Planet Interactive Fiction

Even the winged birds and the two-footed and four-footed, o silvery
Dawn, have set forth following your regulations of time, from the ends of heaven—
For, dawning forth with your rays, you illuminate the whole luminous realm.

— Rig Veda, I.49 Dawn

I was stalled by, once again, spelling. But in a different way this time! (For my previous antics, see my writeup of Circus.)

You see, I was somehow mentally shelving this game having as a three-letter parser, I think because of the spelling “albotross”; ALB was fine for me mentally, ALBO or ALBOTROSS slightly broke my brain. So I went through what turned out to be correct (KILL) but typed it as KILL ALB and not KILL ALBO (whereupon you must specify throwing the knife).

The manual’s hint specified flying; looking at the dead alb– grr, let’s say, “bird”, the game says it has a hole. Miraculously, probably form playing too many Sierra games, I quickly came up with

LIGHT MATCH

MELT WAX

WITH MATCH

which was sufficient to plug the whole.

THE WING IS NOW SUITABLE FOR FLIGHT.

So just to be clear, we’re toting around a dead bird and using it to fly. Sure? You can then go back to the cold lake and fly your way across, but before showing you the next spot, I should mention this is probably the part closest to the Vedas. The gods can “fly like birds” and get constantly compared to them. In a portion on the Maruts (storm deities):

With your chariots fitted with lightning bolts and with spears, whose wings are horses, accompanied by lovely chants, drive here, o Maruts.
Fly here like birds, with highest refreshment for us, you masters of artifice.

In the literature from this period generally there’s enough references to flying and magical Vimānas (flying palaces or chariots) that modern conspiracy theories have developed around them. The 20th century book Vaimānika Shāstra claims the magic is in reality advanced technology; UFO enthusiasts go on to make claims about ancient astronauts and/or aliens depending on their inclination.

My wondering about a random American in the Midwest picking this as a topic could be resolved by this mythology, as it is one of the most famous pieces of cultural lore to come out of the Vedas. It still easily could be by accident but the moment of grabbing a gigantic bird from the sky and using it to fly did feel just a little bit like a moment of the gods (fly, not glide, we’re launching from ground level).

Across the lake is a narrow island. In the middle a soldier blocks the way.

The soldier has armor so you can’t just use KILL; a quick item roll call:

cup with water, knife, matches, shovel, dead bird, two Vedas, coin

I didn’t have the water before, but while frustrated by the bird I tested TAKE WATER at the lake and it worked. The coin came from looking at one of the Vedas (a bookmark, I suppose) and can be given to the soldier who will take it as a bribe and leave. This is followed by the other end of the island, where you can fly yet again.

No more lake: you’ve landed in a desert, which is fairly empty except for a cactus in the center. I tried various attempts to apply the KNIFE to the cactus before simply attempting a DIG instead.

This leads to an underground chamber and the Yagur Veda.

A bit further is a locked door; the game lets you PICK LOCK and specify you want to use the knife. I appreciate the amount of item re-use this has had.

Then comes the last obstacle, a TOMB ENTRANCE with a zombie and some burning leaves. I didn’t have much to work with but I was still carrying water; pouring it led to the leaves being extinguished and the zombie disappearing with the leaves (??).

Finally the fourth book can be claimed.

The locations for all the Morgan games have generally lacked depth, including this one, although somehow the format of a quasi-mystical challenge made it more playable; I had an easier time than Miner 49’er, certainly, and only got stalled by the bird.

I finally made a breakthrough on the mysterious ASD&D. I was poking about in this catalog which has the RPG Wizard’s Domain mentioned, and the name Thomas Johnson. This ended up being a much better lead than Scott Morgan, and I eventually landed on a timeline page which supposedly has a full story:

A Third-Party software house owned by Tom Johnson and run out of P.O. Box 46 Cottage Grove, MN 55016. The company seems to have surfaced in 1981 and disappeared in 1984, shortly after the 99/4A was abandoned by Texas Instruments. Among the dozen or so BASIC and Extended BASIC educational and entertainment products the company manufactured, perhaps the most remembered were Wizard’s Dominion and Entrapment. Wizard’s Dominion was an extremely popular fantasy adventure type game written by Johnson himself. Entrapment, another Tom Johnson creation, was a Mini Memory assembly language coded game that was so well written Texas Instruments had decided in early 1983 to pick it up and market it. Unfortunately, the big “bailout” of October 28th, 1983 took place first and Entrapment never came to market under the TI banner. It did surface through Tenex Computer Express in 1986 however.

The October date is when the TI-99/4A was discontinued.

There’s no sourcing on the connection and I haven’t been able to unearth anything definitively saying Johnson owned the company, but I’ve found enough products with Johnson’s name attached I’m comfortable saying the paragraph is mostly accurate. Previously I speculated

Still, I get the vibe we’re dealing with a 2 or at most 3 person operation here.

which is right, it’s just there’s really only one person (Johnson) who published Morgan’s work.

Coming up: Windmere Estate, for Apple II.

Now the Lord of the Sacred Formulation proclaims the mantra worthy to be spoken,
in which Indra, Varuṇa, Mitra, Aryaman, and the gods have made their home.
Just that would we speak at the rites—the faultless mantra that brings good fortune, o gods.
And if you gladly receive this speech, o noble men, it will attain all things of yours worth winning.

— Rig Veda, I.40 Brahmaṇaspati, Jamison and Brereton translation

Scott Morgan of Eden Prairie, Minnesota produced a series of six games for Texas Instruments computers in 1982 published under the name American Software Design and Distribution (ASD&D).

007 Aqua Base

Haunted House

Miner 49’er

In Search of the Four Vedas (right here!)

Fun House

Stone Age

I am not clear on the intended order. I started with the “beginner” game (Aqua Base) which said at the end to play Haunted House, and the ending of Haunted house said to play Miner, and the end of Miner said to play Vedas, so I’m just following the chain. I should find out at the end of this game whether I’m playing Fun House or Stone Age next.

In Search of the Four Vedas is one of the two games (along with Fun House) marked as “advanced” although at least the start of the game is straightforward.

During this adventure you must find the ancient books that your tribe lost many years ago. They contain great knowledge of magic and the past.

Your goal is to find the four Vedas of Hinduism: the Rig Veda, the Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda and the Atharva Veda.

I don’t think there’s world-verse integration like we had with El Diablero; it’s just the four books form the “treasures” of the game and are a little more interesting than the usual *RUBY*, *DIAMOND*, and *GOLD NECKLACE*. I am not sure why a random American in the Midwest latched onto the Vedas as a good goal, but I appreciate the variety.

The action kicks off on a beach next to a lake too cold to swim in.

The anchor can be nabbed, the X can be dealt with later, and tree can be climbed.

The manual hints about flying a bird, and FLY ALB says “CAN’T FLY…YET!” so I assume there’s some way of setting it up. Here’s the remainder of my currently accessible map:

While quite small I already have two of the Vedas! The first can be found by retrieving a rope from a nearby cave, tying it to the anchor, and then throwing the anchor while next to a “very large tree”. This allows entering a treehouse.

The shovel can then be carted over to the beach where the X sits; digging reveals a chest and the second of the four treasures.

That went rather quickly, but perhaps the treasure distribution is “imbalanced” and the third and fourth will raise serious difficult. As things go I am stuck as there is not much to noodle around with. The Rig Veda had a coin inside; a hut had matches, wax, and a cup. Other than those I still have the shovel for digging as well as a knife, but that’s it. There doesn’t seem to be any places for secret exits, and the “albotross” is not cooperating with any verbs I’ve tried to throw at it. My guess is, structurally, the bird takes us to Part 2 and that’s where things get complicated or at least Advanced.

About now is when I’d trudge through my verb list but the parser treats every valid command in a bespoke way, so there’s no way to find out (say) LASSO is a valid word without testing it in context.

In 1988, a contest was run by the Adventureland BBS out of Lexington, Kentucky called The Great American Adventure Search.

ADVENTURELAND, the largest public domain Adventure base in America, is looking for a few good adventures. And we are offering a prize for the best! From September 1, 1988 to October 30, 1988 we’re offering a prize for the best adventure uploaded! What sort of a prize? How about the Adventure of your choice? Want a copy of Ultima IV? How about Kings Quest III? You might choose a paid-up license for the Adventure Game Toolkit. Any adventure game you’d like (up to $70.00 in value) can be yours IF the adventure YOU upload is chosen as the best!

Adventureland was a BBS up from the mid-80s until at least 1995 which lived up to its name by housing a large number of adventures (over 10 MB in the same year the contest was run). The author, Douglas C. Rogers, also encouraged the writing of more adventures with software for the toolkit AGT called Adventurer’s Aid; in addition, he wrote a guide on how to write adventures in BASIC.

It seems to me that there have got to be others out there in modem country who have adventure running around in their heads. If you are like me, you are brimming over with plots, and just can’t fathom how to code them. Well, since I started writing adventures in 1981, I’ve learned alot about how to code.

The tutorial package I just mentioned includes, as a sample game from the author, The Case at KAXL. We played that game here already; it’s notable for trying to model a “real” environment as opposed to a puzzle-laden one, with locations that only exist because they’d be part of a real radio station and not in service of a story. At the time I didn’t have any other information on the author, but I now can say not only was Douglas C. Rogers responsible for all the BBS activity above, he was the one who wrote today’s game, Drive-In. My suspicion of his involvement with radio was correct; while running the BBS he was a professor at Eastern Kentucky University in Communications.

Drive-In is a much different game than The Case at KAXL. It is, as The Adventurer’s Guild calls it, smut. In fact, I’m going to drop a not safe for certain work environments warning.

Beware of anything past the magazine cover below.

As Rogers was rather dedicated to the public domain model of adventure distribution, Drive-In didn’t need to follow the same path as Bawdy Adventure with sales in a New Orleans-published book; rather, Rogers himself could simply distribute the game on his own BBS once it got started.

Well, here it is! The big evening
Your buddy Arnie set you up with this little number named Andrea, and here you are

There are multiple versions as noted by CASA:

• the 1982 original for Commodore 64
• an incomplete version for Tandy CoCo
• a 1987 version for Coleco ADAM by “ADAMafic Software”
• a PC port in 1987 (almost certainly by the author himself, as he ported his other C64 adventure game Nectar of the Gods using the same company name, Program Dynamics)
• a port by Alan Pilon in 1988 called Passion Pit with a randomized female companion
• a shortened 1990 version called Crusin

I went with the Rogers ’87 port. (The C64 original has a moment mentioned in the Adventurer’s Guild writeup that the author clearly re-considered.)

Before moving on to “the big evening” I’m going to interrupt with a question: is this also “the first” text adventure smut? Not exactly: first of all there’s all the mainframe games we’ve now visited, like Castle ending in a three-way, or Haunt’s “touchdown”, but there’s a general lack of detail. The other early candidate is a game called Porno Adventure (1981) which I haven’t written about yet, and probably isn’t worth a post on its own, so here’s the sidebar–

This game is more a “simulator” than an adventure game and has serious customization involved as the player is able to have a “UNINHIBITED, UNCENSORED ADVENTURE” with “ANY WOMAN THEY CHOOSE”. Unusually, the game lets you swap who you are giving commands to, so while start as a man having an uninhibited adventure with a custom woman, it is possible to change to the woman at any time by typing “0”.

SINCE THIS IS A FREE ADVENTURE, WE SPARED ALL COSTS AND PROGRAMMING SHORTCUTS TO BRING YOU THE PROGRAM IN THE CHEAPEST, QUICKEST WAY POSSIBLE. THEREFORE THIS PROGRAM NILL NOT RECOGNIZE ANY ABBREVIATED COMMANDS.

You are then asked the woman’s name, measurements, clothing, what she calls you, where it takes place, and some other details. You then have a selection of items like “Vaseline”, “priest robe” and “whip” you can pick up before entering the scene.

GENTLY, I TAKE INSERTNAMEHERE’S FACE IN MY HANDS AND DRAW HER TOWARDS ME. SHE TREMBLES AS I PRESS MY MOUTH AGAINST HERS, THEN PARTS HER LIPS, INVITING MY EAGER TONGUE TO EXPLORE THE WARM AND SENSUOUS WETNESS OF HER SOFT MOUTH.

The reaction to KISS is shown above. Sex scenes are also possible. If you swap perspectives, the actions are still done from “I” perspective — it’s just you can specify the command UNDRESS or whatnot and see the result.

Again, this is really a “fantasy simulator” and anything you try succeeds (if the parser understands it). While you are still “in a world” delivering commands like an adventure game, it doesn’t play like one. I’m also unclear if Otto Bresser is a pseudonym. A DOS port in the late 80s changes his name to Dr. Otto Bresser. It does, for certain, qualify as “smut” far more than other games we’ve seen; I think the distinguishing factor is that there’s no “movie cut” past whatever scene gets initiated, and you instead can describe a sequence of actions in detail.

Drive-In is firmly an adventure game. Just like “Dr.” Bresser’s creation it has the player describe actions in detail, as they visit a drive-in with Andrea and attempt to score a touchdown. Very much unlike the Bresser game, you can’t just do whatever you want.

You are in the front seat of your car
You see: ANDREA, wearing halter-top and shorts. loudspeaker. radio (OFF).

Trying to turn on the radio led to a curious response.

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO ? TURN ON RADIO

ARE YOU TRYING TO DEAL WITH THE LOADSPEAKER OR THE RADIO? YES
TRY A NOUN-VERB COMBINATION INSTEAD OF VERB-NOUN

The parser here wants LOUDSPEAKER OFF, RADIO ON, or RADIO OFF. The game comes close to understanding the command, it’d be nice if it went all the way! The game hints (when typing HELP, which I relied on quite a bit) that you want to switch from the movie sound (loudspeaker) to music, so the right acts here are LOUDSPEAKER OFF (“I dropped it out the window…”) and RADIO ON. You are then instructed you can HOLD HANDS…

SHE SLIDES CLOSER TO YOU.

…at which point the HELP feature gives no further direction. My other attempts at interaction were either not understood (the game does not understand conversation at all) or lightly rebuffed, so I got out of the car and went searching. (I thought possibly the game was one-room up to that point; the variation Crusin I mentioned puts all the action inside the car.)

You are Outside, next to YOUR car
You see: YOUR car.
YOU CAN GO: NORTH EAST SOUTH WEST

The map is essentially a straight north/south line. You can wander away from it but that either lands you in a VACANT space or LOST, at which point you are stuck there forever until you restart the game. I always like a little existential dread with my dating simulators.

There’s a playground along the way with a slide, and on top there is a note via Arnie (who set up the blind date) saying “I forgot to tell you! Andrea is NOT on the pill! BE CAREFUL”; this is an indication a condom is needed.

To the far north is a “snackbar COUNTER” and I was unable to read the sign or find out any kind of menu. (It kept repeating the message on the note from the slide.) The player avatar has a billfold with a dollar and popcorn costs 50 cents, but that’s just by guesswork, I’m sure they have other items.

YOU ARE HOLDING:
shirt which you are wearing.
slacks which you are wearing.
briefs which you are wearing.
billfold.
.50 in CHANGE.
popcorn.

The change is enough to go outside, go to a men’s room (deceptively as a drawn arrow, but going “west” is VOID, sorry, you need to GO MENS) and buy a condom from the machine (except the game only understands RUBBER, by this point I was checking the walkthrough).

After all that, I had nothing left to do but go back to the car. Based on the walkthrough I was missing PUT ARM after HOLD HANDS; the parser is very finicky.

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO ? PUT ARM

AROUND WHAT (1 WORD)?

The player is now free to start kissing. FACE isn’t a recognized word. Andrea isn’t into going for the lips right away, but she’s fine with neck kissing. From there the player can move into blowing into her ear, and then she’s fine with kissing lips.

Any further steps mention it getting “cramped” and the idea here is to (without any real mention this even counts as a location) GO BACKSEAT followed by CALL ANDREA.

From here I’m not going to go into intricate detail on each step after. I’m unclear how fixed the walkthrough is and how much is simply “freestyle” choices. (At least some choices the HELP command comes back, at least.) The idea behind the game is to avoid messages like “pushing you away” eventually finally getting to use the rubber. I found it interesting how many different body parts were accounted for (and how easy it was to nonetheless run into an error parser message with an unrecognized part) but the parser made it very difficult to get any progress.

The Case at KAXL was a much better game, but that was a game where the action all clearly fell within the parameters of standard text adventure commands; here, the author was trying something relatively new. The game opened up — due to its nature — a wide potential list of actions, but only understood a fraction of them.

Rogers might have played Otto Bresser’s game first given his TRS-80 background and voracious habit of collecting public domain software. There’s unfortunately no way to ask; while he made a brief appearance at the Adventurer’s Guild post about the game and posted contact information, he died a year later, in 2022.

I’m delighted that after more than four years of work by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and myself — we’re co-editors of this book — the MIT Press and Counterpath have jointly published

Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023

Book launch events are posted here and will be updated as new ones are scheduled!

This anthology spans seven decades of computer-generated text, beginning before the term “artificial intelligence” was even coined. While not restricted to poetry, fiction, and other creative projects, it reveals the rich work that has been done by artists, poets, and other sorts of writers who have taken computing and code into their own hands. The anthology includes examples of powerful and principled rhetorical generation along with story generation systems based on cognitive research. There are examples of “real news” generation that has already been informing us — along with hoaxes and humor.

It’s all contextualized by brief introductions to each excerpt, longer introductions to each fine-grained genre of text generation, and an overall introduction that Lillian-Yvonne and I wrote. There are 200 selections in the 500-page book, which we hope will be a valuable sourcebook for academics and students — but also a way for general readers to learn about innovations in computing and writing.

You can buy Output now from several sources. I suggest your favorite independent bookseller! If you’re in the Boston area, stop by the MIT Press Bookstore which as of this writing, has 21 on hand as of actually publishing this post, has 14 copies!

Upcoming Book Launches, Talks, and Events

February 24 (Monday) Carnegie Mellon University workshop “Ars Combinatoria: A Generative Poetics” with the editors, CFA 215, 2pm–4pm. Registration required, limited to 15.

February 24 (Monday) Carnegie Mellon University book launch with the editors, CFA, STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (CFA 111), 5:30pm–7pm. Free & open to the public, please RSVP.

March 11 (Tuesday) Massachusetts Institute of Technology book launch with the editors, MIT’s Room 32-155, 5pm-6:30pm. Free & open to the public. Book sales thanks to the MIT Press Bookstore.

March 29 (Saturday) AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference, on the panel “Making a Literary Future with Artificial Intelligence,” Concourse Hall 151, 1:45pm–3pm.

March 25 (Tuesday) A talk about & reading from Output, Narcissystem, and All the Way for the Win at the New School, details TBA.

April 5 (Saturday) Both co-editors are on a panel at Baltimore’s CityLit Festival, details TBA.

Previous Events

November 11 (Monday): Both editors spoke at the University of Virginia 5 Bryan Hall, Faculty Lounge, Floor 2. Free & open to the public. 5pm.

November 20 (Wednesday): Online book launch for Output, hosted by the University of Maryland. Both editors in conversation with Matt Kirschenbaum. Free, register on Zoom. 12noon Eastern Time.

November 21 (Thursday) Book launch at WordHack with me, David Gissen, Sasha Stiles, Andrew Yoon, and open mic presenters. Wonderville, 1186 Broadway, Brooklyn, 7pm. $15. Book sales.

December 6 (Friday) Output will be available for sale and I’ll be at the Bad Quarto / Nick Montfort table at Center for Book Arts Winter Market, 28 W 27th St Floor 3, 4pm–8pm.

December 9 (Monday) Book launch at Book Club Bar with the editors, Charles Bernstein, Robin Hill, Stephanie Strickland, and Leonard Richardson. 197 E 3rd St (at Ave B), New York City’s East Village. Free, RSVP required. 8pm. Book sales thanks to Book Club.

December 13 (Friday) European book launch with the editors, Scott Rettberg, and Tegan Pyke. University of Bergen’s Center for Digital Narrative, Langesgaten 1-2, 3:30pm. Free & open to the public, book sales thanks to Akedemika. This event was streamed & recorded and is available to view on YouTube.

January 13 (Monday) “The Output Anthology at Computer-Generated Text’s Cultural Crux”, a talk of mine at the UCSC Computational Media Colloquium, Engineering 2 Room 280, 12:30pm–1:30pm. Free & open to the public.

January 20 (Monday) Toronto book launch with me, Matt Nish-Lapidus, & Kavi Duvvoori, at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Culture & Technology (previously Marshall McLuhan’s seminar room), 6pm–7:30pm.

Jesper Juul has an amazing new book:

Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 !

Just in case you thought I was the only one blogging these days — no, Jesper has a post in which he describes the book and lists talks he is doing about it. In the book, he considers how the C64 was different things to different people over time, with five main sorts of media imaginaries (or computational imaginaries) at work.

Those of us at the MIT Trope Tank were delighted that he came to visit in Spring 2022 and did a good bit of the research and writing of this book while he was with us. I’m also really pleased that this book was the fourth of four 2024 publications in the MIT Press Platform Studies series that I edit with Ian Bogost.

I want to highlight two of Jesper’s talks about this book coming up in February:

ROMChip is sponsoring an online talk on February 7, 2pm Eastern, on Twitch. I have an online meeting at the same time, but fortunately I’ll be at this next event later in February:

MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing is hosting a talk on February 25 at 5pm, Room 14S-130. This room is inside the Hayden Library; I’ll be introducing Jesper.

You could point at Crowther’s participation in a Tolkien-based D&D campaign and say nearly all adventures games are spawned from Tolkien. However, for direct attempts at adapting Tolkien, we’ve so far only had

Ringen based around Moria

and

Cracks of Doom based around the Mordor area at the end of Lord of the Rings.

Firienwood is a name reference only so doesn’t count. What does count is today’s game, Arkenstone, which has the Misty Mountains, Mount Gundabad, Mirkwood, Lake Town, Wilderland, and Lonely Mountain. What’s truly perplexing is how those are represented by a grand total of eight rooms.

The source of our minimalism today is the unmodified VIC-20, the same type of computer Victory Software dealt with. It comes from the book ZAP! POW! BOOM! Arcade Games for the VIC-20, written by Mark Ramshaw.

It was published by Interface Publications in the UK. The book was later merged with the spectacularly named Symphony for a Melancholy Computer by a different author (Tim Hartnell) to form the US version of ZAP! POW! BOOM! Arcade Games for the VIC-20.

We’re caring about Mark Ramshaw’s book as it included a game called Adventure which got re-dubbed Arkenstone upon its US debut. (I went with the easier-to-search-for name, at least I had an option this time!) I played what was technically the original version (download here) although it appears there is no difference between the two.

In order to cope with the tiny memory size of the VIC-20, Ramshaw does a very unusual trick with the parser. Each word is typed on a separate line, with ENTER pressed between, and the last word needs a period. So to pick up a spear, you type

pick
up
spear.

It’s exceedingly surreal to do this. We have experienced a separate-line parser with two words before (like with Chou’s Alien Adventure) but not more than two words, and never with the period mark convention. If you hit enter nine times the game says you are being “Too verbose” so it clearly is aspiring to understand long sentences.

The commands as given in the book are go or move, catch, skewer, fill. kick, pick, swing, inventory, listen, drop, and throw. Recover is a special command for claiming the Arkenstone after rescuing it.

You are the “intrepid hero” and start out in South Mirkwood where there are trees and a bucket.

Your job is to make your way to Lonely Mountain where the dragon sleeps and nab the Arkenstone, the long lost treasure of the dwarves.

Regarding the amusingly compressed map, there is at least a little precedent for that (see, for example Caves of Olympus); here the idea is stretched to its limit as each step takes a matter of days. At least functionally you can still treat the rooms like they were all next to each other.

You might think, given the size of the map (and the fact there is nothing blocking your way) it ought to be possible to just saunter east three times, north once, and then nab the Arkenstone for victory. I did in fact do this once.

The problem is that it was very lucky: usually what happens at the start is the dragon wakes up and then hides the treasure if you wander into the dragon’s location while awake and without any defense, you die. So let’s ignore this as a bonus ending (STEAM ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: THE DWARVES HIRED A REAL BURGLAR) and figure out how to cope with the dragon.

It’s … not much more complicated. Just to the north there is a spear. You should start by going to pick it up (even if the dragon wakes up right away, you have time).

Then defeating the dragon is just a matter of using “skewer/dragon/with/spear” when you see him.

That works if the dragon is awake or asleep! Now you can again just go in and grab the Arkenstone and use “recover”.

You can do a little bit more: you can take a “cage” over at Mount Gundabad, take it to the Misty Mountains (which is south of the Wilderland for some reason) and catch an eagle. (!!) Then it can give hints. (!?!??)

2015 Print”The eagle says:”
2020 Print “What is best axe or spear?Why not quench the worm’s thirst”
2025 Print “There is something special in Mirkwood”

The axe is where the dragon as sleeping, and you can take it to Mirkwood to SWING AXE AT TREES

That was clever — some trees fell down

but other than that message the trees do nothing. And of course it is so simple to take the spear to the target why bother with any of that? I suspect this was a text adventure in progress that got tossed into print without smoothing out the rough edges.

Regarding Mark Ramshaw, who wrote the game, and Tim Hartnell, who wrote the VIC-20 book that combined with Ramshaw’s, the most complete information I’ve found on them is from a book they co-wrote in 1983, Getting Started on Your Commodore VIC-20. Tim is described as founder of the “British National ZX Users’ Club” and its magazine Interface — that is, his club did the publishing.

But what about Ramshaw? He is literally described as a “schoolboy” with “an active interest in VIC games”. This suggests to me he was a teen-aged author like many others we have had, who knew Hartnell from his computer club activities. Ramshaw kept his publishing connection and went on be a journalist for magazines in the UK such as PC Review.

We’re proud to announce that Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app. It’s 30% off until February 6th!

Deep beneath the earth, the dragon is rising! Quest into mysterious underground caverns and forests to learn magical secrets, draw strength from friends and family, secure alliances that can save your home, and carry on the heroic legacy of Stronghold!

Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery is an interactive fantasy novel by Amy Griswold where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—380,000 words and hundreds of choices—without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

You’re the grandchild of your town’s legendary heroic leader, and everyone’s always expected great things from you. So when you began to study sorcery, you intended to prove them all right—until your magical experiments disturbed a sleeping dragon in the depths of the mountain caves. Now you’ll have to discover something even more powerful if you’re going to save your town and help your family’s legacy endure for generations to come.

Delve deep into ancient caverns to find more fuel for your sorcery—along with unexpected allies and places for secure fortified camps. But there are also fragile wonders beneath the earth: will your efforts to protect your town threaten the dryads and treasures in the caverns? Learn mystic lore to strengthen your fight against the dragon—alchemy, magic, or even the knot-work enchantments of goblins and spiders—or raise an army from among your loyal townsfolk and allies. Or maybe, just maybe, you can bargain with the dragon—if you dare.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay or straight.
• Continue the saga of the town founded in Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate, and see the effects of your actions two generations later.
• Marry a spouse (or two), or form a new family with a sworn sibling.
• Explore vast underground caverns to unearth secrets and treasures.
• Reconcile with your grandparent and uphold their position in your town – or convince everyone to defy authority and claim leadership yourself!
• Rebuild an ancient tower into the perfect workshop for mastering sorcery!
• Fight goblins, spiders, and dryads – or make them your allies against the dragon.
• Bond with your friends: help them make difficult decisions, influence their views on important issues, and play matchmaker for them!

How long can your stronghold stand against the dragon’s wrath?

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

On Wednesday, January 29, 2025, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of interactive fiction at Patreon and Ko-fi.

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Snowquest (2009) by Eric Eve

This game begins with you making a trek across the snowfields towards distant mountains in the north. You have forgotten what it was like before this. But eventually you remember that you’re questing for the lost Book of Yashor, written in the ancient tongue. Only you can read its secrets and save everyone.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2009 where it took 3rd place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

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The Sueño (2015) by Marshal Tenner Winter

You play as Benji Evans, an average male university student in Philadelphia. You’re usually broke, so you’ve come to the local hospital to earn some money by participating in a sleep study that will test the side effects of a new medication called The Sueño. It means dream in Spanish.

This was entered in IF Comp 2015 where it took 17th place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

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Thornfell Manor: 1984 (2024) by Tijn Kersjes

In this paranatural murder investigation, you play as Evelyn Cross, the best (and only) paranatural detective in town. Officers found one of the missing kids “shred to pieces” in the old Thornfell Manor, and now it’s your job to investigate.

This game was written for PunyComp 2024, then later participated in the Short Games Showcase 2024. Placements in both events to be determined at time of writing.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

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The Basilisk and the Banana (2024) by Jasper and Darren

In this mythologically-inspired game, you play as Hermes, messenger of the gods. You need to deliver an important letter from your island home to your dad, Zeus, on Mount Olympus. With your magic sandals, this should be an easy flight, but a basilisk and a banana will complicate things.

This game was written in Adventuron and was an entry in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2024 where it took 2nd place. It’s also an entry in the Short Games Showcase 2024, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

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The eight-headed giant (2024) by Zeno Pillan

In this short abstract game set in an office, you play as Gaya, an organized girlboss. Gather what you need, then make your presentation to the eight-headed giant in the aquarium. Features ASCII art.

This game was an entry in the Neo-Twiny Jam 2024, then later in the Short Games Showcase 2024.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

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Ghost Hunt (2024) by Dee Cooke

In this very short game, you play as a kid who regrets bringing the coffin up from the basement into the living room as a Halloween decoration. You accidentally released the ghosts that were inside and now you have to capture them before your parents find out.

This game was written in Adventuron and was an entry in the La Petite Mort (English) division of Ectocomp 2024 where it took 13th place. It was also an participant in the Short Games Showcase 2024, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

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Museum of Paranormal Phenomena (2024) by Olaf Nowacki

In this slice-of-life tribute to Ghostbusters, you’re visiting a museum where every room depicts a scene from the movie. But a few things seem out of place.

This game was an entry in the Le Grand Guignol (English) division of Ectocomp 2024, placement to be determined. This is also an English translation of Museum der paranormalen Phenomene which was entered in the Le Grand Guignol (German) division of Ectocomp 2024.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

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Not Another Sad Meal (2024) by manonamora

In this cooking adventure, you play as someone getting over a bad breakup. Drinking hasn’t helped. You need to make and eat a decent meal. Do you want to make deluxe toast, cursed pizza, or fancy noodles?

This game was written in Adventuron and was an entry in Recipe Jam, SeedComp! 2024, and Short Games Showcase 2024, placements to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Tom Sato, also known as Toshiyuki Sato, was a Japanese national whose interest in computers started as a child:

I watched the film of men landing on the moon, and I was fascinated by the computer in the film.

He moved to London at the age of 14, eventually going to college to study physics and astronomy while teaching himself programming. He went to work for Microsoft right out of college while also writing for various magazines, focused on the MSX computer (being a Microsoft product). His writings include a 1985 article on the history of MSX Basic and technical books on the platform.

Reversing back in time back to around when he graduated college — 1982 — he kicked off his own company, Orchestrated Computing, later renamed to Program Direct. (Orchestrated Computing seems like a better name to me. At least it’s easier to search for!) He started with no company name at all, posting a classified ad in Popular Computing Weekly 5 August 1982:

The earliest full ad anyone’s been able to find is from Computing Today in September.

This is before the existence of the MSX, so he was working with the BBC Micro. The second package listed has an Adventure as the main program with — as a bonus — the programs INVADERS, PONTOON, and LUNARLANDER. The last three games have been lost, but Adventure was recently found on a C90 tape stuffed with other games (Lords of Time, Castle of Riddles, Bumble Bee, Planetoids, Cruncher, Danger UXB) and rescued in 2023.

Enter the DUNGEON at your peril but you have been warned: you are likely to get killed if you don’t use your imagination. Use your weapon, magic, food and treasure efficiently or else. Don’t enter the RANDOM MAZE or you’ll be shouting for help.

Despite the name being Adventure, this is not an adventure game; this is quite directly an RPG. It took enough work to confirm this I decided to plow ahead, but there are zero puzzles: this is mainly a game about fighting enemies in the right order relative to one’s stats, and making sure to eat enough food to rejuvenate.

The game at first appears to have a parser, and it took me a while to realize it was mostly only looking at the first one or two characters of what I was typing. I ended up checking the source code to find:

N/S/E/W/U/D = Directions
F = Fight
G = Get
I = Inventory
O = Open
T = Trade
Q = Quit
EA = Eat
DR = Drop
ST = Status

So if you type G for Get, it then asks another prompt what it is exactly you are getting; if you type GET DIAMOND the game will prompt what you mean to pick up because the entire text “ET DIAMOND” got ignored.

ST, or STATUS, provides STRENGTH, CONSTITUTION, DEXTERITY, DEFENCE, WEALTH, and EXPERIENCE.

STRENGTH=20
CONSTITUTION=25
DEXTERITY=100%
DEFENCE=100%
WEALTH=50 coins
EXPERIENCE=O

I’m not sure what the max is for Strength and Constitution, I would guess 255. All four stats including Dexterity and Defence both can get damaged by enemies; all four stats can be brought up by food (Meat is the best, giving +2 to Strength and +1 to Constitution).

Before showing off the map, and discussing how combat works, I should mention this is a branch of a Wizard’s Castle style game. (The original is from 1980; in the 80s I played the DOS version for many hours off some random public domain disk.) I’m not going to go into intricate detail as the CRPGAddict already has, but the general idea of this small mini-genre is having a small set of mini-floors (generally 8 by 8). These games generally give a “lamp” or some other method of seeing ahead so you don’t have to fight monsters if you don’t want to, and the strategy tends to be to soak up all the treasures possible, convert them into money to buy potions/level-ups for stats, then either go on a monster rampage after or just kill the small selected set of monsters needed to win the game.

Now, the top floor of the map (there are three of them).

Again, 8 by 8. You start in the upper left. All blue squares are treasures, all red squares are monsters (some are randomly placed, some are not). Green represents a “merchant” where you can (T)rade and either sell treasures you’ve found or buy things like food and weapons. The easiest way to buy things is to simply go to the town in the upper right corner which has shops.

You start with 50 wealth so there’s really no reason not to buy the best weapon (mace) and shield right away.

The version I downloaded, by the way, has an error in line 830 checking if the player has a shield — you need one to fight. I just replaced the line with PRINT “”, putting an extra blank line at the start of fights. It looks like the line had a corruption in the dump.

In addition to the weapon and shield you can get a KEY (for opening doors, it doesn’t get used up and it is cheap, again: just buy one), a CROSS, and a WAND. The latter two are for magic; I used one of the two once in the entire game.

The main difference between this game and a regular Wizard’s Castle clone is that it tries to describe all the rooms. Some of the descriptions are minimal, sometimes Sato has added slight touches.

Dwarves are the lowest form of enemy, only giving one experience point each. This is followed by goblins at 3 experience points and centipedes at 4.

Each combat starts with a monster description which may or may not suggest some strategy. I found the descriptions a nice touch, although of the different moves possible…

(E)vade
(F)orward
(B)ackward
(T)hrow
(S)tab
(H)it
(M)agic

…most of them aren’t really needed. I did, upon fighting a difficult scorpion, try using Backwards to change the distance to the enemy hoping to reduce damage; you can then Throw from safety assuming you have multiple weapons. (If you throw with only one weapon, you get a game over: “You silly fool! You haven’t got anything to fight with”.)

However, other than the very early fights I found no difficulty just plowing through with Hitting everything with my mace. I think there’s the vague promise of a system here but it falls apart almost immediately as the player gets experience points. Every 10 experience points gives the player a “level” (not mentioned in the text, but I poked at the source code to check) and after about four levels as long as the player keeps some food around they’ll generally be safe.

This game has the problem a lot of Wizard’s Castle clones do: you can play it far too safe. Most enemies do not attack on sight (the scorpion, dragon, and troll do, I didn’t find any others). So you can wander and hoover vast amounts of treasure, trading it in for cash, and buying meat. You can then eat vast quantities of meat to pump your Strength and Constitution up to high levels and stomp any enemies afterwards.

There’s exactly one spot with a trap I found (a pit) and otherwise it’s just mundane mapping, with the occasional one-way exit.

Yes, there are gaps — my map is likely incomplete. I managed to win without finishing.

By “win” I mean there does not seem to be an end condition, but looking at the rankings the top is GRANDMASTER where you attain a wealth of 450 and experience points of 250. The wealth of 450 turns out to be mostly trivial (amusingly, you can get a rank of GREEDY COWARD by getting lots of treasure but killing almost nothing).

Getting 250 experience points did require trying to mop up everything I found. This includes the only “puzzle fight” against a ghost, where the text specifies physical attacks won’t work.

20 experience points is fairly substantial; killing a DRAGON only gives 10.

The big hunt monster is to find T-Rexes. I found two of them and each gave 70 experience points. They were just as easy as any of the other enemies (by that point, I had eaten enough meat to even make a competitive eating champ turn away in disgust).

Once I was over the thresholds (which I should emphasize I only learned about by checking source code) I typed Q to quit the game and arrive at victory.

The author typing in room descriptions did give this a little more interest than your standard WizCastleLike, and the map shows “sections” with structures that pass over to multiple rooms. For example, the third floor has a “Chamber of Horrors” you can fall into (the only trap) and a one-way exit from the Chamber leads to a Library. My Library had one of the T-Rex fights in it. (I don’t know if was fixed or random.)

However, there’s enough spelling and map errors that it throws off the enjoyment. One of the treasures is a SILVER FULTE; another unfortunate typo is arrived at by dropping a letter from JEWELRY. There were many spots with a “door” that didn’t exist, or a “brick wall” that nonetheless could be walked through (and was clearly not intended as an illusion). I just had to start ignoring what the rooms said about available exits and try them.

I enjoyed the original Wizard’s Castle near the beginning, before I realized the power-strat was to avoid monsters altogether; in that game, you are forced in to fights at generally ever opportunity. In this game, the monsters are so passive it becomes blatantly obvious you aren’t supposed to fight them until you’re ready, so while the author attempted to add some “crunchy” parts like distance, it fails to sustain interest as a system.

I appreciate the attempt at adding some room flavor; it seems to have been Sato’s attempt to modify and enhance the original Wizard’s Castle just like his version of Star Trek added asteroids and a secret weapon. Given the very recent rescue off an obscure tape, I doubt it made for many sales. Just like The Desecration from last time, maybe the most lasting effect of the game was to give Tom Sato business experience; at least that’s his own claim:

That experience taught me about the process of developing a program and commercializing it.

Soon after Sato wrote the MSX book on the top of this post, he was offered a transfer to work for Microsoft Japan, and was the product manager there for Windows 2.0 and 3.0. Eventually Sato left Microsoft and found his way to Silicon Valley; he now works on connecting companies in Japan with companies in the US.

Well, this is certainly a terrible time to play games, isn't it. It's not that I couldn't use the distraction. I need the distraction! The problem is being able to concentrate on the game at all. I want to appreciate these things as the author intended, but wow. Rough.

Here's what I've tried recently.

• Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure
• LOK Digital
• Pine: A Story of Loss
• Chroma Zero
• Discolored 2
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

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Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure

• by Furniture & Mattress -- game site

(I'll start this one because I'm in the middle of it. To order with chronological heck!)

A grid-sliding puzzle game with a pretty goofy story and lush art. Almost too lush, honestly -- there's a lot of layers whizzing around the screen and I found myself tuning out a lot of the environment. Can't blame them for trying though.

This is a good solid time-waster. In theory the world is One Big Interconnected Puzzle, but in fact the map is tidily segmented. Individual challenges are fairly small and tractable -- except where interconnection is specifically called for. Great for "I'll just do one more puzzle before bed", even in distracting times.

Also has the inescapably quotable line (from a teenage NPC): "Have you ever loved someone so much that you wanted to barf up your own skeleton?"

LOK Digital

• by Letibus Design -- game site

A tight little grid puzzler where you trace out magic words. Each word does something. Some letters have special properties too. The goal for each level is to exactly use up all the letters on the grid, once each, none left over.

This is clearly a Baba relative, albeit much simpler. There's only six or seven words to learn in the game; I rolled credits in just a couple of days. But it's not simple. The rules are fussy, precise, and productive; by which I mean that even a simple grid lets you try a whole bunch of different approaches. (Order matters a lot.) You know you're in Baba-land when the game introduces entire chapters by saying "Learn a new keyword" or "Figure out the rule you didn't see before."

(There's a hint system. The hints don't always help.)

And then of course there's bonus levels and secrets to find. If you're wondering how they can fit secrets into a letter-grid puzzle, go play it.

LOK does great on the distraction-ometer because you can play it in tiny snips. Pick it up! Solve a level! Get stuck on the next level! I recommend the mobile edition for this, obviously, but I bet Steam Deck works too.

Speaking of editions, LOK was originally released as a printed puzzle book. I seriously do not understand how people solve this thing on paper. (Even with a dry-erase overlay, included.) You have to experiment a lot -- at least I do -- and the consequences of each move aren't always obvious. Which means that on paper, I would constantly make mistakes! The digital version keeps me in line, and then I can solve the puzzles. Mostly.

Pine: A Story of Loss

• by Made Up Games -- game site

Another one of those small wordless narrative games about An Emotion. A lumberjack figures out how to grieve, aided by solitude, a daily routine, and the superhuman ability to maintain bulk on a diet of three cucumbers per day.

I'm afraid I hit this at the wrong moment. A quiet reflective game about losing yourself in routine? My daily routine is chasing my tail until I'm too exhausted to think, and then maybe I can pass out rather than fretting all night. Reflection is the mind-killer.

As a result, I played Pine with only half my attention. Slow repetitive animations just give me time for a few more moves of a phone solitaire game before it's time to chop the next tree. Or cucumber. This isn't the play experience anybody intended, but it's what I can do right now.

Pine is nicely drawn, anyhow. I'm not sure the wood-carving feels like wood-carving, but the experience of "It's lunchtime, I guess I should look at some food" hits hard.

(Interest note: I backed Pine on Kickstarter, a million years ago.)

Chroma Zero

• by ekorz -- game site

A puzzle metroidbrainia-ish game, sort of a combination of Outer Wilds with an "explorable puzzle box" (think Mu Cartographer). The more you do, the more you learn about what you can do next time. It's not a time loop story but there's a "reset to start" mechanic.

This is clearly a deep and deeply-designed experience, but again, bad timing. I played for a couple of hours and discovered several things, but the highly abstracted world and story didn't hook me. Eventually I realized I wasn't going to play any more and uninstalled. Oh well.

(Maybe I just needed more oontzy synth music in my colorful abstraction. Remember Fract OSC? Aw yeah.)

Discolored 2

• by Jason Godbey -- game site

I played the original Discolored during one of my brief jaunts into Apple Arcade territory. That was a quick narrative puzzler whose gimmick was colors disappearing and reappearing in the world. (Red objects only exist when red is switched on, etc.) I remember nothing of its narrative frame, I'm afraid, but I liked the puzzles.

Now we have the sequel, which is considerably scaled up in size and ambition. Discolored 2 is a full-length game with more story, more characters, and a bunch of new ideas.

I did get into this one, but I'm not sure it was entirely successful. The puzzles: all good. The surreal frame-breaking and narrative strange-looping: yes, that is my jam but this felt like the ideas were just stuffed in as the author thought of them. I guess that goes for the whole game, really. "Okay, you've solved a puzzle, let's rearrange your inventory or the world in an unexpected way to set you up for the next puzzle." Perfectly playable and I'm glad I did; it just didn't hang together as much as I wanted.

(Footnote: I just noticed that this is the same designer as The Search, which I played several years ago. Liked that one too.)

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

• by MachineGames and Bethesda -- by game site

Man, I dodged a lot of discourse by not playing this until January. I recall ledge-painting discourse, NPCs-solve-the-puzzle discourse, stealth discourse, triple-A budget discourse... and that's not even getting into the political topicality.

Anyway, ignore all of that. This is a game where you get to run around being Indiana Jones, which is more fun than anything else that's happened to me this month. And everybody making the game is also having barrels of fun. Troy Baker embodies movie-era Indy/Ford; his obvious love for this character and this actor just sparkles through. The writers do classic movie banter, the directors do classic movie cinematography. (Aftermath had a good post on this.) It's all just deeply relaxing and cheerful.

And yes, I played in "Story Mode", meaning the blackshirts were all stupid and nearsighted and had glass jaws to boot. I was not there for a challenge. I was there to sneak around and take in the scenery and mutter Latin and climb some buildings and raid some flippin' tomb.

Yes, and solve puzzles. This isn't a puzzle-heavy game, but it's got a nice variety of little puzzle scenes. I will cheerfully admit that I went to the walkthroughs a couple of times. Like I said, not there for the challenge.

Did I mention the scenery? The game does a great job with its locations, and they're very different kinds of locations, too. Vatican City is all narrow streets and high-walled plazas and palazzos. Gizeh is wide shimmering desert with the Pyramids looming in the distance. And the shorter chapters (I won't spoil locations) are as distinct and vivid and detailed as the three "showcase" open-world maps.

I almost felt bad soaking up so much art budget for a not-very-challenging play-through-once story adventure! Sorry, this is triple-A discourse after all...

Is this game going to make back its extravagant development costs? Is it going to be this spring's big layoff story? Can I really feel good about supporting the big-studio system, when we've spent two years cursing big studios for their terrible treatment of labor?

Yes, complicated. MachineGames isn't Bethesda; I have no insight into the publisher/licensor/developer dynamics there. And, fundamentally, I paid the AAA price to play the AAA game. I hope it does well. I'll buy the DLC episode when it drops.

But I can't help feeling like Great Circle might be the last standout of its breed. Publishers are clearly scared to fund anything that doesn't promise an infinite money fountain -- live-service, subscription, loot boxes, something. Where do they fit a big-budget game that's just a couple of weeks of plain fun?

I did get a victory screen, and I am surprised because I thought the whole game was going to collapse in a mess of bugs before I got there. I had Dunmark Pykro in my inventory when I won the game.

(My previous post needed for context.)

Continuing directly from last time, I had a robot guard where I was unclear what to do. Part my of issue is that using OPEN on the PURSE gives an error, and I had already been able to nab the food from the grocery store; combining the two facts, I assumed the purse was being implicitly used somehow. No: the purse is opened by using LOOK on it, at which point you find some GOLD. You can then GIVE GOLD which is effective on the guard, and even the main character is confused that the puzzle solution worked.

This opens up a new section of the game.

To the east of the guard is a “sewer entrance” and a “thiefs lair” and as far as I can tell you never get your objects stolen so the lair is just for color.

To the north of the sewer (… not even going to bother with the forward/backwards/left/right thing anymore …) there is an armory with a robot de-activator. You can cart the de-activator back over to where the ROBOT DOUBLE was and use it to fry the robot, leaving behind a robot hand.

Behind the fried robot there is a universal communicator, which you can take over to the alien — the one that was our informant but we couldn’t understand — to get the password for the keypad.

If you go back to the start which had a side entrance with a keyboard, trying to use the password just gets you tossed into jail.

I should give some attention to jail, as it is entirely optional — you just avoid anything that gets you caught — but it does something clever. The first time you’re caught, you end up in a “low security” cell where you can CUT MATTRESS (how? don’t know) and reveal some SPRINGS, then use the springs to PICK LOCK and escape. This deposits you at the LOCKERS and you can LOOK LOCKERS to retrieve all your stuff you had in your inventory. (This includes, still in my case, a TECH GUN, ROBOT GUARDS, ALARM, and SECRETARY. This will become important later.)

If you get caught again (in addition to the door trap, typing SLEEP will get you picked up) you land in a medium-security cell. This time there are WALLS you can look at to find a BOLT, and USE BOLT will free you (it is unclear what is being done with the bolt, but I assume it’s PICK LOCK again except there’s no lock object to refer to).

If you get caught yet again you land in a high-security cell, which you can escape with the power of your mind via THINK. The text clues it pretty well (I had also made my verb list by now and I knew THINK was on it).

Get caught a fourth time and you die. The “upgraded accommodation” trick I ended up finding the best part of the game (there’s shades of a similar trick in Legend of Kyrandia 3 but it is still uncommon).

Returning back to the action: the password needs to get stored under our hat for now, and fortunately there’s still another route to go, as heading east from the sewers will reach a Urr-Beast. The Beast blocks exits to the north and east but you can still go south to find a BEAST KEEPERS ROOM.

The side room has a GROOMING KIT; taking it back north, you can GROOM BEAST and it will purr happily and go to sleep in the corner. This opens access to a data library with a MANUAL…

…and the manual can be read in order to learn operation of a ANTI-ASSASSIN COMPUTER and shut it down.

Back at the guard which was bribed with gold, there’s an exit to the west (I had the accidental fortune of finding it after I finished all the events above). There’s a palm scanner and you can use the robot hand from the double in order to activate it.

Now comes the hardest of the three minigames, as after you cross the bridge over the spikes you get swarmed with droids. They appear on all sides, and you move with the keys right, left, A (up), Z (down), with space for shooting.

This game is genuinely original. It feels somewhat like Solar Fox as far as flying around a middle space section and avoiding things from the side, but I can’t think of an exact equivalent. You’re still getting shot at just like the previous mini-game and once again you have to defeat all the enemies twice.

This was by far the hardest of the three mini-games due to having to keep track of all four directions. If you hit a wall you bounce, so there’s no wrecking on the sides, but it is very easy to keep trapped with no way out by a rogue bullet. It was possible to be trapped in the first mini-game but only at the very start with the initial volley of bullets all coming at the same time.

Moving on to the third part of the game, it goes fairly linearly. First, there’s some toxic gas (wearing the breathing apparatus works to get through).

This is followed by a uniform storage closet.

You need to wear a uniform, as well as nab the makeup kit from the lockers and use that as well, so you appear like one of the regular guards. This lets you get past a security checkpoint…

…and a secretary (which our protagonist wants to skeevily hit on, 1930s noir style).

Just walking past takes you to a transport tube, where there’s another keypad. This time you can type the password (PYKRO RULES) without getting caught.

Finally our hero reaches the Dunmark Pykro’s office, and things go very strange indeed both at the reality level and at the game-bug level.

The cut-off part of the text says he’s SURE ACTING KINDA’ KINKY. I have no idea what the evil business overlord gave us, because it never appeared in the room or in my inventory. In fact, Dunmark Pykro isn’t in the room at all. (I can at least reassure you that no WHIP object exists in the game.)

Baffled and strongly suspecting the game might be unfinishable, I tried going LEFT and found myself back at a steel door with another keypad. Trying to use the password again got me caught and tossed into jail (I hadn’t burned all three iterations on this save file) so I broke out and looked over every location I visited in case something new had happened. Indeed:

That’s back at the beast keeper place, where there was also a newly-added pile of junk. The Dunmark Pykro object somehow got teleported over here, and furthermore, I was able to TAKE him and carry him in inventory the rest of the game.

Heading back to the steel door, you can just ignore it and move on to find an intersection. Off in one direction is a SMALL ARMORY with a spacesuit…

…and in the other is a spacecraft you can escape with.

Again, Pykro was still in inventory when I did LAUNCH. I did try to KILL PYKRO but the game said

IT DIDN’T WORK FOR SOME REASON.(!?)

and no other verb from my big list had any effect at all. It doesn’t matter because launching the spacecraft leads to the third mini-game, followed by victory.

Adventurecade #2 coming soon, eh?

Let’s check out of this by asking the question: why did the company disappear? First of all, as you can probably tell, the quality was wobbly; despite some clever moments, I would take any of the Sierra On-Line games over this one. The mini-games were not fun to play and tilted annoyingly hard, especially given the screen repeats. I will give the game the benefit of the doubt as far as the bugs go; like most Apple II games, this one needed to be “cracked” to be played due to copy protection, and it is possible something broke which caused a SECRETARY to show up in the player’s inventory immediately upon finishing the first mini-game.

Still, for Apple II circa 1982, it had a fighting chance in the market, especially because the graphics genuinely hovered around “decent”; all the people were clearly of the squished-head Sierra variety, but the environmental graphics shows some genuine artistic thought.

Mind you, even Sierra was struggling to sell their graphics starting in 1983 (when The Desecration finally hit general distribution) so possibly it was a game made a little too late.

Additionally, the Mind Games duo (Greg Segall and Gil Beyda) went entirely on their own: they turned down distributors at Applefest (which was, in retrospect, a mistake). A September 1983 profile from the magazine L’Ordinateur individuel notes they have “d’entreprise bien américain” and how it was admirable that they did everything up to and including distribution to retailers. The article claims it is “un exemple à suivre” (“an example to follow”) but I suspect low sales led to their downfall. I have never seen a copy of this game for sale so it is likely quite rare.

Maybe it was good for the experience. While I don’t know about Greg Segall, Gil Beyda at least went on to a successful career in technology and now works as a venture capitalist.

Coming up: Some small non-sci-fi games, just for a change of pace, including another early Tolkien game.

We’re excited to announce that Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery is releasing this Thursday, January 30th!

You can play the first three chapters for free today, and check out the author interview as well!

And don’t forget to wishlist it on Steam! The more wishlists we get, the better the game will do on Steam on release day.

Deep beneath the earth, the dragon is rising! Quest into mysterious underground caverns and forests to learn magical secrets, draw strength from friends and family, secure alliances that can save your home, and carry on the heroic legacy of Stronghold!

Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery is an interactive fantasy novel by Amy Griswold, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—380,000 words and hundreds of choices—without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

You’re the grandchild of your town’s legendary heroic leader, and everyone’s always expected great things from you. So when you began to study sorcery, you intended to prove them all right—until your magical experiments disturbed a sleeping dragon in the depths of the mountain caves. Now you’ll have to discover something even more powerful if you’re going to save your town and help your family’s legacy endure for generations to come.

Delve deep into ancient caverns to find more fuel for your sorcery—along with unexpected allies and places for secure fortified camps. But there are also fragile wonders beneath the earth: will your efforts to protect your town threaten the dryads and treasures in the caverns? Learn mystic lore to strengthen your fight against the dragon—alchemy, magic, or even the knot-work enchantments of goblins and spiders—or raise an army from among your loyal townsfolk and allies. Or maybe, just maybe, you can bargain with the dragon—if you dare.

• Play as male, female, or non-binary; gay or straight.
• Continue the saga of the town founded in Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate, and see the effects of your actions two generations later.
• Marry a spouse (or two), or form a new family with a sworn sibling.
• Explore vast underground caverns to unearth secrets and treasures.
• Reconcile with your grandparent and uphold their position in your town – or convince everyone to defy authority and claim leadership yourself!
• Rebuild an ancient tower into the perfect workshop for mastering sorcery!
• Fight goblins, spiders, and dryads – or make them your allies against the dragon.
• Bond with your friends: help them make difficult decisions, influence their views on important issues, and play matchmaker for them!

How long can your stronghold stand against the dragon’s wrath?

See your name in lights on Broadway! Find fame, fortune, and true love! All it costs is your immortal soul. Devil on Your Shoulder is an interactive urban fantasy romance novel by Lisa Fox, author of A Pirate’s Pleasure. I sat down with Lisa to talk about her newest game and romance in general. Devil on Your Shoulder releases Thursday, February 13th. You can wishlist it on Steam today—even if you don’t intend to purchase on Steam, it really helps!

This is your second time writing for Heart’s Choice, and we loved your first game, A Pirate’s Pleasure. This game has a very different setting and feel! Tell our readers all about it. 

Thanks so much! A Pirate’s Pleasure was an incredible project. My first ever IF. I’m so glad it was as well-received as it was.

Devil on Your Shoulder is definitely a very different setting. It takes place in the 1990s, sort of all the 90s crushed into one year, in New York City’s East Village and Times Square. It was a gritty time, and the city was a gritty place. The city’s rebirth into what it’s become today was just beginning back then, and there were literal sweatshops in Chinatown and rotting tenements throughout the Lower East Side.
But despite all that, the city was also full of everyday magic. A dollar and a dream as the New York lotto used to say. That’s all you need to make it in New York.

Well, that and a whole lot of determination, of course.

I have so many fond memories of that time. I tried to put them all into Devil in some small way. That time, in that place, was amazingly special. If you lived in the East Village, you really could see Joey Ramone walking down the street on any given day, stop by CBGB’S for a beer, have lunch next to Allen Ginsberg, or go to an illegal rave advertised with nothing more than a phone number written on the door of a bathroom stall.

I want readers to feel that vibe, and I hope they love it as much as I do.

What changed for you in the writing of these two games? For one thing, I can see that Devil on Your Shoulder is much longer, at 300,000 words! 

Jebus, what hasn’t changed since Covid? Everything. So much. And Devil is definitely a Covid baby. It has struggled to leave the confines of my computer and see the light of day for quite a while!
But the extra time gave me the flexibility to write extra words, and so I did. Also, this time around I had more of an understanding of how IF works, so I was able to offer – what I hope! – is a fuller experience.

What are some of your favorite romance novel conventions/tropes, or some of your least favorites? 

I go absolutely mad for a tsundere character. Every time. I’m a total sucker. I love that initial aloofness, the slow breaking down of their walls. Bonus points if the love interest is a Ray of Sunshine. I eat that trope up with a spoon!

In that same vein, I love, love, love enemies to lovers. I will never get tired of that one! Also, fake marriage/fake dating is tremendous fun.

The only trope I really can’t get into is yandere. I’ve tried it in many different games, and I’ve just never liked it. Not my thing at all.

If you were going to romance one of your characters in Devil on Your Shoulder, who would you choose? 

Aww, that’s not fair! I refuse to choose… All right, if I must – Mikhail.

What are you working on next?

I’ve made it my goal for 2025 to learn Ren’Py. I think I want to try my hand at visual novels next.

The Boston IF meetup for January will be Tuesday, January 28, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting. 

When I wrote about Dragon’s Keep, I discussed an event called Applefest that happened in December of 1982. (If you haven’t read that post, I recommend reading it before this one.) The company Sunnyside Soft met Ken and Roberta Williams there, leading to Sierra buying them out and Al Lowe eventually going on to write the Leisure Suit Larry series.

There was another software company at Applefest I’d like to discuss today, one rather less famous: Mind Games. It’s completely understandable if you haven’t heard of them, because they only published one game.

Greg Segall and Gil Beyda were the founders. I’m not sure what David Wikin’s relationship is but he doesn’t get mentioned in a March 1983 Softline interview; I would guess he helped on the business side getting the crew to Applefest.

The Softline interview indicates that Segall and Beyda had met 8 years before (aged 11) at a Los Angeles Boy Scout troop; both were up for a “promotion” to a troop rank but the two decided to share the position rather than compete for it. They consequently became friends.

They joined the Beverly Hills computer club and did pranks with the DEC-1170 system (as the interview notes, it was one of the only high schools in the country with such a computer); they followed this with computer jobs at early ages, as Beyda got a job at a computer store at 15 (leading to contacts and consulting work on educational software) while Segall got a job at 14 working for Farmers Insurance (also helping Beyda with the consulting).

In 1981 they got the urge to write a game. They wanted something “more complex” than a two-word parser while avoiding the “rigid conventions of the traditional adventure”. Quoting Segall:

Forget this North, South, East, West stuff; I just wanna go through the door!

They wanted multiple responses to commands that have “nothing to do with the adventure” and writing “like a pulp thriller”. Then as a “hook” they decided the game should be “the first adventure to have serious arcade-game levels”. Quoting Segall directly again:

You don’t want to do the obvious rip-offs — walk into an arcade and see what’s hot and copy it — but take an idea, or several ideas, and make a twist on them. So we put arcade games inside an adventure.

It started with Segall working on plot and design and Beyda doing the programming, but they ended up sometimes swapping responsibilities. The process took 11 months working out of their garage, and then they tried shopping it around to distributors with no takers. They decided to pool the rest of their money to get a booth at Applefest.

At Applefest there’s a story which intercrosses with the Dragon’s Keep one. Mind Games had “distributors” ask for copies of the game, who supposedly were told:

You sent back the one we gave you.

Going back to Dragon’s Keep, and the quote from Hackers about Ken Williams:

Ken tried to throw himself into the spirit of the show, and took Roberta, looking chic in designer jeans, high boots, and a black beret, on a quick tour of the displays. Ken was a natural schmoozer, and at almost every booth he was recognized and greeted warmly. He asked about half a dozen young programmers to come up to Oakhurst and get rich hacking for On-Line.

The adventure-game portions of The Desecration have a strong resemblance to Sierra in visual look. Given the prominence of Sierra in California, and the fact they recruited Sunnyside because of Dragon’s Keep being close in look to Sierra products, it seems almost guaranteed Mind Games was one of the companies that Ken Williams talked to; the exact “you sent back the one we gave you” line may have been spoken directly to him.

Mind Games has been Apple-oriented up to this point, but the company is now looking into Atari and Commodore systems to “see what they can be used for.”

“Programmers are coming to us, now. We give them their freedom because we want them to have the same freedom to create that we had.”

I’m not clear what caused this ambition to unravel, but this game is the only evidence I found of Mind Games publishing anything. Ads starting showing up in 1983.

We’ve seen mini-games before, but the ones here genuinely are more extensive than previous ones; the game is fully half arcade and half adventure. (The closest we’ve seen to that is Mad Martha from the UK, created roughly the same time as The Desecration.) The adventure and arcade sections alternate.

Our job is, according to the game, INTERGALACTIC ASSASSIN. Our assignment is to go to Pykron 9, part of the Pykro Corp. Mining Empire, and kill the chairman, Dunmark Pykro, as he has been “KNOWN TO HAVE AN EYE FOR EASY EXPANSION OF HIS CORPORATE EMPIRE.” Some of his “targets” have pooled money together to hire you for “your usual fee” of 10,000 galactic sovereigns.

Action continues directly after receiving the message.

The interview was fussy about games using NORTH, SOUTH, etc. for navigation, so as exact equivalents this game uses RIGHT, LEFT, FORWARDS, BACKWARDS (abbreviated to R, L, F, B). We’ve had authors thinking “but why compass directions” all the way back to Empire of the Over-Mind and Battlestar. As this game maps them as exact equivalents — you don’t have “relative directions” where entering a room from the opposite side means “forwards” is now “backwards” and so forth — I mentally just thought of them as the usual N/S/E/W.

The TRANSPORTER ROOM mentions transporter controls but as far as I can tell there is no way to examine them or refer to them other than KICK CONTROLS. This is equivalent to activating the transporter. Not a great start.

The opening is relatively short — you can make your way over to a ship, but when you try to sneak it you get caught and tossed in a jail.

LAUNCH SHIP is the right action to take off, leading to the arcade game. Before going there, I should point out two things:

a.) As I already alluded to, the parser is miserable; it seems to be completely not only location-bespoke but also looking for exact phrases. That is, it isn’t using a world-model as opposed to just hand-coding each individual scene; you can, for example, go back in the cell, and the mirror is back to where it was.

b.) The authors seem to have written their room descriptions with a particular sequence in mind, as you can turn south (I mean, “backwards”) instead of going straight to the field to find the cell area, and the description implies you are in the middle of making your escape from the cell (when you haven’t been thrown in yet).

Onto the arcade game!

This is, straightforwardly, horizontal Space Invaders. (So much about avoiding taking actual games from the arcade.) The screen above shows one of the vehicles already vaporized; you drop bombs and they shoot up at you while moving left to right. The start is the hardest as the screen is completely filled with projectiles, and as more enemies die while they move faster, there are gaps that you can sneak your spacecraft between. (If you’re playing on keyboard, note you can double-press to scoot over faster. I think the original intended control was paddle.) Here’s Highretrogamelord attempting to get through:

Note that both this walkthrough and the one from AppleAdventures give up at this mini-game, and both imply they somehow give a complete walkthrough of the adventure portion.

You have to not only kill all the enemies once, but twice. It is definitely a pain but it is possible to get a rhythm in after surviving the initial volley. You can die twice and still continue before hitting a game over.

Why did both video walkthroughs cut off there assuming they had seen the entire game? Well, it starts with a menu where you can choose the three mini-games to play individually. I’m guessing they thought there were four discrete sections, adventure-arcade-arcade-arcade, and not an alternating arrangement where if you pick “adventure” you get the “full game” with the arcade games interspersed in a longer experience.

So with the enemies defeated, we can move on to the Dome City wherein our target awaits.

Our inventory has an I.D. card for getting into the dome, but also, weirdly, a TECH GUN, SECRETARY, ALARM, AND ROBOT PATROL. I assume that’s a bug (it may be a cracking-the-disk bug rather than an “authentic” bug).

Heading down from here leads to a STEEL DOOR with a keyboard which I don’t have a password for yet. However, ahead there are doors where the I.D. card can be used to enter the main complex.

To the left (west, whatever), there’s a person with a “purse” you can steal in order to get some food from a supermarket…

…a breathing apparatus lying about a storage room…

…and PYKRO’S ROBOT DOUBLE. I am unable to interact with it in any way.

To the right (east) is a sleeping police officer and some lockers, which are describing as holding STUFF THAT BELONGS TO THE INMATES. Again, the game’s writing assumes a particular sequence, as it says I BET MY STUFF IS IN HERE SOMEWHERE.

To become an inmate, you go back to the main doors and head forward (north). There is a INFORMANT MEETING PLACE but this person is not the correct informant, so if you try to SMILE as the message at the start of the game suggests, you get arrested.

If you bypass the first “informant” and head north, there’s a second one talking in an alien language. That’s the real informant, and if you SMILE you get some KEYS.

Past that is a robot guard, and it implies there’s something past the guard, but I have (again) yet to get any verb I’ve tried so far to work.

Almost nostalgic for that dodgy Dark Star parser after playing this for a while. I’ll still keep persisting, for if nothing else, two adventure-walkthrough-makers have already made an attempt and fallen.

Look, there is only one thing I want from a Labyrinth sequel, and that's Jennifer Connelly as the Goblin Queen... Mother.

I know, it's tricky. David Bowie was this horny teenage fantasy of Magic and Freedom and Romance; he definitely wasn't a father figure. Do we need a retread of that? No.

So Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) as a single mom, frustrated with her teenage kid, and the kid is frustrated with her. The mom is busy with her job and is never home. The daughter wants to run around the back yard and play with her imaginary friends. Sarah is like "Look, I know! I was your age! The stories are important. But you have to do the laundry and make dinner too! Sorry, I have a late meeting, I have to run."

And the daughter screams "Yeah, go! I wish the goblins would come and take me away forever and ever!"

So they do. Welcome to the Labyrinth. But.

Sarah is the Goblin Queen. She always has been. That's her job. "Away at the office" is "off in the Labyrinth". Ever since Jareth disappeared, Sarah hears the wishes and Sarah cannot leave a wish ungranted. "I have done everything you've asked, turned the world upside down for you..." Only now it's her own kid, and what the teenager wants is for some Mom she doesn't know to save her from the Mom she does know, only they're the same person.

And what Mom wants is for her kid to understand that for sixteen years she has had the power to say "I wish the goblins would free me of this child" and she never said it. But now the kid has said it -- which means it has to happen.

And they're both exhausted by living up to each other's expectations.

Whatever they are to each other, it needs to change.

Sound about right?

Those of you who are regular readers of these histories will surely have noticed the relative dearth of coverage of the CRPG genre over the last few years. This isn’t reflective of any big shift in editorial policy; it’s rather reflective of the fortunes of the genre itself, which were not particularly good in the mid-1990s. Let’s take a moment to review how the CRPG found itself on the outside looking in while the rest of the games industry was growing by leaps and bounds.

The early efforts of pioneers like Jon Freeman, Richard Garriott, Robert Woodhead, and Andrew Greenberg culminated in the CRPG’s commercial breakout in 1985. That year Ultima IV and The Bard’s Tale, conveying two very different but equally tempting visions of what the genre could do and be, both became major hits. CRPGs continued on a steady upward trajectory thereafter, with ever more of them being released. Another watershed was reached in 1988, when Pool of Radiance, the first full-fledged, licensed implementation of the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop rules on computers, sold over 250,000 copies to become the most successful game ever published by SSI, heretofore a modest purveyor of computerized wargames. More CRPGs came thick and fast after that.

By 1992, however, CRPGs were beginning to seem like too much of a single, fairly homogeneous thing. Dungeons & Dragons, Tunnels & Trolls, Might and Magic, The Magic Candle… even when the games were made with passion and love, which for the most part they were, they were becoming a bit difficult for even the cognoscenti to distinguish from one another. With their intense focus on statistics and their usually turn-based combat systems, these games seemed increasingly out of touch with the broader trends in gaming, whether one spoke of the flashy multimedia presentation of interactive movies or the visceral action of DOOM and its contemporaries.

The genre tried to adapt to the changing times by streamlining itself, replacing turn-based with real-time combat systems and making more use of multimedia. A couple of these “CRPG Lites” met with some success; Westwood’s Lands of Lore and Interplay’s Stonekeep both managed to sell more copies in the expanded marketplace of the mid-1990s than Pool of Radiance had at the end of the previous decade. But they were the exceptions that proved the rule. CRPGs stopped appearing regularly on the bestseller charts. As a result, most American publishers washed their hands of the genre entirely, leaving it to European importers and boutique diehards like SSI, who continued to flood the market with ever more underwhelming Dungeons & Dragons product until TSR, the maker of the tabletop game, finally took their license to do so away.

And then, just as 1996 was turning into 1997, along came a little game called Diablo, from Blizzard Entertainment. It did streamlining right; it took the traditional attributes of the CRPG, simplified them enough to make them intuitively understandable without ever cracking open a manual, polished the living hell out of every facet of their presentation and implementation, and then added the secret sauce of procedural generation to yield a game that was, in theory at least, infinitely replayable. In fact, Diablo was so streamlined that gamers have continued to argue to this day over whether it ought to qualify as a “real” CRPG at all. Yet its fast-paced accessibility and addictive nature made it a mainstream hit on a scale which no earlier CRPG could touch. In thus demonstrating to the world that there was some life yet in the old paradigm of exploring dungeons, killing monsters, collecting loot, and leveling up your character, it provided the first glimmer of a CRPG Renaissance that was lurking just over the horizon.

At the time, though, there was ample reason to wonder whether the Diablo model was all that the genre could aspire to in the future. What about the more conceptually ambitious CRPGs of yore, the ones that had striven to be about more than just loot and stats, that had often attempted — to be sure, sometimes clumsily — to present real interactive stories, set in compelling, internally consistent worlds? Those whom Diablo left still wishing for those things had their wish granted ten months later, by a more full-faceted herald of the CRPG Renaissance that went by the name of Fallout.

---

In 1990, Tim Cain was a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine. He was studying computer science, but his first love had long been games, both on the tabletop and on the computer. Late that year, his father passed away while still in his fifties, prompting the young man to properly confront life’s brevity and unpredictability for the first time. Determined to rededicate his own life to that which he loved most, he bought himself the latest issue of Computer Gaming World and sent his résumé out to every corporate address he could find within its pages. He wound up being called in to an interview at and then receiving an offer from Interplay Productions, which happened to be located conveniently nearby in Southern California. His first project as a programmer for Interplay was The Bard’s Tale Construction Set; his second was Rags to Riches: The Financial Market Simulation. After finishing the latter, Cain worked mainly on installers and other unglamorous utilities, whilst tinkering with game engines of his own devising, waiting for a chance to make his mark as not just a programmer but a creative voice. In early 1994, when Interplay’s founder and CEO Brian Fargo said that he was interested in licensing a tabletop RPG property for adaption into a computer game, Cain thought he saw his chance.

An avid tabletop role-player since childhood, Cain had in recent years become a devotee of a system called GURPS, owned by the Austin, Texas-based outfit Steve Jackson Games.^[1]This American Steve Jackson is not the same man as the British Steve Jackson, the co-founder of Games Workshop. GURPS — the acronym stands for “Generic Universal Role-Playing System” — was a prominent member of a new guard of tabletop RPGs that aimed to be more flexible and player-empowering than Dungeons & Dragons, that hoary old standard bearer of the field. Instead of relying upon rigid class archetypes during character creation, it let players select from a menu of skills, advantages, and, most interestingly, disadvantages that made each character completely unique. For example, a disadvantage might be something as simple as an inability to tell even the smallest white lie — a disconcertingly hard quality to live with, whether in our world or any of its more fantastic counterparts that were to be found in GURPS source books. Speaking of which: you could use the basic GURPS rules for Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy, but you could also use them for space opera, cyberpunk, Westerns, horror, mysteries… you name it, as long as you either bought the right supplements from Steve Jackson or were willing to put in the effort to roll your own rules extensions.

Tim Cain loved GURPS so much that he programmed several digital utilities to make the job of a GURPS game master easier and uploaded them to the Internet. He brought his obsession with him to Interplay and spread it among the employees there; within a year or so of his arrival, three separate GURPS campaigns were going on around the office. So, when Brian Fargo sent his memo asking for suggestions of tabletop properties to license, many more voices than Cain’s alone shouted “GURPS!” in unison. Fargo was happy enough to oblige his people. Within weeks, he had signed a contract with Steve Jackson to make a GURPS-branded computer game, with more to follow if the first was successful. The contract didn’t specify which of GURPS’s many incarnations the game in question would embrace. Initially, everyone seemed to assume it would be high fantasy, just like 90 percent of its peers in the CRPG space.

A certain fuzziness about labels and boundaries was rather endemic to Interplay during this period. The company’s ticket to the big leagues had been The Bard’s Tale back in 1985, and Fargo had rushed to follow that masterstroke up with sequels and other CRPGs later in the decade. Yet he was too ambitious a businessman to be confined to one genre. By the early 1990s, Interplay had settled firmly into the spaghetti approach to game developing and publishing: throw a little bit of everything at the wall and see what sticks. Sometimes they hit the bull’s eye — as they did with the gimmicky but fun Battle Chess, the Medieval builder Castles, their licensed Star Trek adventure games, and the frenetic shoot-em-up Descent. Fargo also scouted abroad for interesting games, signing contracts to become the American importer of standout European titles like Out of This World and Alone in the Dark. Many of Interplay’s other releases were less impressive and less successful than the aforementioned ones, but the hits sold well enough to make up for the misses.

In most respects, Fargo was as eager to chase the winds of fashion as any of his counterparts in the executives suits of other publishers. Unlike them, though, he retained a sneaking fondness for CRPGs which was grounded in something other than the hard-hearted logic of business. Thus his decision to take a flier on a GURPS game in 1994, in defiance of all of the industry’s prevailing conventional wisdom.

This is not to say that the nascent game was a major priority. Tim Cain was a talented programmer who was currently somewhat under-utilized, who knew and loved GURPS and was champing at the bit to put his creative stamp on a game that he could truly call his own; all of these factors made him a natural choice for the project. But after he was duly assigned to it, he worked all by himself for several months, tinkering with an isometric engine and implementing the GURPs rules piece by piece. In September of 1994, it had still not been decided what the game was actually to be in the most fundamental sense; most people at Interplay still assumed that it would be “generic” fantasy, as befitted the first word of the GURPS acronym.

Desperate to inject some momentum into an assignment that was starting to seem more like a purgatory, Cain decided to host a series of after-hours brainstorming sessions at a local pancake restaurant. Anyone who was interested could join him to eat a meal containing way too much sugar to be healthy, talk about his GURPS engine-in-progress, and bat around ideas for what sort of game it ought to power. Only a handful of people showed up regularly. Luckily, among them were two employees from the art department, Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson, who had more than enough enthusiasm and creativity to go around. The budding power trio’s thinking soon shifted away from epic fantasy, first toward time travel, and then, when that began to seem too daunting, in the direction of a post-apocalyptic scenario. Yes, there was a GURPS source book for that as well.

Brian Fargo was immediately receptive to the idea, as they had anticipated he might be. Back in 1988, when Interplay was still known primarily for their CRPGs, they’d made one called Wasteland, set in the aftermath of a nuclear war. At the time, Interplay had been a development studio only, relying on Electronic Arts to publish their games; in fact, Wasteland had been the very last Interplay game to be published by EA. As was standard practice in the industry, the latter had been given the rights to the Wasteland name, preventing Interplay from ever doing a sequel, even though the first game had sold fairly well. With the slightly messy breakup between Interplay and EA now more than half a decade in the past, Fargo thought he might be able to convince his former publisher to give up the name. He told Cain, Boyarsky, and Anderson that he would try, at any rate. In the meantime, he said, they should get on with making their post-apocalyptic game, which could even in the worst case be marketed as a “spiritual successor” to Wasteland. Just like that, Tim Cain had two full-time colleagues to help him make his GURPS CRPG.

These events occurred in December of 1994. Early in the new year, Leonard Boyarsky came to his two teammates with a proposal whose importance to the game and the trans-media franchise it has spawned can scarcely be overstated. Instead of being present-tense or even conventionally futuristic, Boyarsky mused, what if the world of the game was “what the fifties thought the future would be like?”

In light of this stroke of genius, it was actually for the best that Brian Fargo ultimately failed to convince Electronic Arts to give him back the rights to the Wasteland name. By the time he reported his failure to the team, the new game had long since become its own thing, quite distinct from Wasteland. Ironically, it was Fargo who chose the game’s final name, from a long list of potential appellations given to him by his employees after yet another extended brainstorming session. He knew that the game simply had to be known as Fallout as soon as he saw the name. It was pithy but memorable, and perfectly evoked the game’s cheerily paranoid atmosphere of duck-and-cover drills and atomic cafés.

Every present creates its possible futures in its own image, a fact which is amply demonstrated by “The Gernsbeck Continuum,” one of my favorite William Gibson stories. In it, a 1980s photographer assigned to shoot the decrepit holdover architecture of the mid-century Art Deco era suffers something of a psychotic break. He begins to see “semiotic ghosts” of that lost America everywhere he looks, the same one that some prominent political figures still speak of so longingly today. This lost America “knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose”; it was all giant Tom Swift airplanes and enormous tail fins, all coruscating chrome and complacent conformity as far as the eye could see. Whether he knew this story or not, Leonard Boyarsky had a similar vision for Fallout, one which Cain and Anderson embraced wholeheartedly to turn the game into an alternate history rather than a tale of nuclear war in the world that we know.

By following the breadcrumbs embedded in the finished game and its sequels, we can deduce that their timeline diverges from ours just after the Second World War — more exactly, in 1947, in which year a team of researchers at Bell Labs failed to invent the transistor in this alternate universe. Coincidentally or relatedly, the postwar era of uninhibited Big American Government that brought such wonders as the Moon landing and the Internet even in our timeline never petered out in this one. Meanwhile the march toward miniaturization that occurred in our timeline once high-tech became the purview of corporations rather than governments failed to occur in this one: no transistor radios, no portable televisions, no personal computers, no Sony Walkmen, no smartphones. Technology continued to grow up rather than grow down, to emphasize the monumental at the expense of the personal. The lack of innovation at the scale of individuals did much to allow the stifling social conformity of the 1950s to persist. Fallout’s version of the 1960s saw no acid rock, no sexual or feminist revolutions, no civil-rights movement and no anti-war movement. Not having to deal with protestors and draft dodgers, the American military was eventually victorious in Vietnam. Nevertheless, the Cold War didn’t end in 1989, in fact went on for 130 years.

By the end of that span of time, people had nuclear reactors in their homes and cars, alongside robot assistants that were presumably equipped with something like Isaac Asimov’s “positronic brains” rather than microprocessors. The police and military had death rays straight out of Lost in Space. And yet computers were still the hulking monstrosities that one might find in an IBM product brochure from our 1960s.

In 2077, China and the West went to war. (The substitution of China for the Soviet Union as the primary antagonist is a melancholy reflection of the times in which Fallout was made, when Russia was still widely expected to join the community of rules-abiding democratic nations — and to become a significant growth market for computer games in the process.) The world was effectively destroyed in the war. The only people who escaped the horrors of radiation exposure in the United States were those who were able to take shelter in one of the hardened, self-sufficient “vaults” that had been scattered around the country for just such an eventuality.

Fallout proper begins in 2161, casting you as a resident of one of these vaults who has been tasked with venturing out into the ruined world in order to locate a chip that is needed to keep your community’s water-purifying facilities functional. Everywhere you go during the game, you encounter the shattered detritus of an era when, as David Halberstam wrote in his book about the 1950s, the good life was defined as “finding a good white-collar job with a large, benevolent company, getting married, having children, and buying a house in the suburbs.” Of course, everything is wildly exaggerated for comedic effect — who could forget Nuka-Cola, or Pip-Boy, the clunkiest handheld PDA ever? — but there’s an unnerving resonance to the setting that you won’t find in The Forgotten Realms of Dungeons & Dragons. It may not be irrelevant to mention here that Tim Cain is himself a gay man — i.e., one of the sorts of people whom 1950s society preferred to pretend did not exist at all. (At the time he made Fallout, he was still closeted, living and working as he did in a hardcore-gamer milieu that was scarcely less prejudiced against people like him than the 1950s writ large had been.)

The Fallout team had grown to thirteen people by January of 1996, with perhaps the most notable additions being Chris Taylor as lead designer and Mark O’Green as dialog writer. Cain’s official title became “producer.” He listened to everyone, but he didn’t hesitate to say no to any proposals that violated the core retro-future vision. Any technology that didn’t look like someone could have dreamed it up in the 1950s got tossed. Ditto any of the lazily anachronistic contemporary-pop-culture references that were so endemic in other games.

But Cain’s vision for this game extended well beyond the boundaries of its fiction. With the impetus of GURPS behind it, it was to be a new type of CRPG in other, even more important ways, ones that would place their stamp on a whole ecosystem of games that would come later. Every bit as much as Diablo, Fallout deserves to go down in history as the urtext of a brand-new strand of the CRPG.

When they first began attempting to transfer the tabletop-RPG experience to computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, programmers naturally tended to emphasize the things that computers could do well and to de-emphasize those that they could do less satisfactorily. Computers were good at smoothing out all of the lumpy complexities of Dungeons & Dragons combat, with its endless die-rolling, table-consulting, and round-counting, not to mention the arguments that inevitably arose from its hundreds of pages of baroque rules. They were less good, however, at simulating conversations with the people you met, or letting you choose your destiny in any less granular sense than whether to turn right or left at the next intersection in a dungeon. So, most CRPGs spread a thin veneer of story and world-building atop game engines that were really all about combat and logistics; they became “roll-playing” rather than “role-playing” games. (Seen in this light, the bestowal of the Dungeons & Dragons license upon the wargame publisher SSI starts to make a lot more sense…) Those CRPGs that did endeavor to do more with their fictions tended not to do so with much systemic rigorousness. (Ultima VII, for example, although a brilliant game in its way, is at its best when it’s content to be a walking-and-talking simulator.)

Tim Cain and company wanted to move beyond the old dichotomies and simplifications. Wasteland had actually tried to do some of the same things that they wished to do, by using a skill-based system inspired by the tabletop RPG Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes. (Non-fantasy settings did tend to drive designers in that direction, if only to find a use for character attributes like Intelligence that weren’t obviously useful in combat that didn’t involve spell-casting.) But Wasteland had been hobbled by the 8-bit computers on which it ran; in practice, it devolved into a sort of skill and attribute lottery much of the time, forcing you to guess which one might be applicable to any given situation and then to actively “use” it from a menu. The faster processors and bigger memories and hard drives at the disposal of Fallout should allow it to implement a system that touched every aspect of the player’s experience far more organically.

As they were designing each area of Fallout, the team kept three broad character archetypes in mind, which not coincidentally coincide with the three pre-generated starter characters you can choose from in the finished game should you not wish to build one of your own. There was the brawler, who could be expected to fight his way through the game much as one did in the CRPGs of yore; the sneaker, who would solve problems using stealth and thievery; and the diplomat, who would rely on a sharp mind and a silver tongue to bend others to his will. Another of Tim Cain’s non-negotiable requirements was that every character you might make had to have a viable path forward in every situation. Ideally, this would make the character you controlled a reflection of you the player — or at least of the type of person you felt like play-acting as that day — rather than becoming an exercise in purely tactical min-maxing. (This does not mean that plenty of Fallout players haven’t indulged in plenty of min-maxing over the years…) The approach extended right to the climax of the game, where a sufficiently clever diplomat can convince the big villain to give up his nefarious schemes and commit suicide using nothing more than words.

Every aspect of Fallout is tailored to the person you happen to be playing. For example, if you’re a smart cookie, your dialog options reflect this. Ditto if you’re not so smart; Cain decided that anyone with an Intelligence below a certain threshold should be allowed to speak only in single-syllable words. The same general principle holds true when trying to operate or repair machinery, heal your wounds, duck into the shadows… you name it. At the time, no other CRPG had ever implemented such a comprehensive set of rules, to simulate all of your possible interactions with the world.

Then, too, within the framework of affordances and limitations of the character you chose to play, the designers strove to give you maximal freedom of choice at every juncture. You can lay waste to everyone and everything you encounter and still win the game. Or you can try to do as little killing as possible. When the game is over, you’re shown a closing movie that varies on the basis of the choices you made. “I wanted the player to know, ‘We saw you do that, and the game’s going to react to you,'” says Tim Cain. It’s the same ideology that Gabe Newell instilled into the team at Valve that was making the very different game of Half-Life at the same time, an insistence that the virtual world must acknowledge the things you do and respond to them, in order to ensure that your experience is truly your own. Fallout is not especially long by CRPG standards — you can play through it in about 25 hours — but it was explicitly designed to foster replays in radically divergent styles.

Given how intimately linked Fallout was to GURPS in spirit and systems alike, a series of events in February of 1997 ought to have been deadly to its conception of itself. That month Interplay sent Steve Jackson, who hadn’t been following the game’s progression at all closely, a demo of the work-in-progress. It opened with a now-iconic cutscene, in which a soldier shoots a civilian prisoner in the head to the soothing tones of the Ink Spots singing “Maybe.” Jackson took immediate umbrage. At first glance, it’s hard to understand exactly why. While the scene certainly had its fair share of shock value, it’s not as if he was a noted objector to violence in games; one of his company’s signature products was Car Wars, an unabashedly brutal game of Mad Max-style vehicular combat. (“We’re selling a very popular fantasy,” said Jackson to one journalist. “Have you ever been driving down the road and somebody cuts in front of you or otherwise infuriates you to the point where the thought flashes through your mind, ‘Now, if this horn button was a machine gun…'”)

It might be helpful to recognize here that, for all that no one could doubt Jackson’s genuine love for games, he was a temperamental individual and an erratic businessman, whose company went through endless cycles of expansions and layoffs over the years. Tabletop designer and writer S. John Ross, who worked with Jackson often in the 1990s and knew him well, told me that he suspected that, on this occasion as on many others he was witness to, Jackson was attempting to paper over a failure to do his homework with bluster: “There’s a lot of reason to suppose that Steve was just trying to cover for dropping the ball on giving the game an honest try, by overstating his reaction to the five minutes he actually spent with it, thus buying himself time to soften his view on that and actually get a view on the game past the intro — a gambit that didn’t pay off.” If this is a correct reading of the case, it was a dramatic misreading by Jackson of the strength of his own negotiating hand, as S. John Ross alludes.

Be that as it may, on February 17, 1997, Steve Jackson turned up in a huff at Interplay’s Southern California offices, only to have Brian Fargo refuse to meet with him at all. Instead he wound up sitting on the other side of a desk from Tim Cain for several uncomfortable hours, reiterating his objections to the opening movie and to a number of other details. Most of his complaints seemed rather trivial if not nonsensical on the face of them; most prominent among them was a bizarre loathing for “Vault Boy,” the mascot of “VaultTec,” a personification of the whistling-past-the-graveyard spirit of the mid-century military-industrial complex. Cain, who quite liked the maligned movie and adored Vault Boy, stated repeatedly that he “wasn’t empowered” to make the changes Jackson demanded. The meeting ended with no resolutions having been reached, and a dissatisfied Jackson flew home. A few days later, Brian Fargo came to Tim Cain with a question: how hard would it be to de-GURPS Fallout?

If Steve Jackson remains something of a black box, it isn’t so hard to follow Fargo’s line of thinking. The buzz that seemed to have been building around GURPs in 1994 had largely dissipated by this point; with a personality as idiosyncratic as this one at its head, Steve Jackson Games seemed congenitally unequipped to be more than a niche publisher. Meanwhile Interplay now had in the works several Dungeons & Dragons-branded CRPGs. (I’ll have much more to say about them later in this series of articles.) Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, the GURPS name on a box seemed unlikely to become a driver of sales in and of itself. What was the point of bending over backward to placate a prickly niche figure like Steve Jackson?

Jackson tried to backpedal when he realized how the winds were blowing, but it was to no avail. He wasn’t inclined to accept Brian Fargo’s assurances that, just because Fallout wasn’t going to be a GURPS game, Interplay couldn’t do one in the future. “What would you do if you were me?” he asked plaintively of a journalist from Computer Gaming World. “I work on it with them for three years, and then they decide not to go with GURPS. Why would I want to go through that again?”

Setting aside the merits or lack thereof of Jackson’s attempt to cast himself as the victim, the really amazing thing about all of this is how quickly the Fallout team managed to move on from GURPS. This was to a large extent thanks to Tim Cain’s modular programming, which allowed the back-end plumbing of the game to be replaced relatively seamlessly without changing the foreground interface and world. In place of GURPS, he implemented a set of tabletop rules that Chris Taylor had been tinkering with in his spare time for more than a decade, jotting them down “on the backs of three-by-five cards, in notebooks, and on scraps of paper.” Once transplanted into Fallout, his system became known as SPECIAL, after the seven core attributes it assigned to each character: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck.

That’s the official story. Having conveyed it to you, I must also note that there remains much in SPECIAL that is suspiciously similar to GURPS. GURPS’s idea of allowing players to select disadvantages as well as advantages for each character as an aid to better role-playing, for example, shows up in SPECIAL in the form of “traits,” character quirks — “Fast Metabolism,” “Night Person,” “Small Framed,” “Good Natured” — that are neither unmitigatedly good nor bad. I haven’t seen the contract that was signed between Steve Jackson Games and Interplay, but I do have to suspect that, had Jackson been a more conventionally businesslike chief executive with deeper pockets, he might have been able to make a lot of trouble for his erstwhile partner in the courts. But he wasn’t, and he didn’t. In rather typical Steve Jackson fashion, he let GURPS’s last, best shot at hitting the big time walk away from him without putting up a fight.

The breakup with GURPS was only the last in a series of small crises that Fallout had to weather over the course of its three-plus-year development cycle. “Nothing against Brian [Fargo] or anybody else at Interplay,” says Leonard Boyarsky, “but at the time, no one really thought much about Fallout. Brian gave us the money and let us do whatever we wanted to do. I don’t think that was [his] intent, but that’s how it ended up.” As Boyarsky hints, this benign neglect gave the game time and space to evolve at its own pace, largely isolated from what was going on around it — when, that is, it wasn’t being actively threatened with cancellation, which happened two or three times over the course of its evolution. Only in the frenzied final few months of the project, leading up to the game’s release in October of 1997, did it become a priority at Interplay. By that time, Diablo had become a sensation among gamers, leading some there to think that there might be some serious commercial potential in a heavier CRPG as well.

Such thinking was more or less borne out by the end results. Although Fallout did not become a hit on anything like the scale of Diablo, it was heralded like the return of a prodigal son by old-timers in the gaming press. “With a compelling plot, challenging and original quests, and, most importantly, a rich emphasis on character development, Fallout is the payoff for long-suffering RPG fans who have seen the genre diluted in recent times by an endless stream of half-baked, buggy, uninspired duds,” wrote Computer Gaming World. The game sold well over 100,000 copies in its first nine months. It was only the beginning of a trend that would give fans of high-concept CRPGs as much reason to smile as Diablo fans in the years to come.

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I’ve offered up quite a lot of explicit or implicit praise for Fallout to this point. Sadly, though, I do have to tell you that it also has its fair share of weaknesses in my opinion. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever played another game that marries aesthetic slickness and formal innovation with abject clunk to quite the same degree.

When you first fire it up, Fallout finds a way to put both its best and its worst foot forward. It bids you welcome with an opening movie that’s nothing if not striking and memorable, being the same one that Steve Jackson objected to so vehemently. This kind of clashing juxtaposition of tone and content would become a bit of a media cliché in the post-Sopranos Age of the Antihero, but it was still as jarring as it was intended to be in 1997. However you feel about it, you can’t deny that it’s brought off with astonishing deftness and confidence. We’re a long, long way from the tacky babes in chain-mail bikinis of the CRPGs that came before — and, for that matter, plenty of those that came afterward.

Thanks to Interplay’s proximity to Hollywood and the connections Brian Fargo had cultivated there, Fallout is blessed with an extraordinary cast of voice actors to go with its distinctive, self-assured visual aesthetic. Ron Perlman — the beast from Beauty and the Beast — narrates the second stage of the intro. Other voices that turn up later include that of Richard Moll, best known as the simple-minded bailiff of Night Court, and Richard Dean Anderson, who played the ever-inventive protagonist of MacGyver

Once we click the “New Game” button, we’re dropped into a character-building system that’s visually of a piece with what has come before. Here we can choose to play one of the three pre-generated characters or make one of our own. Doing the latter is unavoidably more complicated, but the game does a pretty good job of explaining itself even to those who refuse to glance at the manual.

So far, so good. Another movie sets up the first part of the plot, telling us that the vault in which we’ve lived all our life has a failing chip in its water purifier. We must venture out into the world to find another one before the old one dies completely, which will happen in 150 days — yes, this game has a time limit, although there will still be plenty to do after we find the replacement chip, what with all the other problems we’re about to uncover on the Outside. For now, though, off we go, walking through the door to our vault for the first time in our life. Behind it we find… an anonymously dull cave system, full of rats and not much else. It’s right here that we’re first confronted with the fact that, despite the fresh new coat of paint Fallout has received, there is still much that is old-school about the game.

There’s a sort of Puritan ethic to many old CRPGs, an insistence that you have to earn the right to eventually have fun by struggling for a few hours as a glorified exterminator, clubbing pissant vermin with first-level characters who are weak as kittens. Fallout doesn’t start you out as woefully unprepared for the world you face as some CRPGs do, but it certainly doesn’t go all-out to welcome you into its world either. After killing or dodging rats in the caves outside your own vault, you travel to another, abandoned vault in in the hope of salvaging a water chip from it. There you encounter… you guessed it, a whole lot more rats. If you complain to them about this slow and dull beginning, Fallout fans will rush to tell you that the game opens up in the course of things and becomes much more interesting. By no means are they wrong about this. But why can’t it grab our interest from the start? It seems to me that games should strive to delight and intrigue us right from beginning all the way to the end. We’ve earned our fun, if that’s the way one wishes to think about it, via all the boring tasks we did earlier in the day before we finally got to sit down in front of our gaming computer.

Alas, other aspects of Fallout are annoying from the start and never really do improve. Its interface is the opposite of intuitive, seeming to be predicated on the philosophy that, if one mouse click is good, five clicks must surely be better. Everything you try to do is more awkward and fiddly than it ought to be. It’s doubly frustrating because so many of the problems could have been fixed so easily. When you try to conduct transactions with bottle caps — this post-apocalyptic world’s equivalent of coinage — you find that you’re inexplicably only allowed to move 999 of them around at a time, meaning you have to go through multiple rounds of the process just to effect a major purchase or sell off a decent-sized pile of loot. Would it have killed the team to add an extra digit or two here? When you come across a new item and rush to your inventory to see what it is and whether you want to equip it, you find that it’s been added to the end of your list of objects carried, meaning you have to rummage your way down through potentially dozens of other items to get to it. Vital messages scroll by in green text in the tiny window at the bottom left without doing anything to draw your attention to them. They’re shockingly easy to miss entirely. No one of these little sources of friction is sufficient to ruin your experience on its own, but they do begin to add up.

Fallout needed to reconcile the free-roaming real-time movement which late-1990s gamers demanded with a set of turn-based combat rules. As we’ll see in future articles in this series, most Renaissance-era CRPGs with aspirations of offering a deeper gameplay experience than Diablo had to negotiate similarly tricky terrain, for which they deployed various solutions. I have to say that I find Fallout’s one of the least satisfying. Whenever nearby enemies notice you, the game automatically switches into turn-based mode, in which every action you take costs some number of action points. When you run out of action points, there’s nothing to be done but click the (too small and weirdly obscure) “Next Turn” button, at which point everyone else gets a turn before control comes back around to you. It makes for painfully slow going in even the most trivial fights. The worst moments are when you find yourself just at the edge of the perception range of a group of enemies, and the game keeps switching spasmodically between its real-time and turn-based modes. It’s enough to convince you to put all of your skill points into Sneak, just to try to avoid the whole mess.

While I’m complaining, let me note as well that I’m not at all fond of time limits in games like this — not even of fairly generous ones, as Fallout’s admittedly is. Nobody enjoys being told that they’ll have to start over because they spent too much time dilly-dallying in a game’s world. There are other, subtler ways to inculcate a sense of drama and urgency.

Of course, all of these judgments are just that: judgment calls on the part of yours truly. You may very well find that those things I call weaknesses are strengths for you. Certainly the original Fallout still has a devoted fan base who continue to swear by it as the purest articulation of a unique vision, even after its name has gone on to spawn a series of vastly more popular, faster-paced games and, most recently, a popular television series. (Who could have imagined such things when Tim Cain first began to tinker with his GURPS CRPG? Surely not him!) As I grow older, I continue to learn over and over that one person’s great game is another’s boredom simulator. If you love Fallout, I’m very happy for you and would never presume to tell you you’re wrong to feel as you do. Please don’t hate me for having more mixed feelings about it. Believe me, no one is sadder than I am that I can’t fall head over heels in love with it.

There’s just one part of Fallout that is, I would argue, objectively broken: the companion system. In the last few months of the game’s development, when it was suddenly looking like it might have real hit potential in the wake of Diablo’s spectacular reception, a dictate came down from Brian Fargo stating that it must be possible to recruit companions to join you in your quest. So, a handful of  these recruitable non-player characters were shoehorned in. Their implementation is woefully incomplete. You can’t even trade items with your friends; some players have been reduced to using their pickpocketing skill as a way to get the right equipment into the right hands. But worst of all is combat when companions are involved. Lacking the time to write custom code to control the companions’ behavior, the team employed the same routines that were already being used to control non-recruitable characters. It’s good fun when you’re fighting a bunch of thugs and one of them mows down most of his own people with his Uzi in his eagerness to put some bullets into you. It’s rather less fun when your character is the one taking friendly fire. Circular firing squads abound when playing with companions, such that the wisest policy is probably just to go through the entire game solo. But having to tiptoe through a minefield in order to have a good time, picking and choosing from the opportunities a game offers you, is pretty much the definition of “broken” in game design, not to mention the antithesis of everything Fallout purports to stand for.

In my perhaps jaundiced eyes, then, Fallout is a piebald creation, combining amazing aesthetics and world-building with game systems that are groundbreaking in the abstract but sometimes excruciating in execution. Mixed results like these are often the fate of games that dare to push in bold new directions and rejigger the matrix of the possible. The immaculate conception is the exception in game design; change more commonly comes in piecemeal, initially imperfect fashion. The CRPGs that would follow Fallout as the Renaissance gathered steam would embrace its strengths, whilst smoothing out many of its rough edges.

Next time, we’ll see how a venerable series from the previous era of CRPGs adapted its old-school approach to the changing times, and was rewarded with another solid hit which demonstrated that the CRPG’s doldrums were fast coming to an end.

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Sources: “Fallout and Yesterday’s Impossible Tomorrow” by Joseph A. November, from the book Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History. The books Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs by David L. Craddock, Designers & Dragons: A History of the Roleplaying Game Industry, Volume 2, by Shannon Appelcline; Burning Chrome by William Gibson; The Fifties by David Halberstam. Computer Gaming World of January 1997, May 1997, and January 1998; Retro Gamer 186; The Austin American Statesman of April 18 1988.

I also made use of the Interplay archive donated by Brian Fargo to the Strong Museum of Play and of Interplay’s 1998 SEC annual report.

My thanks to S. John Ross, who shared with me his memories of Steve Jackson Games and his impressions of its titular founder. And thank you to Felipe Pepe, Zoltan, Busca, and other commenters for pushing me to add some nuance to the discussion of the overall state of the CRPG genre that opens this article.

Most of all, this article owes a debt to Tim Cain’s YouTube channel, which is a consistent, oddly soothing delight that’s become a fixture of my lunch breaks, regardless of whether “Uncle Tim” wants to tell me about games or chocolate. (“Hi, everyone. It’s me, Tim. Today I’m going to talk about…”) I’m sorry that Fallout doesn’t completely do it for me, Tim. I hope I’ll love Arcanum when I get there.

Where to Get It: Fallout is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com.

I have finished the game, and my previous posts are needed for context.

Bomb #20: The only thing that exists is myself.
Sgt. Pinback: Snap out of it, bomb.
Bomb #20: In the beginning there was darkness. And the darkness was without form and void.
Sgt. Pinback: Umm. What the hell is he talking about? Bomb?
Bomb #20: And in addition to the darkness there was also me. And I moved upon the face of the darkness and I saw that I was alone.
Sgt. Pinback: Hey…..bomb?
Bomb #20: Let there be light. (Explodes.)

— From the ending of the movie Dark Star (1974)

There’s what might be a Dark Star movie reference in the game; I know have a couple of fans watching. It’s hard to tell, because it’s mashed up with the Blake’s 7 reference.

First, a theoretical side tangent. Text adventures have tended to always have diegetic and non-diegetic commands; diegetic commands are ones that translate to something the avatar does in the world, while non-diegetic commands involve affecting the game program itself: SAVE, RESTORE, QUIT, and so forth. Some games blur the difference (Quondam infamously having the save feature not work in the first part of the game because the player gets beaten up by mobsters) but the general ramification is the player does not reach across the aisle unless some alteration to the program state is needed, and furthermore, it is expected by the player there won’t be some diegetic effect to a non-diegetic command. (The big issue games from this era have is advancing time even upon saving or loading a game.)

HELP has always been an oddball between the two groups; Crowther/Woods adventure clearly is giving a non-diegetic explanation of the game’s setup…

I know of places, actions, and things. Most of my vocabulary describes places and is used to move you there. To move, try words like forest, building, downstream, enter, east, west, north, south, up, or down. I know about a few special objects, like a black rod hidden in the cave.

…but Fortress at Times-End had HELP be the necessary starting command of the game, as for some reason it caused a drawbridge to open. Between the two we’ve had the command sometimes give a piece of information that is absolutely essentially to playing the game (a parser command that is impossible to guess, for instance).

Dark Star turns out to fall in that category, because pressing the buttons at the self destruct area is wrong. The game wants the code formatted in a very specific way, one that can only be worked out via typing HELP.

ENTER GREEN/YELLOW/BLUE AS’CODE GYB’

This is slightly cheeky not only in requiring a command that might make a player feel like they were giving up any kind of personal “no hints challenge” but also the three button colors are green, yellow, and red so the combination doesn’t make sense.

There’s only six combinations so it is easy to simply guess, but there is a way of getting the information otherwise. Back at the ORAC you can type CODE.

Why the player would even know this syntax works is unknown. (I just got it later from the source code.) Also, as shown, it doesn’t actually work: if you type HELP the game lets you know ORAC needs you to be polite, so the correct command is CODE PLEASE.

The Orac was a bit messy to converse with in Blake’s 7, so this could simply be a reference to that, but the actual refusal followed by the “leave me alone” feels more along the lines of talking to Bomb 20 in Dark Star. I’m still going to say the reference is accidental, but I’m going to leave the surfing picture anyway just for fun.

With the self-destruct stopped, the game enters a new phase, the “second mission”. (That means my mucking about the planets was “virtual branching” — I got to see ahead before figuring out the “puzzle” of realizing the HELP command was being mildly abused.)

Another timer! It turns out the complication is not from the life support timer but the fact the space suit (which you need to wear during all the planetary visits) starts running out of oxygen.

Back at planet THREE, there was an ORB, a HOOK, a ROCK, and a KEY.

The ORB simply blows up if you try to teleport it away, so that’s clearly a red herring, but out of the other three items only one of them is useful. You can take the HOOK over to the “green planet” with the fishing, nab the rope and pole, and CATCH FISH. However, you just get a fish, and that’s it. It does nothing. This is a red herring on the level of Ferret, letting you actually solve a puzzle but it turns out to be completely the wrong thing to do.

No, the item you need is a KEY, which I’ll show off in a moment. You also need to get the box over to the cave and nab the stalactite (as I showed off before) and do the SHOOT STALACTITE (as I also showed off before). SHOOT incidentally doesn’t even bother to check what noun you use, so the only reason I knew for sure it was applying to the stalactite was the brokenness of the parser.

For whatever reason, if you step to the cliff one step to the east and do the SHOOT over there, the dissolving ice will make some vapor and get TWO CRYSTALS from the rockface. I don’t think there’s a clue to this other than it seems like the command ought to do something.

This, plus the KEY, are what’s needed to win the game. Flying back to the Dark Star, I went back to the chamber with two spots missing on a cube. There I had an epic hour-long struggle with the parser.

The two commands that work — which I eventually had to pull straight out of the source code — are REPLACE CRYSTALS and COMPLETE CUBE. For “complete”, I suppose that makes sense, but this is the first and will probably be the last time I’ve ever seen that verb in an adventure game. For “replace”, the crystals go in empty spaces — we’re not replacing anything! I tried PLACE CRYSTALS as one of my first attempts with no joy.

However, even with the right command, I was stopped by a “glass dome”. You cannot refer to either the GLASS or DOME so I tried taking over the heavy stone from the crater planet and using it for smashing purposes, but I just got gnarly default messages.

I finally realized the LOCK just outside did not correspond to the ID card door as I previously assumed, but rather was its own independent thing. Typing USE KEY (more fun with the parser!) will cause, the game reports, nothing to happen, but we’ve seen that trick already.

The key-use opened up the dome, so now it is possible to COMPLETE CUBE.

This suggests either Mexican Adventure was written earlier or the games were made together. Haunted House also references Mexican Adventure. That’s the one game from the Sharpsoft Class of ’82 that I haven’t reached yet, but it’ll have to wait for another time, because I need a breather from their particularly ornery parser…

…and possibly cope with another ornery parser, as coming up: we’re staying with science fiction and visiting an unusual Apple II graphical game, a deep enough cut it did not make my 1982 list.

(Continued from my previous post.)

I’m in the curious position of figuring out how to fuel the starfighter and visit other planets, but still with the Dark Star self-destruct timer ticking down. I don’t even know if stopping the self-destruct is the end of the game or you get missions after. There’s three structural possibilities for what’s going on:

a.) I’m “looking ahead”, like how Burglar’s Adventure lets you keep playing after setting off an alarm to see what’s coming, even though the game is already lost. This can help understand what some earlier objects in the game might be for and/or help get a notion of what kind of patterns the game follows (for example, how many items are red herrings?). This idea really could use a name. “Virtual plot branching” maybe?

b.) The timer is incredibly tight and you’re genuinely supposed to fly off to get resources before coming back and stopping the self-destruct sequence.

c.) This is a Ferret-style game, where you clearly and intentionally have to go murder your virtual selves finding out some information which will then get applied back in the “main plot”. There’s no realistic way your main character could learn that information other than referring to things learned from their doomed-to-death clones. This is like if in the game Outer Worlds, instead of there being a time loop, your character just dies over and over and you somehow happen to know the information from your dead selves; that is, it is functionally identical to a time loop, but the game-world ramifications are grislier.

Continuing from last time, I was able to grab: ID CARD, CHART (mentioning “DILUS DC”), TEA STRAINER, SPACESUIT, METAL SUIT (radiation protection), GREEN SUIT, COMPASS, DETECTOR (of radiation), BOX (polystyrene, trying to open it says “it’s not that easy”), PHASER, COIN (for a pinball table).

For open problems, other than the mysterious box (the one thing I’ll resolve later), there’s an ORAC computer that might be a red herring, there’s an alien in the vent (you’d think the phaser works, but it is rigged to not be able to fire while in the space station), two suspicious “blank walls” (again the phaser would be nice to use, but alas), a crystal cube “without two blocks” in the engine room, and three buttons (yellow, red, green) that supposedly disable the self-destruct sequence. Trying to press any of the three buttons is rebuffed by the game.

PRESS YELLOW: I DON’T SEE THE POINT IN THAT!
PRESS RED: IT WON’T WORK!
PRESS GREEN: I DON’T SEE THE POINT IN THAT!

I gather, given the differing error messages, that red is the first button in the combination, but something is stopping the PRESS. Since the crystal cube is in the same room, I suspect fixing the crystal cube is the hang-up.

Returning back to the room with the starfighter, there’s a “TAP” and a “HOSEPIPE”, and turning the tap causes fuel to flow out of the hose.

The right command here is tricky to find; if you try to take off with starfighter the game says it needs REFUELING, and that word specifically needs to be used here: REFUEL STARFIGHTER. Unfortunately if you try to then take off it doesn’t work:

(I’m starting to imagine, plot-wise, that we did an “emergency long distance teleport” over to the bridge of the Dark Star when contact was lost, and it’s such a difficult/dangerous procedure only one person could be sent. That explains why we aren’t familiar with what the buttons on the bridge do, and also suggests some lore questions: What happened to the crew? Why was the fuel sabotaged? Why is the crystal cube broken? Why did the self-destruct sequence start? Where did the alien come from?)

Going back out and checking the fuel, you see it is LUMPY. The TEA STRAINER works to fix this (!!) by typing STRAIN FUEL. Doing REFUEL STARFIGHTER with the fix now allows you to take off.

The procedure (given on a note earlier, combined with information from a chart) is to set COURSE DILUS and then type DRIVE.

This changes the starfighter’s location, closes the exit “down” (to the Dark Star) and opens an exit south, to a “hold”.

The belt is a GRAVITY COMPENSATOR BELT and the bracelet allows for teleportation. You can then hop in the alcove and find five buttons corresponding to the three planets in the viewscreen. And yes, those numbers don’t match, so PRESS FOUR and PRESS FIVE result in an unfortunate demise:

As an aside, this is where Rob was getting stuck and thought the code needed changing in order to introduce the digits 1 through 5, as the buttons are described that way. PRESS 1, PRESS 2, etc. previously didn’t work at all because the game doesn’t even let you push the actual buttons. Quoting Rob:

When I originally got to that area, I naturally assumed that, since the game says “the buttons are numbered 1-5” that you had to use the numerals. When it became obvious that you couldn’t, I tried typing them out but the game kept responding “nothing happened!”. Since not being able to enter numerals was clearly a bug, I immediately reported it.

This is not the first and certainly will not be the last bit of early-80s text adventure jank that gets mistaken for a bug. (Certainly by modern standards it is a bug — why would you mismatch display and input like that?)

With fairly high efficiency (I’m off by 1 or 2) I was able to get to the alcove safely with everything worn (space suit, bracelet, belt) in 27 moves.

Given the space station explodes at 50, this does not seem like enough time to do everything and come back. For example, here’s the map upon pressing THREE:

It’s just a straightforward grid, exploring a crater.

In addition to the KEY from the center there’s a HOOK (“fishing hook”), ORB (“made out of an unknown element”), and STONE (“heavy”) lying out in the open.

Picking up all three items and returning to the start (at the “monolith” that allows teleportation) takes 17 turns. Given the 27 moves at start (let’s say 25 with perfection and no typos, and yes making a typo counts as a move) that’s 42 moves used up already on only one teleport destination. Even if it turns out one or more of the items are red herrings, I think option b (explore planets, then rush back to stop the self-destruct) it starting to seem unlikely.

Jumping over to planet ONE, it is just two rooms (so far):

The stalactite might make a tempting phaser target, but shooting it is a bad idea:

You can try to take it but the game says you need an “INSULATED CONTAINER”. This turns out to be the BOX from the Dark Star, but taking it results in yet more moves being wasted.

TWO leads to a “green planet”, which is again small.

The LONG STICK at the opening room is described as “bamboo”. The pool to the west has FISH, and if you try to CATCH FISH the game says you need a hook. If you bring the hook over from the crater it turns out you’re still missing something.

To the north there are three “cliff” rooms with ROCKFACE objects (“crystalline”). Trying to CLIMB (even while holding the rope, or dropping it in the room) is rebuffed.

Trying to SHOOT ROCKFACE (with the phaser) gives the response

YOU DO NOT HAVE THE STALACTITE!

and bringing the stalactite along gives this screen:

It’s hard to experiment with the planets because the background timer keeps going off quickly; while it is still very faintly possible the player is just supposed to move very fast, I can’t imagine doing all the steps to make a fishing pole and do whatever it is the stalactite needs and grabbing at least the hook from the crater and still be under fifty.

I suppose playing this game is a little like talking Bomb 20 out of exploding, but only by coincidence.

Next time I’m going to take another stab at the Dark Star itself, as I get the nagging feeling it’s the bespoke-command parser that’s really tripping me up here (am I even pressing the buttons on the self-destruct control in the right way?)

SharpSoft, the company out of London with products for the Sharp line of computers, advertised four games in the January 1983 issue of Personal Computing World.

Dark Star by A.J. Josey
Mexican Adventure by Geoff Clark
Haunted House by A.J. Josey and Geoff Clark
Secret Kingdom by Geoff Clark

As the links above imply, we’ve played two of them, and have two more to go. I’m still unclear if these were listed in the order they were written or not. Having played Dark Star a little, I can say the parser feels better than Haunted House but worse than Secret Kingdom. However, that’s not really proving anything, and it could even be the case (given we’re dealing with two different authors) they were developing games in an overlapping way.

Both A.J. Josey and Geoff Clark remain mysteriously resistant to my attempts to find them even as references in computer magazines. The closest I found was that there was a person named Geoff Clark who worked as a camera supervisor on some Classic Doctor Who episodes; it would be lovely to find out it was the same person (especially as I know one of the readers of this blog also worked as a camera supervisor for Doctor Who) but there’s absolutely no evidence for that and there’s enough Geoff Clarks out there I can’t call it anything more than coincidence.

I didn’t find much else on Sharpsoft either other than a profile of Michael Opacic who wrote them word processor, spreadsheet, and database software, and “sold full rights — no royalties” with “the attitude that a bird in the hand is worth several in the bush.” A different contract paid out 15% royalties so the company was clearly giving both options; I still have no names associated with the founder or founders.

I originally had this game farther down on my list, due to a technical issue commenter Rob discovered; while you are required to type numerical digits later in the game, the program (in the MZ-700 format we have) doesn’t let you. It is literally impossible to win without modifying the source code.

Rob asked a while ago for help in a Czech MZ Sharp forum, and Lanhawk noticed that advice had recently rolled in. Specifically, this line is wrong:

500 IF(T<65)-(T>90)THENUSR(62):GOTO440

It needs to be

500 IF(T<48)-(T>90)THENUSR(62):GOTO440

What’s happening here is that the game is restricting what the player types to certain ASCII codes. The ASCII code for “0” is 48, and the code for “A” is 65. The first line restricts input to letter characters (anything less than 65 in ASCII is left out), leaving out the needed digits. By changing the value to 48, “0” through “9” are now included.

While it certainly is possible for a unfinishable game to hit in the 80s for no particular reason at all, in this case the game was originally written for MZ-80A before getting moved to the MZ-700. While this more or less just adds color, I could easily see a change like the bug above also slipping in.

So you don’t have to noodle with all that, I put together a package of the game with an emulator and the fix already swapped in. Load save state 1 and hit ENTER to start from the very beginning, or load save state 2 to jump straight to the first room.

The game starts with music, which I’ve dropped a video of below.

Despite the Star Wars theme, the game feels (so far) like an amalgam of Star Trek and Alien. You’re in the Dark Star ship and you are the only one aboard (except for, as you’ll see later, an alien); the closest aspect to Star Wars is a “starfighter” that’s on board, but maybe that gets later to shoot down TIE Fighters so suddenly the theme will be appropriate again.

The most interesting part of the instructions is the notice that this game has no score as it is “mission” based and “you either make it or you don’t!!”

You start in the control room of the Dark Star. There’s no options other than to SIT DOWN. That alone took a bit of time to work out. The command SIT is bespoke and only works in this room in this context (that is, somewhere it is hard-coded to check for “SIT DOWN” as a phrase rather than the command SIT being considered a verb on its own). It (and some other commands) evaded my verb list:

The evasion can be pretty bad; just typing SIT alone gives the message I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN BY THE COMMAND ‘SIT’, which suggests this is entirely the wrong thing to be typing; SIT SEAT gets equal confusion, and the parser doesn’t even let you type SIT ON SEAT (it will stop you from putting in a space after a second word — the same kind of hard enforcement that led to the bug where numerals couldn’t be typed in).

Sitting down successfully results in a blank screen, a red button and a blue button. Pressing either button just states NOTHING HAPPENS! which is slightly frustating because something happens in both cases. With the blue button, it turns the screen on and reveals the player’s mission: the ship is about to blow up and the self-destruct needs to be de-activated.

The red button invisibly opens an exit to the north, where you can find a map which gives the overall ship layout in glorious ASCII.

Before going on to explore the ship, I want to point out how incredibly odd the opening is in a meta-sense. Surely if we’re here, and we’re the only one, we’re meant to be here — that is, the avatar ought to already know the function of the red button and blue button, so saying that nothing happens is doubly curious? In 1982, the amnesia trick still hasn’t been rolled in much yet to cure player-vs-avatar-knowledge disjoint (Ferret and El Diablero have been the only two); most games from this era seem to just pretend it doesn’t matter. It’s hard to deal with, though; Kirk in a Star Trek adventure game surely should know his own ship’s layout, yet the player needs to map it out.

Following the same order as the ship’s map:

2 is the recreation room, which has a pinball machine and a table. The table has an ID card which will be needed later, and a chart which talks about a star system DILOS DC. I have not used this information yet.

The pinball machine is described as a Captain Fantastic which is a real pinball game from the 1970s (it was the follow-up to Wizard by Bally and sold immensely well; it helped for Bally’s finances that Elton John — whose likeness was used — took his payment in pinball machines).

Moving on to 3 is the research lab, which has a radiation detector, a polystyrene box, and an Orac (a fictional computer from the show Blake’s 7). Sure, let’s toss all the sci-fi shows in there.

4 is the flight deck with a starfighter. You can hop on but the starfighter lacks gas. So much for escaping self-destruct the ignoble way.

5 is the galley (that’s far southeast on the map) which has an old tea strainer.

Stepping into the larder reveals an air vent; you can go in the air vent to find a “blank wall” and going any further results in death-by-alien.

Moving up to 6 is the cargo hold, with multiple suits: a spacesuit, a “metal suit” (which turns out to be radiation protection) and a green suit (which I don’t understand yet). Hidden within the suits are a COMPASS and a NOTE, the latter explaining that the starfighter — the one we saw earlier that needs fuel — responds to spoken commands.

With the ID card back at the recreation room you can get into 7, which is a armoury. It has a phaser (which can only be set to kill) and a coin which goes back at the pinball table.

Finally there’s 8, which can be reached by starting at the control room and going due north. If you just do that right away you die.

The metal suit back at the storage is sufficient for protection.

The control panel has three buttons (yellow, red, and green) with the note that they disarm the self-destruct in the right combination. Why don’t we know the combination? Maybe we’re raiders and there’s a missing manual insert. Just to emphasize why the “bespoke command” feature is dodgy, here’s my attempt at reading the inscription that goes with the colored buttons:

I picked the wrong noun on READ first and it told me the command READ wasn’t understood! This very much implies to stop using READ, and I only persisted because I already observed the response was deceptive.

Once I got past the rough starting command the game became fun to explore. I’m not even “stuck” yet, but I had enough enthusiasm from people who wanted to play along I figured this was a good place to stop.

Deep beneath the earth, the dragon is rising! Quest into mysterious underground caverns and forests to learn magical secrets, draw strength from friends and family, secure alliances that can save your home, and carry on the heroic legacy of Stronghold!

Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery is an interactive fantasy novel by Amy Griswold, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—380,000 words and hundreds of choices—without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Choice of Games editor Mary Duffy sat down with author Amy Griswold to talk about the upcoming game and some of her other works. Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery releases Thursday, January 30th—you can wishlist it on Steam today, it really helps, even if you don’t plan to purchase it on Steam. 

We’re returning to the world of Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate. This is something of an indirect sequel, right?

Yes, it’s a chance to revisit the town founded in Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate with a new generation of characters facing new challenges. The influence of your town’s founding hero determines the starting situation of your town and the personality of your grandparent, the town’s current leader. But for players who want to jump in without playing the first game, there’s the option to choose a preset backstory or make detailed choices about your town’s history when you begin the game.

How was it for you picking back up the threads of the Stronghold universe?

I really enjoyed revisiting the world of Stronghold and getting to explore some corners of it in more detail. In Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate, the goblins are mostly seen at a distance, and the dryads are enigmatic forest protectors. Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery takes a closer look at both goblins and dryads, with befriendable (and romanceable) goblin and dryad NPC companions. It was also interesting to write a game primarily focused on sorcery. In Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate, it’s possible to never engage with the lost magic of your ancestors at all. In Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery, the player character and their friends Corbin, Zoe, and Fox are all sorcerers, and “I use sorcery!” is the obvious way to approach a lot of problems. This required making the magical system more complex and varied, with options to focus on the knotwork of goblins and dryads or the experimental science of alchemy as well as rediscovering your ancestors’ lost arts.

Between these two games you published The Play’s the Thing with us, which is a fantastic game, and a fantastically different setting. Tell me a bit about the inspiration there, because within the Amy Griswold canon we’ve also got one of my all time favorite games, The Eagle’s Heir, which is a wonderful Napoleonic alt-history. You seem adept at jumping around in genre.

I like changes of pace. The Play’s the Thing was a fabulous chance to play with a bunch of dramatic tropes that would probably be over the top in a Stronghold game — wicked rulers, troubled heirs, long-lost siblings, and a deadly curse! plus a dancing bear! — while at the same time exploring what it’s like to try to make art that means something while the world is falling apart around you. The Eagle’s Heir is a swashbuckling steampunk adventure with airship racing and dastardly plots, but it’s also about how personal choices can shape political change. And both Stronghold games are fantasy adventures built around the tropes of classic tabletop games, and are also about how your choices influence other people in a small community. To me, the Choice of Games format is well suited to games that let players soak up the atmosphere of a particular genre, while at the same time exploring the reasons why choices and stories matter.

What surprised you most about the writing of Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery?

I kept finding edge cases carried over from A Hero’s Fate that I had forgotten were possible and needed to be accounted for. What happens if the original player character has no children (biological or adopted) and no nephew, and then chooses a protégé as their heir, and then their protégé dies, leaving no one the right age alive to be the grandparent of the player character in Caverns of Sorcery? Etc.

There’s a dragon in this game. Choice of Games is a dragon-heavy publisher. Please say a bit about your dragon.

Dragons are useful because they give player characters a problem to react to in interesting ways. It’s hard to ignore a dragon. The dragon in Caverns of Sorcery was imprisoned by your ancestors centuries ago in the caverns near your town. It would very much like to escape, set your town on fire, and feast on the survivors. What else the dragon wants is possible to explore over the course of the game. But this isn’t, at its heart, a game about a dragon; it’s a game about a situation where doing nothing will lead to disaster, so you have to try doing something. What kind of “something” is up to you.

In addition to writing interactive fiction for us, you’re also a prolific novelist, I’d love to tell our readers about other works of yours they can enjoy.

Fans of the steampunk world of The Eagle’s Heir may enjoy the gaslamp fantasy mysteries Death by Silver and A Death at the Dionysus Club (with Melissa Scott), in which metaphysician Ned Mathey and detective Julian Lynes solve mysteries and navigate the fascinatingly awful world of Victorian London and its gay community. And for sci-fi adventure, I recommend the Stargate Legacy series, a virtual fifth season of tie-in novels set after the end of the Stargate Atlantis TV series (start with Homecoming by Jo Graham and Melissa Scott.)

What are you working on next?

I’m working on revisions to a science fiction novel, Gyre, that’s under contract for probably sometime in 2026, and I’ve got a couple of historical fiction projects on the back burner as well.

what are turns made of?

to everything, turn, turn, turn.

Last week, a reader commented on my use of a carry out rule. That’s great! I’ve been thinking about it, and decided it’s probably time to review action processing.

“Action processing” is a general term referring to order, organization, and outcomes with regard to the things that “happen” during Inform games. Time passing in parser games typically occurs is measured in units of time called turns. Turns pass in response to player commands. Usually, one actionable (valid) command creates a response, and that response takes one turn. The most common command is EXAMINE. If a player examines something, a typical response is for Inform to print the description of that something.

>x chairs
There were an incredible number of seats there, probably twenty at least! I had a hard time imagining so many people in one place all at once. There weren't any people sitting in them, but I had a feeling that there was more to them than I could see at first glance.

This exchange takes one turn, and increments an automatically tracked number called the “TURN COUNT”. We can refer to this number any time we like:

say "The current turn count is [turn count].";

Even though players may not see all or even most of it, a lot of things happen during the course of an Inform turn. I’ll share a link to a very complex diagram of the turn, but don’t get lost in it, as understanding the highlights is often enough.

Check out this 2009 post from Emily Short’s blog.

What I say here will not be exhaustive, but it should provide a good starting point for new authors. I’ll list these in order, though some cycling is possible.

the player’s command.

The turn starts with the player’s command. In nearly every parser game, time stands still until a command is entered. Parser gameplay usually consists of commands being parsed into actions and, when applicable, one or two nouns. While there are some opportunities to get involved with parser operation, a lot of it is not accessible to us as beginners. Let’s set aside the parser for another day.

However, before the command parsing begins, we do have some fairly direct methods for engaging with Inform. This involves two basic formulations:

before reading a command:

Since the game has not read the command yet, our options are quite limited. Perhaps we’d like to check or change some variables or modify the appearance of the command prompt.

after reading a command:

This one is used more commonly. We can check a command in ways we can’t–by default, anyway–check via Inform’s natural language diction. We can even edit or replace commands, bypassing the parser to do so. In fact, the command isn’t really a command. It’s a line of text that Inform’s parser hasn’t evaluated yet.

Note that no turns have passed at this phase, because the parser has not yet turned a command into action.

However, there is a lot to consider while using either tactic, since we are setting aside Inform’s usual framework of parsed commands and actions. That isn’t to say that a beginner should never use them! My advice is just to exhaust the possibilities of action processing first.

before.

Inform will then parse valid commands into actionable elements. This occurs in a series of steps. During this process, the state of the world will be checked several times.

Once a valid command has been processed, Inform will perform a couple of checks pertaining to items included in groupings, for instance what is included in the “all” of TAKE ALL.

Once that’s done, our action rules begin in earnest. The earliest possible action processing rule is the BEFORE rule. BEFORE rules are, in my experience, both potent and uncommon. Uncommon, because it’s not usually necessary or useful to do things with BEFORE (we’ll use later rules for almost everything). Potent, because when you need them, you really need them. The biggest reason to use BEFORE is that it comes before Inform has checked either visibility or accessibility.

“Visibility” is a little misleading. It is a check to determine the room has light or not. We could use a BEFORE room to allow players to perform actions that are prevented by darkness.

If we wanted to render an item or room visible in a less limited sense, we would change the scope of the player. More on that another day!

“Accessibility,” on the other hand, governs what the player can touch (many actions require one or more “touchable” things). Using a BEFORE rule may allow the player to manipulate an item locked within a transparent container, even though that is usually impossible. Essentially, a BEFORE rule will allow the player to touch any visible or in-scope thing, regardless of location. BEFORE also allows actions against non-touchable objects, for instance:

before touching north:
	say "OK!"

will yield

>touch north
OK!

You must name something more substantial.

Note that the “OK!” response is from the BEFORE rule, while the “You must name something more substantial.” comes from the BASIC ACCESSIBILITY RULE, which has subsequently determined that a direction cannot be touched.

The other reason for using BEFORE, and this will be a recurring concept, is that we can “get in front” of later phases of action processing. Let’s say we have an INSTEAD rule (the next phase of the turn) that almost always works, but we need to disable it for a very specific situation. If we don’t want to retool the actions involved, we can just prevent that INSTEAD from firing:

before jumping when the turn count is less than ten:
	say "It's far too early for that." instead.

Still, because of visibility and accessibility differences, it’s good to think such things through.

instead.

Once BEFORE rules have completed, and visibility and accessibility are determined, INSTEAD rules are processed. INSTEAD rules, as the name suggests, happen INSTEAD of something else. Although INSTEAD can be a trap for new authors (I’ll come back to this), it has a lot of uses. I usually use it for simple redirection of actions. We might have a custom action for something, for instance. In some cases, built-in actions might be redirected to it.

instead of cutting something:
	try preparing the noun.

In this way, trying to cut something–an onion, for instance–would redirect to an action we’ve come up with, PREPARING. Note that we can be very general with our INSTEAD rules. There’s nothing to stop us from making a rule like:

instead of doing something:
	say "I prefer not to.".

That’s kind of silly. But let’s say we have an item. It’s an apple. Instead of implementing every possible action with the apple, we can use a general instead rule to head most things off.

instead of doing something other than eating, taking, or examining to the apple:
	say "That apple is only good for eating.".

That can be pretty handy, especially if we are trying to avoid Inform’s built in action responses.

My personal taste is to avoid instead rules in a lot of cases, because INSTEAD stops action processing. If we have an INSTEAD rule for SMELLING THE ROSE, Inform will stop processing that action the INSTEAD is reached. My general preference is to use the entire processing turn unless I have a reason not to. From a learning point of view (I’m still learning, after all), I benefit from keeping an eye on what happens as the turn progresses. Another reason is that I like using AFTER rules for things like keeping score, tracking player goals, and so forth. I’ve written about that here!

Still, it can’t always be helped. This is especially true of actions that are part of the Standard Rules. There are multiple rules governing the EXAMINING action, for instance, and it isn’t easy for us to just jump in the middle of that. Rather than taking a wrench to the action and hoping for the best, it’s probably best to “get in front” of the action with an INSTEAD rule.

instead of examining the jeweled scepter when the house is on fire:
	say "You don't have time to look at that right now!".

Here’s something you don’t want to do, and I want to stress this emphatically: don’t write your game using INSTEAD rules for everything. You can, definitely, and because you’ll be stopping other actions, you’ll never have to worry about what Inform does during the usual turn. You’ll never need to learn how default responses work. Consider this code:

instead of unlocking the iron door with the titanium key:
	say "Even though your hands are sweaty and shaking, you manage to get the iron door unlocked!";
	say "The fearsome mutant blorglebeast charges! But you manage to squeeze through the door in the nick of time, locking it behind you.";
	now the player is in the safe room;
	try looking.

Now, chances are this will all do that the author expects. We have dramatic text, and the player has gotten beyond the locked door! It’s fine. But what if you want a scoring system later? What if you want more than one thing happening, or if it matters if the door is actually open? This will work, but there’s no future in it, and it doesn’t have much to teach.

That isn’t to say don’t use it; just be wary of it.

check.

Next come CHECK rules, which have a narrower scope than INSTEAD. Usually, a CHECK rule is used to evaluate a specific action.

check eating the strawberry:
	say "You are allergic to strawberries." instead.

Note that we are still shutting down the action with “instead.” We don’t have to do that, we could use “check” to print one message or update a status, then continue on with a later CARRY OUT rule.

Why not use an instead rule? Once concept of organization is to use INSTEAD rules for broad, general purposes. If food can have a fried property, we could have a rule that handles all such cases with a single response.

instead of eating something fried:
	say "I've sworn off fried foods for the sake of my heart."

A CHECK could follow behind with specific cases that get past our rather healthy prohibition against fried foods. We can handle such scenarios with more tailored and specific response messages.

check eating kale:
	say "Even though they all say how healthy it is, I can't stand Kale. I can't even swallow one bite of it!"

The general concept is that action processing begins wide but narrows to the specific.

As a matter of personal style, I rarely use CHECK messages (I’ll explain later), but that doesn’t mean they can’t be useful to you.

carry out.

By this time, the player’s parsed command has travelled a long way. BEFORE, INSTEAD, and CHECK have all permitted that the action reach the CARRY OUT phase of action processing. As the name suggests, now is the time for actions to be carried out. Things aren’t usually stopped here; the action does whatever it does and moves on.

What kinds of things can happen during carry out? In some cases, the state of the world changes. If a player successfully opens a door, the status of the door changes:

Carry out an actor opening (this is the standard opening rule):
	now the noun is open.

Sometimes, the only obvious result is printed text.

Carry out examining (this is the standard examining rule):
	if the noun provides the property description and the description of the noun is not "":
		say "[description of the noun][line break]";
		now examine text printed is true.

Note that “examine text printed” is tracked so that Inform knows whether it has printed something while examining, it doesn’t have any persistent effect on the world.

CARRY OUT might be a state of mind, then, since complexity, world condition, and printed output are all optional for a CARRY OUT rule. Instead of what such rules do, it’s often useful to think of when they happen during the player’s turn.

If BEFORE is the wide, open mouth of a funnel, then CARRY OUT is the narrowest point in the process. This is where specific, successful actions are carried out. In an abstract sense, a printed failure message might be a valid CARRY OUT rule. If the rule is specific and is going to continue on through action processing, CARRY OUT is a good fit.

Most of what your game does to affect the world or give feedback on completed actions will happen here.

I usually recommend specific rules, rather than complex conditional rules. That is, I prefer

carry out eating the apple:
	say "Juicy and crisp. Delicious!".

carry out eating the plum:
	"Delicious. So sweet and so cold.".

rather than

carry out eating a fruit:
	if the noun is the apple:
		say "Juicy and crisp. Delicious!";
	otherwise if the noun is the plum:
		say "Delicious. So sweet and so cold.".

As part of action processing, multiple applicable rules can execute during the same turn. The built-in rule for eating sends whatever is successfully eaten “nowhere,” or out of play.

Carry out an actor eating (this is the standard eating rule):
	now the noun is nowhere.

By default, both our rule printing feedback and the built-in rule taking the noun out of play will be processed.

after.

AFTER rules follow on after something has been carried out (or otherwise passed beyond the CARRY OUT phase of action processing). AFTER rules are useful and versatile. They can accommodate broad conditions, like

after doing something:

This makes AFTER rules handy for things like scoring systems, where actions and values require checking or updates with every successfully carried out action. If you’ve been following along, you know that I’ve used AFTER rules for tracking player objectives, for instance. A familiar idea from the documentation is giving items a property after the player examines them. We can use such a property to manipulate item descriptions, among other things. We’ll use a custom property called “examined” for this purpose.

a thing can be examined or unexamined.
a thing is usually unexamined.

first after examining something unexamined:
	now the noun is examined;
	continue the action;

A couple of features to note! “FIRST” can be used to push a rule to the front of its class. That is, if we have multiple AFTER rules and desire to arrange output in a specific order, we can use FIRST and LAST designations to do so. Note that this is only relevant to multiple rules from the same phase of action processing. We can’t make a CARRY OUT rule execute before an INSTEAD rule, but we can decide which applicable CARRY OUT rule runs first (or last).

The other important element of the above code is the phrase “continue the action.” We haven’t seen this before, but if, for example we want an action to proceed in spite of a rule that would normally end it (an INSTEAD rule, for instance), we can include the code “continue the action.”

AFTER rules, by default, end the action. INSTEAD rules end with a designation of “failure,” which I wouldn’t worry too much about. It’s a technical rather than a practical designation. AFTER rules end in “success.” In both cases, action processing stops. One implication of this is that it isn’t possible to reliably execute multiple AFTER or INSTEAD rules unless we’ve made arrangements. This isn’t a big deal for INSTEAD: that’s supposed to stop things. If we’re using “big” AFTER rules, on the other hand, we need to think things through.

One reason AFTER rules end processing for a specific action is that they can “get in front of” REPORT rules. In our fruit-eating example above, Inform has a built-in success message.

Report an actor eating (this is the standard report eating rule):
	if the action is not silent:
		if the actor is the player:
			say "[We] [eat] [the noun]. Not bad." (A);
		otherwise:
			say "[The actor] [eat] [the noun]." (B).

Now, we’ve already written our own text. This doesn’t interest us. We can stop the report rule from printing, or we can just make an AFTER rule.

after eating a fruit:
	do nothing.

That’s enough to prevent the report message and call the action a “success” (which, again, we aren’t paying too much attention to at the moment). If we preferred, we could move our text feedback here. We could also use AFTER rules to preempt any other REPORT rule, be it ours or Graham Nelson’s.

report.

I don’t do a lot with REPORT, personally, though it’s been helpful to me in some very specific situations. It’s generally used to print success messages from the standard rules. I’m sure a lot of us will recognize this, for instance.

Report an actor taking (this is the standard report taking rule):
	if the action is not silent:
		if the actor is the player:
			say "Taken." (A);
		otherwise:
			say "[The actor] [pick] up [the noun]." (B).

While it’s generally for feedback, there’s nothing stopping authors from messing with world state at the report phase. Some of the things that work other places will work here. Organizationally, though, it’s time to wrap things up by the time REPORT rolls around.

Report can’t handle the kind of broad, “big” rules that AFTER can. REPORT DOING SOMETHING, for instance, doesn’t work. AFTER is for follow ups, REPORT is a lid closing.

churn.

Note that action processing can repeat, or spawn parallel actions during a single turn. If we use INSTEAD to redirect action, for instance,

instead of taking the massive iron weight:
	try pushing the noun.

“Try pushing the noun” will spawn a new action that begins at the BEFORE phase. Consider this possibility:

carry out pushing the big red button:
	try hiding under the table;
	try covering my ears.

Inform will try to perform both actions starting at BEFORE, as ordered in the rule, then go back to try taking the original action (“pushing the big red button”) through action processing.

every turn.

Once every action dictated by the player’s command has completed, Inform will check scene status (I’ll be writing about scenes soon), then take a look at EVERY TURN rules.

EVERY TURN is part of the player’s turn, but it isn’t directly triggered by player action. Rather, EVERY TURN rules run independently. They’re good for general world management and machinery. Perhaps we’d like an ambient sound in a room:

every turn when the player is in the damp corridor:
	if a random chance of one in three chance succeeds:
		say "You hear the sound of dripping water.".

or

every turn when Scene III is happening:
	increment the dangerous number;
	if the dangerous number is 10:
		say "The skylight shatters overhead, and a very dangerous looking man leaps through!";
		now the dangerous man is in the living room.

scene iii ends when the dangerous man is in the living room.

And so forth! General, player-independent management of the game world is what EVERY TURN rules are all about. If they seem similar to AFTER rules used to keep score, they really aren’t. Think of such AFTER rules as responding to actions. EVERY TURN, on the other hand, is concerned with the game world itself.

Note that it is very common to have multiple EVERY TURN rules processing during a turn. If we add “rule succeeds” or “rule fails” or “stop the action” to an EVERY TURN rule, Inform will stop processing EVERY TURN rules. This is true of other phases, too. It usually isn’t desirable to say rules “succeed” or “fail” unless we have specific reasons for doing so.

what else.

Most of what happens next is out of scope for us. Inform will check for timed events, then advance the clock. More scenery stuff, etc.

A brief recap, in order of the kinds of action processing rules:

• BEFORE: first to process. Can bypass checks for visibility and accessibility. Support for “big” rules that can cover multiple actions and such.
• INSTEAD: Best use to redirect actions, prevent broad categories for action, or otherwise get in front of CHECK rules.
• CHECK: Perform checks on specific actions and stop or redirect as needed.
• CARRY OUT: Perform specific actions, print output, update world state as needed.
• AFTER: Good for action follow ups (score systems, property changes). Alternately: a way to get in front of REPORT. Support for “big” rules accommodating multiple actions.
• REPORT: Print output once actions are complete. Like CHECK and CARRY OUT, REPORT does not support “big” rules.
• EVERY TURN: Rules that execute every turn, independent of player action. Best used for checking and updating world state.

Sometimes a mix is good! Eventually, you might want to spread actions across multiple phases of action processing. I think the important thing for us beginners is to try and experiment with every phase, getting a feel for when and how things happen during an Inform turn.

next.

Back to relations. Scenes, too.

I’m on Bluesky!

I’m in Canada today — Toronto, specifically — to celebrate the publication of Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023. (ed. Lillian-Yvonne Bertram & Nick Montfort, MIT Press & Counterpath 2024) in conversation with Matt Nish-Lapidus and with a reading by Kavi Davvoori. I haven’t been here very long, and the Output event doesn’t start for an hour and fifteen minutes, but I’ve already enjoyed walking from the airport, and then around town, not to mention consuming a smoked meat omelette.

While I’ve come to praise Output and not to bury the lede, I wanted to take this occasion to thank two Canadian institutions for making another recent book of mine possible. Narcissystem is an amazing production by Montreal-based Anteism and a great example of innovating publishing / publishing as an artistic practice. Ryan & Harley at Anteism realized this project with a foil seal on the cover, a Smyth sewn binding, and a special feature on the inside front cover that really makes this bookwork / artists’ book complete. The other organization I must thank is the Canada Council for the Arts, which provided support to make this publication possible.

Narcissystem is a computer-generated book, of the sort represented in Output, but the program that generated it is quite remote from “Generated AI.” Perhaps it’s more honest, however, about the way computer systems (like poems) tend to mainly gaze lovingly at themselves?

Roger M. Wilcox has now had 19 games we’ve covered on this blog. This is the 20th and the last for 1981.

As a brief reminder, they were nearly all “private games” without much a notion for publication. The only exception was The Vial of Doom which the author tried to send to Captain 80 Book of Basic Adventures but missed the deadline on. All the games eventually made it to the author’s web site. Wilcox doesn’t give much background for Derelict 2147 other than he calls it a “ho-hum treasure hunt”; his next game for TRS-80 (The Last City, #21) was designed as his grand send-off as he was transitioning to DOS.

He mentions — as a complete coincidence — Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future (1987) also being set in the year 2147. It had toys that you could use while watching to interact with the show.

Derelict 2147 is rather like the Aardvark Software Derelict in that you are raiding an alien spaceship. This time the ship has appeared past Mars, and you start from Earth and need to steal a vehicle, killing a guard in the process.

This is akin to the opening of Odyssey 2: Treasure Island, where you have to murder a pilot and steal his plane to go over to the title island. I’m going to assume we know the guard is evil somehow and the ship would otherwise be used for the Evil Empire of Evil to do Bad Things. (Or. sticking with the Captain Power theme, used by Lord Dread in a quest to destroy humanity.)

The game is genuinely straightforward but I only found it that way because I’m used to playing both old games and Wilcox games in particular. For instance, at the very start, there’s a manhole which resists attempts at opening it.

>OPEN COVER
It’s beyond your power to do that.

>GET COVER
It’s beyond your power to do that.

>ENTER MANHOLE
I don’t know how to “enter” something.

PUSH? SLIDE? Nope. I whipped out my standard verb list and tested my way through before doing anything else, resulting in:

CUT, CLIMB, READ, BREAK, OPEN, CLOSE, KILL, UNLOCK, LOCK, PRESS, PUT, PUSH, PULL, MOVE, MAKE, SHOOT, EXAMINE, CONNECT

MOVE worked on the manhole. Incidentally, I keep trying to use ENTER for the entire rest of the game (this game uses GO only as the appropriate verb).

Hopping in the manhole:

You are in an ancient sewer. Visible items:
Long dead body.
Obvious exits: Up

The body has a gun license. Why do we need a gun license?

Well, the other location at the start is a “weapons shop” which contains guns and knives. You can grab a knife just fine, but if you try to get a gun it says you need a license, and I’m pretty sure grabbing some dead person’s gun license will make everyone happy.

With the gun and knife in hand we can now murder a guard (single guard) blocking an interplanetary spaceship in order to steal it.

>SHOOT GUARD
Zzap!
Wow! That was rather impressive!
>ENTER PLANETSHIP
I don’t know how to “enter” something.
>GO PLANETSHIP
Ok

The ship has a sign indicating *treasures* go here, and a red button with a joystick. Pressing the red button is sufficient to fly all the way to mars and dock with an alien ship.

Let’s rotate our way through the map, using the docking bay as a hub, and starting with far east and rotating counterclockwise.

Upon the first LOOK, the shelves reveal a “small device” with a green button that reverses gravity temporarily. The shelves are the kind you need to LOOK at more than once — the second time around, you’ll find a “five-pound key”. The “panel” is locking the “sliding doors” and need an identity device, which we’ll return with later.

Headed counterclockwise, the next place is a “antechamber” with a cryonics chamber and a lever. Pull the lever opens the chamber, revealing an alien who will now follow you around.

Trying to kill the alien has the game respond it is your friend, so I guess we don’t need to be trigger-happy anymore. I’m curious what the lore is behind the “you’re not a mutant” line; maybe the aliens were trying to escape mutants, so since we aren’t that’s why the alien is friendly?

Moving on to “up” from the docking bay (next on my map), there’s a tunnel with a hole in the ceiling. You can use the temporary gravity shut-off to float up through the hole and retrieve an octagonal crystal (a treasure) and an electric iron rod. The iron rod has a blue button which gives an electric shock.

Keeping our rotation, heading straight north from the docking bay leads to Large Quarters with “rows” of cryonics chambers. Looking at the console:

It has a lever on it.
… with a crystal attached!
An alien voice sounds in your mind:
‘Oh? You want that, eh? Sure thing!”
He removes the gem, opens a chamber, and seals himself off.

This gives a *parasite crystal*, another one of the treasures. Rotating again, my map has the exit “down”. This leads to a strange forcefield and possibly the most interesting part of the game. If you pass through the forcefield you die because of the difference in atmospheres between the inside and outside of the ship, but you see an alien with a metal belt before you die.

That is, the main text says:

>D
Ok
>LOOK FORCEFIELD
It’s very tenuous, only strong enough to impede gasses.
>GO FORCEFIELD
Ok
Your body couldn’t take the transition to zero pressure!
You were ripped apart!

But on the death screen you can see the room description:

You’re on a destroyed platform open to space. Visible items:
Alien wearing a steel belt.
Obvious exits: West

In another room (which we’ll arrive at shortly) there’s a copper coil. If we have the electric iron rod in copper coil in inventory, the command MAKE turns them into an electromagnet. Yes, this could have been very hard to find, but I found MAKE from verb-testing, and I knew both from the game’s response to MAKE (saying you don’t have the right materials yet) and previous Wilcox games that I didn’t need to specify a target. I only needed to use the verb MAKE, and the rest would happen by magic.

The electromagnet can then serve to pull in the alien, which we can only see because of the death screen!

A charge flows through the copper wire.
It was stronger than you thought! It pulled something in.

The alien has a treasure (an *advanced communicator*) as well as an identity amulet. The amulet goes back to the far-east storage room to open the sliding doors, leading to a cabinet with yet another treasure (a vial of Californium).

One last area:

There’s that copper coil I already mentioned, and also a treasure (a *platinum cube*) made deadly by being attached to a wire. If you LOOK CUBE you’ll see the wire, and the knife serves well enough to CUT WIRE, making the cube safe to take. The wire can also be pulled, revealing the pit you’re supposed to be dying in. This lets you climb into the pit safely and retrieve one of the spikes.

The spike turns out to be a “printed-circuit spike” and counts as a treasure. It’s all over!

Again, I want to emphasize: I found this straightforward, but I’m used enough to various conventions to recognize quickly what I’m looking at (and I have my secret weapon, the verb list). It does seem Mr. Wilcox’s heart wasn’t as much in this one; it’s lacking the satire of his other 1982 game, Followers Adventure, or the creativity of the Trash Island games. However, keep in mind this was not meant to be commercial; these are still private games, it’s just Roger Wilcox was gracious enough to eventually make them available.

This game does have one bit of satire, although it might be accidental. In addition to the button and joystick, your planetship has a fuel gauge. Upon docking, the fuel gauge is empty, and we never addressed that particular concern, implying the player character is now trapped on the alien ship albeit with their treasures, making for a grisly tomb instead of triumph.