bell
  end on

## The estate exterior — the night begins here.

create the Grounds
  a region
  containing the Iron Gates, the Gravel Drive, the Fountain Court
  containing the Greenhouse, the Boiler Shed, Folly Hill

  on every turn while one chance in 6
    phrase night-wind
  end on

  after entering it
    phrase cold-returns
    play ambient night-wind when client has sound
  end after

  after leaving it
    stop ambient when client has sound
    phrase out-of-the-wind
  end after

create the House
  a region
  containing the Entrance Hall, the Study, the Pantry
  containing the Kitchen, the Cellar Stairs and the Cellar

  after entering it
    phrase house-hush
  end after

create the Iron Gates
  a room
  aka gates, gate
  north to the Gravel Drive
  south is blocked: long-road

  after entering it while the player has the deed
    play music dawn-theme when client has music
    win fernhill-saved
  end after

  first time
    The cab is already grinding away down the lane, its lamps swallowed
    by the dark. An auction notice is nailed to the left-hand gate,
    ruffling in the wind: FERNHILL HOUSE AND GROUNDS, BY ORDER OF THE
    ESTATE, AT DAWN.

  Wrought-iron gates stand open on one hinge apiece, rust freckling
  the scrollwork. The gravel drive runs north toward the dark shape of
  the house.

create the Gravel Drive
  a room
  aka drive
  south to the Iron Gates
  north to the Fountain Court

  The drive curves between bare lime trees, gravel crunching underfoot.
  The house looms ahead to the north; the gates are back south.

create the Fountain Court
  a room
  aka court, courtyard
  south to the Gravel Drive
  north to the Entrance Hall
  west to the Greenhouse
  east to the Boiler Shed

  A paved court before the front door, holding a dry fountain crusted
  with last summer's leaves. The greenhouse glimmers palely to the
  west; a squat brick shed hunches to the east; the front door of the
  house is north.

create the Greenhouse
  a room
  aka glasshouse
  east to the Fountain Court
  north to Folly Hill
  north is blocked while the boiler is off: frost-sealed

  Glass panes furred with frost on both sides. Staging benches run the
  length of the house, and a door in the north wall — glass too — leads
  up toward the folly, if it would open.

create the Boiler Shed
  a room
  aka shed
  west to the Fountain Court

  Brick, low, and bitter with old coal dust. The estate's boiler sits
  cold as a tomb against the back wall, its pipes running off through
  the earth toward the greenhouse.

create Folly Hill
  a room
  aka hill
  south to the Greenhouse
  north to the Folly through the folly door

  The hill rises behind the greenhouse, and on its crown stands the
  folly: a little stone temple, fire-scarred about the windows, that
  nobody has entered in twenty years.

create the Folly
  a room

  Soot still ghosts the walls in here, twenty years on. The night sky
  shows through a scorched hole in the dome, and a cache of ancient
  estate fireworks slumps against the far wall.

  after entering it, once
    change the fuse to lit
    phrase fuse-catches
  end after

create the Entrance Hall
  a room
  aka hall
  south to the Fountain Court
  west to the Study
  west is blocked while Mrs Kettle is guarded: kettle-blocks
  east to the Kitchen
  north to the Cellar Stairs

  The heart of the house: a cold marble floor, a dead fireplace under
  a wide mantel{mantel-hint}, and a tall case clock standing silent
  against the stairs. Doors lead west to the study and east to the
  kitchen; a colder passage runs north.

create the Study
  a room
  east to the Entrance Hall

  Verity's study, exactly as she left it: a desk under the window, a
  travelling trunk against the wall, and the smell of pipe smoke that
  never quite left the curtains.

create the Kitchen
  a room
  west to the Entrance Hall
  north to the Pantry through the pantry door

  Copper pans hang in ranks over the cold range. The pantry door
  stands in the north wall.

create the Pantry
  a room

  Narrow shelves of preserves and crockery. With the door shut, no one
  in the kitchen would know you were here.

create the Cellar Stairs
  a room
  aka stairs, landing
  south to the Entrance Hall
  down to the Cellar through the cellar door

  A bare landing at the top of the cellar steps. An oil lamp sits in a
  wall niche, left where a careful hand could always find it.

create the Cellar
  a room
  dark

  Brick vaults run off into the dark, cold enough to keep milk in
  July. Somewhere back in the blackness, water is dripping.

  on every turn
    phrase cellar-drip
  end on

  on every turn while the oil lamp is lit, once
    phrase lamplight-startle
  end on

create the folly door
  a door
  aka warped door

  A stone-framed door of oak, warped and silvered by the fire. It has
  not been opened in twenty years.

  on opening it while tobias is not shaken
    refuse folly-jammed
  end on

create the pantry door
  a door, lockable, starts unlocked
  aka white door

  A plain white-painted door with a bolt on the pantry side.

create the cellar door
  a door, lockable with the tarnished key
  aka grey door
  score unsealed worth 5

  A heavy grey door, locked as long as anyone can remember. The
  keyhole is tarnished black.

  after opening it, once
    award unsealed
  end after

create the doormat
  aka mat
  scenery, a supporter
  in the Fountain Court

  A bristle mat worn bald in the middle, older than you are. It sits a
  little proud of the flagstone, as if something kept it from lying
  flat.

create the tarnished key
  aka key
  concealed
  on the doormat
  score found worth 5

  A small key gone black with weather.

  after taking it, once
    award found
  end after

create the oil lamp
  aka lamp
  light-source, switchable
  in the Cellar Stairs

  A hurricane lamp with a full reservoir and a clean chimney.

create the boiler
  aka furnace
  scenery, switchable
  in the Boiler Shed
  states: cold, filled, primed, running
  score lit worth 10

  A cast-iron estate boiler, cold now, its dial at rest. Pipes run
  from its flank toward the greenhouse. A stopcock and a primer
  plunger stand ready on its flank, and a small brass plate reads:
  FILL. PRIME. LIGHT. IN THAT ORDER.

  on switching_on it
    refuse when it is cold: boiler-clank
    refuse when it is filled: boiler-clank
    award lit, once
  end on

create the stopcock
  aka cock, water valve
  scenery
  in the Boiler Shed

  A quarter-turn stopcock on the feed pipe from the rain tank.

  on turning it
    phrase stopcock-turns
  end on

create the primer plunger
  aka primer, plunger
  scenery, pushable
  in the Boiler Shed

  A long-handled primer plunger, worn smooth by fifty winters of use.

  on pushing it while the boiler is cold
    refuse primer-dry
  end on

define machine the boiler works
  role furnace is the boiler
  starts cold

  state cold
    when turning the stopcock: filled

  state filled
    on enter
      change the boiler to filled
      phrase water-gurgles
    end on
    when pushing the primer plunger: primed

  state primed
    on enter
      change the boiler to primed
      phrase primer-thumps
    end on
    when switching_on the furnace: running

  state running, terminal
    on enter
      change the boiler to running
      change the vine to flowering
      phrase pipes-warm
      phrase vine-stirs
      play sound boiler-thump when client has sound
    end on
end machine

create the solicitor's letter
  aka summons
  readable

  The letter that brought you here: Fernhill goes to auction at dawn,
  and whatever Great-Aunt Verity hid is lost with it unless someone
  finds the deed tonight.

  on reading it
    phrase summons-text
      "…the property known as FERNHILL to be sold at public auction at
      first light. Any party asserting prior title must produce the
      original deed of the estate before the fall of the hammer."
  end on

create the travelling trunk
  aka trunk
  a container with max items 3
  openable
  in the Study

  Verity's old travelling trunk, papered with steamer labels from
  ports she never mentioned. The lid is heavy but unlocked.

create the diary page
  aka page, diary
  readable
  in the travelling trunk
  states: folded, read

  A page torn from a diary, the hand young and furious.

  on reading it
    change it to read
    phrase diary-text
      "K. says the greenhouse will take the worst of the frost and the
      vine with it. Let it. What matters is safe where the fire went,
      and only the little silver thing will open it. If I cannot keep
      Fernhill, no bank and no buyer shall have the proof of it."
  end on

create the half-burned letter
  aka burned letter
  readable with text "…arrangements with the county bank, where the deed may rest secure until…"
  in the travelling trunk

  Only the middle of the letter survived its trip through a grate. It
  seems to say the deed went to the bank in town. It seems to.

create the mantel
  aka mantelpiece, shelf
  scenery, a supporter with capacity 2
  in the Entrance Hall

  A wide stone mantel over the dead fireplace, dusted but bare except
  for a single framed photograph.

create the framed photograph
  aka photograph, photo, frame
  scenery
  on the mantel

  Verity at thirty, on the folly steps, squinting into some summer
  long gone.

  phrase detail while the diary page is read:
    Knowing what the diary knows, you see it now: the folly whole
    behind her, and on her knee a small steel box with a bright slot
    in its lid.

  after examining it
    show image folly-photograph when client has images
  end after

create the grey overcoat
  aka overcoat, coat, verity's overcoat
  wearable, a container
  in the Entrance Hall

  A great grey wool overcoat hanging by the door, too heavy for
  anyone's shoulders but hers. The pockets are deep.

create the winding key
  aka clock key
  concealed
  in the grey overcoat

  A small brass crank key — the kind that winds a tall case clock.

create the crowbar
  aka bar, pry bar
  in the Cellar

  A forge-made crowbar, cold and certain.

create the nailed crate
  aka crate
  a container
  openable with the crowbar
  in the Boiler Shed

  A pine crate nailed shut hard, stencilled FERNHILL ESTATE — BOILER
  SPARES.

create the tin opener
  aka opener
  in the nailed crate

  A wooden-handled tin opener, estate issue.

create the brass valve handle
  aka valve handle, handle
  in the nailed crate

  A four-spoked brass handle, sized for the boiler's water valve.

create the kipper tin
  aka tin
  a container
  openable with the tin opener
  in the Pantry

  A flat tin of kippers with no ring-pull and no mercy.

create the kipper
  aka fish
  edible
  in the kipper tin

  One bronze kipper, pungent enough to summon any cat in the county.

create the garden shears
  aka shears
  in the Kitchen

  Long-bladed garden shears, oiled and sharp — Tobias's pride, judging
  by the edge.

create the sherry bottle
  aka sherry, bottle
  in the Kitchen

  A dusty bottle of oloroso, the good stuff, hidden behind the pans at
  hip height where a housekeeper might know to look.

create the vine
  aka determined vine
  scenery, prunable
  in the Greenhouse
  states: seedling, flowering, fruiting
  score fruited worth 5

  Verity's vine, at the warm end of the staging over the buried
  pipes: barely more than a seedling now, twenty years after the
  frost that should have killed it.

  after pruning it while it is fruiting, once
    award fruited
  end after

create Smoke
  aka cat, grey cat
  a person, follower
  feedable with food the kipper
  in the Pantry

  A smoke-grey cat with lantern eyes, appointed to the pantry mice
  and answerable to no one.

  on every turn while it is fed and the player is in the Greenhouse, once
    phrase smoke-nose
  end on

create the furnace poker
  aka poker
  in the Boiler Shed

  A long iron poker for the furnace grate.

  on taking it while the boiler is running
    refuse poker-hot
  end on

define trait feedable
  data
    food: entity
  states: peckish, fed

  phrases en-US
    no-morsel:
      You have nothing that would interest a cat of standing.
    already-fed-cat:
      A slow blink. The account is already settled.
    cat-eats:
      The kipper vanishes with terrifying efficiency, and something is
      decided about you. From now on, you have a shadow.

  on feeding it
    the actor must have its food: no-morsel
    it must be peckish: already-fed-cat
    change it to fed
    phrase cat-eats
  end on
end trait

define action feeding
  grammar
    feed :creature
  the creature must be reachable
  otherwise refuse not-feedable

  phrases en-US
    not-feedable:
      That has no appetite you can help with.

define trait prunable
  on pruning it
    the player must hold the garden shears: need-shears
    select on its state
      when seedling
        phrase vine-too-young
      when flowering
        change it to fruiting
        move the silver locket to the Greenhouse
        phrase vine-fruits
      when fruiting
        phrase vine-done
    end select
  end on
end trait

define trait windable
  on winding it
    the player must hold the winding key: need-winding-key
    it must be stopped: clock-already-going
    change it to ticking
    phrase clock-wound
  end on
end trait

define action pruning
  grammar
    prune :target
    trim :target
  the target must be reachable
  otherwise refuse cannot-prune

  phrases en-US
    cannot-prune:
      There's nothing to prune about that.

define action winding
  grammar
    wind :target
    wind up :target
  the target must be reachable
  otherwise refuse cannot-wind

  phrases en-US
    cannot-wind:
      That doesn't wind.

create the fuse
  aka fireworks fuse
  scenery
  cuttable with the garden shears
  in the Folly
  states: coiled, lit, cut
  score nerve worth 5

  A long waxed fuse snaking from the fireworks cache across the
  floor. Old, but not too old to burn.

  on every turn while it is lit
    phrase fuse-hiss
  end on

  on cutting it
    change it to cut
    award nerve, once
    phrase fuse-cut-through
  end on

define sequence the fuse burn
  when the fuse becomes lit
    phrase fuse-racing
  3 turns later
    kill the player fuse-blast when the fuse is lit
end sequence

define sequence the long night
  at turn 14
    phrase dusk-deepens
    change the story to midnight
  at turn 70
    phrase small-hours
  at turn 130
    lose dawn-comes
end sequence

create the deed box
  aka box, steel box, silver box
  a container
  openable with the silver locket
  in the Folly

  A small steel box under a shroud of soot, unmarked but for a neat
  bright slot in the lid — the exact size of a locket that does not
  open like a locket.

create the deed
  aka title deed, title
  readable
  in the deed box
  score recovered worth 10

  Heavy paper, folded in oiled cloth, whole and legible after twenty
  years in the dark: the original deed of Fernhill.

  after taking it, once
    award recovered
  end after

  on reading it
    phrase deed-text
      "…the house and grounds known as FERNHILL, held in perpetuity by
      the family and heirs of the bearer of this instrument."
  end on

create Mrs Kettle
  aka housekeeper, kettle
  a person, proper, guard
  pronouns she
  in the Entrance Hall
  states: guarded, softened
  score softened worth 5

  The housekeeper, planted before the study door with her knitting and
  no intention of moving. Her eyes say the study is not for visitors.

  on giving it
    change it to softened when it has the sherry bottle
    award softened, once when it is softened
    phrase kettle-softened when it is softened
  end on

create Tobias
  aka groundskeeper
  a person, proper, patrol with route [the Gravel Drive, the Fountain Court, the Boiler Shed] and wait-turns 5 and announces-movement true
  pronouns he
  in the Gravel Drive
  states: steady, shaken
  score truth worth 5

  The groundskeeper, out in all weathers on his rounds, a storm
  lantern swinging at his knee. Weathered, watchful, in no hurry to
  help.

  on asking it
    phrase tobias-shrug
  end on

create the silver locket
  aka locket

  A little silver locket on a fine chain, its face engraved with the
  folly before the fire. It is heavier than it looks, and it does not
  open like a locket.

define topics for tobias
  about the boiler:
    phrase tobias-boiler-reply
  about the silver locket:
    phrase tobias-locket-reply
  about "the folly", "the fire":
    change it to shaken
    award truth, once
    phrase tobias-folly-reply
  about "the bank": phrase tobias-bank-reply
end topics

define topics for Mrs Kettle
  about the grey overcoat: phrase kettle-coat-reply
  about "the study", "verity's study": phrase kettle-study-reply
end topics

create the player
  starts in the Iron Gates
  carries the solicitor's letter

  Cold, underslept, and the last of the family who still believes
  Verity hid the deed.

create the auction notice
  aka notice, sign
  scenery, readable
  in the Iron Gates

  Fresh print on old iron: FERNHILL HOUSE AND GROUNDS, BY ORDER OF THE
  ESTATE, AT DAWN.

  on reading it
    phrase notice-text
      "Sale to be conducted at the property at first light. Viewing by
      arrangement with the solicitors, Messrs. Hobbes & Vane."
  end on

create the lime trees
  aka trees, limes
  scenery, plural
  in the Gravel Drive

  Bare pollarded limes, planted two lifetimes ago, creaking in the
  wind.

create the fountain
  aka basin
  scenery
  in the Fountain Court

  A dry stone basin drifted with last summer's leaves. The cherub in
  the middle has lost his nose to some hard winter.

create the staging benches
  aka benches, staging
  scenery, plural
  in the Greenhouse

  Slatted staging the length of the glasshouse, empty but for one
  determined vine at the warm end, over the buried heating pipes.

create the iron pipes
  aka pipes
  scenery, plural
  in the Boiler Shed

  Lagged iron pipes leaving the boiler's flank, running toward the
  greenhouse through the earth.

create the fireplace
  aka hearth
  scenery
  in the Entrance Hall

  Cold ash and a firedog, under the wide stone mantel.

create the case clock
  aka clock, tall clock
  scenery, windable
  in the Entrance Hall
  states: stopped, ticking

  A tall case clock, stopped at some hour years gone. The winding
  hole waits behind the little brass door in its face.

  on every turn while it is ticking and one chance in 8
    phrase clock-chime
    emit estate-clock with hour "evening" when evening
    emit estate-clock with hour "past midnight" when midnight
  end on

create the writing desk
  aka desk
  scenery, a supporter
  in the Study

  A leather-topped desk under the window, its blotter still dented by
  a heavy hand.

create the long curtains
  aka curtains
  scenery, plural
  hiding-spot with position behind
  in the Study

  Floor-to-ceiling curtains of faded bottle green, deep enough to
  swallow a person whole.

create the copper pans
  aka pans
  scenery, plural
  in the Kitchen

  Ranks of copper pans, dull with disuse but hung in strict order.

create the cold range
  aka range, stove
  scenery
  in the Kitchen

  A black iron range, cold to the wrist, its fire door hanging open.

create the preserve shelves
  aka shelves, preserves, jars
  scenery, plural
  in the Pantry

  Narrow shelves of preserves in ranked jars: damson, quince, and
  things gone too dark to name.

create the wall niche
  aka niche
  scenery
  in the Cellar Stairs

  A little arched niche worn smooth at the lip — a lamp has lived here
  a long time.

create the scorched dome
  aka dome, hole
  scenery
  in the Folly

  The folly's little dome, breached by fire; the night sky shows
  through the black-edged hole.

define sound night-wind from "audio/night-wind.wav"
define sound boiler-thump from "audio/boiler-thump.wav"
define music dawn-theme from "audio/dawn-theme.wav"
define image folly-photograph from "images/folly-photograph.png"

define channel clock
  mode replace
  gated by sidebar
  return "The clock: (hour)" from estate-clock
end channel

define phrase long-road
  The lane runs three dark miles to the village, and the cab is gone.
  You are not leaving without what you came for.
end phrase

define phrase frost-sealed
  The glass door to the folly path is sealed fast under a rind of
  frost. Nothing short of real warmth in these pipes will shift it.
end phrase

define phrase night-wind, randomly
  The wind comes off the downs and worries at the bare limes.
or
  A gust rattles every pane in the greenhouse at once.
or
  The wind drops for a moment, and the night is very quiet.
end phrase

define phrase distant-bell
  Far off in the village, the church bell counts another quarter hour
  gone.
end phrase

define phrase cold-returns, first-time
  The cold finds you the moment you step out, and means it.
or
  The cold again, familiar now.
end phrase

define phrase out-of-the-wind
  You step out of the wind, and your ears sing in the sudden quiet.
end phrase

define phrase house-hush
  The house holds its old hush — mothballs, cold ash, and wax.
end phrase

define phrase kettle-blocks
  Mrs Kettle does not move from the study door. "The study is not for
  visitors," she says, to her knitting.
end phrase

define phrase kettle-softened
  Mrs Kettle turns the bottle to read the label, and something in her
  shoulders comes down an inch. "Her ladyship's oloroso. Well." She
  steps away from the study door. "Five minutes, mind."
end phrase

define phrase kettle-coat-reply
  "Her walking coat. Twenty winters old and warmer than anything you
  could buy now. She'd not begrudge you the loan of it tonight."
end phrase

define phrase kettle-study-reply
  "Shut since the spring, and it'll stay shut. Unless," she looks at
  you over the needles, "you were to bring me something that made the
  evening kinder."
end phrase

define phrase tobias-shrug
  Tobias turns his head and spits, which appears to be his whole
  opinion on the subject.
end phrase

define phrase tobias-boiler-reply
  "She's not dead, just cold. Fill her, set the valve, then light
  her — in that order, mind, or she'll clank at you like church
  bells."
end phrase

define phrase tobias-locket-reply
  Tobias goes very still when he sees it. "Her little silver box.
  She wore it the night of the fire and never after. Whatever it
  opens, it's up at the folly."
end phrase

define phrase tobias-folly-reply
  The lantern stops swinging. "Twenty years I've not opened that
  door, and her ladyship neither." He looks up the dark hill for a
  long moment. "Go on then, if you must. The door's only warped, not
  cursed. Shoulder it."
end phrase

define phrase tobias-bank-reply
  "Bank?" He snorts. "Bank never had it. Her ladyship trusted banks
  the way foxes trust hounds."
end phrase

define phrase boiler-clank
  You twist the dial and the boiler answers with a hollow CLANK, like
  church bells dropped down a well. Cold, dry iron. The brass plate
  insists: FILL. PRIME. LIGHT.
end phrase

define phrase stopcock-turns
  You crank the stopcock a hard quarter-turn.
end phrase

define phrase primer-dry
  The plunger sinks with a dry wheeze and comes up again. Nothing to
  prime — the jacket is empty.
end phrase

define phrase water-gurgles
  Somewhere inside the iron, water gurgles down into the jacket.
end phrase

define phrase primer-thumps
  The plunger meets resistance at last and thumps home. The boiler
  is primed.
end phrase

define phrase pipes-warm
  Flame catches with a soft whump, and within moments the pipes begin
  to tick and stretch as warmth crawls toward the greenhouse.
end phrase

define phrase fuse-catches
  The warped door's first draught in twenty years drags across the
  floor — and wakes a thread of sparks in the old blasting cord. The
  fuse is burning toward the cache.
end phrase

define phrase fuse-hiss, cycling
  The fuse hisses on, eating its slow way toward the fireworks.
or
  Sparks walk the waxed cord, closer now.
end phrase

define phrase fuse-racing
  It is racing you.
end phrase

define phrase fuse-cut-through
  The shears bite through the waxed cord. The spark train staggers,
  gutters, and dies a hand's breadth from the cache.
end phrase

define phrase fuse-blast
  The cache goes up in one white roar, and the folly keeps its
  secrets after all.
end phrase

define phrase dusk-deepens
  Somewhere beyond the grounds the last light goes out of the sky.
  Midnight is coming on.
end phrase

define phrase cellar-drip, cycling
  Somewhere back in the vaults, a drop falls.
or
  Drip. The dark keeps its own time.
end phrase

define phrase lamplight-startle
  Something small skitters away from your lamplight and is gone.
end phrase

define phrase need-shears
  Bare-fingered pinching will mangle it. This wants the garden shears.
end phrase

define phrase vine-too-young
  It is all stem and hope — nothing to prune yet. What it wants is
  warmth in these pipes.
end phrase

define phrase vine-fruits
  You take the dead growth off in three clean cuts, and the vine
  answers the warmth almost while you watch: a single heavy fruit
  swells, splits — and something small and silver slides out into the
  leaf mould. Verity's own way of banking.
end phrase

define phrase vine-done
  The vine has given everything it kept.
end phrase

define phrase vine-stirs
  At the warm end of the greenhouse staging, something green stirs.
end phrase

define phrase need-winding-key
  The little brass door wants its crank key — the kind a careful
  housekeeper leaves in a coat pocket.
end phrase

define phrase clock-already-going
  It is wound and walking. Tick, tock.
end phrase

define phrase clock-wound
  The key turns, the weights climb, and the old clock clears its
  throat and begins to walk again: tick, tock, after twenty years.
end phrase

define phrase clock-chime
  The case clock counts the quarter, bright and even, through the
  whole house.
end phrase

define phrase poker-hot
  The poker has been drinking the furnace's heat — it would take the
  skin off your palm.
end phrase

define phrase smoke-nose
  Smoke pads down the staging, ignores the vine entirely, and noses
  hard at the leaf mould at the warm end. Cats know where things are
  buried.
end phrase

define phrase mantel-hint while the diary page is read
   — and over it Verity's photograph, which you cannot stop looking
  at now
end phrase

define phrase small-hours
  The small hours settle over Fernhill. Dawn — and the auction — are
  no longer an abstraction.
end phrase

define phrase dawn-comes
  Grey light finds the gates, and with it the first motorcar of the
  auction party. Whatever Fernhill still hides, it will hide it for
  strangers now.
end phrase

define phrase fernhill-saved
  You come down the drive with the deed of Fernhill inside your coat,
  and the iron gates, for the first time tonight, look like they are
  holding the world out rather than you in. At dawn the hammer will
  fall on nothing: the proof came out of the fire after all.
end phrase

define phrase folly-jammed
  The warped door doesn't shift. Twenty years of weather have set it
  like a jaw — and something in you doesn't care to force Verity's
  folly without knowing more of it.
end phrase

create the iron weathervane
  aka weathervane, vane
  scenery, pushable
  in the Iron Gates

  An iron weathervane on the gatepost, older than the house behind it.

  after examining it
    phrase vane-mood
  end after

  after pushing it
    phrase vane-story
  end after

  after touching it
    phrase vane-quiet
  end after

define phrase vane-story
  The weathervane creaks the same one story it always tells, whatever
  the hour.
end phrase

define phrasebook midnight-voice while midnight
  vane-mood, first-time:
    The vane swings hard north, as if the night had opinions.
  or
    The vane holds north. Of course it does.

  vane-story:
    A book must never win this line.
end phrasebook

define phrasebook evening-voice
  vane-mood, first-time:
    The vane noses the evening breeze, unhurried.
  or
    The vane sits easy in the last of the light.

  vane-story:
    Nor this one.

  vane-quiet:
    The vane keeps its own counsel.
end phrasebook

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction met on Monday, July 20, 2026 over Zoom. Attending: Hugh, Josh Grams, Andrew Stephens, Michael Stage, Zarf, Vince Kotchian, Doug Orleans, Stephen Jablon, Matthew Griffin, and anjchang welcomed newcomer Shelby S. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just a log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.

Links & Lightning Round

• Plans were floated for an in‑person gathering at MIT. We decided we’ll meet on campus somewhere in the fall (updated) Angela will reserve a room for the greeting, and then people might head to the Flat Top Johnny’s restaurant after.
• Josh shared updates from the author of Animalia, Ian Waddell, and mentioned connecting with Ed Sibley. Working on a Godot + Ink project.
• Shelby introduced herself — they’re a writer based in Baltimore. https://shelbyswitzer.com/
• Andrew Stephens’s award‑winning game Voyage of the Marigold was highlighted: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=nlp1zehiwuts79bf
• Matt Griffin shared several links from ELO 2026, including Mark Sample’s Subcutanean Variorum talk: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2026/algorithmsandimaginaries/schedule/7/ Media Arts Exhibits: https://projects.cah.ucf.edu/mediaartsexhibits/elo2026/ Recordings: https://anastasiasalter.net/ELO2026/recordings.html
• Nick Montfort’s ELO talk was shared: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2026/hypertextsandfictions/schedule/7/
• Matt also shared his own ELO talk: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2026/hypertextsandfictions/schedule/10/ He’s expanding it into a longform article planned for completion by September, alongside finishing his Videotome talk.

Narrascope Recap & Debugging Tools

We discussed a Narrascope‑adjacent project (from Aaron Reed) that allows you to inspect and annotate narrative variants — potentially useful for debugging branching structures or exploring narrative space. This led to a broader conversation about debugging tools and narrative visualization.

Aaron Reed related mentions:

• Medium series on Subcutanean design: https://medium.com/@aareed/subcutanean-design-posts-e25d9c158cce
• Subcutanean itself: https://subcutanean.textories.com/
• Game Narrative Reader: https://www.gamenarrativereader.org/

Sound Design, Mods, Puzzles & Parser Nostalgia

We then talked about a recent foray Angela had at a rap conference. How audio is another way to tell a story audibly, and that narrative branching is possible. Ambiguity in how homophones can be spoken (or twisted) by the rapper can result in exploring different ideas with the same utterance. e.g. how someone might say “it’s nothing” and different narratives cold result. Josh noted that removing the K from Counterfeit Monkey gives counterfeit money — a moment of collective amusement.

Hugh mentioned that many games are now doing clever sound design with interaction. For example, a racing car game where driving over items creates a sound composition. The Ocarina of Time was mentioned as having clever use of sound for narrative. Michael mentioned that open‑source narrative variants reminded him of the modding culture around Doom.

The group briefly touched on the Granite Puzzle in Zork, a classic parser moment that continues to inspire IF puzzle design.

Jams, Engines & Experiments

The following Jams were mentioned and sparked interest from the group:

• A low‑stakes month‑long jam from Neo‑Interactives: Engine Jam 26 — “try a new engine or make IF in a tool not meant for IF (Jupyter notebooks, spreadsheets, etc.)” https://itch.io/jam/engine-jam-26
• Andrew Stephens mentioned he’s joining an IInk Jam 2026 link: https://itch.io/jam/inkjam-2026 The two jams overlap by about a week.

Moments Out of Time & IFComp History

Stephen highly recommended Moments Out of Time, by L. Ross Raszewski a time‑loop mystery where you replay multiple runs, choose limited items, and reconstruct a family’s history. Many nice qualities noted, including the sound effects and stuff in the game. The game includes a debriefing phase that checks whether you’ve inferred things you shouldn’t know yet. Stephen also noted that Moments Out of Time is a Z6 game, complete with sound effects. https://www.ifwiki.org/Moments_Out_of_Time

The group noted it placed second in IFComp 2001 by a slim margin — a reminder of how community visibility and author activity can influence long‑term recognition. We discussed how certain games persist due to the author’s continued interaction with the community. John Ingold’s name also came up in connection with his winning game’s legacy.

Matt asked whether anyone had played Incident at Galley House.

Closing Notes

The meeting wrapped with reminders about upcoming events and jams.

A MIT Campus meetup is planned Wednesday July 29th, at 6PM postponed due to transit and weather forecast. We’ll aim to meet up sometime over the next few months on campus.

The next PR‑IF meeting is scheduled for August 17th at 6:30 PM.

Here's an interesting bit of game-historic preservation: someone has posted a browser-playable version of Cliff Johnson's epic (and epically-slow-to-release) 2012 puzzle game, The Fool and his Money. Here's the new web site: www.the-fool-and-his-money.com.

I dunno who did this. Cliff Johnson's original web site, www.thefoolandhismoney.com, stopped working a couple of years ago. I have no leads on what happpened to the man himself. I hope he's okay.

That's the announcement. I'm about to go into one of my rambles through game history, but I figured you'd want the hot link up front.

So, rambling. Way back in my college years, I played a Mac game called The Fool's Errand. It was awesome. Changed my life. (As you know if you played System's Twilight.)

Long after that -- but still a long time ago -- Cliff Johnson announced the sequel, to be titled The Fool and his Money. I immediately pre-ordered it. That was December 2002. After Shade but before The Dreamhold, as S. Morgenstern might have put it.

The game went through, let's say, a few delays. (And I gave it some guff on my blog for that.) But it shipped in 2012 and it was pretty darn good. I said that on my blog. My blog review is cited on Wikipedia, which I guess tells you how big a splash the game didn't make.

Sadly, playing The Fool and his Money has become its own sort of puzzle. The original Fool's Errand was a Mac puzzle game, which means it was released as Mac floppy disks. The Internet Archive is great at Mac floppy disks. You can play it right now! (Also play 3 in Three!)

The Fool and his Money, in contrast, was written in Adobe Director / Shockwave. (A different tech than Flash, despite Flash's "SWF" file suffix.) The "modern" Mac and Windows binaries were essentially launchers for an embedded Shockwave player and DCR media file.

This did not turn out to be a long-term solution. Director was end-of-lifed in 2013; Shockwave didn't last a lot longer. Mac dropped the hammer on Intel 32-bit apps in 2019, and started the switch to ARM in 2020. So running the Mac app at all became a problem.

I don't know what the story was on the Windows side -- better than Apple, to be sure. But even if you could run the app, you couldn't buy it any more. Cliff Johnson used some kind of hand-rolled license key framework. You buy the game, Johnson emails you a license key file.

I can't laugh at this, because it's exactly how I handled System's Twilight registrations for the first couple of years. In fact I would mail back a printed code sheet. I still have a big manila envelope full of registration forms.

But that was 1994. October of 2012 was into the era of Steam Greenlight, if barely; Itch.IO launched six months later. Either would have accepted gamerbucks and handed out The Fool and his Money forever. Cliff Johnson did not choose to avail himself of these services. Instead, he kept hand-crafting license key files... until he got tired of it, or Director broke, or the app ran into compatibility issues, or something. I don't know what straw broke the Tower's back, but you couldn't buy it any more.

A 2023 post by Renzo Pigliacampo cites this response to an inquiry (from TangoBunny, see comment below):

A few months after that, the game's web site (and Johnson's) turned into a fly-buzz banner:

It didn't. The site disappeared entirely in late 2024.

The good news, or interesting news anyhow, is that Renzo Pigliacampo dug into that license key framework. His post describes the process of installing Adobe Director, opening up the game file, and porting the script that handles license keys.

You can access to the encoder, decoder and keygen on GitHub together with the cast decompilation, or online from the extras section here.

We are not done yet, as there's a little detail we overlooked. Back over the game's website, in the installation instructions there are two sections: current orders and true believer pre-orders. The only difference is that the latter doesn't come with a PassKey.txt file, only the PassWord. So this means that there has to be a way to enter the game with just a password...

-- "Making a keygen for a commercial Shockwave game", 5 May 2023

In other words, the pre-order keylist was hard-coded into the app. And indeed Pigliacampo dug it out! Take a look.

There's me at #10. I recognize quite a few other names on the list, from my on-line and in-person social circles. Also some more famous puzzle fans. Check out #297.

(Special shout-out for Christina Schulman, #134, a friend from Pittsburgh. Christina was the very first person to register System's Twilight in 1994. She passed away a year ago.)

And that brings us around to where we started: the web port of The Fool and his Money.

In the year 2026, I still aspire to finish this damn game, so I ended up porting the original Adobe Director game content to the web.

I’ve made every effort to contact Cliff about this project, but I haven’t been able to reach him. If you know how to reach Cliff — or ARE Cliff — I’d appreciate hearing from you.

I’m sharing this web port in the spirit of software preservation for a game that is no longer commercially available or runnable on the platform that many purchased it on — but especially in appreciation of Cliff’s puzzling genius.

-- from "About this site", www.the-fool-and-his-money.com

I don't know who put it up. It wasn't me. The web site is unsigned. It claims to be someone on the True Believers list, so that cuts it down to 1600 names or so.

I can say that I did finish the damn game, back in 2012. It was worth playing. I could probably take another stab at it; it's not like I remember any of the puzzles.

So what happened to Cliff Johnson? I don't know. I don't know anybody who knows.

The last news I heard was 2017, when Johnson designed a puzzle for a book on the architecture of Kazakhstan. I realize how that sentence sounds but it entirely happened. I bought the book but I did not try to solve the puzzle.

I didn't try to read the book, either. It seems to be either pure crackpot woo or a serious monograph aimed at the crackpot woo market. These are the sort of questions which, if the answer were "yes", would not be phrased as questions:

Is Astana the sun-worshipping capital of Zionist Freemasons? Is there an energetic grid linking its major buildings with the pyramids of Egypt? Is the city’s Master Plan a coded magical talisman devised by the New World Order? Separate fact from fiction and find out how an underground stream of design principles and ideas permeates the layout and construction of the most extraordinary city ever conceived.

-- from the Astana web site

Great photos, though.

The book's puzzle page is still up. The original "Closing Date" was supposed to be the end of 2018. I guess nobody solved it, because on the web page, that's extended to May of 2020. There's no indication of any sort of conclusion since then. The people running the contest might have been a wee bit distracted by the end of the world.

Only that's not the last footprint left by Mr Johnson upon the puzzle world. Check out this article from the ancient eldritch time of the blockchain:

Looking for a different type of puzzle game? Quantum Noesis is a game that’s part graphic novel, part puzzle game, unlocks episodically over the weeks and features prizes for those who are fast enough to solve them first and – of course – it’s powered by NFTs and has its own unique token economics and behind-the-scenes AI enterprise.

Are the puzzles number puzzles? Word games?

Almost all of them are word-based puzzles and they were designed by legendary puzzle master Cliff Johnson. Cliff comes up with indescribable, category defying word puzzles, the likes of which you’ve never seen.

-- from "Quantum Noesis: Redefining the puzzle game with a little NFT magic", BlockchainGamer.Biz, 20 May 2022

(Credit to zaratustra on the thinky-puzzle-games discord for uncovering this treasure.)

The Quantum Noesis website lasted a bare two years, from a coming soon page in January 2022 to this snapshot in October 2023. There's some nice art in the middle. The aesthetic is sort of Tron crossed with Poser models, which, okay, I might have gone for that. Except for the NFT stuff. And except for the story, which is exactly the sort of weak-tea five-years-ago "decentralized AI utopia" hype which got stomped flat and incinerated by the corporate dystopian AI of the current hype cycle.

But, indeed, Cliff Johnson is listed as the game's Puzzle Designer. This interview remains live:

Cliff has come on board with Synesis One as our puzzle designer, after connecting with Tracy Spaight. He was drawn to the opportunity to create new conundrums and puzzles against the background of AI singularity and NFT word tokens.

-- from "Meet Cliff Johnson, Puzzle Game Designer", Medium, 23 March 2022

The article mostly just reiterates Johnson's history for folks too young to have experienced it first-hand. His comments about the Quantum Noesis game feel pro-forma. Well, I don't want to project my assumptions. Paying work is paying work.

I guess we can compare Cliff Johnson with Chris Manson, another cult puzzle-master of that era. (Maze and The Fool's Errand were just two years apart!) Manson did another couple of puzzle books after Maze; I spent a summer banging my head against The Practical Alchemist. But then he disappeared from puzzle-dom, preferring to work on illustrated storybooks... until Tonda Ros showed up with Blue Prince and asked him to guest-star.

The difference is that Blue Prince is a genre-defining triumphant hit. The Astana book and David Blaine's Mysterious Stranger were, um, not. I don't think that's Cliff Johnson's fault. Then again, I don't think the success of Blue Prince can be laid at Chris Manson's feet either. I don't know where I'm going with this comparison, sorry. "Riding coattails is a crapshoot"; well, working on your own stuff is a crapshoot too.

Of course the remixes and inspirations echo on forever, but that may be tepid comfort to the original artist.

Let's try a different comparison. People preserve, remake, and reinvent old games. Sometimes it's the original creators taking another run at their old work. Sometimes it's licensed and aligned with the corporate legal framework. And sometimes, as with the Johnson's games, it's samizdat. Under the covers. Puzzle sickos in trenchcoats handing out floppies. That last one was metaphorical.

As you know, I'm going that unaligned route with the Infocom canon. It started out as a community project, which is to say, I ignored copyright entirely. ("Fair use" is something we say to each other, not a legal ruling.) It became Officially Permitted when Microsoft open-sourced the Zork trilogy, but I'm way past that now, back into the technically-illegal.

It's nice when the business world does this work. (You can buy the Zork trilogy on GOG.) It's nice, full credit given, when the business world turns a blind eye to community work. That's the fanfic bargain; unspoken, largely projection on both sides, but real.

But we can't rely on the business world. We can't even rely on the non-profit world. (I say this as the IF Archive lead for IFTF! And a devoted admirer of the VGHF, etc.) The bigger the organization, the more legal crap it has to contend with. That's why my Visible Zorker project isn't an IFTF project; it's me going rogue.

Cliff Johnson, to his credit and his curse, refused to let The Fool and his Money get caught up in the business world. Now just plain folks have to take up where he left off.

If he did leave off. I never rule out a triumphant return, or even a modest low-key return. I'll let you know what I see.

Update with footnotes

Lot of replies to this one! Let me add more info.

First, the original download packages of The Fool and his Money remain available from the Internet Archive. You can download the Windows zip file from that link and play on a modern Windows setup, using one of the passwords in the True Believers list. Feel free to use mine: AND974VPR.

The Mac app is not viable on modern Macs, but can be made to work on sufficiently old Macs. (Looks like it will run on PowerPC or 32-bit Intel Macs.)

If you play on the web, then your progress is saved in local storage (cookies). Beware cookie-clearing.

On the UI

When you launch the game (either on the web or on Windows), you see a screen of twelve Tarot card "tokens". These are your save profiles. The card with the yellow-highlighted name is your current save slot. Since you're almost certainly playing on your own machine, just ignore the token list and hit "Play". You'll be off and running in the default slot.

If you hit "Tokens" you'll be back at the slot-selection screen. Just hit "Play" again.

The "Menus" screen shows all the available levels. Some are unlocked when the game starts; most will need to be unlocked by solving puzzles. There's a "Prologue" which introduces the story, but it doesn't autoplay -- you need to click to watch it.

On bugs

Torbjörn Andersson notes in comments that the Prologue sequence is janky in the web version. Now that I take a look, it's janky for me too.

(The first time I clicked "Prologue", the music played but no further animation started. When I clicked outside the pane and then hit "Prologue" again, the animation started too early.)

The Prologue isn't critical; it just recaps the Finale of The Fool's Errand. But this brings up the possibility of bugs in other scenes or puzzles. I've only tested a few.

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction met on Thursday, June 23, 2026 over Zoom. Attending: Zarf, Doug Orleans, Andrew Stephens, Michael Stage, Hugh, Carl Muckenhoupt, Vince Kotchian, Josh Grams, Allyson, Cidney Hamilton, Matthew Griffin, and anjchang. It was a lively reunion, with several folks returning from Narrascope and plenty of cross‑talk about talks, tools, mysteries, and parser theory. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just a log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.

PR-IF Representation at Narrascope

• Many had returned from Narrascope (Carl, Cidney, Zarf, Allyson). Carl shared thoughts on the Narrascope escape‑room experience, along with his long‑running review archive, The Stack: https://wurb.com/stack/
• Michael Stage’s Narrative Nonfictions: Using IF tools to reach students, workers, consumers and voters”
• Mentioned was Don’t Escape: 4 Days to Survive: https://www.gog.com/en/game/dont_escape_4_days_to_survive
• Josh highlighted recent uploads to the IFTF YouTube channel, especially the Analog Roleplaying keynote by Sharang Biswas.
• Allyson’s “That’s plainly inedible”: Crafting Custom Errors and Refusals for More Flavourful Parser-Based Narratives.

Narrascope Highlights

Many attendees had just returned from Narrascope (or had attended remotely), so the conversation was full of fresh impressions:

• The Narrascope YouTube playlist was shared: https://www.youtube.com/@IFTechFoundation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK58-DMuOdc&list=PLbTgViUvfchfMf1RnZnLs1Yiv6WJcps1-
• Carl and Allyson pointed out Joshua Mandel’s talk on designing adventure games
• Cidney also attended and shared impressions of the role‑play MUSH talk. Josh noted how interesting it was to hear from someone deeply rooted in MUSH culture.
• The author of Butterfly Soup launched a new Kickstarter, The Crane Rider’s Tale: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/psychickiss/the-crane-riders-tale
• Andrew has been following the Game Narrative Kaleidoscope project: https://www.inklestudios.com/kaleidoscope/ It encourages you to click around and explore, and there’s even a podcast at the bottom — featuring Zarf.
• The Kickstarter for The Crane Rider’s Tale (by the Butterfly Soup author) was shared: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/psychickiss/the-crane-riders-tale
• Andrew highlighted Game Narrative Kaleidoscope: https://www.inklestudios.com/kaleidoscope/ And noted that Zarf appears in the podcast linked at the bottom.
• Zarf mentioned he has a podcast recording coming up. Doug pointed out he recently heard Zarf on The Retro Adventurers podcast: https://retroadventurers.podbean.com/e/41/ Forum thread: https://intfiction.org/t/the-retro-adventurers-podcast/68047
• Hugh shared a Humble Bundle link for Inkle’s complete library: https://www.humblebundle.com/games/complete-inkle-library

Mystery Design, Deduction Games & Player Agency

A major portion of the meeting turned into a deep dive on mystery design, branching, and player agency. We discussed how players interpret clues.

Topics included:

• Variations on “who is the murderer”: the culprit could be the player, a friend, or a shifting suspect list.
• Andrew shared A Death in Hyperspace: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=e4cdkwedm311iyun
• Josh contrasted Brindlewood Bay’s “dramatic wrap‑up” style with more puzzle‑driven mysteries. Michael asked for the Brindlewood Bay talk link; Josh clarified it was part of Sharang’s keynote, Speculation by Design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD_60CeJbgM
• Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective came up as an example of a game where the mystery reshapes itself around who you suspect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes:Consulting_Detective(gamebook)
• Discussion of whether there are adduction games vs. deduction games — leading to a mention of Zendo, a game built around discovering hidden rules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zendo_(game)
• Zendo was mentioned as an example of rule‑discovery gameplay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zendo_(game)
• Josh shared a link about freeing yourself from the “tyranny of meaningful choices”: https://azhdarchid.com/you-must-free-yourself-from-the-tyranny-of-meaningful-choices/
• Matt reflected on Hadean Lands as the science‑game experience he’d always wanted.
• Andrew noted that parser IF makes narrator‑player dynamics especially visible because the parser speaks directly to the player.

Nicholas O’Brien’s talk sparked conversation about the point of interactivity — how much agency matters if it doesn’t alter the story, and how players stitch together meaning from small variations.

This led to a broader discussion of branching, agency, and narrative theory:

• Carl noted that branching is often just a slight variation on linearity anyway, citing Minecraft as an example of a game with many approaches but no traditional branch points.
• The group discussed how players stitch together meaning, even when choices don’t alter game state.
• Allyson mentioned Sarah Willson’s Closure, where the narrator is your best friend texting instructions to you.
• Iron Chif Episode 2 (ZIL) got a shoutout.
• Carl shared an IFDB poll and mentioned Ryan Veeder’s Orient Express project: https://ifdb.org/poll?id=o5jhbd6i9tw8jt

This led to a discussion of how much players understand the impact of their choices, and a “cranky post” someone shared about choices that don’t change game state but do change the stage of the player’s experience.

Finally, Gram Nelson’s classic triangle of identities came up — the relationship between player, protagonist, player‑character, and narrator — and how IF authors handle the shifting boundaries between them.

Other References,Tools, Articles & Parser Experiments

A few additional links and mentions rounded out the meeting:

• Josh shared a rosebush article on parser poetics in Portrait with Wolf: https://the-rosebush.com/2026/06/parser-poetics-in-portrait-with-wolf/
• The group celebrated ongoing experimentation with narrators in IF — from parser‑as‑narrator to friend‑as‑narrator to hybrid forms.
• ClubFloyd reminder: Sundays on ifMUD https://allthingsjacq.com/interactive_fiction.html#clubfloyd Instructions: https://www.ifwiki.org/ClubFloyd

Closing Notes

This month’s meeting was a whirlwind of Narrascope impressions, mystery‑game theory, branching‑narrative philosophy, and community updates. The mix of talks, tools, and design debates made for a rich conversation.

Travel logistics came up — several folks are considering Boston or NYC meetups later in the year.

It’s been a while since we’ve played Peter Kirsch, despite this being his 16th game for this blog. (Most recently: The Dalton Gang, Alaskan Adventure, The Curse of the Pharoah). This is the 20th and last game for the SoftSide Adventure of the Month (he didn’t write all of them, but he edited all of them and wrote the majority). He kept going after this with the SoftSide Adventure Series (10 more games!); it was published on their “SoftSide Selections” which has more than just adventure games. The reason for the transition seems to be the desire to put everything on the “disk version” (DV) or “cassette version” (CV) of the magazine, which SoftSide was starting to push out more by this point.

Source.

As mentioned in my earlier Kirsch posts, the benefit of cranking out so many games has been getting to explore every genre rapid-fire, including some where Kirsch is one of the earliest examples (like the track-the-killer game Jack the Ripper, which has two sequels in the forthcoming Adventure Series). Here the game is something in the Indiana Jones mold, kind of. We’re supposed to rescue the American ambassador’s daughter, who has been kidnapped and is somewhere in the jungles of India.

From Softside, January 1983.

As usual, the SoftSide series has Apple, TRS-80, and Atari versions; I do not have a download of the TRS-80 version. I went with the Atari despite being warned ahead of time of an issue which requires modifying a variable mid-game (found by Dobson in his playthrough); I will do the same thing myself when I get to that section.

Dobson points out that “Sam” could be male or female, so I decided to imagine the main character as a woman. I’m reading a book by Sam Hawke (City of Lies) so it works for me.

As far as why I’m going with Atari instead of Apple: in a practical sense, I find it easier to read text when there’s lowercase characters, I haven’t brought out Atari to this blog in a while, and just in general amongst retro-sites I get the sense that Atari users were much keener on the games than people on other platforms. I assume people on Apple were busy playing Sierra games. (Also, the Apple version might have the bug that the Atari version does, and the same fix may not work!)

I decided to make a verb list right away this time; Kirsch games can be finicky and sparse with their verb choices.

Three-letter parser, so typing SHOUT is really just SHOOT. I additionally want to emphasize this is not comprehensive on every possible verb; there’s one verb early not on my list (fortunately easy to work out).

There’s another reason I kicked off with a verb list: the game starts you in a maze. Just stalling a little bit before starting to map made me feel better.

There’s a brief scene if you go northwest, but it seems to be just marking the endpoint of the game.

Maybe you could give some supplies? All the game starts you with is a hat and a gun.

The aforementioned gun and hat then need (ingloriously) to be used as room markers for mapping the jungle. You can climb trees but they don’t always have something to see (this seems to be vaguely buggy, I’ll explain in a moment.

YOU’RE ON TOP OF A TALL TREE

Visible exits:
Down

It doesn’t look like a maze when properly laid out, but I still had to map it out like one (and the general logic to shape didn’t form until about halfway through). At least this isn’t the sort of maze with lots of “arrow jumps”; most rooms are connected to “adjacent” geographic space rather than flying around like a pinball.

Kirsch at least emphasizes the maze in one respect by having apples up one of the trees, but having the apples be stolen when you drop them. They can’t be used as “breadcrumbs” for mapping.

Most of the trees have bananas … sort of. It seems to be buggy; I think the author’s intent was to have jungle trees either be apples (in one case) or bananas (in all other cases) but every once in a while my game would have the bananas just not show up, even if shortly after on a second trip they did. Fortunately, there’s no need to get too fussy about it; all you need is to give a banana to a monkey in the jungle, who will leave behind a knife.

You can take the knife over to a canoe and cut a rope tying it to a tree; while I can then GO CANOE I unfortunately can’t get it to move!

This is where the unusual verb shows up: PADDLE is understood.

Hence, I am fairly certain I am in need of some sort of oar, but there’s only one other place that the oar can be: a sleeping bear in a different part of the jungle.

I thought about using the gun to scare or even just shoot the bear (…although in the latter case the bear would still be sleeping on the object…) but unfortunately this attracts the attention of “natives” who come and kill you (this is true if you SHOOT GUN anywhere, even not in the context of being at the bear).

I could of course check the very walkthrough I linked earlier but I’m going to be stubborn a bit longer. It’s faintly possible I’m wrong about the oar and it’s instead a get-a-boat-to-move puzzle, where there is almost no consistency between games on what commands to use. I’ll still take suggestions (from people who didn’t look at hints) but please no help right now otherwise.

It was remembered as a “joke” computer, with its 22 by 23 character screen and 3.5Kb of RAM. Revisionists forgot that at the time there was nothing else, and that within the confines of that 3.5Kb of RAM (sometimes more) we made magic happen.

Brendan Jones (quoted above) we’ve seen before with three VIC-20 games from 1982, the most memorable being Fatman: Crime and Vice which invokes gritty American ultracrime stories despite being written by a teen-aged Australian. He was friends with Nigel Dunk (mentioned here and here) and Nigel used Brendan’s Adventure Compiler to write three games of his own: Deathship, Werewolf, and Crown Castle. The third game (described as “coming soon” in a text file from many years ago) seems to have never been dumped and since we’re talking about private games here, likely was genuinely lost, but we can still play the first two.

I do want to emphasize the “private games” part; despite the moniker of the project being All the Adventures, we can’t take it literally. Not only is there lost commercial work, but there’s also the vast supply of games that were written on personal computers for fun and only played by family/friends. We’re reliant on the few people who uploaded their games to the Internet many years later and maybe a random disk or two surviving to get a window into what things were like historically.

From eBay Australia.

The private-game aspect is good to keep in mind here because both games are straightforward and short. That’s not necessarily a bad thing! Certainly for a modern player they’re used to “game poems” and the like which might last five minutes and most, but with a commercial product from this time it would be considered too insubstantial, and even as a type-in there would need to be special circumstances for an adventure to be so simple (although it did happen). In the context of VIC-20 games, there’s also the matter of low memory capacity to consider, although these games were written for the 16k expansion memory.

In Deathship, you “awake on a ship”, no exact context of what your function was (passenger? sailor?); everyone else is dead. (Not to be confused with the Ohio Scientific game by Aardvark with the horrible parser. This game’s parser isn’t great but the game is short and straightforward enough it doesn’t matter.)

You start in a cabin that “reeks of salt” with a watch and a cupboard. In the cupboard you can find a hammer if you LOOK (OPEN isn’t understood here) and if you LOOK at the watch (not READ) you are mysteriously told the number of turns until sunset. So mysterious, I wonder what kind of game this is?

The rest of the map is very small and not exactly reflecting a ship, but I’ll be forgiving. In the small span there’s some nice moments of atmosphere.

The atmosphere here would be better if you could do something with the locker, but you can’t LOOK or do anything else useful I could find.

Just laying about the map, in addition to the hammer/watch from the start area, and the warning note from a different cabin, you can find a lantern, some food, a key, some wood, some garlic, some spaghetti, and some pizza.

If it isn’t blatantly obvious yet, what we need are the hammer, wood, key, lantern. The garlic isn’t useful!

To the east there’s a room that’s dark and you’ll die if you aren’t carrying the lantern.

With the lantern, you’ll find a coffin. You need to open it and apply the wood/hammer promptly on the vampire sleeping inside.

You need to HAMMER WOOD.

Even with mapping things out and taking screenshots this was a five-minute game, but I’m not complaining; other than the parser struggle at the end it didn’t pad out its gameplay with tedious mazes or the like.

Next game! Rather than hunting down a vampire you are hunting down a werewolf.

You start in a Large Square with a poster announcing a reward for killing a werewolf menacing the village, and a monument with a “gun” inside which is the “fabled gun Wolfsmane”.

Unlike Deathship there are characters to talk to. A blacksmith mentions they can do melting including “firearm accessories”…

…a clerk wants proof there is a werewolf before allowing access to the gun in the monument (via a key)…

…a baker can’t sleep (this scene is purely for “color”, you can take the cake but it does nothing)…

…a necromancer wants some wolfsbane to make a werewolf repellant (you can nab the potion right there)…

…and a priest announces (with slurring I assume meaning they’re drunk) that they’re not a nice person.

I’m unclear what the deal is with the priest. If you take the potion from the necromancer and drop it, the priest will eagerly drink it and then die, but past him is a shovel which does nothing (DIG is not understood, it is unnecessary for the game). What you do need is a CRUCIFIX you can see by LOOKing at the altar. The cross is made of gold, but the crucifix is made of silver, which is (using the “fan fiction shortcut”) the sort of thing you want vs. werewolves. Since you can take the cross/crucifix while the priest is alive without getting stopped there’s no reason to kill the priest, who is simply trying to stop you from entering the graveyard.

While I’m talking about it, let’s get that crucifix swiped from the altar melted down into a silver bullet, although we still need the gun:

To the far north (just past some matches which you can pick up) there is a “Dense Wood” with wolfsbane, but it is attached to a tree. To cut it you need a knife which is conveniently nearby. What is less convenient is if you try to take the knife and leave a werewolf will kill you.

I was very confused here because I thought this was a timed event. It is not. The idea here is if the body is left behind the werewolf will get you because … smell or something? I don’t know, but if you BURN BODY before leaving, you won’t get killed when leaving the cabin.

With the knife you can take the wolfsbane, leave it for the necromancer, and get the repellant. For the gun, at least in my version of the game, I was just able to OPEN MONUMENT and GET GUN with no fuss at all. I didn’t need to bother with the clerk. I assume this is buggy, and what you’re supposed to do is use the head from the house with the body (why the smell of the head didn’t matter if the smell of the body didn’t matter I don’t know).

This lets you go south into a records room and pick up a key. It will let you then UNLOCK MONUMENT but this isn’t required to OPEN MONUMENT.

With the repellant, gun, and bullet, you have almost everything ready; there’s a bear in front of the werewolf cave, but you can nab some honey from a dock and bribe the bear to go away.

Plot twist at the end, though!

The solution here was more difficult to wrangle than Deathship, especially the cryptic part about burning the body and the priest who can be killed with a random potion drop (but for no apparent reason). Comparing with Brendan Jones (using the same engine): his games were much more linear. Crime and Vice in particular was quite scene-oriented, and likely designed imagining what each scene would be like in order; both of Dunk’s games were non-linear and based around collecting resources for killing a supernatural creature (meaning there was more flexibility in the order). I don’t think either approach is “bad”, necessarily, but based on the weak parser, I think the open world worked better; despite it being sometimes arbitrary if you needed to “drop” something or “give” it, by not locking the actions in a particular order it was less painful to hit a spot of parser difficulty (even though I generally persisted each time until I made it through parser trouble, having the option to go elsewhere made the overall experience less grating). Jones still has two games left in 1983 we have to play, so I’ll return to that comparison when I get to those games.

One last thing to note is that, based on the CASA solution, the C64 version of the game is less buggy than the VIC-20 version I played. Unfortunately, the file has seemingly been purged at every C64 site I’ve visited; I played the VIC-20 version not because I wanted to but because I had to. (The VIC-20 version also has some unfortunate text vandalism.) A current link to the C64 version would be lovely if someone has one (it’s freeware, so there’s no reason the file should be secret, I think?)