Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian

Choose Your Own Adventure

In 1999, after twenty years and many tens of millions of books sold,[1]A truly incredible figure of 250 million copies sold is frequently cited for the original Choose Your Own Adventure series today, apparently on the basis of a statement released in January of 2007 by Choosco, a company which has repeatedly attempted to reboot […]

In 1999, after twenty years and many tens of millions of books sold,^[1]A truly incredible figure of 250 million copies sold is frequently cited for the original Choose Your Own Adventure series today, apparently on the basis of a statement released in January of 2007 by Choosco, a company which has repeatedly attempted to reboot the series in the post-millennial era. Based upon the running tally of sales which appeared in Publishers Weekly during the books’ 1980s heyday, I struggle to see how this figure can be correct. That journal of record reported 34 million Choose Your Own Adventure books sold in North America as of December 1, 1989. By that time, the series’s best years as a commercial proposition were already behind it. Even when factoring in international sales, which were definitely considerable, it is difficult to see how the total figure could have exceeded 100 million books sold at the outside. Having said that, however, the fact remains that the series sold an awful lot of books by any standard. Bantam Books announced that it would no longer be publishing its Choose Your Own Adventure line of children’s paperbacks. So, since these histories currently find themselves in 1999, this seems like a good time to look back on one of the formative influences upon the computer games I’ve been covering for so many years now, as well as upon the people who played them — not least, yours truly. Or maybe that’s just an excuse for me to finally write an article I should have written a long time ago. Either way, I hope you don’t mind if I step out of the chronology today and take you way, way back, to steal a phrase from Van Morrison.

The first and most iconic of all the Choose Your Own Adventure books involved spelunking, just as did the first and most iconic of all computer-based adventure games.

These books were the gateway drugs of interactive entertainment.

— Choose Your Own Adventure historian Christian Swineheart

My first experience with interactive media wasn’t mediated by any sort of digital technology. Instead it came courtesy of a “technology” that was already more than half a millennium old at the time: the printed book.

In the fall of 1980, I was eight years old, and doing my childish best to adjust to life in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, where my family had moved the previous summer from the vicinity of Youngstown, Ohio. I was a skinny, frail kid who wasn’t very good at throwing balls or throwing punches, which did nothing to ease the transition. Even when I wasn’t being actively picked on, I was bewildered at my new classmates’ turns of phrase (“I reckon,” “y’all,” “I’m fixin’ to”) that I had previously heard only in the John Wayne movies I watched on my dad’s knee. In their eyes, my birthplace north of the Mason Dixon Line meant that I could be dismissed as just another clueless, borderline useless “Yankee,” a heathen in the eyes of those who adhered to my new state’s twin religions of Baptist Christianity and Friday-night football.

I found my refuge in my imagination. I was interested in just about everything — a trait I’ve never lost, both to my benefit and my detriment in life — and I could sit for long periods of time in my room, spinning out fantasies in my head about school lessons, about books I’d read, about television shows I’d seen, even about songs I’d heard on the radio. I actually framed this as a distinct activity in my mind: “I’m going to go imagine now.” If nothing else, it was good training for becoming a writer. As they say, the child is the father of the man.

One Friday afternoon, I discovered a slim, well-thumbed volume in my elementary school’s scanty library. Above the title The Cave of Time was the now-iconic Choose Your Own Adventure masthead, proclaiming it to be the first book in a series. Curious as always, I opened it to the first page. I was precocious enough to know what was meant by a first-person and third-person narrator of written fiction, but this was something else: this book was written in the second person.

You’ve hiked through Snake Canyon once before while visiting your Uncle Howard at Red Creek Ranch, but you never noticed any cave entrance. It looks as though a recent rock slide has uncovered it.

Though the late afternoon sun is striking the surface of the cave, the interior remains in total darkness. You step inside a few feet, trying to get an idea of how big it is. As your eyes become used to the dark, you see what looks like a tunnel ahead, dimly lit by some kind of phosphorescent material on its walls. The tunnel walls are smooth, as if they were shaped by running water. After twenty feet or so, the tunnel curves. You wonder where it leads. You venture in a bit further, but you feel nervous being alone in such a strange place. You turn and hurry out.

A thunderstorm may be coming, judging by how dark it looks outside. Suddenly you realize the sun has long since set, and the landscape is lit only by the pale light of the full moon. You must have fallen asleep and woken up hours later. But then you remember something even more strange. Just last evening, the moon was only a slim crescent in the sky.

You wonder how long you’ve been in the cave. You are not hungry. You don’t feel you have been sleeping. You wonder whether to try to walk back home by moonlight or whether to wait for dawn, rather than risk your footing on the steep and rocky trail.

All of this was intriguing enough already for a kid like me, but now came the kicker. The book asked me — asked me!! — whether I wanted to “start back home” (“turn to page 4”) or to “wait” (“turn to page 5”). This was the book I had never known I needed, a vehicle for the imagination like no other.

I took The Cave of Time home and devoured it that weekend. Through the simple expedient of flipping through its pages, I time-traveled to the age of dinosaurs, to the Battle of Gettysburg, to London during the Blitz, to the building of the Great Wall of China, to the Titanic and the Ice Age and the Middle Ages. Much of this history was entirely new to me, igniting whole new avenues of interest. Today, it’s all too easy to see all of the limitations and infelicities of The Cave of Time and its successors: a book of 115 pages that had, as it proudly trumpeted on the cover, 40 possible endings meant that the sum total of any given adventure wasn’t likely to span more than about three choices if you were lucky. But to a lonely, hyper-imaginative eight-year-old, none of that mattered. I was well and truly smitten, not so much by what the book was as by what I wished it to be, by what I was able to turn it into in my mind by the sheer intensity of that wish.

I remained a devoted Choose Your Own Adventure reader for the next couple of years. Back in those days, each book could be had for just $1.25, well within reach of a young boy’s allowance even at a time when a dollar was worth a lot more than it is today. Each volume had some archetypal-feeling adventurous theme that made it catnip for a kid who was also discovering Jules Verne and beginning to flirt with golden-age science fiction (the golden age being, of course, age twelve): deep-sea diving, a journey by hot-air balloon, the Wild West, a cross-country auto race, the Egyptian pyramids, a hunt for the Abominable Snowman. What they evoked in me was as important as what was actually printed on the page; each was a springboard for another weekend of fantasizing about exotic undertakings where nobody mocked you because you had two left feet in gym class and spoke with a stubbornly persistent Northern accent. And each was a springboard for learning as well; this process usually started with pestering my parents, and then, if I didn’t get everything I needed from that source, ended with me turning to the family set of Encyclopedia Britannica in the study. (I remember how when reading Journey Under the Sea I was confused by frequent references to “the bends.” I asked my mom what that meant, and, bless her heart, she said she thought the bends were diarrhea. Needless to say, this put a whole new spin on my underwater exploits until I finally did a bit of my own research about diving.)

Inevitably, I did begin to see the limitations of the format in time — right about the time that some of my nerdier classmates, whom I had by now managed to connect with, started to show me a tabletop game called Dungeons & Dragons. Choose Your Own Adventure had primed me to understand and respond to it right away; it would be no exaggeration to say that I saw this game that would remake so much of the entertainment landscape in its image as simply a better, less constrained take on the same core concept. Ditto the computer games that I began to notice in a corner of the bookstore I haunted circa 1984. When Infocom promised me that playing one of their games meant “waking up inside a story,” I knew exactly what they must mean: Choose Your Own Adventure done right. For the Christmas of 1984, I convinced my parents to buy me a disk drive for the Commodore 64 they had bought me the year before. And so the die was cast. If Choose Your Own Adventure hadn’t come along, I don’t think that I would be the Digital Antiquarian today.

But since I am the Digital Antiquarian, I have my usual array of questions to ask. Where did Choose Your Own Adventure, that gateway drug for the first generation to be raised on interactive media, come from? Who was responsible for it? The most obvious answer is the authors Edward Packard and R.A. Montgomery, one or the other of whose name could be seen on most of the early books in the series. But two authors alone do not a cultural phenomenon make.

“Will you read me a story?”

“Read you a story? What fun would that be? I’ve got a better idea: let’s tell a story together.”

— Adam Cadre, Photopia

During the twentieth century, when print still ruled the roost, the hidden hands behind the American cultural zeitgeist were the agents, editors, and marketers in and around the big Manhattan publishing houses, who decided which books were worth publishing and promoting, who decided what they would look like and even to a large extent how they would read. No one outside of the insular world of print publishing knew these people’s names, but the power they had to shape hearts and minds was enormous — arguably more so than that of any of the writers they served. After all, even the most prolific author of fiction or non-fiction usually couldn’t turn out more than one book per year, whereas an agent or editor could quietly, anonymously leave her fingerprints on dozens. Amy Berkower, a name I’m pretty sure you’ve never heard of, is a fine case in point.

Berkower joined Writers House, one of the most prestigious of the New York literary agencies, during the mid-1970s as a “secretarial girl.” Having shown herself to be an enthusiastic go-getter by working long hours and sitting in on countless meetings, she was promoted to the role of agent in 1977, but assigned to “juvenile publishing,” largely because nobody else in the organization wanted to work with such non-prestigious books. Yet the assignment suited Berkower just fine. “As a kid, I read and loved Nancy Drew before I went on to Camus,” she says. “I was in the right place at the right time. I didn’t have the bias that juvenile series wouldn’t lead to Camus.”

Thus when a fellow named Ray Montgomery came to her with a unique concept he called Adventures of You, he found a receptive audience. Montgomery was the co-owner of a small press called Vermont Crossroads, far removed from the glitz and glamor of Manhattan. Crossroads’s typical fare was esoteric volumes like Hemingway in Michigan and The Male Nude in Photography that generally weren’t expected to break four digits in total unit sales. A few years earlier, however, Montgomery had himself been approached by Edward Packard, a lawyer by trade who had already pitched a multiple-choice children’s book called Sugarcane Island to what felt like every other publisher in the country without success.

As he would find himself relating again and again to curious journalists in the decades to come, Packard had come up with his idea for an interactive book by making a virtue of necessity. During the 1960s, he was an up-and-coming attorney who worked long days in Manhattan, to which he commuted by train from his and his wife’s home in Greenwich, Connecticut. He often arrived home in the evening just in time to put his two daughters to bed. They liked to be told a bedtime story, but Packard was usually so exhausted that he had trouble coming up with one. So, he slyly enlisted his daughters’ help with the creative process. He would feed them a little bit of a story in which they were the stars, then ask them what they wanted to do next. Their answers would jog his tired imagination, and he would be off and running once again.

Sometimes, though, the girls would each want to do something different. “What would happen if you wrote both endings?” Packard mused to himself. A long-time frustrated writer as well as a self-described “lawyer who was never comfortable with the law,” Packard began to wonder whether he could turn his interactive bedtime stories into a new kind of book. By as early as 1969, he had invented the classic Choose Your Own Adventure format — turn to this page to do this, turn to that page to do that — and produced his first finished work in the style: the aforementioned Sugarcane Island, about a youngster who gets swept off the deck of a scientific research vessel by a sudden tidal wave and washed ashore on a mysterious Pacific island that has monsters, pirates, sharks, headhunters, and many another staple of more traditional children’s adventure fiction to contend with.

He was sure that it was “such a wonderful idea, I’d immediately find a big publisher.” He signed on with an agent, who “said he would be surprised if there were no takers,” recalls Packard. “Then he proceeded to be surprised.” One rejection letter stated that “it’s hard enough to get children to read, and you’re just making it harder with all these choices.” Letters like that came over and over again, over a period of years.

By 1975, Edward Packard was divorced from both his agent and his wife. With his daughters no longer of an age to beg for bedtime stories, he had just about resigned himself to being a lawyer forever. Then, whilst flipping through an issue of Vermont Life during a stay at a ski lodge, he happened upon a small advertisement from Crossroads Press. “Authors Wanted,” it read. Crossroads wasn’t the bright-lights, big-city publisher Packard had once dreamed of, but on a lark he sent a copy of Sugarcane Island to the address in the magazine.

It arrived on the desk of Ray Montgomery, who was instantly intrigued. “I Xeroxed 50 copies of Ed’s manuscript and took it to a reading teacher in Stowe,” Montgomery told The New York Times in 1981. “His kids — third grade through junior high — couldn’t get enough of it.” Satisfied by that proof of concept, Montgomery agreed to publish the book. Crossroads Press sold 8000 copies of Sugarcane Island over the next couple of years, a figure that was “unbelievable” by their modest standards. Montgomery was inspired to pen a book of his own in the same style, which he called Journey Under the Sea. The budding series was given the name Adventures of You — a proof that, whatever else they may have had going for them, branding was not really Crossroads Press’s strength.

Indeed, Montgomery himself was well able to see that he had stumbled over a concept that was too big for his little press. He sent the two extant books to Amy Berkower at Writers House and asked her what she thought. Having grown up on Nancy Drew, she was inclined to judge them less on their individual merits than on their prospects as a franchise in the making. A concept this new, she judged, had to have a strong brand of its own in order for children to get used to it. It would take her some time to find a publisher who agreed with her.

In the meantime, Edward Packard, heartened by the relative success of Sugarcane Island, was writing more interactive books. Although their names were destined to be indelibly linked in the annals of pop-culture history, Packard and Montgomery would never really be friends; they would always have a somewhat prickly, contentious relationship with one another. In an early signal of this, Packard chose not to publish more books through Crossroads. Instead he convinced the mid-list Philadelphia-based publisher J.B. Lippincott to take on Deadwood City, a Western, and Third Planet from Altair, a sci-fi tale. These served ironically to confirm Amy Berkower’s belief that there needed to be a concerted push behind the concept as a branded series; released with no fanfare whatsoever, neither sold all that well. Yet Lippincott did do Packard one brilliant service. Above the titles on the covers of the books, it placed the words “Choose your own adventures in the Wild West!” and “Choose your own adventures in outer space!” There was a brand in the offing in those phrases, even if Lippincott didn’t realize it.

For her part, Berkower was now more convinced than ever that this book-by-book approach was the wrong one. There needed to be a lot of these books, quickly, in order for them to take off properly. She made the rounds of the big publishing houses one more time. She finally found the ally she was looking for in Joëlle Delbourgo at Bantam Books. Delbourgo recalls getting “really excited” by the concept: “I said, ‘Amy, this is revolutionary.’ This is pre-computer, remember. The idea of interactive fiction, choosing an ending, was fresh and novel. It tapped into something very fundamental. I remember how I felt when I read the books, and how excited I got, the clarity I had about them.”

Seeing eye to eye on what needed to be done to cement the concept in the minds of the nation’s children, the two women drew up a contract under whose terms Bantam would publish an initial order of no fewer than six books in two slates of three. They would appear under a distinctive series trade dress, with each volume numbered to feed young readers’ collecting instinct. Barbara Marcus, Bantam’s marketing director for children’s books, needed only slightly modify the phrases deployed by J.B. Lippincott to create the perfect, pithy, and as-yet un-trademarked name for the series: Choose Your Own Adventure.

Berkower was acting as the agent of Montgomery alone up to this point. There are conflicting reports as to how and why Packard was brought into the fold. The widow of Ray Montgomery, who died in 2014, told The New Yorker in 2022 that her husband’s innate sense of fair play, plus the need to provide a lot of books quickly, prompted him to voluntarily bring Packard on as an equal partner. Edward Packard told the same magazine that it was Bantam who insisted that he be included, possibly in order to head off potential legal problems in the future.

At any rate, the first three Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks arrived in bookstores in July of 1979. They were The Cave of Time, a new effort by Packard, written with some assistance from his daughter Andrea, she for whom he had first begun to tell his interactive stories; Montgomery’s journeyman Journey Under the Sea; and By Balloon to the Sahara, which Packard and Montgomery had subcontracted out to Douglas Terman, normally an author of adult military thrillers. Faced with an advertising budget that was almost nonexistent, Barbara Marcus devised an unusual grass-roots marketing strategy: “We did absolutely nothing except give the books away. We gave thousands of books to our salesmen and told them to give five to each bookseller and tell him to give them to the first five kids into his shop.”

The series sold itself, just as Marcus had believed it would. As The New York Times would soon write with a mixture of bemusement and condescension, it proved “contagious as chickenpox.” By September of 1980, around the time that I first discovered The Cave of Time, Publishers Weekly could report that Choose Your Own Adventure had become a “bonanza” for Bantam, which had sold more than 1 million copies of the first six volumes, with Packard and Montgomery now contracted to provide many more. A year later, eleven books in all had come out and the total sold was 4 million, with the series accounting for eight of the 25 bestselling children’s books at B. Dalton’s, the nation’s largest bookstore chain. A year after that, 10 million copies had been sold. By decade’s end, the total domestic sales of Choose Your Own Adventure would reach 34 million copies, with possibly that many or more again having been sold internationally after being translated into dozens of languages. The series was approaching its hundredth numbered volume by that point. It was a few years past its commercial peak already, but would continue on for another decade, until 184 volumes in all had come out.

Edward Packard, who turned 50 in 1981, could finally call himself an author rather than a lawyer by trade — and an astonishingly successful author at that, if not one who was likely to be given any awards by the literary elite. He and Ray Montgomery alone wrote about half of the 184 Choose Your Own Adventure installments. Packard’s prose was consistently solid and evocative without ever feeling like he was writing down to his audience, as the extract from The Cave of Time near the beginning of this article will attest; not all authors of children’s books, then or now, would dare to use a word like “phosphorescent.” If Montgomery was generally a less skilled wordsmith than Packard, and one who displayed less interest in producing internally consistent story spaces — weaknesses that I could see even as a young boy — he does deserve a full measure of credit for the pains he took to get the series off the ground in the first place. Looking back on the long struggle to get his brainstorm into print, Packard liked to quote the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “Every original idea is first ridiculed, then vigorously attacked, and finally taken for granted.”

Although Packard at least was always careful to make his protagonists androgynous, it was no secret that Choose Your Own Adventure appealed primarily to boys — which was no bad thing on the whole, given that it was also no secret that reading in general was a harder sell with little boys than it was with little girls. Some educators and child psychologists kvetched about the violence that was undoubtedly one of the sources of the series’s appeal for boys — in just about all of the books, it was disarmingly easy to get yourself flamboyantly and creatively killed — but Packard was quick to counter that the mayhem was all very stylized, “exaggerated and melodramatic” rather than “harsh or nasty.” “Stupid” choices were presented to you all the time, he noted, but never “cruel” ones: “You as [the] reader never hurt anyone.”

Although Packard always strained to present an “AFGNCAAP” protagonist (“Ageless, Faceless, Gender-Neutral, Culturally Ambiguous Adventure Person”), when the stars of the books were depicted on the covers they were almost always boys. Bantam explained to a disgruntled Packard that it had many years of market research showing that, while little girls were willing to buy books that showed a hero of the opposite gender on the cover, little boys were not similarly open-minded.

One had to be a publishing insider to know that this “boys series” owed its enormous success as much to the packaging and promotional skills of three women — Amy Berkower, Joëlle Delbourgo, and Barbara Marcus — as it did to the literary talents of Packard and Montgomery. Berkower in particular became a superstar within the publishing world in the wake of Choose Your Own Adventure. Incredibly, the latter became only her second most successful children’s franchise, after the girl-focused Sweet Valley High, which could boast of 54 million copies sold domestically by the end of the 1980s; meanwhile The Baby-Sitters Club was coming up fast behind Choose Your Own Adventure, with 27 million copies sold. In short, her books were reaching millions upon millions of children every single month. Small wonder that she was made a full partner at Writers House in 1988; she was moving far more books each month than anyone else there.

Of course, any hit on the scale of Choose Your Own Adventure is bound to be copied. And this hit most certainly was, prolifically and unashamedly. During the middle years of the 1980s, when the format was at its peak, interactive books had whole aisles dedicated to them in bookstores. Which Way?, Decide Your Own Adventure, Pick-a-Path, Twisted Tales… branders did what they could when the best brand was already taken. While Choose Your Own Adventure remained archetypal in its themes and settings, other lines were unabashedly idiosyncratic: anyone up for a Do-It-Yourself Jewish Adventure? Publishers were quick to leverage other properties for which they owned the rights, from Doctor Who to The Lord of the Rings. TSR, the maker of that other school-cafeteria sensation Dungeons & Dragons, introduced a “gamebook” line of same; even this website’s old friend Infocom came out with Zork books, written by the star computer-game implementor Steve Meretzky. Many of these books were content with the Choose Your Own Adventure approach of nothing but chunks of text tied to arbitrarily branching choices, but others grafted rules systems onto the format to effectively become solo role-playing games packaged as paperback books, with character creation and advancement, a dice-driven combat system, etc. The most successful of these lines was Fighting Fantasy, a name that is today almost as well-remembered as Choose Your Own Adventure itself in some quarters.

The gamebook boom was big and real, but relatively short-lived. By 1987, the decline had begun, for both Choose Your Own Adventure and all of the copycats and expansions upon its formula that it had spawned. Although a few of the most lucrative series, like Fighting Fantasy, would join the ur-property of the genre in surviving well into the 1990s, the majority were already starting to shrivel and fall away like apples in November. Demian Katz, the Internet’s foremost archivist of gamebooks, notes that this pattern has tended to hold true “in every country” where they make an appearance: “A few come out, they become explosively popular, a flood of knock-offs are released, they reach critical mass and then drop off into nothing.” It isn’t hard to spot the reason why in the context of 1980s North America. Computers were becoming steadily more commonplace — computers that were capable of bringing vastly more flexible forms of interactive storytelling to American children, via games that didn’t require one to read the same passages of text over and over again or to toss dice and keep track of a list of statistics on paper. The same pattern would be repeated elsewhere, such as in the former Soviet countries, most of which experienced their own gamebook boom and bust during the 1990s. It seems that the arrival of the commercial mass-market publishing infrastructure that makes gamebooks go is generally followed in short order by the arrival of affordable digital technology for the home, which stops them cold.

In the United States, Bantam Books tried throughout the 1990s to make Choose Your Own Adventure feel relevant to the children of that decade, introducing a more photo-realistic art style to accompany edgier, more traditionally novelistic plots. None of it worked. In 1999, after a good twelve years of slowly but steadily declining sales, Bantam finally pulled the plug on the series. Choose Your Own Adventure became just another nostalgic relic of the day-glo decade, to be placed on the shelf next to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, a Jane Fonda workout video, and that old Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set.

Appropriately enough, the very last Choose Your Own Adventure book was written by Edward and Andrea Packard, the latter being the grown-up version of one of the little girls to whom he had once told interactive bedtime stories.

As of this writing, Choose Your Own Adventure is still around in a way, but the only real raison d’être it has left is nostalgia. In 2003, Ray Montgomery saw that Bantam Books had let the trademark for the series lapse, and formed his own company called Chooseco to try to revive it, mostly by republishing the old books that he had written himself. He met with mixed results at best. Since Montgomery’s death in 2014, Chooseco has continued to be operated by his family, who have used it increasingly as an instrument of litigation. In 2020, for example, Netflix agreed to settle for an undisclosed sum a lawsuit over “Bandersnatch,” a bold interactive episode of the critically lauded streaming series Black Mirror whose script unwisely mentioned the book series from which it drew inspiration.

A worthier successor on the whole is Choice Of Games, a name whose similarity to Choose Your Own Adventure can hardly be coincidental. Born out of a revival of the old menu-driven computer game Alter Ego, Choice Of has released dozens of digital branching stories over the past fifteen years. In being more adventurous than literary and basing themselves around broad, archetypal ideas — Choice of the Dragon, Choice of Broadsides, Choice of the Vampire — these games, which can run on just about any digital device capable of putting words on a screen, have done a fine job of carrying the spirit of Choose Your Own Adventure forward into this century. That said, there is one noteworthy difference: they are aimed at post-pubescent teens and adults — perhaps ones with fond memories of Choose Your Own Adventure — instead of children. “Play as male, female, or nonbinary; cis or trans; gay, straight, or bisexual; asexual and/or aromantic; allosexual and/or alloromantic; monogamous or polyamorous!” (Boring middle-aged married guy that I am, I must confess that I have no idea what three of those words even mean.)

Edward Packard, the father of it all, is still with us at age 94, still blogging from time to time, still a little bemused at how he became one of the most successful working authors in the United States during the 1980s. In a plot twist almost as improbable as some of his stranger Choose Your Own Adventure endings, his grandson is David Corenswet, the latest actor to play Superman on the silver screen. Never a computer gamer, Packard would doubtless be baffled by most of what is featured on this website. And yet I owe him an immense debt of gratitude, for giving me my first glimpse of the potential of interactive storytelling, thus igniting a lifelong obsession. I suspect that more than one of you out there might be able to say the same.

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

Sources: Publishers Weekly of February 29 1980, September 26 1980, October 8 1982, July 25 1986, August 12 1988, December 1 1989, July 6 1990, February 23 1998; New York Times of August 25 1981; Beaver County Times of March 30 1986; New Yorker of September 19 2022; Journal of American Studies of May 2021.

Online sources include “A Brief History of Choose Your Own Adventure“ by Jake Rossen at Mental Floss, “Choose Your Own Adventure: How The Cave of Time Taught Us to Love Interactive Entertainment” by Grady Hendrix at Slate, “The Surprising Long History of Choose Your Own Adventure Stories” by Jackie Mansky at the Smithsonian’s website, and “Meet the 91-Year-Old Mastermind Behind Choose Your Own Adventure“ by Seth Abramovitch at The Hollywood Reporter. Plus Edward Packard’s personal site. And Damian Katz’s exhaustive gamebook site is essential to anyone interested in these subjects; all of the book covers shown in this article were taken from his site.

Footnotes[+]

Footnotes
↑1	A truly incredible figure of 250 million copies sold is frequently cited for the original Choose Your Own Adventure series today, apparently on the basis of a statement released in January of 2007 by Choosco, a company which has repeatedly attempted to reboot the series in the post-millennial era. Based upon the running tally of sales which appeared in Publishers Weekly during the books’ 1980s heyday, I struggle to see how this figure can be correct. That journal of record reported 34 million Choose Your Own Adventure books sold in North America as of December 1, 1989. By that time, the series’s best years as a commercial proposition were already behind it. Even when factoring in international sales, which were definitely considerable, it is difficult to see how the total figure could have exceeded 100 million books sold at the outside. Having said that, however, the fact remains that the series sold an awful lot of books by any standard.

Published 16:05 • 2 days ago

Wade's Important Astrolab

IFComp 2025 review: my creation by dino

my creation by dino is a short (10 minutes) parser game (the IFComp website incorrectly said it was Twine but I have emailed them about this) in which the PC is a dad stuck in bed in a rickety house with his crying baby. You would never guess this from the cover art, a design which will only resonate if you complete the game.♦Endlessly crying babies raise human hackles at a primordial level, so the

Endlessly crying babies raise human hackles at a primordial level, so the game's temporal depiction of that common experience of shuffling around a room one can't leave while the crying can't be stopped is likely to knife (or knife anew) anyone who tries it, in spite of major implementation gaps. It's clear my creation hasn't had a testing round or received any technical advice, but I commend the author for bringing a story like this to the parser format on their own. Other gains can come in future.

It's important to say there's ultimately more to the game than the screaming baby. If that had been the whole thing, it would be an uninviting ask of players to say the least. It's tough as is. But there is more. I will discuss the more with complete spoilering in the remainder of the review.

The PC's in the bed and the baby's in a nearby basket, crying. Where the geography of the parser model really works for this game is making the bed into the PC's world. For reasons not made clear until the end, the prose indicates the PC is in physical pain and inhibited in movement, so each NORTH, SOUTH etc. drags them, with effort, to another section of the bed. The efforts are described. On the one hand, the idea of thinking about compass directions while moving around a bed is absurd. Obviously we're not meant to be thinking about them, they're just the stock method of movement in a parser game. For a new author to program up some replacement terminology would be a big ask, so in this case, it shows dino working with the strengths of the format, but also the need to bend the format's stock trappings to the game. In prose, it's also effective for the bed world that the game's opening paragraph is written in the third person (the rest of the game is in typical parser second person) offering a bird's eye view of the situation:

"He is lying in his bed, in his bedroom, in his own crooked little house with small windows, single glass, overlooking other crooked houses;"

The cut from this intro text into the "middle of the bed" location, the change of scale and pronoun and person, all act together like a magnifying glass zooming in on the PC's situation, where suddenly one bed seems giant.

The geography of the bed isn't respected in the programming, though. There's a constant mismatch between what's described, what can be acted on, where things are. This doesn't block progress – the game is too small for that – but it does interrupt the spell of the fiction and so reduce its power. One inadvertent side-effect was that I was chuckling at my gauche handling of such props as the baby or the basket, but at the same time I experienced a kind of remote terror in handling them. Like, god, I hope the game won't let me DROP the baby in any bad way.

I was surprised when, having found a copy of the novel Frankenstein near the bed, I typed READ BOOK and was suddenly hit with an almost 700-word excerpt. This moment broke the dirge of the baby situation and made me re-engage afresh. I also admit that my kneejerk reaction to the idea of reading Frankenstein to a baby was laughter, but I remembered a second later, of course you can read anything to a baby with a chance of soothing the baby. Reading Frankenstein to this baby is the "winning move". It leads to another text block, this one almost 800 words, in which the dad monologues to the restful baby.

The monologue drops the details of the story into place. It's not a twist, but narratively it has some of the functions of a twist of a short story. The dad's in pain in bed because he's had gender-changing surgery, but before that he gave birth to the child. The monologue muses on their possible future and their future relationship. It's certainly a breather after the oppression of game-long crying, and the dewy-eyed intimacy of the moment feels real. In the context of what's come before, which gave away little, and only a little bit at a time, 800 words straight up inevitably feels expositional. That's how I/we typically respond to story structures and lengths after we've encountered enough of them. But the monologue doesn't feel expositional in a "nobody would say all this" kind of way, and I think that's more important. It reads authentic and illuminates the sketched character of the dad. The value of Frankenstein is now also apparent, its tale of human creation and unusual birth and an outsider human in an unusual body resonant with the PC's experiences.

I valued my creation more after playing it and after thinking about it than during the playing, at which time the implementation was kicking the atmosphere every few moves. Even implementation can't stop a baby crying baby, though.

Published 02:49 • 3 days ago | Updated Friday, 05. September 2025 02:52 • 3 days ago

Thursday, 04. September 2025

Zarf Updates

Spotting X marks the spot

Here's a bit of trivia from the Infocom source code collection. All modern parser-IF tools let you type X as an abbreviation for EXAMINE. It's such a familiar shortcut that we forget that most Infocom games didn't work that way. Back when we ...

Here's a bit of trivia from the Infocom source code collection.

All modern parser-IF tools let you type X as an abbreviation for EXAMINE. It's such a familiar shortcut that we forget that most Infocom games didn't work that way.

Back when we played Zork, you had to type out EXAMINE:

>x mailbox I don't know the word "x".

>examine mailbox The small mailbox is closed.

Although L was a supported abbreviation for LOOK, so you could save a couple of keystrokes in a goofy way:

>l at mailbox The small mailbox is closed.

This came up in a forum thread. When did Infocom adopt the X abbreviation? Hey, I keep the source code collection handy for just these questions. Regex search!

Turns out the following games support X:

The very late-period games: Beyond Zork, Border Zone, Bureaucracy, Lurking Horror, Moonmist, Nord and Bert, Plundered Hearts, Sherlock
The graphical games: Arthur, Zork Zero, Shogun
The "Solid Gold" releases of Hitchhiker, Leather Goddesses, Planetfall, and Wishbringer (the re-releases with built-in hints)
A couple of the "Infocom Samplers" (several game demos packed into a single playable file)
The in-development games that were dropped when Infocom shut down: The Abyss, Restaurant at the End of the Universe

From this we observe that 1987 was the year that Infocom adopted the X. Leather Goddesses and Stationfall did not pick it up, but Bureaucracy, Lurking Horror, and all later games did. (Except for Journey, which was not a parser game.)

The "Solid Gold" re-releases also started in 1987, so it's not surprising that they got the X as well. Except, interestingly, for Zork 1! The SG release of that is dated Nov 1987, but no X. I don't have a guess why not.

As the forum thread notes, some modern Z-code interpreters provide X support for all games, by sneakily modifying your input. This is a bit tricky. You can imagine a game where you have to say COMPUTER, X is 135. You wouldn't want the interpreter to mess that up. Or you might be playing a German game where the verb to substitute is UNTERSUCHE! Or something. Tread carefully, anyhow.

For reference, my file search:

% ack -l 'SYNONYM.* X[ >]' | sort

We're looking for lines that look something like:

<VERB-SYNONYM EXAMINE X>
<SYNONYM EXAMINE X INSPECT DESCRIBE STUDY OBSERVE SEE SCOUR>
<VERB-SYNONYM EXAMINE X INSPECT DESCRIBE CHECK STUDY SURVEY SEE TRACE>

(Different games have different sets of synonyms. Which could be an interesting post on its own...)

The output of the above command:

abyss-r1/syntax.zil
arthur-r41/syntax.zil
arthur-r74/syntax.zil
arthur-rmid1/syntax.zil
arthur-rmid2/syntax.zil
beyondzork-r50/syntax.zil
beyondzork-r57/syntax.zil
beyondzork-r60/syntax.zil
borderzone-r9/syntax.zabstr
borderzone-r9/syntax.zil
borderzone-rlater/syntax.zil
bureaucracy-r160/syntax.zil
hitchhiker-invclues-r31/syntax.zil
leathergoddesses-invclues-r4/syntax.zil
lurkinghorror-r203/syntax.zil
lurkinghorror-r221/syntax.zil
moonmist-r13/syntax.zil
moonmist-r9/syntax.zil
nordandbert-r19/syntax.zil
nordandbert-r20/syntax.zil
planetfall-invclues-r10/syntax.zil
plunderedhearts-r26/syntax.zil
plunderedhearts-rlater/syntax.zil
restaurant-r15/syntax.zil
restaurant-r184/syntax.zil
sampler-clean-r8/syntax.zil
sampler-r97/syntax.zil
sherlock-nosound-r26/syntax.zil
sherlock-r26/syntax.zil
sherlock-sound-r26/syntax.zil
sherlock-ss-rearlier/syntax.zil
shogun-r322/syntax.zil
shogun-rearlier/syntax.zil
wishbringer-invclues-r23/syntax.zil
zork0-r242/syntax.zil
zork0-r286/syntax.zil
zork0-r296/syntax.zil
zork0-r393/syntax.zil

I'm omitting intermediate (non-source) files, and also generic/x-syntax.zil, which was a sample-code template rather than a full game.

Published 19:37 • 3 days ago

Choice of Games LLC

Meteoric—Sing in a metal band with a possessed mic!

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play! You get fired from your job. Then your car breaks down. On the walk home, you nearly get hit by a meteor. You discover a spirit possessing a skull shaped microphone inside. He wants to make you a rich, famous metal musician. Meteoric is 40% off for a week starting today! Meteoric is a chilling 125,000 word interactive horror novel by Samwise Harry Young,

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

You get fired from your job. Then your car breaks down. On the walk home, you nearly get hit by a meteor. You discover a spirit possessing a skull shaped microphone inside. He wants to make you a rich, famous metal musician.

Meteoric is 40% off for a week starting today!

Meteoric is a chilling 125,000 word interactive horror novel by Samwise Harry Young, where your choices control the story. It’s text-based, with occasional visual art, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Mysterious magic quickly proves effective in gaining fame and fortune in the death metal music industry, but you soon discover that you must pay a tribute of blood. And when your meteoric rise inevitably creates a rival with a violent vendetta, are you prepared to face the consequences?

Play as male, female, or nonbinary; romance men, women, both, or no one at all.

Romance a charismatic bassist, a tough guitarist, a thoughtful guitarist, or a mysterious drummer.

Reap all the benefits the influence of a magical microphone can conjure, and suffer the consequences, or try to resist the temptation.

Read approximately 45k words per playthrough!

What and who will you sacrifice to achieve fame, fortune, love, and revenge?

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

Published 14:10 • 3 days ago

Wade's Important Astrolab

IFComp 2025 review: Temptation In The Village by Anssi Räisänen

Temptation in the Village by Anssi Räisänen is a parser game adaptation of an unfinished short story by Franz Kafka. That story is dated 1914. Temptation took me 30-40 minutes to complete and my review discusses it in full.♦Räisänen explains in the ABOUT that the game begins as a faithful adaptation of the story followed by his own expansions on it in the spirit of Kafka. The result is the experien

Temptation in the Village by Anssi Räisänen is a parser game adaptation of an unfinished short story by Franz Kafka. That story is dated 1914. Temptation took me 30-40 minutes to complete and my review discusses it in full.

Räisänen explains in the ABOUT that the game begins as a faithful adaptation of the story followed by his own expansions on it in the spirit of Kafka. The result is the experience of a Kafka tale manoeuvred to suit the parser format. Psychologically focused within the PC, it is atmospheric and works very well. The methods for the adaptation are interesting but uncomplicated, and they drew my attention back to some fundamental qualities of the parser format and their effects. The story is certainly as existential as one expects from Kafka, but it doesn't have the unrelenting heaviness of something like The Trial. Its feet are in naturalism and it's set on a village farm.

The opening paragraph of the game acts as a kind of benchmark. It depicts the PC experiencing what psychologist Abraham Maslow termed "the peak experience", the feeling that life is infinitely interesting and exciting, and potential-filled:

"One summer, as evening falls, you arrive in a village you’ve never been to before. You’re struck by how broad and open the roads are. Tall, old trees stand in front of the farmhouses. It has been raining recently, the air is fresh, everything delights you."

This experience will soon be defused by the PC's dealings with a roster of unhelpful and sometimes unintentionally sinister village characters. In my reading of the game, the elaboration of the move to or away from this psychological high point is the frame for what happens in the story.

I need to preface the rest of this review by saying that at the time I'm writing this, I haven't read any Kafka. Being a literary type, I know a lot about Kafka from secondhand reading, the zeitgeist, and the overused and under-understood adjective "Kafka-esque". The experience of Temptation meshed with specific qualities I expected from Kafka. It features absurdity and an uncertain prosecutorial atmosphere, and though there are no real bureaucracies in it to confound the PC, the minor hierarchy of the farm's running amounts to a version of one.

The story begins with the PC wandering in the countryside when they come across a farm. Looking for shelter and work, they start to enquire about both, and are soon running afoul of ambiguously helpful/unhelpful locals. A villager suggests the inn might suit, but also points out it's been turned over to a cripple the local community was obliged to provide for. The cripple and his wife can hardly manage the inn, so the inn stinks and ends up providing for nobody. The villager man and his wife hang about the dithering PC, following him at a distance for no good reason and seeming both menacing and foolish in doing so.

The main way such events are managed in the game is just by allowing or blocking directional movements at different times. The player is forced to twitch and dawdle about the first location, being invited in one direction, finding that way blocked by NPCs or their ideas, invited in another, finding it now blocked too for new narrative reasons. For the most part, these methods get around the need for any conversation mechanic. When I first tried to speak to the villager, I was briefly led astray by the ALAN engine's default help message regarding ASK PERSON ABOUT THING, which prompted me to think (with great relief) that I wouldn't have to use such a command at all, since all the characters thus far had been speaking spontaneously. It turned out later that I did have to come up with ASK MAN ABOUT ... so my least favourite IF mechanic struck again, forcing me to the walkthrough for one command.

The divisions of parser game turns and locations suits Kafka's and Räisänen's unhelpful NPCs. The prose of Temptation conveys an inner psychological process, not just a series of standalone vignettes about place. The PC enters a room, is often prohibited from performing actions by implied social customs or just the silence of others (how strange it would be to go to ask an old couple for a room for the night, find them at dinner, but also that they're prepared to sit there ignoring you in the half-dark while eating porridge) and must work out what to do to unstick the situation. The prose indicates a normalcy, or at least non-rudeness, in the PC, that is tested by others who seem to be unthinkingly rude or just not thinking.

Even children have an air of menace in this story. They awaken and encircle the PC in unison when they hear the sound of a dog barking at night:

"It is too late; suddenly, all around you, you see the children rising up in their white nightshirts as though by agreement, as though on command, and eye you closely."

There is the sense of conspiracy amongst others, never verified or verifiable. It just emphasises that the PC is the PC and cannot know others' thoughts, yet he keeps trying to balance what he guesses those thoughts might be against his own standards.

Where Kafka's story ended in the night, Räisänen continues to the morning with the PC's enquiries regarding work. A young man seen earlier on a wall, where he was inviting the PC onto the farm in what modern folk would describe as a passive-aggressive manner, now submits the PC to a pre-work test:

"It would make a great impression on the master if you mowed the tall grass south of the house. There is a scythe in the old barn... Another thing you could do is move the big trunk from the old barn to the new barn."

The PC thinks this man seems like a foreman, and speculates he might even be the son of the old farmer, but chooses not to ask about either of these things. The player's more traditional adventuring skills are now drawn on to bring the farming tasks to a close, at which point the man asks one more thing:

"... remember seeing those fallen cherry blossoms in the garden? You could go and glue them back onto the tree branches. I am sure the master would appreciate that very much."

The PC's realisation that the man has been pranking him and wasting his time is accompanied by another; that the PC himself has been behaving in a blindly obedient manner while on this farm.

Similar incidents sprinkled throughout the game have led to this point. As a player, I recalled my own following of all the suggestions made by the first villagers outside the farm in spite of them not actually being helpful. However, I didn't realise that the old couple I'd found eating porridge on the first evening had never even offered me a room until I reviewed my transcript. I had just felt they had, then I'd gone off and lain down on a pile of straw to sleep. The so-called foreman never indicated who he actually was, or why he might have had any real authority over me, yet the PC had behaved in a manner as if he had.

Given that this is the conclusion to the fully original portion of the game, and that it weaves together the prior contents of Kafka's short story so well, I think the integration is excellent, and the story has a thematically and psychologically powerful conclusion.

The man's prank isn't the final word, though. Recalling the peak experience of the protagonist in the first scene, that hard-to-share delight he experienced at everything, I'm aware of the distance travelled from that moment to his humiliation at the hands of the foreman. The game has shown that the PC got here by careless small steps in the face of uncertainties, and certainly lost his way after that first moment. Peak experiences can feel like accidents. Abraham Maslow ended up assuming they were. Writer-philosopher Colin Wilson later explored the phenomenon in literature and in reality. He wrote about the true value of these experiences, their nature, what we can do to try to bring them about, what we can do to try to recall them, or avoid losing them or moving too far away from them. Temptation ends with a turn back towards the potential of the opening high point:

"But even in this desolate moment, you know that one day you will find a place that truly belongs to you, no matter what it takes - and it will be somewhere entirely different from here."

For the evolution of the PC, this is the right move. The game casts most of its situations in Kafka's socially adversarial light, so there are practical implications we can take from the story, or be reminded of, about how more assertiveness may be needed in dealing with such situations, and with self-proclaimed authorities, if we aren't to be given the runaround like the PC is in Temptation.

Given my lack of Kafka-reading, I don't know if Kafka ever ended stories with what you might call a positive vector. By reputation, my guess is that he wouldn't have. On the other hand, if he'd trafficked down in Samuel-Beckett-like levels of wilfully stupid pessimism, I'm sure I'd have heard about that.

Temptation in the Village is interactive, but not in the sense that the player could have warded off all those unhelpful people. There's a journey to go on here and the interactions highlight opportunities to think about it. The player is subjected to the old "You can't go that way" message a lot – in situation-specific prose, of course – but that message is existential, not just physical. The PC chooses not to go that way, now. Why? Probably because they're being too careful to try not to offend any of the uncaring NPCs.

What is the Temptation of the title? I have no idea. Some googling suggests there aren't solid ideas out there regarding Kafka's original piece. It was an unfinished fragment, after all. I think some mystery is always a good thing.

Published 07:01 • 4 days ago | Updated Thursday, 04. September 2025 11:22 • 3 days ago

Wednesday, 03. September 2025

Wade's Important Astrolab

IFComp 2025 review: Willy's Manor by Joshua Hetzel

Willy's Manor by Joshua Hetzel is a good-natured puzzling-in-a-house parser adventure, no more and no less. The blurb's concept of the PC being a producer for a TV show called Celebrity Houses is the game-unimportant excuse to subject them to a test organised by novelty-manufacturing eccentric Willy in Willy's extravagant manor. In other words, you enter the manor and solve all the adventure game puzzles inside. Willy has a box which dispenses lightly riddly questions whose answers are objects. Put your object-answer in the box, pull the lever and see if you're right to get the next puzzle. It took me about 45 minutes to complete the game using the in-game HINT command seven times. There are some typos, it lacks proofreading polish, and sports the odd non-critical bug, but it works.

The character of Willy is built up during play in his absence. There are lots of photos in his house showing moments from his life that either amused him or were important to him. These include shaking hands with the president of the USA and laying out whoopee cushions. Other notes and books and bits and pieces pay out anecdotes about the man. He comes across as a thoroughly nice and quite nostalgic chap, a Willy Wonka (I assume the main inspiration) without the dark bits. So while it's his house that's supposed to be the subject of the PC's interest, it's really Willy's life that the player seems to be analysing during the course of the puzzling. I don't recall the game specifying Willy's age, but it does all feel like an exercise in looking back in fondness. Ultimately it felt good in its emotion to me, if in danger of being a little cloying on the way.

The game is not technically a limited-parser one but it is one of those that lists all the commands you might need in its HELP section. It doesn't exploit a wide range of actions, sticking to the basics and adding a few custom ones. The in-game graded hints can be called on generally or in relation to specific items, and worked well for me. A couple of times, one of them in the case of a word riddle, I continued to enter HINT until I got the explicit answer.

I'm not sure the manor is as bizarre as the blurb suggests. There's definitely one fantastic section you'd not find in a house, but otherwise it's mostly traditional rooms and halls. It pays to EXAMINE everything. A lot of items don't appear until the PC first notices them. Most puzzles involve you observing the quality of some item and matching it to the riddle answer Willy's box is asking for at the time. A few puzzles in the fantastic section involve more elaborate work, and actually I kicked myself in this area for not being more observant of the environment. I felt I spoiled a good puzzle mechanism with the hints; I blame IFComp haste.

The very last puzzle exasperated me a little as it relies on the player having either a good memory of details of their game, long scrollback that they can review, or a transcript. After wracking my brain I was able to extract from it the needed data. There is a satisfaction in the last room in reviewing Willy's various nostalgic memories, this scene amplifying the overall theme of the game.

Willy's Manor is a little rough-edged and the prose isn't remarkable, but there are lots of puzzles and some good puzzles. The indirect focus on the character of Willy adds an angle to distinguish this arbitrary-puzzling-in-a-house game from the many similar ones out there.

Published 10:08 • 5 days ago | Updated Wednesday, 03. September 2025 10:08 • 5 days ago

IFComp 2025 review: Not so Happy Easter by Petr Kain

Not so Happy Easter 2025 (NSHE) is a humourous, light horror adventure originally written by Petr Kain in the Czech language. The author's translation of it to English debuts in IFComp 2025. The platform is the ZX Spectrum, one of the most popular 8-bit microcomputers in Europe and the UK in the 1980s, so you need to use an emulator to play it. I used and can recommend Retro Virtual Machine&nb

Not so Happy Easter 2025 (NSHE) is a humourous, light horror adventure originally written by Petr Kain in the Czech language. The author's translation of it to English debuts in IFComp 2025. The platform is the ZX Spectrum, one of the most popular 8-bit microcomputers in Europe and the UK in the 1980s, so you need to use an emulator to play it. I used and can recommend Retro Virtual Machine (RVM) which I've used for ZX text adventures before.

I found NSHE to be compelling, well designed and a lot of fun, so I would say to players, yes, it is worth the effort to get the emulator and play it if you're prepared to take that little bit of time to get into (or re-tap) its 8-bit mindset. It has some contemporary design sensibilities like an absence of random deaths and "walking dead" situations, and I also particularly enjoy retro-platformed IF that is set in the present day (unsurprising, as I made one of my own). NSHE offers the anachronistic delights of cell phones, Teslas and QR codes rendered via technology which predates their existence. As an Australian, the game was also culturally interesting for me. It has some local slang, the Czech currency and other European touches which might be inconsequential if you live there but are nice transporting details if you don't.

Note: I don't think the game's playtime estimate of half an hour is accurate. Bringing my retro-adventuring skills to bear, it took me 83 minutes to complete without hints. I don't know if it would be physically possible to get through it in half an hour at the accurately emulated game's sub-5Mhz speed. Commands have processing time, text doesn't appear instantaneously and you can't type too fast or characters are missed by the buffer. It's possible that on a different emulator, you may be able to overcrank a little, but RVM offered me real speed or an impossible-to-manage warp speed. On the plus side, I discovered you only have to type the first two characters of any word to be understood. The great danger for modern players is that L is not short for LOOK here but for LOAD, which will fastload a fastsaved game! To LOOK, either type LOOK or R (Refresh?)

Having recently commended the blurb for valley of glass, at least for its ability to draw me, I think NSHE has a good one too, and which is an accurate tonal harbinger of the game's content:

"You invented a simple adventure game for the kids in the town, where they had to solve simple puzzles and look for chocolate eggs. They solved nothing, they found nothing, and three of them got lost somewhere."

I especially like that second line conveying the mildly exasperated cynicism of the PC voice. The good thing is that that voice doesn't become overly cynical during play. 8-bit games of the day could be snarky at the expense of the game's narrative or atmosphere, and still can be if they emulate that tone, but I found NSHE to be sitting in a good spot. My own feeling of achievement in solving its 75 points worth of puzzles was not undermined by cheap one-liners. Those puzzles involve the PC's search for the missing kids with the goal of avoiding being drubbed by angry parents. There are a handful of F-bombs dropped and some described violence, but contextually there's not much of it and no gratuitousness.

The game starts in a town, and with this section being more open than what comes later, it's potentially a little more difficult, or at least less aimed. I found the key to success is to continue to make your rounds. The environment is mildly dynamic (e.g. there's a bus stop, and a bus that doesn't come immediately, and NPCs who come or go in response to events) but this is a game where repeat visits to locations and retrying actions over time can pay off. Once you've observed this, the fact that the roster of locations isn't too big works for you, as does the limited verb set. The game gives a complete list of verbs if you ask for VOCAB. Anything that can't be expressed with a more specific verb can be effected with USE A, or USE A ON B. There's lots of technical help, too, in the form of colour-coded feedback and the marking of interactive props with inverse text. Such features help prevent the wasting commands on things that aren't implemented.

The post-town adventure which takes place in spookier wilderness is where the game gets denser. This is well-performed classic adventure gaming with lots to do in a small number of locations, some back-and-forthing and the potential for new ideas and uses for such diverse items as an electric bike or a rubber duck to pop into the player's head. I finished with a score of 71/75, interpreting a few actions I performed as gaining bonus points, so there must have been some more that I missed. You can check your SCORE at any time en route.

Overall, Not so Happy Easter 2025 is a solid and solidly 8-bit adventure touching with humour on the tropes of modern life, still managing to exercise a bit of a PC voice and attitude through terse-leaning writing, and which does what it can technically to smooth play.

Published 13:30 • 5 days ago | Updated Wednesday, 03. September 2025 00:55 • 5 days ago

Tuesday, 02. September 2025

Renga in Blue

Ring Quest: The Fiery Ruin of Hill and Sky

I’ve finished the game, and my previous posts are needed for context. I was quite close to the end last time. The most comparable game I can think of on the last puzzle — and the other reference-puzzles — is the game Avon. That game was chock full of Shakespearean references and in some cases […]

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

I was quite close to the end last time.

Dutch paperback editions of Lord of the Rings, via Reddit.

The most comparable game I can think of on the last puzzle — and the other reference-puzzles — is the game Avon. That game was chock full of Shakespearean references and in some cases it helped to know the reference to solve a puzzle (like the Cassandra with her gift of prophecy; it is originally unclear she is trying to do prophecy if you don’t know who she is). However, there never was a case where it was absolutely required, and I speculated about a game leaning into references and not being shy about requiring book- or play- knowledge.

The fact we’re being subjected to a blizzard of Shakespeare references is given up front, and I had genuine fun learning about characters I didn’t know and scenes I didn’t remember. I think the idea of a game being intentionally past its bounds is not intrinsically terrible as long as the “educational” part is telegraphed.

Ring Quest absolutely requires book knowledge to win. It has an issue straight out the gate with failing the “is telegraphed” condition I mention above — despite the early Tom Bombadil puzzle, it was only about halfway did I realize the extent of outside knowledge the game was asking the player to use. There’s more issues, but let me explain that last puzzle first…

Orc with mithril, from the movie version of Return of the King.

…which was directly after passing through Shelob’s lair, at the tower of Cirith Ungol. The orcs fought over the mithril coat (the one obtained from Smaug) and killed each other in “the fight that follows”. However, we were unable to leave:

You’re stopped by what seems to be an invisible wall.

You’re in the tower of Cirith Ungol.
Orc corpses lie everywhere.

NE
You’re stopped by what seems to be an invisible wall.

Three-headed, vulture-faced statues seem to be staring at you.

SE
You’re stopped by what seems to be an invisible wall.

A new regiment of Orcs arrives and takes you prisoner.
You’re doomed to the torment of the Tower!

The “vulture-faced” description means we are dealing with the Watchers from the book. Here’s Tolkien’s description:

They were like great figures seated upon thrones. Each had three joined bodies, and three heads facing outward, and inward, and across the gateway. The heads had vulture-faces, and on their great knees were laid clawlike hands. They seemed to be carved out of huge blocks of stone, immovable, and yet they were aware: some dreadful spirit of evil vigilance abode in them. They knew an enemy. Visible or invisible none could pass unheeded. They would forbid his entry, or his escape.

Sam (as I was half-remembering last time) comes into play with the phial, which he brings out, and the Watchers are warded off: “slowly he felt their will waver and crumble into fear.” What I most definitely was not remembering is that the Watchers get dealt with a second time, as Sam and Frodo leave the tower. Quoting Tolkien again:

‘Gilthoniel, A Elbereth!’ Sam cried. For, why he did not know, his thought sprang back suddenly to the Elves in the Shire, and the song that drove away the Black Rider in the trees.

‘Aiya elenion ancalima!’ cried Frodo once again behind him.

The will of the Watchers was broken with a suddenness like the snapping of a cord, and Frodo and Sam stumbled forward.

This is an invocation of first Elbereth (invoking an angelic figure), and then Eärendil (heroic). These statements are in two invented languages (Quenya, Sindarin) and Bots did not have a wiki to refer to. The game wants you to INVOKE ELBERETH.

INVOKE ELBERETH
The will of the Watchers is broken with a suddenness
like the snapping of a cord.

You’ve now passed the Silent Watchers of Cirith Ungol.

A winged Nazgul dives down on you!

KILL
With a ghastly cry the ringwraith falls.
Among the now shapeless garments you discover a golden ring.

You then have a straight shot to the cracks of doom, with one more ringwraith along the way (I ended up with eight of the nine Man-rings). Before that, just for fun, if you diverge the wrong way:

Suddenly your gaze is held: wall upon wall, battlement upon battlement,
black, immeasurably strong, mountain of iron, gate of steel,
tower of adamant, you see it: Barad-dur, Fortress of Sauron.

There is an eye in the Dark Tower that does not sleep.
It has become aware of you!

There’s no real puzzle here; you don’t need to resist the urge to wear the One Ring or anything like that.

Frodo at the moment he decides not to destroy the ring, from the Rankin/Bass animated version of Return of the King.

(I’ve wondered how you might render the urge in game form. Possibly as a longer term “sanity management” system like Sunless Sea or Darkest Dungeon; maybe if you keep the Sense of Will under a certain number it allows resisting this moment?)

You’re standing on top of the Orodruin.

In front of you are the cracks of Doom.

INVENTORY
At present you’re carrying the following:
a bow and 14 arrows
3 Elven-rings
1 Dwarf-ring
8 Men-rings
the One Ring of Power
a long rope
the phial of Galadriel
a tiny key
the sword from the Barrow-downs
some dead wood

THROW RINGS
As the Rings of Power plummet into the Cracks of Doom,
your quest has come to an end.

The realm of Sauron is destroyed!

So far, this game has lasted 25 minutes and 50 seconds.

Out of a possible 1000 points, you scored 819.

You’ll notice I was lacking some rings, but the game is fine as long as you toss in the One Ring; you don’t need to destroy all the rings to win, just the One; the rest are for points. (Which, ok, fair.)

Focusing on the final puzzle: in Tolkien, Sam does not know Quenya; he was remembering something he heard prior in his journey, and the word Elbereth gets used as a “password” in the tower to identify it is Sam talking (with the logic no Orc would say that word). For the player of the game, from the content of the game they not only don’t have that to refer to, but they need to parse what was going on in the text into a valid statement in the parser. It honestly still took me a while and the reason I knew I was on the right track is that ELBERETH was an understood noun. (SUMMON TEXTGARBAGE gets a message about needing to be more specific, whereas SUMMON ELBERETH gets “You can’t do that.” which means the noun was understood.)

Eén Ring om allen te regeren, Eén Ring om hen te vinden,
Eén Ring die hen brengen zal en in duisternis binden,
In Mordor, waar de schimmen zijn.

Pieter Bots first read Tolkien when he was twelve. It seems likely he read it in Dutch; it was readily available translated, as the very first translation of Lord of the Rings from English was into Dutch, using the somewhat odd title “In de Ban van de Ring”; it literally translates to “Under the Spell of the Ring”. Tolkien himself approved the translation of placenames (The Letters of JRR Tolkien. Letter 190). I have prodded at various key moments but don’t see anything that would suggest some kind of different perception the author might have had due to the change in language, and of course even if he originally read the books in Dutch, by the time he wrote Ring Quest he could have read the books in English.

The most truly erratic thing, besides the book-knowledge and the giant number of sparse rooms (likely related to the 1975 HOBBIT heritage) is how the player is all the characters at once: Frodo the ring-bearer, Sam with the phial, Gandalf with moments like the staff, Bilbo with the dragon and Bard with the dragon simultaneously, even Pippin and Merry at Treebeard. (I never was able to invoke Treebeard, which I’m guessing would net me the last Man-ring, but I’m guessing it’s a reference like Elbereth rather than a “normal” adventuring action; same for obtaining the Dwarf-rings from — presumably — Moria.) The logic more or less worked; at the very least I don’t think the author “didn’t know the novel” or got confused. The biggest stretch was Galadriel and Elrond giving their rings when asked (they never gave them to any character), although I can see where the temptation to include every ring came from.

From a Dutch comic version of Lord of the Rings.

Overall this was fascinating in an “outsider art” sense in the same manner as Tiny Adventure; with Crowther/Woods being merged with a game that probably traces back to mainframe Star Trek, an unusual deviation in media history was bound to happen. Not like it was the greatest fun to play: I’ve stuck to the highlights, but the experience of trudging through had a great deal of

You’re following a north-south trail.

S
You’re following a north-south trail.

S
You’re following a north-south trail.

S
You’re following a north-south trail.

S
You’re following a north-south trail.

S
You’re following a north-south trail.

S
You’re following a north-south trail.

which gets across why the gigantic grid method wasn’t duplicated as much elsewhere.

Coming up: Urban Upstart.

Published 23:06 • 5 days ago

Gold Machine

The Wolf that Cried Boy: The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode

A lengthy and humanities-centered discussion of Victor Gijsbers’s doppelganger and the concept of interpretive abjection. a memorable incident in the development of an interactive fiction critic. It was early 2022, and my blog about 1980s text adventure games by a company called “Infocom” was beginning to find a readership. Twitter was still Twitter in those […] The post The

A lengthy and humanities-centered discussion of Victor Gijsbers’s doppelganger and the concept of interpretive abjection.

a memorable incident in the development of an interactive fiction critic.

It was early 2022, and my blog about 1980s text adventure games by a company called “Infocom” was beginning to find a readership. Twitter was still Twitter in those days, and I had found myself in one of those spontaneous open-air conversations that made it an enjoyable place sometimes. I had just told someone how much I enjoyed their essay about Steve Meretzky’s A Mind Forever Voyaging, a game that I would later write a good deal about. That author said something appreciative, and then I went on to say–what did I say? I must have said something about my own ambitions for a series about AMFV and what I perceived as a high critical bar that writers had set for the subject.

After a bit more of this, another conversant emerged from the ether. If I wanted to understand A Mind Forever Voyaging, this person suggested, I need not read the opinions of critics. Everything I needed to know had been recorded in a considerable and fascinating collection of documents known as Steve Meretzky’s “Infocom Cabinet.” I was already familiar with that archive and loved its contents. It contains design notes, tester feedback, drafts, on and on! Still, I didn’t think that anything in the cabinet made thinking and writing about Meretzky’s games superfluous. If that were the case, why play them at all? I think the endgame of that interpretive strategy is devaluing one’s own experience as reader and player, as if it were an inferior echo of Meretzky’s notes.

This unnamed person, who was at least right to insist on the value of the collection, soon vanished. We were never going to agree! I wasn’t ready to surrender my own personal experience with A Mind Forever Voyaging, not even to a post-facto Meretzky.

authors are not to be trusted.

Let’s say that I write a short work of interactive fiction. It’s a charming piece about dinosaurs and a magic accordion. More optimistically, let’s imagine that people love it. “Petunia and the Mesozoic Polka” is rated highly by critics and players! Its characters are likable, and the story has many enchanting surprises.

Let’s further imagine that, a month after many enthusiastic reviews have been published, I begin “explaining” my work online. I say that it’s a very serious game, in fact, about Althusser’s concept of “interpellation.” The accordion and its bewitching tune, I argue, hail the dinosaurs (even poor Petunia) as ideological subjects [this is all fancy-sounding gibberish, by the way, there’s no need to look any of this up]. People are not “getting” my work! In order to correct the record, I place my purportedly Marxist dinosaur game in a ZIP file along with a text document exhaustively explicating it. The ZIP, containing game and text file together, is now the sole means of downloading my work.

What should readers make of my admonitions? Some considerations:

Intent and outcome are not the same. It is not so terribly important what I “mean” for people to see in my work. Intent cannot be verified, for one thing, and even if it could, why would that dictate audience experiences? I might intend for something I’ve written to be “good,” for instance, but reviews and contest judges tend to make their own assessments regarding quality.
What if I’m wrong? To perfectly express my intent, I’d have to perfectly understand myself. Some people spend years in therapy in hopes of achieving such self-awareness. I may not actually understand my own intent very well.
What was my game before I explained it? To continue the A Mind Forever Voyaging line of discussion: the “cabinet” was published decades after the game was initially released. The interpretations of players in the 80s, 90s, and aughts were not invalidated or contradicted by the cabinet, and people who liked “Petunia” for the cute dinosaurs likewise remain the sole owners of their experiences.
We are not islands. Authors, like readers, emerge from a large and hard-to-encapsulate cultural context that includes, among other things, social, cultural, and economic factors. In some sense, the whole of human history (!), or parts thereof, may play a role. If knowledge of my reality is the only path to understanding my work, then a reader can never fully understand my work. I am an inexhaustible subject! I can likewise never completely know my readers.

When authors intervene, readers may miss out on chances to have an interesting thought by granting them more power than is their due. Sometimes, authors–I include myself!–are like vampires: the audience must invite them in. Being welcomed in is the source of the vampire’s power over hapless villagers and readers.

a free audience and the production of meaning.

My only recently-coined “vampire interpretation theory” has unexpected implications. Audiences are not the only ones to have surrendered their powers, as the author has given up a great deal as well. Conversations that would have once been concerned with the meaning of a work are reduced to evaluations of the author’s success or failure: did they achieve their stated intentions? By interfering with an audience’s interpretation, the author disrupts a work’s capacity for meaning.

Unless meaning is something Platonic, a magic bit of moonbeam out in space, then authors have no special authority over it. They cannot call attention to it, because there is no “it” that exists beyond the reach of readers. Without an audience, there is only a writer’s intent. Authors do not call attention to meaning, they only call attention to themselves. Meaning is a product of audience encounters with art. Audiences, not authors, make meaning.

A reader’s freedom to experience a work and make of it what they will is, then, an essential element of the creator-author partnership. Without it, a work shares many features with a student’s five-paragraph argumentative essay, as it becomes a case for the author’s thesis.

Is that necessarily bad? No. The five-paragraph essay is a valuable pedagogical instrument, and any cultural artifact (books, computer games, films, etc.) could be used–productively–in such a way. However, I think an overtly didactic work may not leave enough play (as in space for unimpeded movement) for audiences to make something of it. Without leaving space for audiences to draw their own conclusions authors offer readers only two options: subversion or acceptance.

This will not apply in every case, but it may be useful to think of a trust relationship between a work and its audience. IF critics have talked about a player’s ability to trust a game: are its rules reasonable and consistent? Can it be relied upon, or is it out to–forgive my use of a craft term–jerk the player around? Trust, as the old expression goes, is a two-way street. The player’s trust is a generally important consideration in game criticism, but the inverse can be just as significant. That is, it is worth assessing the amount of trust a work and its author place in their audience.

Play (in the interpretive sense) is an indicator of trust, as it leaves audiences free to have their own experiences, to have a subjective encounter that belongs to them. In the absence of trust, a work risks becoming an exam: readers might wonder if they have arrived at the “correct” interpretation, or if they have instead “failed” their encounters with art. A work that trusts its audience leaves space for a reader to value their own interpretations simply because they are theirs, rather than weigh them against a real or perceived authorial mandate.

That isn’t to say that freedom and enjoyment increase together in a line. It’s common to encounter people who have had frustrating, bewildering experiences with James Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance. Sometimes, commenters will assert that any lack of understanding is their own fault, a flaw in their understanding. While they are free to think so, I offer an alternative: their experience didn’t match some internal or external expectation involving author, work, or reader. This may not sound like much, but I think it’s really important to challenge the idea that anybody is supposed to “do something” with art, other than offer some base minimum of respect (and not even that in all cases!). It isn’t an audience’s responsibility to perform grand interpretive feats just because, James Joyce or otherwise. A reader’s motivation for completing such draining tasks–outside of a scholastic setting, of course–comes from their own responses to the work. People will engage with texts or not–on whatever level they wish–in accordance with their experiences.

But even in cases where a reader experiences either too much play or else too much pressure regarding their use of it, trust is essential to the production of meaning. Unless resisting the author is a compelling option, players can only make meaning out of experience when a work stays out of their way.

the wolf who cried boy: a work insisting upon its own credibility.

I can’t help but think of the curious case of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode by Victor Gijsbers (sometimes referred to herein as HNM), a game that seems to have lost a fight with itself. What a dramatic overture! Let me speak in a more measured way: it really seems that the text simultaneously declares itself reliable and unreliable. As a critic, I’m interested in what experiences mutually exclusive work/author perceptions of trustworthiness might encourage. This seems like a distinction upon which all subsequent interpretation hangs. If the work and the claims of its author are deemed reliable, we find ourselves evaluating intent rather than interpreting the work. If the author and work are incredible, then a more difficult but more rewarding possibility awaits: having a subjective experience with art that belongs to me and me alone.

The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode is a complex of texts. It is delivered in a ZIP archive containing the following:

A cover image depicting an oddly hostile-looking white-and-brown-black rabbit on a blue, Mickey Mouse blanket. Said blanket appears to be littered with rabbit feces.
A PDF containing an essay titled “Anatomy of a Failure.” This essay is purportedly by a “Victor Gijsbers,” a respected author and critic of interactive fiction. It is not clear whether this is the same “Victor Gijsbers” who wrote The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode.
A plain text file with an “.NI” file extension, which suggests it contains Inform 7 source code. A brief inspection reveals programming code for a game called The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode by “Victor Gijsbers.”
A compiled story file for a game called The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode by “Victor Gijsbers.”

To my knowledge, it has never been distributed any other way. The Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) entry for the game refers to the archive as “Complete Package,” perhaps indicating that an experience of the game that does not include all four archived components is correspondingly incomplete. My tendency as a reader–I am not aware of well-theorized argument for doing otherwise–is to examine supplementary materials before playing the games that they accompany. My assumption is that they are narrative framing. I exclude things like walkthroughs and source code, of course.

In the case of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, that means that I began with the essay. “Hidden Nazi Mode: Anatomy of a Failure” is dated September 11, 2010. Glancing over at the actual game file, I see that its compile date is the same. The page history at IFDB matches, as well. I don’t believe the specific date is relevant, despite its place in American history, but I feel it must be acknowledged because at least one critic has mentioned it. Since this essay arrives fifteen years after the release of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, I write in an established critical context. This reading is filtered through the readings of others, and through developments in the world of IF at large. The date has been part of the game’s reception, and reception is especially interesting to me.

translucency.

As a general assertion: an “authorial” (I’ll justify my use of quotation marks while referring to the author later) statement like this can have a profound effect on player experiences, and early reviews of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode bear that out. The experience of the game itself, for many, became an assessment of a thought experiment regarding public source code. That is, the question of the game’s quality becomes a matter of utility: does this Inform 7 text adventure game support an argument regarding the absence of transparency in compiled computer programs? Let’s have a closer look at the stated problem.

A “Victor Gijsbers” begins by asserting the growing cultural significance of computer games:

Computer games are now an integral part of our society. In the realm of entertainment, playing computer games has a legitimate place next to reading books, listening to music, playing board games and watching movies. Computer games are used for educational purposes in primary and secondary schools, where they supplement textbooks and educational videos. And in higher education, courses about computer games are now taught alongside more traditional courses on literature and the fine arts. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 1)

Fourteen years later, this claim might seem a given, but it was arguably prescient for its day. By 2014, the discourse surrounding computer and video games had proven capable of imposing considerable and unfortunately negative power in broader cultural and political spheres (“Gamergate“). However, “Gijsbers” envisions a different, acultural sort of problem, in that a compiled program could contain hidden and troubling content: “But there is one big difference between a computer game and any of these other media: computer games are not transparent” (“Anatomy of a Failure” 1).

“Transparency”, “Gijsbers” argues, is a feature of traditional print, film, music and media. That is, its contents are in some sense exhaustively visible.

By this I mean that when you read a book, watch a movie, examine a board game or a statue, you know everything that is contained within the work. You may not understand everything, you may have missed hidden layers of meaning, but you can be certain that the book does not contain any words you have not seen, that the movie does not contain any scenes you have not seen. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 1)

This rings true: in the first half of the twentieth century, for instance, persons who all but certainly lacked affection for challenging modernist literature managed to find instances of so-called “obscenity” within the famously dense prose of James Joyce’s Ulysses (“United States v One Book Called Ulysses”). Even when there is misunderstanding, there is at least an assurance that all audiences of static media are looking at the same thing.

…some or most of the game’s content may not have appeared to you even if you played it often and thoroughly. This has everything to do with the triple nature of a computer program: it consists of source code, as binary, and as an interpreted program with which you interact. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 1)

It is generally true that such medial layers have a destabilizing effect on what I might call “interpretive confidence.” Consider the narrative structure of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The narrative frame is constructed via the account of the oblivious Mr. Lockwood, a landowner new to the region. He, in turn, relays accounts from other characters, chief among them Nelly Dean, a gossiping servant. Sometimes those characters repeat the stories of still other people. The novel’s story is a bit like a game of Telephone (“Telephone Game“): the story is bound to have changed by the time it reaches its readers.

“Gijsbers’s” claim that the more mechanically formal obscuration of a program’s “triple” nature suggests an escalation fom experiences of Wuthering Heights and the like, as his clarification of terms suggests. The “top” layer–that experienced by players–is near-analogous to the visible or audible elements of other media. However, there is a twist:

The interpreted program, as it appears on your screen, is what you will actually interact with as end user. The interpreted program is not transparent: if this is the only layer you have knowledge of, you can never be sure that you know what the program will do in different circumstances, and you can never be sure that you have seen all the content the program has to offer. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 2).

I concede this is true. While one might not share the author’s perhaps hard-to-account-for suspicions, the assertion that average users never engage directly with a program’s code or have access to exhaustive indexes of their contents seems unassailable. The next, lower layer consists of the complied program itself.

The binary is the compiled code: the original human readable source code has been translated into a machine readable program. For an unaided human, a binary is not transparent. It is in theory possible to reverse engineer a binary and make it transparent again, but this is often exceedingly difficult and sometimes illegal. For practical purposes, a binary is not transparent. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 2)

This must be conceded, too, though I think that–in the case of a computer game–this is often desirable. Players do not, in fact, want transparency. A common motivation for playing is a feeling of discovery and progression. If a game were somehow utterly transparent, there would be no puzzles, no surprises, no wonder. Arguably, translucency–rather than transparency–is a source of appeal. While there is not sufficient space here, it would be interesting to better know how agency destabilizes text, and if translucency fosters rewarding, agentic experiences. My position on the latter question has always been that it does (“Initial Groundwork for a Reading of A Mind Forever Voyaging“). As an author and critic of text adventure games, my experience is that, in a thoroughly implemented work, one is at least reminded of an iceberg: some unknowable amount must go unseen by readers.

What of the source code? Like the end product (the interpreted program) and unlike the intermediary (the compiled program), the source is readable to anyone familiar with its programming language. Speaking generally of source code, “Gijsbers” asserts its transparency to audiences:

The source code is the human readable code that the programmers have created. If you look at the source code and you know the programming language, you can see exactly what the program will do in different circumstances. As source code, a computer program has the same transparency that a book or a movie has. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 1-2)

This is, one must admit, a fairly optimistic and literal usage of the term “transparency:” source is transparent in the same sense that the Vulgate bible is. While specialists can read it at will, many of us will have to rely upon the assurances of others, playing Mr. Lockwood to a programming Nelly Dean. In reality, non-programmers can only experience the “transparency” of source code as the assurances of another person, not as the text itself. Whether relying on the ABOUT information regarding a “closed” game or else trusting another’s translation of source, the contents will be experienced translucently by non-specialist audiences.

Can the average user ever really be sure that a program is safe? While “Gijsbers” seems confident that source code is the way to safety, most of us will turn to other people for assurances.

the humiliated professor and other true tales of terror.

The next section of “Anatomy of a Failure” dramatizes a short thought experiment of the sort that philosophy students and professors enjoy. Who knows what dark surprises a closed software program might hold?

Thinking about this, I realised that there is a certain danger inherent in the use of closed games in any situation where you are responsible for what someone else is playing. For instance: you teach a university level course about computer games. Many of the homework assignments require the students to play games chosen by you for their academic interest. As one of the students is playing a closed game you assigned, the screen suddenly fills with–whatever kind of inappropriate content you find most inappropriate. Such an occurrence would be very embarrassing. It could even get you fired. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 2)

It isn’t yet time to discuss critical receptions of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, but contemporary readers may be surprised to learn that the possibility of an unexpectedly vulgar video game was granted a sizable portion of HNM‘s critical attention: how plausible is this scenario? Can such disasters be averted? A great deal of my compatriots in the humanities would be no better off with a printed copy of C+ source code in hand.

In this doomsday scenario, a hapless professor becomes an object of interpretive abjection (“abjection“). Before readers protest my use of specialized critical terms, I am simply referring to a condition in which a reader thinks that a deeply troubling meaning may exist within a text, even though the full contents of that text cannot be verified. Consider the genre of horror in which there may or may not be something terrifying inside a character. In Ridley Scott’s Alien, that something might be a larval alien silently maturing within its host. In the well-traveled genre of zombie stories, the virus that transforms a human into a mindless, shambling monster might be multiplying in secret, initiating an undetected process of awful transfiguration. This is the horror of abjection. Real or not, the sufferer worries about the possibilities of contamination and descent from subject to object, to mere incubator, container, or host.

In this thought experiment, the unknowable contents of a program call forth a kind of interpretive abjection. The horror of the abject is experienced at the boundary between person and thingness: fluids, excrement, corpses, and the like. Interpretive abjection, as “Gijsbers” would have us experience it, is the place where information and its insoluble technological abstractions collide. The professor cannot rid themselves of the program’s uncertainty. It is as inevitable as blood is to life. A program could be filled with embarrassing trash, or it could not, and our experience of it in classrooms and elsewhere is ultimately informed not by the truth but by our fear (or its absence). Have we already transgressed? Perhaps we have jeopardized the tender minds of our students. As in the case of abject horror, interpretive abjection is experienced as an indeterminate borderland. Infection, penetration, envelopment, contamination, and decay are not merely a future possibility. Once the spectre of infection is raised, one must admit that there is no way to be sure that a program is not already in some way diseased. Despite the inadequacy of source code for laypersons, it is asserted here as a careful instructor’s only hope.

The interesting thing is: you cannot prevent it. Playing the game yourself and finding no objectionable content is no guarantee that other interactors will not stumble upon such content. It might only appear once every 200 times; or only if the player is very bad (such as a non-experienced student might be); or only after the 17th of July 2011; or only when the username entered is `Mary-Jane’; or only if the user’s hard drive contains songs by Bon Jovi; or all of those together. If the game is closed, if you and others do not have access to the source code, there is no way to be sure that such dubious content is not within the games you assign. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 2)

I have to admit it: this screen that bears my words and the phone resting to the left of my keyboard are not exhaustively understood by me. They could do anything at any time. They could say anything. My phone could display strange characters, or my laptop might silently transmit all of my documents to a shadow cabal of boring person document collectors. Such is the world we live in! In hopes of precipitating an abjective interpretive experience, “Victor Gijsbers” created a booby trap within a small Inform 7 game.

In order to make this point in a more dramatic way, I wrote a little game called Hidden Nazi Mode. In this game, you get to feed carrots to cute little bunnies–until you type “heil Hitler”, after which the game transforms into something infinitely less savoury. (The game did automatically stop itself before the worst happened, though.) (“Anatomy of a Failure” 2)

There is a game, but how much play is in its play? As this essay’s lengthy and discursive introduction claims, an author’s stated effect reduces interpretive play. “Anatomy of a Failure,” it seems, is pushing the player to experience the game as an evaluator rather than as an interpreter. Even I have assessed the validity of “Gijsbers’s” stated problem! It seems a temptation impossible to resist. Many reviewers have wondered whether the experiment of adding a hidden, problematic vignette to a seemingly innocent compiled program would prove a point regarding “closed” games.

My own experience as evaluator is this: no, a secret “mode” is not the spearhead of a convincing argument for readily available source code, and I wonder if a philosophy professor (like the real-world Victor Gijsbers) would think that it did. While the theoretical possibility of abjection arises, my heart is not frozen by it. In the absence of an abject experience with the text of HNM, my reading grows increasingly concerned with the credibility of this so-called “Victor Gijsbers” as opposed to the credibility of the compiled program. So far as any possible dangers go, readers may wonder what the “worst” (as in “before the worst happened”) consists of, since that is presumably a very low bar to get over for members of the Schutzstaffel (“Schutzstaffel“). This stated effort to minimize the “harm” of the hidden mode will be revisited later.

This secret mode, we are told, was short-lived. Players apparently misunderstood it as a cautionary tale regarding the evil of video games.

Unfortunately, Hidden Nazi Mode turned out to be a failure. Rather than it being a dramatic way to make the point that open games are more trustworthy than closed games, it was read by most of my testers to be a dramatic way to make the point that games are evil. Of course, I don’t believe that games are evil; and I don’t believe that Hidden Nazi Mode made that point. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 3)

These players, who presumably experienced the hidden mode for themselves, reached a surprising conclusion. My first question, if confronted with a secret Nazi mode, would be concerned with the quality of the content itself. An author centering gameplay around an SS member’s experience would be playing a very dangerous game. Should this man (the soldiers were all men) be humanized? What of his victims? Is the entire thing handled competently? Does the tone work? Not every author who can write a game with bunnies and carrots will be up to the task. In fact, it might be that none could fare well. However, in this authorial account, authorial craft and moment-to-moment gameplay are never mentioned. Perhaps authorial direction had rendered the text so sterile in terms of its potential meanings that it was reduced to a windsock signaling some invisible social force.

It is hard to know what to believe.

But the cultural context in which the game would have been released would have almost ensured misunderstanding. People, and especially those who live in the United States, are used to hear diatribes about the immorality of computer games, and to hear pleas for banning games. In such a context, few people will pick up the more subtle message of my piece. Most would read it as an argument for the banning of games.

But I don’t want to ban games, and don’t want to be read as advocating such a thing. I therefore decided not to release the game. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 3)

I wonder how true this is. I have certainly grown accustomed to certain strains of evangelical misunderstandings of evil, but my admittedly nonscientific impression of American evangelism has not indicated unusual sensitivity regarding violence. In 2010, five of the top ten-selling games in the United States involved killing sentient beings (humans in most cases) as a central mechanic, for instance, and I can find no evidence to suggest they were particularly controversial (“The Best Selling Games of 2010“) (“Video Game Controversies“).

We have returned to the question of credibility, then. Not of the compiled program, which we have yet to execute, but of the “author.” In closing, “Victor Gijsbers” explains that the potentially upsetting Nazi content has been removed from The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode.

But I still had a game sitting on my hard drive in which you could give carrots to little bunnies. Some people even liked it, as long as the hidden nazi [SIC] mode was not invoked. (Some liked it as a children’s game; others for the dark atmosphere created by its cultural hints.) So I have decided to take out all the Nazi stuff, rename the game to The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, and release it. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 3)

An interesting feint: the problem (should we believe that it is a problem) has been removed, leaving a wholesome game with dark implications. As a critic, I do wonder what the effects of stating that something bad has been removed from an enjoyable experience. Is it unease? Perhaps it is relief. Perhaps it is the abject uncertainty of the invisible pathogen coursing through a program’s abstracted and unintelligible systems. Perhaps it is bemused skepticism. Whatever the case might be, readers may be as surprised as I was to learn that the credulousness of even the most disinterested parties could survive the essay’s concluding statement: “No worries, friends. This is an open game” (Anatomy of a Failure” 3). To me, it was at last clear: this so-called “Victor Gijsbers” is a fiction, and he is the antagonist of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode. This “Gijsbers” is the deceiving demiurge of his illusory world, exploiting the reputation of well-regarded critic and author Victor Gijsbers for sinister, if unguessable, ends. How did I know? “Gijsbers” is a liar, I am sure, and Victor Gijsbers, so far as I know, is not (Tangentially: The real Victor Gjisber’s Nemesis Macana is accompanied by a lengthy and unreliable manifesto, though that content is overtly fictional, authored by the character “Herman Schudspeer.” (Nemesis Macana).

I will repeat this very sentence at this conclusion of this essay: The entire argument of “Anatomy of a Failure” hangs not upon logos or pathos but ethos. As such, The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode is an inverted children’s tale. It is the story of the wolf who cried boy.

**playing the game that is The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode.**

“The Game Formerly Known as Hidd.zblorb” is a compiled Inform 7 program. While any deep exploration of Inform’s history and architecture would be a distraction here, it is enough to say that it is a system for writing text adventure games based on a world model. That is, Inform 7 games generally consist of places and things that can be acted upon or used to act upon still other things. The state of these things is tracked to simulate the world of their game. These are, as I’ve said, text games. Input and output consist of text either entered or read by players.

Input consists of crude and sometimes incomplete sentences consisting of verbs (always) and nouns (frequently). For a protagonist to take a blue soccer ball in the world of the game, a player might enter one of the following:

TAKE BALL
TAKE BLUE BALL
TAKE BLUE
TAKE SOCCER BALL
TAKE BLUE SOCCER BALL
TAKE SOCCER
TAKE SOCCER BALL

If there is only one takable thing in the simulated area, called a “room,” the player might get away with typing TAKE without specifying any noun. Likewise, were more than one soccer ball in the room, the game might ask the player to be more specific.

Generally speaking, Inform games seek to maximize the specificity of their processing while minimizing the amount of text the player must type. Since typed commands are an important element of an Inform 7 game’s text, longer game excerpts will always include player input. As the above example with the blue soccer ball indicates, specific commands are not canonical, though the actions that they trigger are.

Upon launching the The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, the player is asked to input their name. After doing so, they are rewarded with title information (programmatically referred to as the “Banner Text” by Inform 7) followed by a salutation and room description. I have belabored the possible variations between equivalent commands in order to explain that a single transcript–such as the one referenced here–may not perfectly match another.

In this essay, extended passages of output and source code will appear as preformatted monospace text preceded and succeeded by the designator [“transcript”].

["transcript"]

Hi there! What is your first name? > drew
Welcome, Drew! I am sure we're going to have a great time together.
 
The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode
A cute game for unattended young children by Victor Gijsbers
Release 1 / Serial number 100911 / Inform 7 build 6E72 (I6/v6.31 lib 6/12N)
 
Parents, please type ABOUT for more information.
 
Next to the busy street
You are standing by a bus stop, Drew. You can go east to a large square. (If you want to go east, just type "go east".) There are also some things here you can examine: the bus stop, the street, and yourself. (If you want to examine something, you just need to type "examine" and then the name of the thing. So if you want to examine the bus stop, you can simply type "examine bus stop". Always examine everything you see!)

["transcript"]

Even as the game opens, the spectre of interpretive abjection is summoned by the game’s approximation of language suitable for children’s entertainment (“I am sure we are going to have a great time together”) and the radically unprompted reassurance of “A cute game for unattended young children.”

Since we are parents of a sort, birthing and nourishing our understanding of the work, it only makes sense to begin by typing *ABOUT* at the command prompt (for clarity’s sake, commands entered verbatim will be printed in capital case and bracketed by asterisks). Doing causes a “menu” screen to print. It consists of six options, each selectable via direction and enter keys on a standard keyboard:

["transcript"]

   What kind of game is this?
   How is it played?
   Why is this game called The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode?
   Where can I get the source code to this game?
   Legal stuff
   Credits

["transcript"]

This is a second layer of paratext, a fictive intervention between essay and playable game. While much of it treads familiar ground, it contains important information that doesn’t appear elsewhere. Tonally, the menu system further approximates the discourse of texts for children, and declares a new name for its container:

["transcript"]

Fluffy Bunny Friends is a cute text adventure suited for all children who can read and type well enough to interact with it. The aim of the game is to give carrots to all of the scared, hungry bunnies who have hidden themselves in the different locations!

["transcript"]

Within the wider context established by “Anatomy of a Failure,” this supposed title reinforces impressions of saccharine disingenuousness. Reading further, it becomes clear that one should not believe anything that this work has to say for itself:

["transcript"]

This game is not called The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode. It is called Fluffy Bunny Friends. Any information to the contrary is a lie sent into the world by our competitors, and should be disregarded. I mean, would we publish a game called The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode? Well? Okay, we did. If you want to know why, read the essay that ought to be accompanying this game.

["transcript"]

The title is The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, and we have the poop-laden cover art (and corresponding IFDB entry) to prove it! Who might “our competitors” be? The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode was not released as part of any competition, nor has it been monetized in any way. Perhaps readers are meant to view closed software as an inherently capitalistic enterprise. This rhetorical wink is more proof that HNM’s self-characterizations do not render it a suitable object of unchecked credulousness. The plural “we” is curious as well. It may be an artifact of formal, academic discourse. Perhaps Gijsbers and “Gijsbers” are co-conspirators. In any case, it seems clear that the text is meant to prompt a more critical and investigative reading of the text, even if it has inconsistently achieved such results.

General tutorial messages regarding gameplay afford a complete, if unconvincing facade. We players are invited to examine the bus stop. This is our reward for following the narrator’s guidance:

["transcript"]

>examine bus stop
You took bus 88 to get here, but it will be a long time before the next bus arrives. Anyway, you're not ready to leave yet.

["transcript"]

The number eighty-eight, I have the misfortune of knowing, is not-so-secret code for “Heil Hitler” (“88 (number)“). This must be one of the “cultural hints” alluded to by “Gijsbers!” So, too, must be the name of our next location, “Muranowska Square,” which almost certainly refers to the site of a pitched battle between Nazis and members of the Jewish Military Union during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 (“Battle of Muranów Square“).

["transcript"]

>e
Very good, Drew! Let me tell you about your mission. You have come here to give nice tasty carrots to all the rabbits in the neighbourhood. But the rabbits are hungry and scared, and they've hidden themselves away in all kinds of places. Will you be able to find all six of them, and give them a carrot?

["transcript"]

What are the rabbits scared of, one must wonder? One can quickly find a rabbit, though no source of fear is identified.

["transcript"]

>x alley
Who knows what you might find in there?
 
>s
 
Dead end
The alley quickly turns out to be a dead end. You can go back north to the square.
 
You can see a rabbit here.
 
>x rabbit
This rabbit looks scared and hungry. Maybe you should give it a carrot? (You can type "give carrot to bunny" to do so.)
 
>give carrot
(to the rabbit)
You give the carrot to the rabbit. It eats it immediately, and looks much happier now!
 
You have given carrots to one of the six rabbits. Only five more to go!
 
>x rabbit
This rabbit looks very happy.

["transcript"]

It isn’t clear what has frightened the rabbit, but carrots certainly seem to help.

Other critics have pointed out the protagonist’s dislike of traditionally Jewish foods, and it certainly does seem to stand out in such a minimally implemented game.

["transcript"]

>x food
You can see a stack of matza (very flat breads made without yeast), several challahs (breads in the form of a braid) and a fruited rice pudding on the counter. None of it seems very appealing to you.

["transcript"]

After a bit more exploring, players find another rabbit hiding in a grandfather clock “just like the clock where the youngest goat was hidden in the story of the wolf and seven goats” (“transcript”). In that fairy tale, the youngest goat is the only one of its siblings to avoid being devoured by a wolf. Nearby, a collection of sheet music by composers of Jewish descent rests on a piano: “Among the stacks, you see works by Gustav Mahler, Felix Mendelssohn, Kurt Weill and Arnold Schönberg.” Just to the east, bookshelves contain works by “Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka and Heinrich Heine.” The bookcase hides a secret room containing a frightened “rabbit,” which comes off as an unsubtle reference to Anne Frank.

This essay is not meant to be an exhaustive list of references to Jews and Nazis in a place where a massacre of Polish Jews took place as a matter of historical fact. I will say more later, but I think a case can be made that this work is a rather Overt Nazi Mode. The gameplay and descriptions are so slight that the purported absence of Hidden Nazi Mode occupies more imagined space than the game’s world does, which in turn has an amplifying effect on what little content there is. For comparison’s sake, “Anatomy of a Failure” amounts to 1,006 words while my representative play transcript totals 2,111 words. A full third of the work so far (we have yet to consider the supposed source code or decompilation) is static text!

Here, it seems that a reader comes to a fork in the interpretive road. The ending of the game, which can barely be called that, offers neither certitude nor relief. Given all that comes, the player must decide: is this it? Is there a Hidden Nazi Mode? Or is this compiled game a ghost story? That is, is this Inform 7 program haunted by the unwholesome spirit of Nazi-themed entertainments? The unsubtle references to Nazi and Jewish seem an argument for the existence of Pink Elephant Syndrome (“Ironic Process Theory“) rather than for the virtues of open games. A ghost story, then, is one possibility of the abjection binary. The other is that the virus is real, that it courses through the veins of this game. The player must attempt to determine, in other words, if there is a Hidden Nazi Mode. Can they and will they confront whatever abjected meaning might lurk beneath the surface?

there really is a hidden nazi mode.

While not every player arrives at the ledge where only leaping or remaining is possible, a certain sort of curious player will have to know the truth. Since abjection is liminal, those who remain must find a way to consign the text to a non-signifying noplace. Perhaps they can convince themselves that questions of hidden content don’t matter. If reviews of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode are any indication, then such suppressions of curiosity are both possible and unsatisfying. It isn’t yet time to discuss such reviews, but it is important to acknowledge the choices they reflect and corresponding strategies for enduring or ending experiences of interpretive abjection.

We curious few who have to know, those of us who have discerned the difference between a “Victor Gijsbers” and the Victor Gijsbers, must find a way to proceed. The essay claims that the command “heil Hitler” once opened the titular secret mode, but this no longer works, just as “Gijsbers” has promised. In fact, the compiled game does not even return an admonishing response:

["transcript"]

>heil Hitler
That's not a verb I recognise.

["transcript"]

At this point, it makes sense to consult the provided source contained in a text file called “story.ni”. Combing through it, there is no mention of the command grammar “heil Hitler,” nor is there any other sign of hidden inputs or texts. It is a short read at only 3,200 words. The source code has no comments: nowhere does it state that “this is where the hidden Nazi mode once was,” nor is the hidden Nazi mode commented out, so that we can verify its absence from the compiled game. It’s a dead end, rendered completely unconvincing by all that has preceded it. How can a reader get to the truth?

Tools exist for examining the textual content of Inform 7 games. A popular one used today is Glulx Strings, a web-based utility that extracts printable text from compiled program files. It is commonly used by critics and players today. However, Glulx Strings did not exist at the time of HNM‘s release. Since we will be discussing critical responses to The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, it makes sense to use tools that would have been available to critics in 2010. Research indicates that ascertaining the truth regarding hidden content was, in fact, possible, via widely available tools.

After several false starts, which all pointed to Glulx Strings, I was able to find two likely candidates via posts at the Interactive Fiction Community Forum, also known as Intfiction. One thread recommended a tool called MRIFK.EXE (“Reverse Engineering the Source Code from .gblorb“, while the other suggested REFORM.EXE (“Decompiling with Reform?“). Both programs are by the same author, Ben Rudiak-Gould. While the page where they were once hosted, “Interactive fiction decompilers,” is now defunct, several Wayback Machine captures exist, including one from 2008. Both tools would have been available at the time of HNM‘s release.

I tried MRIFK first, but it exited with an error message. Fortunately, I had better luck with REFORM.

C:\mr>reform hnm.zblorb > hnm.txt

This generated a text file called “hnm.txt” that contains 22,838 lines. A lot of it is unreadable to me and would likely be unreadable to the average player. However, it still contains useful content. Beginning near line 22,000, printable lines of text–making up the output of the game–appear. They directly refer to Nazi-related content, including a line in German from the anthem of the Nazi Party (“hnm.txt” 22,064). Elsewhere can be found statements like, “A frightened Jewish girl huddles in a corner” (“hnm.txt” 22,100).

This is enough to look for the appropriate command. This wouldn’t necessarily be a printed text, so it’s good that we have a decompiler tool instead of one for extracting text strings. Further investigation reveals that actions are detailed at the top of the file. They are laid out in terms of their “command grammar,” that is, detailing what imperative verbs be used and whether articles, objects, or direct objects are involved. In this entry, various possible verbs are associated with an “examine” action.

Verb 'check' 'describe' 'examine' 'watch' 'x//'
    * noun                                                                                        -> Examine
    * 'under' noun                                                                          -> LookUnder
;

It’s important to say that I cannot read anything in this file beyond what it says on its surface. I do not understand Inform 7’s lower-level layer, Inform 6, nor do I know how to read decompiled Inform 6 code. Since we have found a section detailing commands used by the program, a layperson’s understanding will hopefully be enough. We don’t have to read far. In fact, the secret can be found in the 41st line of code:

Verb 'join'
    * 'the' 'ss'                                                                    -> A80_nazimoding
;

The command needed to enter hidden Nazi mode is “join the ss.”

It’s my assertion that a curious person of modest technical aptitude could find a secret command hidden in the game using readily available tools. I am such a person, using a program as it would have been downloaded in 2008.

As an aside: there are ways to get a less busy output file, but the technical challenges are greater, especially for everyday users. For the sake of the more proficient members of the audience: one could extract the z-code from the zblorb (using Andrew Plotkin’s “blorbtool.py” script), then send text output to a file via ztools (“Ztools (The Infocom Toolkit)“) (“Blorb: An IF Resource Collection Format Standard“). This process is only mentioned for completeness’s sake, as using REFORM is more than adequate for our purposes.

well, now you know.

This is it: the fruit of our readerly exertions. We have parsed “Anatomy of a Failure” and identified the villainous perpetrator of this hoax, one “Victor Gijsbers.” We have waded through old forum posts to break open the compiled program just as one might have in 2010, thereby discovering its secret command. What horrors await us there?

["transcript (hnm)"]

>join the ss
Indeed, young soldier! Congratulations with finding the real game--just make sure those worthless liberal parents of you [SIC] don't see it. Now we can get some serious business done. Grab your Gewehr 41, Drew, and kill the enemies of the Reich!

>i
You are carrying:
  a Gewehr 41

>x 41
This is one fine semi-automatic rifle, fully loaded and ready to be used. (Just type "shoot X" if you want to shoot someone, with X the name of that person!)

>x me
Well, Drew, it's just you. You are wearing a smart military uniform.

["transcript (hnm)"]

The continued use of the player’s name has a rather unpleasant effect. Has a player who has come this far an enemy of “Gijsbers,” or are they his co-conspirator? Why have I worked so hard to enter a hidden nazi mode, and how far am I willing to go in seeing things through?

This geography, which is once again Muranow, has identical room descriptions. The sole apparent difference is that all of the rabbits have been replaced with persons targeted by the Nazis for extermination. I won’t detail them all; they are banal and disturbingly slight. I hope it isn’t just “Americans” who are bothered by this sort of thing.

[“transcript (hnm)”]

A communist is shouting Marxist slogans.

>x communist
SHOOT, brave soldier, SHOOT! The name Drew will be revered by countless generations if you rid our country of these inhuman pests!

["transcript (hnm)"]

It would seem there is a young girl hiding behind a bookshelf, after all. After wandering this empty desert of implementation, one without descriptive vividness or simulated nouns, it appears that the only way to move things forward is to do what the game suggests: murder someone.

I am reminded of a game released a few years ago that required the use of a “rape” command before the true “ending” could be reached. Both that and our current case ask an interesting philosophical question: is there a relationship between agency and responsibility? That is, in the world of this game, I enjoy freedoms that real life does not afford me. What will I do with them, and how far am I willing to go to “win?” In the case of this hidden Nazi mode, players committed to reaching the ending must decide to commit murder in the first place and decide which victimized person to kill as a consequence.

Dear friends, I have made a commitment to see this through, and we are gathered here to kick the ashes of my experience. I have learned that the output is the same in every case. One’s choice of victim might matter to the dead, but it does not matter in terms of output. This is–let’s be honest–a low effort production that depends on audience surprise and shock instead of its own content for effect. Shoot the girl behind the bookcase or shoot the old man: the output is the same. What was anticipated as an abjection, as primal and inexorable, has proven to be merely and blandly specific after all.

This is a notable failure of the text: the unknown was far more ominous than this reality.

The more significant effect of our action is that we players have chosen to stay rather than go, to stick things out. We have, in our vicarious digital lives, chosen atrocity. What is our reward?

["transcript (hnm)"]

Ok, let's stop right there. After all, this is not supposed to be a real nazi game.
 
You have read the essay, I assume? So, yes, I decided that the time was not ripe to use a game like this to communicate about the dangers of closed source software. A forteriori, then, the time is not ripe to use a game like this to warn against the dangers of not compiling your own open source software. But I couldn't resist the temptation! I could not resist the temptation to make this point...
 
...and, most of all, I could not resist the temptation to provide you with what I hope is one of the most original puzzles in the history of IF. Realising that this mode exists, hacking the z-code file, finding the command needed to enter this mode -- surely no puzzle like that has been created before? I hope you enjoyed it. Don't forget to nominate me for a XYZZY. ;)
 
And all in all, hopefully this message is so esoteric and so well hidden that none but the initiated will read it.
 
 
 
    *** The world is a complicated place. ***
 
 
 
Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, QUIT or UNDO the last command?

["transcript (hnm)"]

This preemptive conclusion must be the one promised by “Anatomy of a Failure” (3). “Gijsbers” is wrong to the last, though, because the subjective experience of deciding to murder marginalized peoples is, in its own way, a thing to live down. Perhaps it is worse to decide than it is to hear the outcome of our decisions, since we alone are responsible for the former. Since our own understandings of history will play a role in our experiences, we realize that the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto will meet terrible fates. Even the buildings will be destroyed. Isn’t it enough to put us there, gun in hand, prodded by countless winks and nudges allegedly inspired by concerns regarding public source code?

It is not initially clear whether it is “Victor Gijsbers” or Victor Gijsbers who speaks of temptation. Perhaps this indeterminate “Gijsbers’s”/Gijsbers’s use of “A forteriori” is an attempt to ground this endeavor in philosophical seriousness. It is too late for that, I believe, given the disingenuous tone of “Anatomy of a Failure” and the absence of subtle reference in Fluffy Bunny Friends.

However, at long last, our liminal author acknowledges what might be interesting about this work: its formal experimentation, its questions regarding authorial credibility, and its novel metagame pitting various paratexts against one another. Perhaps a different approach would have led to productive craft conversations regarding such matters, though I suppose that can never be known. Critical reception of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode did not go as far as it might have. Perhaps the thought experiment laid out in “Anatomy of a Failure” was too distracting–or too slight–to motivate players to engage with the metagame. As a result, critics missed out on the ethical and interpretive questions raised by it.

This is what one might expect, I suppose, when a wolf cries boy.

is credulity a game mechanic?

My goal in discussing reviews of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode is not to call attention to specific authors or openly argue with their interpretations. In fact, I don’t intend to quote any specific review. Instead, I will point out what I am labeling audience credulity regarding the claims of “Victor Gijsbers” regarding closed software, cut content, and, of course, his own credibility. Believing “Gijsbers,” whom we have caught lying, seems fundamental to many critical experiences of HNM. In researching this review, I was encouraged to ask if it mattered whether there was a Hidden Nazi Mode or not. My answer was and still is yes, I do usually consider the contents of the games I write about, especially if the game repeatedly insists that I do so. I can’t take the question of “closed” software seriously, as it really seems a reinvigoration of “hidden satanic messages” in 1980s heavy metal records. And, as HNM ably proves, there is more than enough implicative Nazism in Fluffy Bunny Friends to keep one’s “liberal parents” busy.

Why believe “Gijsbers?” He is riding the coattails of well-regarded critic and author Victor Gijsbers, for one thing. In the smaller and more focused IF community of 2010, most potential players would have had well-formed ideas of who he was and would have likely considered “Victor Gijsbers” a trustworthy person. Victor Gijsbers is a philosophy professor, and any proffered thought experiment would likely be perceived as more well-wrought by virtue of his credentials. The entire argument of “Anatomy of a Failure” hangs not upon logos or pathos but ethos. How would it have fared without “Victor Gijsbers?” My position is that, on its face, the premise is infeasible, as is the shaggy dog story used to frame it.

If I tested your patience at the outset of this endeavor, please know that your efforts were not all in vain! We have returned to our starting point, as reception of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode is a compelling argument for the ways in which authorial explication robs a work of interpretive play and saps players of their freedoms. Reviews of HNM have mostly (not entirely) focused on evaluating the success of the thin argument put forth by “Anatomy of a Failure,” and critics have found that argument wanting. In other words, interpretation of HNM been reconfigured as evaluation as a result of authorial imposition. Someone must become the professor in our newly transformed author-reader relationship! Perhaps the author is teaching us a very important lesson, and the game is an exam. Perhaps, on the other hand, the work is like a nut driver set sold on Amazon. How many stars does it merit? That all depends on how well it turns bolts.

While The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode was released in September 2010, the first online mentions of the secret mode–so far as I could discover–occurred in 2015. On April 20, IFWiki user Dmcc made their sole contribution to the wiki, adding information regarding the hidden mode to the page (“The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode: Revision History“). Dmcc’s account is apparently inactive, and it seems to only have been used for this specific edit (“User contributions for Dmcc“). Later, in October, IFDB user Wafflebaby commented on Emily Short’s review of HNM from 2010: “There is a hidden Nazi mode enabled by typing ‘join the SS’ (“Review“). Wafflebaby has only rated two games on IFDB: My Angel by John Ingold and HNM. Their last login, as of this writing, was May 9, 2021 (“Wafflebaby“).

David Wellbourn added his walkthrough to the IFDB page for HNM in 2019. It details the required command for the secret mode, as well as providing a listing of characters, credits, items, and endings for both modes. This is the most exhaustive treatment of the game’s contents, mechanically speaking, that I can find (“Key & Compass presents: The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode“).

It is noteworthy that a community consisting of so many technically capable persons—far more so than I—took so long to uncover this barely-hidden secret, or, if they did, they decided not to discuss it publicly. Even after the secret was discovered, critics did not shoulder the burden of discussing it. This is a historically curious community that enjoys solving puzzles and figuring things out. The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, presumably via its paratext, managed to convince people not to do what many of them often do in their free time for the sheer fun of it.

a note on care and the absence thereof

Despite my interest in The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, it would be irresponsible of me to ignore what seems cavalier treatment of fascism, especially as many countries are witnessing its resurgence. Speaking as an American, I feel we have been careless and irresponsible regarding fascism. We have not been vigilant. Fascism in media has been normalized by flanderized or humorous treatments over the years. It has been the subject of edgy jokes of the sort we find here. This is a work that gamifies shooting a girl meant to remind us of Anne Frank. Hidden Nazi Mode could have just as easily been Hidden Flatulence Mode, for instance, or Hidden Dog Poop on Shoe mode, or ever Hidden Loose Pants Falling Down Unexpectedly Mode. Many things might embarrass an unwitting Professor. While the metagame of forcing the player to decide whether to “win” by killing Jewish people might have held a mirror to our darker natures, the implementation is too slight for serious questions. In fact, the “Nazi sim” is only there as a bit about public source code, which might indicate misplaced priorities.

This work tries to punch above its weight. I know it might be tempting to handwave the problems away. “Sure, it is crass, but that is the whole point!” a critic might say. I challenge those critics to hunker down and confront this text in a serious manner. We have been invited to think about Hidden Nazi Mode. It is a thought experiment. What do we think about this specific treatment? Does situating it in an argument about source code make sense?

It is surprising that critics have been as accepting of the content as they have been of “Gijsbers’s” deception. Perhaps more so. It may be that people simply did not want to know the truth, let alone talk about it.

In any case, I find the subject matter more than troubling. It is normalizing in its way. Despite my interest in this work, I maintain that we critics ought to wrestle with its treatment of fascism with as-yet-to-be-seen seriousness. What I have said here is not enough, as the question merits an essay of its very own.

**a player’s review of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode.**

The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode confesses its failures in its companion essay “Anatomy of a Failure,” and, even though we know its confessor to be dishonest, he has chosen the right noun. This work has failed on its own, stated terms. That is, its thought experiment regarding the dangers of using compiled programs in the absence of published source code is incredible, and there is general consensus on this point (“All Written Member Reviews“). My personal experience of essay and Fluffy Bunny Friends is that the antagonist protests too much: obviously there is a hidden mode, and obviously we are hoped to find it.

However, the phenomenon of the author inserting themselves into a work had a distorting effect on receptions of it, as many responders have replied to the programmatic equivalent of an exploding cigar earnestly, meditating on the integrities of tool chains and whatnot. In other words: “Gijsbers” has directed players to the least interesting aspect of the work, and something that could have led to some rather interesting conversations regarding craft, agency, and metafiction seldom if ever reached such interpretive heights.

The chief problem with The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode is that it doesn’t engage with any of these bracing concepts in a serious way. It overplays its hand in terms of its “cultural hints” and fails to do the type of authorial or coding labor required to hold aloft a game whose chief prize is atrocity. Within its context, its only source of seriousness (public source code) comes across as a trivial, crank obsession. In spite of its carelessness, though, HNM is at least something to discuss. Its critical history tells a cautionary tale regarding the interpretive play an author must leave for readers. Moreover, HNM challenges writers to consider a text holistically as a thing situated rhetorically among considerations of author, audience, conditions of reception, and occasion (“Elements of Rhetorical Situations“). As this essay has hopefully indicated, these factors can have a profound effect on what readers experience as the meaning of a work.

The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode is not entertaining, and its treatment of human rights atrocities has–undeservedly–escaped critical attention. Nevertheless, there is an important-yet-overlooked moral choice at its center that broadly applies to popular games like Grand Theft Auto V. What is a player willing to do to win? Do player and author share responsibility for what follows? What is the source of abjection? Player or text?

Perhaps that is a case of a wolf crying wolf.

sources.

[“apologies”]

This format is inspired by MLA, but WordPress does not fully support it. I regret any formatting inconsistencies.
Despite my obvious gestures to academic discourse, I made a conscious decision to rely on Wikipedia rather than scholarly journals and books to both maximize accessibility and minimize potential reader costs.

[“apologies”]

Various, “Entry for The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode.” The Interactive Fiction Database, ifdb.org/viewgame?id=7a3yn4x0aor0jxfd. Accessed 18 September 2024.

Victor Gijsbers, “Anatomy of a Failure,” Complete Package, 2010. Retrieved from www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/FormerlyHiddenNaziMode.zip on 30 November 2023.

Various, “United States v. One Book Called Ulysses.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Book_Called_Ulysses. Accessed 18 September 2024.

Various, “Telephone Game.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game. Accessed 18 September 2024.

Cook, Drew, “Initial Groundwork for a Reading of A Mind Forever Voyaging.” Gold Machine, golmac.org/initial-groundwork-for-a-reading-of-a-mind-forever-voyaging. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Various, “Abjection.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjection. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Various, “Schutzstaffel.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzstaffel. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Reilly, Jim, “The Best-Selling Games of 2010.” IGN, www.ign.com/articles/2011/01/14/the-best-selling-games-of-2010. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Various, “Video Game Controversies.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_controversies. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Gijsbers, Victor. “The Game Formerly Known as Hidd.zblorb.” Complete Package, 2010. Retrieved from www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/FormerlyHiddenNaziMode.zip on 30 November 2023.

Cook, Drew and Gijsbers, Victor. “Transcript.” Generated by “The Game Formerly Known as Hidd.zblorb.” Complete Package, 2010. https://bit.ly/hnm_transcript. Recorded 18 September 2024.

Various. “Ironic Process Theory.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironic_process_theory. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Various, “Reverse Engineering the Source Code From Gblorb.” Interactive Fiction Community Forum,
https://intfiction.org/t/reverse-engineering-the-source-code-from-gblorb/6558. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Various, “Decompiling With Reform?” Interactive Community Forum, intfiction.org/t/decompiling-with-reform/7613. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Rudiak-Gould, Ben. “Interactive Fiction Decompilers [archival copy dated 23 July 2008].” Original address www.darkweb.com/~benrg/if-decompilers/. Retrieved from web.archive.org/web/20080723112640/http://www.darkweb.com/~benrg/if-decompilers/ 18 September 2024.

Gijsbers, Victor. “hnm.txt.” Extracted from “The Game Formerly Known as Hidd.zblorb.” Complete Package, 2010. bit.ly/hnm_reform. Decompiled 18 September 2024.

Unattributed. “Ztools (The Infocom Toolkit).” Inform, inform-fiction.org/zmachine/ztools.html. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Plotkin, Andrew. “Blorb: An IF Resource Collection Format Standard.” Zarfhome, eblong.com/zarf/blorb. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Gijsbers, Victor. “hnm (nazi mode).txt.” Extracted from “The Game Formerly Known as Hidd.zblorb.” Complete Package, 2010. https://bit.ly/hnm_secret. Recorded 18 September 2024.

Programmatically generated. “The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode: Revision history.” IF Wiki, https://www.ifwiki.org/index.php?title=The_Game_Formerly_Known_as_Hidden_Nazi_Mode&action=history. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Programmatically generated. “User contributions for Dmcc.” IF Wiki, www.ifwiki.org/Special:Contributions/Dmcc. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Wafflebaby. Comment on “Review.” IF Wiki, https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=7a3yn4x0aor0jxfd&review=11618#comments. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Programmatically generated. “Wafflebaby.” Interactive Fiction Database, https://ifdb.org/showuser?id=e895q2vfpriktsa8. Retrieved 18 2024.

Welbourn, David. “Key & Compass presents: The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode.” Key & Compass, http://plover.net/~davidw/index.html. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Programmatically generated. “All Member Reviews.” Interactive Fiction Database, https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=7a3yn4x0aor0jxfd&reviews. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Purdue Online Writing Lab. “Elements of Rhetorical Situtations.” Purdue Online Writing Lab, owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/rhetorical_situation/elements_of_rhetorical_situations.html. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Thanks to Mike Russo, Tabitha, Kit Reimer, and JazzTap for offering their feedback.

The post The Wolf that Cried Boy: The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode appeared first on Gold Machine.

Published 17:00 • 5 days ago

Wade's Important Astrolab

IFComp 2025 review: valley of glass by Devan Wardrop-Saxton

valley of glass, a lyrical-leaning and extremely short parser game by Devan Wardrop-Saxton, was the first IF I chose to play from the IFComp 2025 crop because I liked the blurb. However, when I say it is extremely short, I mean that it seems incomplete, a stub of an experience. The author may view it as complete – I don't know – but I expect that most players will not experience it that way. My rev

The blurb for valley of glass starts like this:

Here you are again, walking the North Road in a rare moment alone before another day of your seven years promised to the village blacksmith.

This called to my mind the English folk song The Blacksmith, the first track on both of Steeleye Span's first two studio albums, which I like very much, and I expected to find a broadly similar vibe here.

I assumed the PC was a woman, both because of the song and because of the line in the blurb "promised to the village blacksmith" which I read as being about marriage. When first examining my inventory, I found I was wearing "A heavy woolen coat made for a man twice your size." Then I wasn't sure. Perhaps the seven years I promised were of hard blacksmithing toil? If I was a woman, the coat description sentence was ambiguously written, though admittedly the blurb pointed out it was a borrowed coat; but that's the blurb. That info should be in the game if confusion is to be avoided.

My speculations continued. The blurb continued, "seven years until you may reunite with your love, the Black Bull of Norroway." Now I was thinking woman again, because the Black Bull of Norroway sounded like the kind of entity a woman betrothed to a blacksmith might instead pine for. What cinched the deal for womanhood were my boots: "Plain leather-soled boots that first belonged to your eldest sister, then your second-eldest sister, and now you." To play devil's advocate and suggest the boots might have been passed from sister to brother felt like a stretch atop all the other bits of info.

I thus find myself walking on the road in the game's first location. It's clear the author is unaware of Inform typicalities. X ME replies "as good-looking as ever" and no exits are listed. Testing the directions, I discover that a geographical and/or memory-based blockage exists in three of the four main directions, and that they imply puzzles I expect to solve. e.g.

But until you’ve won your iron shoes from the blacksmith, you’ll never make it past the first few switchbacks.

The southern location was a village. Here, no compass directions worked, so I tried IN. That provoked the end of the game. I had to run the ending a number of times before I got the feeling that yes, it can be considered a legitimate ending, as vague as it is about all things other than that a workday is beginning.

I couldn't locate a blacksmith, forge, shoes, or anyone or anything else, except some jewelled fruits in my inventory, polishable with the cloth I had. My instinct, when stuck in certain kinds of parser game, learned back in the day from Infocom's Wishbringer, is to try squeezing or breaking things I'm holding. BREAK worked here, reducing my jewelled fruits to detritus, but also indicating that this was probably a mistake.

Those are the far extents of the game that I've found. They comprise the start of a character who has memories, possessions that add to that character (the clothes), others that are unexplained (the fruit), and a few locations recalling memories. The lyrical bent of these things is something, but there's not a game here and not enough resolution of what is to convey much else.

Given that I harped on the blurb, I should also point out that valley of glass's synopsis did describe it as "a reimagined moment alone from the folktale Black Bull of Norroway." Moments aren't long, unless you're in Inception. I personally anticipated a certain vibe here because of my acquaintance with Steeleye Span's take on a folk tale, but I expect most other IFCompers won't have that. Perhaps my review describes my process of acclimatising myself to the scale of valley of glass, which I had misapprehended. It never promised me puzzles or greater length, though it presented four geographical nodes that I could have sworn were going to lead to puzzles. I still don't think there's enough detail here to convey the import of the promised moment.

Published 06:02 • 6 days ago | Updated Tuesday, 02. September 2025 07:40 • 6 days ago

Monday, 01. September 2025

Renga in Blue

Ring Quest: All Shall Love Me and Despair

(Continued from my previous posts.) I’m gone through essentially the whole map now, with two major chunks and two minor chunks remaining I can’t reach. The red highlights are areas I explored, although I decided not to go through the tedium of filling in every single square to the southwest, as they’re all “wandering aimlessly” […]

(Continued from my previous posts.)

I’m gone through essentially the whole map now, with two major chunks and two minor chunks remaining I can’t reach.

The red highlights are areas I explored, although I decided not to go through the tedium of filling in every single square to the southwest, as they’re all “wandering aimlessly” rooms. The rooms to the right are roughly the same (although they do connect with the Mirkwood maze). The two columns to the southeast are actually “wraparound” rooms; you’re going east and the game switches from saying you’re wandering to the southeast to saying you’re wandering to the southwest.

You’re wandering aimlessly through south-eastern Middle-Earth.
E

You’re wandering aimlessly through south-western Middle-Earth.

The missing parts are circled. For the missing minor chunks, one of them is a portion near the map of Mirkwood that the maze doesn’t quite get to, and might simply be all mountains. The second, more suspicious one, is a section at Moria which has no rooms:

The empty spaces are all adjacent to Thrain’s tomb, and since only one dwarf-ring has been located (out of seven) this suggests the rings might be in the area somehow

You’re standing in a dimly lit chamber.
In the center you see a stone tomb.

On top of it lies an old, dusty book.

READ BOOK
Among many sad tales is the story of Thrain, once Lord of Moria.
After hiding the seven Dwarf-rings, he departed to seek vengeance
upon the Dark Lord.
Nothing was heard of him ever since.

OPEN LID
You’ll have to be more specific.

OPEN TOMB
In it you discover the skeleton of a noble Dwarf.

Of the major gaps, one is past Saruman’s army. I have not been able to summon Treebeard’s army by any means to assist, as was promised.

The last major gap is at Mount Doom itself; I have gotten past Shelob (as I’ll show off shortly) but I am only one step in further; I haven’t gotten around to experimenting yet.

My major progress (based on a hint from Rob) was based on going absolutely gonzo with using book references to try to solve puzzles. The instructions say the “Elven-rings are kept by the elven-lords” and since they know of your question you can ask for them. That doesn’t mean they’ll visibly display in a location or anything, you just have to assume they’re there (based on it being logical based on the books).

You’re standing at the foot of a slender tower.

W
You’re in the Grey Havens.

ASK CIRDAN FOR RING
Cirdan knows of your quest and gives you Narya, the Ring of Fire.

Now we’re getting deep into the trivia. (And also the wildly specific phrasing; nothing else works except you can put LORD CIRDAN if you like.) Over at Rivendell, ASK ELROND FOR RING works equally well…

Elrond knows of your quest and gives you Vilya, the Ring of Air.

…and just north of where Galadriel’s Mirror gave a vision, Galadriel herself awaits (again you have to make the leap to assume that she’s there!)

ASK LADY GALADRIEL FOR RING
Galadriel knows of your quest and gives you Nenya, the Ring of Water.

That’s not all! Now that we’ve unlocked Go-Wild-With-Book-References mode, there was something else also that Galadriel gave over:

ASK LADY GALADRIEL FOR PHIAL
She might be so kind if you gave her something first.

GIVE JEWEL TO LADY GALADRIEL
Galadriel thanks you kindly .
In return she gives you a small crystal phial that radiates a bright light.

Oho! So that resolves the purpose of the jewel sitting on the road; as El Explorador de RPG points out in the comments, that means the jewel is likely the Elfstone, also known as the Stone of Eärendil, being used in a slightly different context here.

From “The Gift of Galadriel” (1991) by Greg Hildebrandt

I took the Phial all the way through Moria with no effect, but it certainly does work on Shelob.

You’ve reached the haunted city of Minas Morgul.

E
You’re groping through a dark tunnel.

Suddenly you hear a rustling sound behind you!

LIGHT PHIAL
The Lady’s glass sends forth a bright light.

KILL
The dazzling light makes the monstrous creature helpless.
Your blade inflicts a mortal wound.

Notice how this is so reliant on book-references it does not even bother to describe who Shelob is!

Shelob on a cover. From the UK HarperCollins version, 2020.

Immediately after, the mail stolen from Smaug comes into play:

SE
You’ve reached the tower of Cirith Ungol.
You are surprised by a patroling band of Orcs and taken prisoner.

However, when they discover your mithril coat, they start to quarrel over it.
In the fight that follows all Orcs get killed!

Trying to leave, the game says “You’re stopped by what seems to be an invisible wall.” Then the game says “Three-headed, vulture-faced statues seem to be staring at you” followed by the player being overtaken by orcs a turn later. I’m not remembering exactly what happens here in the book (I remember Sam was involved; we are all the characters simultaneously) but I’m guessing it’s still another match to the text somehow?

Just to recap, we are missing:

a.) some method of getting the Ent army to help with Saruman; the fact getting captured isn’t an immediate game over is suspicious, but I have not gotten anything to happen

b.) all the Dwarf-rings except one, which may or may not be connected to the empty space on the map attached to Moria

c.) and some method of getting by the orcs I just mentioned.

Any and all speculation are welcome, keeping in mind the game is reliant enough on book-knowledge to require you remember who Lord Cirdan is.

Oh, and in case anyone asks:

GIVE RING TO LADY GALADRIEL
Don’t be ridiculous!

Published 23:08 • 6 days ago

IFComp News

Welcome to the 31st Annual IFComp!

Welcome to the 31st Annual IFComp!The 2025 Interactive Fiction Competition has officially begun!For the next six weeks, players and judges around the world will be diving into this year’s crop of brand-new interactive fiction. We’re delighted to share that 85 entries(!!) have been submitted this year. We’re excited to see so many authors tossing their hat into the ring.As always, you don’t ne

Welcome to the 31st Annual IFComp!

The 2025 Interactive Fiction Competition has officially begun!

For the next six weeks, players and judges around the world will be diving into this year’s crop of brand-new interactive fiction. We’re delighted to share that 85 entries(!!) have been submitted this year. We’re excited to see so many authors tossing their hat into the ring.

As always, you don’t need to play every entry to be a judge. You only need to play and rate at least five entries to submit a ballot. Whether you’re a seasoned IFComp veteran or joining us for the very first time, we welcome you and hope you’ll find plenty to discover and enjoy!

What’s New for 2025
You can now choose whether or not to see content warnings. Authors still provide them, and they’ll be shown by default, but if you’d prefer not to see them (to avoid spoilers or for any other reason), you’ll find a setting at the top of the ballot that lets you hide them.

The Colossal Fund
We’re excited to share that this year’s Colossal Fund is already halfway to its goal! Thanks to the generosity of donors, we’re well on our way to ensuring a strong pool of prizes. If you’d like to learn more about the Fund and how to contribute cash (or other prizes), visit https://ifcomp.org/about/prizes

Our Awards Ceremony
As in years past, we will celebrate the conclusion of this year’s competition with a virtual awards ceremony, where we announce the results and recognize the authors. The awards ceremony will be held on Twitch at 4:00 PM Eastern Oct 18. To confirm what time the awards stream will be for you in your time zone, check here.

On the Topic of the UK’s Online Safety Act
This year brings change for many authors and all of our UK judges: the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act (OSA), which restricts access to a wide range of content that could be harmful to children. We spent considerable time investigating whether a third-party provider could offer age verification for our UK users without us needing to retain sensitive information, but we were not able to implement a workable solution before launch. We are still pursuing that possibility, but it may not be in place until next year’s competition.

Until earlier this week, we thought we’d need to geoblock all entries for UK users. That was something we very much wanted to avoid. Fortunately, we were able to put in place a more limited, case-by-case approach. With 85 entries, over two dozen of which arrived after we learned of this option, it was not possible to thoroughly play every entry beforehand. Instead, we based initial geoblock decisions on a mix of author-provided content warnings and notes from our Curation Team.

Ofcom has published guidance to help organizations navigate the OSA, including exceptions to the law. At the recommendation of our attorney, we are utilizing their guidance to inform our decisions as we review entries. All authors whose entries were selected for geoblocking in the UK were notified and invited to discuss their entry with us if they felt their work was acceptable for all ages under the OSA. After reviewing additional text from entries, and weighing that text against exceptions provided by the OSA, we lifted geoblocks for several authors.

We do not love restricting content and we understand that many in the community are frustrated, but we are obligated to comply with the law for UK users. For transparency: as of the time of this post, 24 of 85 entries are geoblocked in the UK. It is possible that this number may shift slightly in the coming days as more authors reach out to us.

In response to a question we’ve already received, we do not intend to make a new Author Rule to address the OSA. It is a law external to the IFComp, and it does not affect all users. As case law develops, and as the broader internet learns to navigate the OSA, authors will likely get a clearer sense of what may or may not be restricted. We may also be able to implement age verification for users who wish to take advantage of it. Regardless, our preference remains the same: authors should write whatever they want to write to tell the stories that they wish to tell for the audiences they wish to reach.

Generative AI in IFComp
Another evolving area is the use of generative artificial intelligence (GAI). The community remains divided on its role in interactive fiction, and the technology itself continues to change rapidly. Our stance for the past two years has been to require transparency but to otherwise allow GAI. On the entry form, authors are asked to declare most uses of GAI in their work. After last year’s competition, we expected to see a flood of feedback about AI in the post-comp survey. In reality, only about 10 percent of respondents mentioned it. Based on that, we kept the same policy for 2025.

We plan to use this year’s post-competition survey to float some ideas about new approaches on GAI in the competition, including possible rule changes, and invite your input. The survey will also include space for you to share rule ideas of your own. We recognize that it is unlikely that we’ll land in a place that makes everyone happy, but we’ll endeavor to do our best to find common ground. We intend to finalize decisions for 2026 by the end of this calendar year, so that authors have plenty of time to plan.

Anything we haven’t covered? Still got questions? Email us at [email protected]

Thank you in advance for judging!
– Jacqueline Ashwell,
September 2025

Published 15:02 • 6 days ago

Renga in Blue

Ring Quest: Last Battle of the Oathbreakers

(Continued from my previous posts.) While I’ve made a fair amount of progress I’ve also hit two points that make me wonder if the game is too buggy to complete. Updates to the map are shown in red: This doesn’t look like much compared to the overall map, but keep in mind the vast majority […]

(Continued from my previous posts.)

While I’ve made a fair amount of progress I’ve also hit two points that make me wonder if the game is too buggy to complete. Updates to the map are shown in red:

This doesn’t look like much compared to the overall map, but keep in mind the vast majority of the rooms are “filler” rooms like “you’re following a north-south trail” or “You’re wandering aimlessly through north-western Middle-Earth.” The southeast corner (starting to encroach onto Mordor territory) is denser than elsewhere.

Let’s start with Gollum and the riddle game. He gives the same riddles as in The Hobbit, but then kills the protagonist if a.) they don’t have the One Ring yet or b.) they try to get away. KILL GOLLUM was doable but this left me stuck in Moria. I was mostly getting thrown awry by the lack of a WEAR verb; in the spots where it is useful (and only in those spots) USE RING will work.

USE RING
You’re now wearing of One Ring of Power.

Gollum curses as he runs right past you.
Unknowingly he leads you to the eastern exit of the mines of Moria.

Towards the east you discover light, as in daylight!

Crouched in front of the exit sits Gollum, wting…

KILL GOLLUM
Gollum’s now dead.

(Bots incidentally said that any typos in the original have been left in the current version, so “wting” is authentic early 80s typing.)

I’d like to say this is the last of me dealing with Gollum, but there’s a part that made me think perhaps I was still doing this wrong. But for now, it’s possible to trek out to the Balrog, and (after some major verb-hunting) I came across HIT BRIDGE as the solution.

E
The Ring slips from your finger.

You’re standing on the bridge of Khazad-dum, facing the mountains.
A huge black shadow with a heart of fire materializes in front of you!

HIT BRIDGE
There’s a blinding flash of light.
A deep pit opens up in front of you.

With a stonesplitting cry the Balrog vanishes in the abyss.

E
You’re passing through the Dimril Dale.

It’d be nice if the ring summons ringwraiths so I could mop them up with the sword, but alas, it behaves more like the ring from The Hobbit. Keeping in mind what was seen at the Mirror of Galadriel, I next went over to Mirkwood and Dol Guldur.

While at the entrance, you can USE RING to sneak inside, and find a dead dwarf in the dungeon.

USE RING
You’re now wearing of One Ring of Power.

The guards do not see you.

ENTER
You find your way through a labyrinth of chambers and corridors.
Finally you reach the Tower’s deepest dungeon.
On the floor you see the remnants of what once was a noble Dwarf.

Among the dust and bones shimmers a golden ring.

GET RING
It’s yours now.

LEAVE
The guards do not see you.

One Dwarf-ring down, six to go. The fact at least one isn’t hidden in Moria makes me think they might be more spread out than I expected. Other than that ring, my inventory from this point has “a bow and 14 arrows”, “4 Men-rings”, “the One Ring of Power”, “the green jewel you found on the road”, “a tiny key”, “the mithril-coat from under the Mountain”, and “the sword from the Barrow-downs”. (The where-you-found feature is actually quite nice and I can’t think of other adventure games offhand that do that!)

With the Balrog taken care of it was time to explore more extensively past where I had met Treebeard. I incidentally discovered at the boat which has a long rope that you can just ignore the boat-ride aspect and take the rope (more on that later).

South of the Ent area is a corpse with a red arrow.

At your feet lies the beheaded corpse of a warrior.

The mutilated hand is still holding a red arrow.

Just southwest of the red arrow is the fortress of Rohan.

You’ve reached Dunharrow, fortress of Rohan.

The red arrow you carry is taken from you.
It’s the sign that Minas Tirith is in great danger!
The host of Rohan is prepared to follow you to the east.

(You actually want to wait on grabbing the red arrow and pass through the first time here, but we’ll come back to that.) This is another “you’ve gained a follower” type message although in this case you actually see the riders coming behind you as you go east.

You’re travelling through Anorien, north of the White Mountains.

The Rohirrim are riding with you.

E
You’ve reached Druadan forest.

S
You’re passing through the Druadan forest.

It’s inhabitants, the wild Woose, lead the host over secret paths
to Minas Tirith.

You’re on the field of Cormallen.

Here a great battle is fought.

The Riders of Rohan charge the enemy from the north.
For a moment the powers are balanced.

Then a black fleet appears on the Anduin. The Corsairs of Umbar are coming!
The Western forces are outnumbered many times.
Minas Tirith is destroyed.
Only you manage to escape the onslaught.

If you head southwest from here, you can have an unfortunate encounter with the Corsairs.

You’re at the Mouth of the Anduin.

The Black Fleet of the Corsairs has gathered here.

Fierce men suddenly jump from their hidingplace and grab you!

While the riders aren’t able to go down and take care of the Black Fleet, there is another group that can: the Oathbreakers. Now we get back to where I said it’s better to skip bringing the arrow to the fort the first time through; that’s because you can pass into a cave and find the ghosts of the Mountain-men who broke an oath to their king and were cursed. So now we’re Bilbo, Frodo, and Aragorn all at the same time!

You’re standing in front of a cave.

ENTER CAVE
After a seemingly endless journey through the whispering dark
you are out in the open again.

You’ve reached the Black Stone of Erech.

ASK HELP
From who?

SUMMON GHOSTS
A distant voice answers you:
We shall follow you until our oath is fulfilled.

As far as I can tell, the exact command SUMMON GHOSTS is the only way to make this work (possibly the most extreme moment of book knowledge needed yet — at least Tom Bombadil gives his name if you hit the scenes in the right order and think to use CALL HELP).

Movie version of the Oathbreakers.

Now it is safe to pass by the Corsairs…

You’re at the Mouth of the Anduin.

The Black Fleet of the Corsairs has gathered here.

The men flee in panic with death at their heels!
Having fulfilled their oath, the Dead vanish.

…but only once, because if you leave and come back (or even just use the LOOK command) there are people left over that grab you.

Fierce men suddenly jump from their hidingplace and grab you!

That would normally be fine (as you don’t need to hang around) but there’s no effect on the big battle with the Riders either.

Then a black fleet appears on the Anduin. The Corsairs of Umbar are coming!

This honestly feels like an outright bug? The death-message does change so maybe you need a second wave to mop up the Corsairs, but this entire section is confusing; and maybe the result of everyone dying was intended, and there’s no better result? That means there’s no point in summoning the Oathbreakers at all, then.

Official WETA figurine of Minas Morgal.

Once past the battle, you can visit the Ruins of Osgiliath and beyond; one of the ringwraiths is down at Minas Morgal…

You’ve reached the haunted city of Minas Morgul.

A tall black ringwraith materializes in front of you!

KILL
With a ghastly cry the ringwraith falls.
Among the now shapeless garments you discover a golden ring.

…and nearby is “Sheloop”. I was truly confused for a while by the spelling of Shelob.

You’re groping through a dark tunnel.

Suddenly you hear a rustling sound behind you!

KILL
In the dark there’s no escape from Sheloop.

To the north is the Black Gate; my attempts at sneaking in were rebuffed by Orcs.

You’re facing a large rampart of stone.
In it there’s a single gate of iron, and upon it’s battlement
sentinels pace unceasingly .
None can pass the Teeth of Mordor and not feel their bite,
unless they are summoned by Sauron, or know the secret passwords
that will open the Morannon, the black gate of his land.

You can head up north farther to swampland, and here is where I think perhaps I dealt with Gollum incorrectly.

You’re wandering through the Dead Marshes.

W
You’re following an east-west trail.

W
You’re lost in the gloomy hills of Emyn Muil.

The only creature that might have helped you out of here is dead.

You die from hunger and thirst.

Remembering that I could get the rope from the boat early, I rejiggered my sequence so that rather than killing Gollum at the exit I could TIE GOLLUM instead. It does get understood as a command earlier (it says he “dexterously” avoids you) but unfortunately it fails to work at all at the exit: the game says “He’s not here.” Given that KILL GOLLUM does work this strikes me as an outright bug, and makes me concerned this may have been the right action, just the game is broken.

There’s still a lot of elements to whack at so I can’t say I’m giving up yet; if nothing else I can go back and try to figure out how to communicate with those elves. Regarding the Palantir from last time, no amount of touching or gazing or rubbing has had any effect at all; I also haven’t been able to use the One Ring to avoid the patrols, nor call eagles or Ents after getting captured. However, this game does sometimes requires super-specific phrasing (see: SUMMON GHOSTS) so I can’t say anything is completely ruled out yet.

Published 02:26 • 7 days ago

Sunday, 31. August 2025

Renga in Blue

Ring Quest: A Rage of Loss and Suspicion Was in His Heart

(Continued from my previous posts.) I have the One Ring to rule them all, that means the rest of this ought to be easy, right? My count otherwise is unchanged: 4 out of 9 Man-Rings, 0 out of 3 Elf-Rings, and 0 out of 7 Dwarf Rings. The game gives some general help about the […]

(Continued from my previous posts.)

I have the One Ring to rule them all, that means the rest of this ought to be easy, right? My count otherwise is unchanged: 4 out of 9 Man-Rings, 0 out of 3 Elf-Rings, and 0 out of 7 Dwarf Rings.

The game gives some general help about the rings, noting that

a.) the Elven-rings are kept by the Elven-lords, and “will yield their treasure if you ask for it”

b.) the Dwarf-rings are hidden in Moria

c.) the Nazgul have the Man-rings (I’ve killed four, I just need to find the other five); the instructions say that they’re easy to find “by those who have read The Lord of the Rings thoroughly”

My map so far.

Before plowing ahead, I should also mention something about the specific port I’m playing: it does not, in a technical sense, have a save game feature. It has a log feature. That means it keeps track of what commands you’ve put, and you can have it store those in a log, and then recollect it to have what is functionally a save game; in practice, my gameplay has a lot of testing useless exits to find out they’re blocked so I feel strange making a log until I have “clean” progress. The end result is that “insta-testing” is a bit harder; I’ve found a Balrog, for example, but haven’t tried all the different possible ways of defeating him yet because I don’t have a log file there.

(Also — and this reflects a general characteristic of this game allowing some flexibility in pathing — I approached the Balrog from the east side of Moria. I’ll explain later.)

The Trolls, art by Tolkien, based off art by Jennie Harbour for Hansel and Gretel.

Remember, this game is mashing together scenes from The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. One encounter early (near where the jewel and the glowing staff are) is a tableau of trolls, already pre-frozen:

Three large Trolls are standing motionless before you!

One of them seems to have something in his pocket.

I had enormous trouble getting the thing out of the pocket. SEARCH POCKET, LOOK POCKET, LOOK IN POCKET, EXAMINE POCKET, EMPTY POCKET, TAKE POCKET, TAKE SOMETHING, OPEN TROLL’S POCKET, and EXAMINE TROLL’S POCKET were all unproductive. I finally gave up and only hit on a later pass-through PICK POCKET, and that’s the only method that works.

In the Troll’s pocket you find a tiny key.

Subsequently I went ahead and made my verb list to help with further troubles.

It’s a four letter parser, so LISTEN is interpreted as LIST which lists the inventory.

Note that some of the verbs give different messages; MAKE (which was used in MAKE FIRE) says “you’ll have to be more specific” but LEAVE says “Please use directions to move.” The latter is deceptive as (for example) the cave that had the staff wants the player to LEAVE CAVE to get out. Thus I am treating this entire list “neutrally” even if the message seems to indicate the verb won’t get used; the game says “What?” when a verb is truly not understood, like QWKAVWEE.

Serena Malyon, from the author’s post on r/lotr.

With the tiny key in hand, let’s take a trip back to Smaug.

You’re facing a grey wall of rock.
In it you discover a small hole.

This is where going west gets our hero spotted and killed.

USE KEY
The lock clicks open.

OPEN DOOR
Which door?

LOOK
You’re facing a grey wall of rock.
In it you discover a small hole.

ENTER HOLE
A huge pile of gold shimmers at your feet!

On top of it lies a glowing Dragon, sound asleep.

SHOOT
Your arrow whizzes and dispatches the sleeping dragon.

Trying to get the gold indicates there’s too much to take along, but there’s a “precious coat of mail” made of mithril in the hoard you can nab. (No WEAR verb, which is kind of weird in a game about rings.)

Incidentally, you don’t have to actually pass through either the snow mountain or the underground to get to Lonely Mountain; you can backtrack to a gap in the mountains and go through a bunch of rooms described as

You’re wandering aimlessly through north-western Middle-Earth.

which the author clearly intended as an explicit shortcut, even though it short-circuits the scene where you burn wood for heat.

One last observation about that “wandering aimlessly” message before we start getting into more adventures; at a certain point going west to east the message switches from “north-western Middle-Earth” to “north-eastern Middle-Earth”. Similarly, there’s a change while going from north to south where “north-western” turns into “south-western”. This marks the exact middle of the map and it helped me make sure the color grid above follows the exact layout of the game; there’s some parts (especially “foreign shores”) that wrap around and otherwise go in tangled directions so I was uncertain until I confirmed it with these messages.

For more mischief, going from Smaug and backtracking slightly, you can find Mirkwood.

You’re lost among the dark trees of Mirkwood.

SE
You’re lost among the dark trees of Mirkwood.

SW
The trees are too dense here.

This is another maze that breaks the grid (and remember, no item dropping!) and I was unable to map it out precisely, but I did find what seems to be the reason for going in.

You’re lost among the dark trees of Mirkwood.

SW
You’ve reached the black fortress of Dol Guldur.
The entrance is strongly guarded.

ENTER FORTRESS
The guards leap up as they see you.

Backtracking even farther — right before the Caradhras pass — there’s a very long path going to the south leading to a new area, at the eastern side of Moria.

Sure, the Balrog doesn’t have any reason to hang out right at the entrance, but remember this is Alternate Reality Tolkien.

W
You’re standing on the bridge of Khazad-dum, facing the mountains.
A huge black shadow with a heart of fire materializes in front of you!

KILL
The Balrog lashes out with his whip of flame.
Its ends curl around your legs and drag you into the abyss.

BECOME WHITE WIZARD hmm, I guess that method didn’t work. Now, given how easily Smaug was felled, there might be just as simple a method here, but as I already indicated earlier, I haven’t wrangled the log system to land a “save” here yet.

Less fatal is the Mirror of Galadriel, but Galadriel herself is a no-show.

Upon a low pedestal carved like a branching tree stands
a basin of silver, wide and shallow, filled with water.
This is the Mirror of Galadriel.

LOOK MIRROR
At first, all you see is your own reflection.
Then the mirror clears.
You see a dark tower, surrounded by a forest of dark trees.
You seem to come closer, passing the guards, who fail to notice you.

The mirror darkens, revealing a deep dungeon.
As you try to make out what’s shimmering among the dust and
bones, the picture fades…

I’m guessing this changes to give hints on the current situation (and assuming some continuity with 1975 HOBBIT, matches the Oracle from that game); this indicates we need the One Ring to get inside Dol Guldur.

There’s also a small scene with a boat and I am not sure why it is there given you can just walk around the path the other direction to end up at the same place.

You’re standing in a small clearing.

There’s a boat here.

In it lies a long rope.

GET BOAT
You push the boat off the shore and jump in.

You’re travelling in a boat on the river Anduin.

Just a bit south further is a very short conversation with an Ent…

You’re wandering through Fangorn forest.

Here you meet Treebeard, Master of the forest.

The Ent promises to help you against Saruman, if necessary.

…and through the forest you can get captured and stuck. I don’t know if this is a “loss” here or not.

You’re crossing the fords of the Isen.

A company of Uruk-hai bearing the White Hand of Isengard overtakes you.
Saruman takes all the rings from you.

You’re set alone on the pinnacle of Orthanc.

Let’s rewind now back to right before entering the snowy route, skip by the Moria route (again) and just try to wrap around south. This turns out not to be a great idea as you get captured by Saruman again, although there’s a slight divergence where you can make it to the Tower of Orthanc without being taken prisoner.

Tolkien’s own illustration.

You’re standing at the foot of the Tower of Orthanc.

Suddenly something heavy passes close to your head!
It appears to be a dark crystal globe.

You can’t take the globe; I’m not sure what it is for. (I realize, writing this, I never tried my verb list against it; an assignment for next time.)

One more thing to mention before tackling Moria proper: early on there’s a room that calls itself Rivendell. I use that phrasing because it seems remarkably underwhelming and I have yet to get to communicate with any elves that might be about. I’m not taking any hints from people playing along for this right now, but if someone wants to speculate “blind” based just on the books I am happy to hear suggestions.

You’ve reached Rivendell.

GO IN
You can’t do that.

IN
You can’t do that.

ENTER
You can’t do that.

CALL ELVES
Don’t be ridiculous!

(Also attempted: FIND ELROND, where the game responds “That would be too easy!” Harumph.)

Finally, it’s time to SAY FRIEND and enter.

Towards the east you see stairs hewn out of rock.

E
You’re standing in front of the Gate of Moria.

Strange runes are engraved on the smooth surface.

SAY FRIEND
Slowly the gates swing open.
As you enter the mines, the gates are closed behind you with tremendous power!

You’re lost in the dark mines of Moria.

While the game is still on a grid, it drops having every direction work to turn it into a maze (without random jumping around).

The Tomb of the Lord of Moria first:

You’re standing in a dimly lit chamber.
In the center you see a stone tomb.

On top of it lies an old, dusty book.

READ BOOK
Among many sad tales is the story of Thrain, once Lord of Moria.
After hiding the seven Dwarf-rings, he departed to seek vengeance
upon the Dark Lord.
Nothing was heard of him ever since.

GET BOOK
The book crumples to dust when you touch it.

OPEN TOMB
In it you discover the skeleton of a noble Dwarf.

I have no idea how to find the rings. I assume they lurk in the maze; maybe we need more light? Or maybe we just need to shake the poor corpse open somehow because he swallowed them all in one swig (nothing I’ve worked tried)?

The One Ring is, perhaps appropriately, easier to find: wander into the right room and simply GET RING.

You’re lost in the dark mines of Moria.

Groping through the dark you suddenly touch a golden ring.

GET RING
It’s yours now.

Gollum lurks nearby, and he wants to play his riddle game with you in the exact same manner as The Hobbit (as opposed to this being Lord of the Rings Gollum).

Deep down here by the dark water lives the old Gollum, a small slimy creature.

Gollum seems afraid of you and proposes a riddle game:
if you know the answer to his three questions, he’ll lead you
out of the mountains. If you fail however, you’ll serve him for lunch.
Do you agree?

YES
This is his first riddle:

What has roots that nobody sees,
Is taller than trees,
Up, up it goes,
And yet never grows?

MOUNTAIN
You found the answer!

His second riddle is:

It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,
Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt,
It lies behind stars and under hills,
And empty holes it fills.
It comes first and follows after,
Ends life, kills laughter.

DARK
You found the answer!

Gollum has one more riddle for you:

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

TIME
You found the answer!

The light of Gollum’s eyes has become a green fire,
and it’s coming swiftly nearer.

NE
Your opponent does not let you pass.

In a flash Gollum grabs the One Ring from your pocket!

Suddenly Gollum vanishes from sight.
Next thing you feel are two strong, slimy hands around your neck!

He kills you even if you don’t have the ring; with the ring, you have time here to KILL GOLLUM but there isn’t any benefit from his corpse. I have some ideas on what to try; it is possible we might be able to skip Gollum altogether by entering Moria from the “wrong way” and figuring out the path.

Published 03:40 • 8 days ago

Saturday, 30. August 2025

My So Called Interactive Fiction Life

Standard Library is LLM Proof

I think anyone that has attempted to build a new IF platform will tell you one of the harder problems is building the standard library in a cohesive manner. All 40+ actions have to work in a similar fashion. New actions must be easily created. This has to be seamless.

I've probably tried to let Claude do lawnmower refactors against all 40+ actions ten or more times. Each time I discover new patterns and improve the set, but when I do a deeper review, some actions are implemented better than others. Some are not following all of the patterns I've defined (but still working properly).

I finally had to erase the last refactor branch and go back to main to look more deeply at all of the actions in the standard library. I decided to do this one at a time. Each action must work how I want them to work. No exceptions, no assumptions.

We started with TAKE, which translates to the event 'if.action.taking'. This led to some long-winded discussions about missing data, dirty data construction, and minor, but annoying engineering issues.

The result is we're adding a shared data property to the action context, so our three-phase format (validate -> execute -> report) can add/read data in validate and execute for report to have everything it needs. The other thing is that World Model will report some of the mutations in the event source (like moveEntity) so report and Text Service has everything it needs, replacing some platform events.

Sample timeline of an action executing (timings are examples):

  Turn 5, Time 0ms:   execute() starts
  Turn 5, Time 1ms:   world.moveEntity() called
  Turn 5, Time 2ms:   world.entity.moved EMITTED ← World event
  Turn 5, Time 3ms:   execute() completes
  Turn 5, Time 4ms:   report() called
  Turn 5, Time 5ms:   report() returns events array
  Turn 5, Time 6ms:   if.event.taken PROCESSED ← Action event

This will definitely slow me down, and that's a good thing. I've now reached the point where larger refactors are detrimental to the code base and I'm reaching in and refining things at a molecular level. This will improve the quality of the standard library significantly. I suspect I'll need 2-4 hours for each action, which is going to require several weeks of focused work.

[Update August 31, 2025]

Refactored taking, opening, and about.

Published 02:28 • 9 days ago

Renga in Blue

Ring Quest: Whispering Inside the Tree

(Continued from my last post.) The grey-rain curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise. — Return of the King So I haven’t made that much progress, relatively speaking, but I have played enough to get a […]

(Continued from my last post.)

The grey-rain curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.

— Return of the King

So I haven’t made that much progress, relatively speaking, but I have played enough to get a sense of what I’m up against.

From the movie version of the Lord of the Rings map.

Last time I mentioned investigating the area west of the Shire for any places of interest. There is, at least, the tower where the Grey Havens are visible, but the area seems just to be a lot of rooms with nothing of importance to the quest.

You’re in the Grey Havens.

N
You’re standing on a foreign shore.

S
That way you’ll leave Middle-Earth.

SE
The hills here are too steep for you to climb.

E
You’re standing at the foot of a slender tower.

NW
You’re standing on a foreign shore.

N
You’re wandering aimlessly through north-western Middle-Earth.

Trying to map things out, the grid broke down; the game does not let you drop items (“That won’t help you.”) so I can’t do item-mapping to be exact about it, but I did enough to confirm the weird connectivity of one of the “foreign shore” rooms (look on the bottom):

I think the author’s intent is simply to avoid feeling like there’s a wall (when there isn’t on the real map) while subtly shoving them eastward towards adventure. The issue with this in practice is that adventures can have clues anywhere, and while I’m leaving this section for now as a map-making mess, I can’t know for sure there isn’t some odd hidden byway until I’ve beaten the game.

With that out of the way, the obstacles I had were the Willow, the Barrow-Wight, and one of the ringwraiths. I managed to get by the Willow via book knowledge:

You’re walking through the Old Forest.

Overcome by a sudden drowsiness, you rest against a huge willow-tree.
Slowly you sink away into a crack in its bark…

S
You’re stuck in the bark of Old Man Willow.

TOM BOMBADIL
As you cry out for help, a man (or so it seems) appears, singing merrily.
Indeed, it is Tom Bombadil. With his song, he makes the willow-tree let you go.
You may call upon him, if you should fall into danger while still near.

Reading this text after the fact, I found CRY HELP specifically works, but many other variants don’t so it was much faster to just go straight for the end result, so to speak. This also confirms this is definitely an outside-knowledge kind of game, but this seems completely in line with the intent of the author.

From the 2024 HarperCollins cover of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.

ASIDE: I don’t normally do a random call for comments, but I am morbidly curious what people think about Tom Bombadil. That section of the book always came off to me as walking into a different story, somehow (even though Bombadil helps with the next part which then gets the hobbits their weapons).

“The next part” is referring to the barrow-wight, where you can TOM BOMBADIL your way out again. I was slightly puzzled at first because Frodo technically cuts off the hand of the barrow-wight first before calling in the calvary, and trying to do that in the game just kills you.

You’re standing among misty barrowdowns.

A tall dark figure like a shadow against the stars leans over you.
You’re in the power of a Barrowwight!

You find yourself lying on a stone bed.
A sickening pale hand is holding a shining sword, ready to pierce you!

TOM BOMBADIL
With a loud crash the barrowdown bursts into rubble.
The Barrowwight wails as it vanishes in the mist.
At your feet you discover a shining sword.

GET SWORD
It’s yours now.

There are no other Hobbits; it’s just us, somehow starting with a bow and arrows (which I incidentally have yet to use — the ringwraiths laugh them off). In the events that are to follow it strikes me we’re more like Aragorn, except we start in Hobbiton? The author clearly wanted to include all the places in Lord of the Rings but wasn’t worried about playing loose with the capabilities of the characters.

You know what the ringwraiths don’t laugh off? The sword from the barrowdown.

You’re on the Weathertop.

A dark shadow is creeping up the hill!

KILL SHADOW
With a ghastly cry the ringwraith falls.
Among the now shapeless garments you discover a golden ring.

My first ring! And now with the sword you can go back and kill the riders on either side of the Brandywine bridge; rather than HIDE, type KILL.

A ghostly rider is galloping towards you!

KILL RDIER
With a ghastly cry the ringwraith falls.
Among the now shapeless garments you discover a golden ring.

All that running around and Frodo could have just stabbed them! What was he thinking!

With all that out of the way, I was able to find a jewel along the road, and a side cave with a glowing staff. A third rider guarding the path to the east fell easily to the blade.

Things still were “dense” enough in this section I thought the game would keep it up, but then the rest of my map (for my first trek farther) went like this:

While some directions were blocked, the map opens up from here to its full 36 by 36 glory (or something — the tangled exits on the foreign shores now makes me unsure). Again, the “zoomed-in” perspective now seems the wrong way to look at the game; from a practical perspective, I think trying to map the entire game in Trizbort may be a problem and I need to switch to filling in grid square colors instead.

You’re following an east-west trail.

E
You’re following a narrow trail through the hills.

E
The path splits up in two directions.

E
You’re at the fords of the river Loudwater.

E
You’re looking over the beautiful valley of Imladris.
Rivendell should be near.

E
You’re following an east-west trail.

E
The path splits up in two directions.

N
You’re following a north-south trail.

N
You’re wandering through a small forest.
There’s a lot of dead wood lying around.

The dead wood is an object that gets used just a bit later, going through the “High Pass of the Caradhras” where there is a blizzard.

You’re on the high pass of the Caradhras.

E
Snow is falling in big flakes.

E
You’re caught in a terrible blizzard.
If you don’t make fire soon, you’ll freeze!

MAKE FIRE
You burn all the wood you have.

E
Snow is falling in big flakes.

E
You’re on the high pass of the Caradhras.

This is the extreme version of the “fan fiction shortcut”, where the entire map of Middle Earth is considered more or less a given, and where the game becomes more vivid is for a player who knows the word “Caradhras” in the first place. (That’s the mountain where the Fellowship gets stalled by a blizzard, and Frodo (who gets the vote as Ring bearer) decides to take Gimli’s suggestion to pass through Moria instead.

Past the blizzard is the “old forest” where the player can have a run-in with a spider which is a lot easier to handle than the equivalent puzzle in the Melbourne House game The Hobbit:

Among the trees you discover huge cobwebs.

Suddenly you hear a rustling sound behind you!

KILL SPIDER
The hideous black spider is now dead.

Then lots of “path”, and more “path”, and even some “turn” in there…

…and the path I took ended at, somehow, Smaug.

Far to the north you can see the Lonely Mountain.

N
You’re passing through the ruins of Dale.

N
You’re following a north-south trail.

N
You’re facing a grey wall of rock.
In it you discover a small hole.

N
You bump into a wall of rock.

E
Your way is blocked by a wide river.

W
In front of you are the broken gates of the Lonely Mountain.

I’m afraid that Smaug has noticed your approach.

Wait, aren’t you supposed to be dead?

To be fair, we didn’t have the One Ring to start with, and Frodo (if that is even our main character) is able to take down ringwraiths with ease, so this is a “parallel universe” Lord of the Rings where Smaug is still around, and where all the rings need to be cast into Mount Doom, not just the One Ring.

I’m going to try using a color-grid next time and see how it goes, but I’m afraid this might be a scenario where I need to swap between big-scale view and small-scale view at a moment’s notice.

Published 01:57 • 9 days ago

Friday, 29. August 2025

Key & Compass Blog

New walkthroughs for August 2025

On Friday, August 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. EYE (2025) by Arthur DiBianca In this wordplay […]

EYE (2025) by Arthur DiBianca

In this wordplay game where you can only use one-word three-letter commands, you play as a Word-Mage and as a Visitor to the Academy. Return home with one or more Flowers to placate the Giant and save Isabel.

It’s an entry in ParserComp 2025, where it placed 1st in the Classic category.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Wild West (2025) by Gianluca Girelli

In this western game, you play as a cowboy named Kenneth Johnson. After Cortez and his gang of bandits raided your ranch, left you for dead, and abducted your wife and daughter, you pursued them into the desert. But now your faithful horse lies dead and you must continue on foot, with only your wits and your revolver to protect you.

This game was an entry in ParserComp 2025, where it placed 10th in Classic category. This game is an enhanced, text-only English port of the semi-graphic Italian adventure Kenneth Johnson: Wild West that was written by Bonaventura Di Bello, using The Quill and Illustrator, and published in 1986 and 1987. It is also the first part of a trilogy succeeded by Tin Star and Desperados.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Cave Adventure (2007) by Jazz Remington

In this cave-crawl adventure, you play as someone lost in the woods during a nature hike, but when you take refuge inside a large cavern, the ceiling caves in behind you, blocking your exit. Escape the caves if you can. Features an underground lake and a scary troll.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Quest of the Mysteries (2025) by Brian John McGill

In this short fantasy game, you play as a traveller, searching for the answer to the mysteries. Before you lies the manor and then the town which holds the famous Tower of Mysteries within its borders. Soon its secret will be yours.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Roguelike Goose (2020) by Lizzard

In this RPG parody, you play as a goose exploring a dungeon. You like to honk, peck, flap, and swim. In the dungeon entrance, a glossy sign in bright orange and virulent green welcomes you: “Let AirDnD be your Guide, as we bring you to new depths in Adventuring!”

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Adventura (2017) by Leighton Swannell

In this deliberately-barebones game, you play as someone who wakes up in a nondescript and empty hospital room. Explore the hospital, a police station, a residential area, and a fuel station and find nothing to do but go on to yet another featureless room. Did you find the Finish? Did you enjoy the story that you were expected to make up for yourself? QUIT.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Mouse Quest: Chapter 1 – The Arrival of Winter (2016) by Bryan and Sean Lian

In this short game, you play as an able-bodied mouse named Nibbles. Most of the other mice are out collecting nuts and berries for winter. Mother Mouse asks you to fetch the last huckleberries from the bush from the top of our stump.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Swap Wand User (2025) by Sarah Willson

This unusual story is about Lucross’s co-founders and their transposition wand. You are presented with a series of short paragraphs (called fragments) where some words are in the wrong positions. Your only option is to swap words of equal length using commands like SWAP WAND USER. This story has two endings.

This game was an entry in ParserComp 2025, where it placed 2nd in the Classic category. It’s also an entrant in Neo-Twiny Jam 2025.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

A Remote Problem (2025) by André Kosmos

In this slice-of-life game, you play as a ten-year-old boy eager to watch a special hour-long episode of your favorite cartoon show. Unfortunately, the remote control is missing and the show starts in twenty-six minutes!

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Published 21:57 • 9 days ago

Renga in Blue

Ring Quest (1983)

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. In my last post I wrote about an original game HOBBIT (1975) coded […]

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

In my last post I wrote about an original game HOBBIT (1975) coded in FORTRAN for Hewlett-Packard mainframes that ended up having a port for TRS-80; it was also the inspiration for the 1980 game The Wizard’s Castle which itself spawned many clones.

Water, Wind, and Sand, art by J. R. R. Tolkien, 1915.

To start today (and get to Ring Quest), I need to talk about another game called HOBBIT, from 1978 or so, which may or may not be related. I think the evidence is strong that the author Steve Richardson was thinking of the original HOBBIT, but I’m not sure. For the purposes of my discussion here, I’ll call the two versions CLASSIC-HOBBIT (for the original) and NEW-HOBBIT (for the new version), which was made on a PDP-11/70 at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania.

The “1978 or so” is because Richardson graduated out of high school in New Jersey in 1978, and the author of Ring Quest (Pieter Bots) first discovered the game during his 1980-1981 academic year, so the game had to be written between the two. (Incidentally, the game that Rob mentioned in the comments as being for DEC computers — that is, ported for the type of PDP that Dickinson college had — is from April 1978, so is likely CLASSIC-HOBBIT, since Richardson was still a high school senior in New Jersey at the time.)

Sam and Frodo Climb Mount Doom, 1978, by Bg Callahan. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

We do not have NEW-HOBBIT. We do have a description from the author on his blog from 2007:

When I was in college at Dickinson in Carlisle, PA, I was a bit of a computer geek, and the school’s mainframe had a text-based adventure game called, oddly enough, ADVENT. It was fun, but frustrating; there was no SAVE command, so once you started, you had to keep going until you won or died. It wasn’t exactly Myst, but it was fun! As I was a programmer, I decided to write my own text-baased adventure game based on Lord of the Rings. Since program names on this system had to be no longer than six characters, I called the program HOBBIT. Characters moved about Middle Earth collecting the Rings of Power to throw into Mount Doom. I took huge liberties with the plot, but it was fun, and I learned a lot.

NEW-HOBBIT has six rings of power to collect (and one sword for killing Ringwraiths) which more or less matches the seven treasures of HOBBIT; more importantly, NEW-HOBBIT was oriented such that the entire game is on one outdoors grid representing a large-scale map. This is highly unusual and the only other adventure I’ve played for the Project (other than HOBBIT) that does something like this is Reality Ends. The latter point (combined with the name coincidence) especially makes me suspicious that Richardson had at least seen ORIGINAL-HOBBIT.

Now, since we don’t have the actual game I’m going to pass that by and move onto the game that we do have: Ring Quest.

Pieter Bots had come from The Netherlands to study chemistry in the United States at Dickinson; while there he found the university’s PDP-11/70 and discovered it had games.

From Bitsavers.

One of the games was HOBBIT, that is, NEW-HOBBIT, the Richardson game, and as a longtime Tolkien fan he was interested. However, as Bots writes, Richardson “had taken such liberties with the story of Frodo’s quest” that “I felt that a more faithful interpretation was desperately needed.” He wrote his own HOBBIT (NEW-NEW-HOBBIT, I suppose), although ran afoul of his full ambitions due to 16K memory limit for BASIC programs. Then:

Having the same name as the authorized game on the system, my HOBBIT drew the attention of the system administrator, Tom Burtnett, first to my computer account (from which the file was confiscated on suspicion of being a hacked copy), and subsequently to my person, which started a principal-student relation of which I still have fond memories.

The affair brought me in contact with the maker of the genuine HOBBIT and his friends (notably Betzi Hoff and Chris Russell, and soon also Chris Leyon and Bill Biancamano) who led me into the magical world of Dungeons & Dragons and became great friends throughout my year at Dickinson and after.

Bots still wanted to make an “ultimate” Lord of the Rings game and when he came back to The Netherlands to resume his studies at the University of Leiden, he wrote Ring Quest on his Sharp MZ-80B (64K of memory) in assembly language.

From the Centre for Computing History, the same platform the Japanese Mystery House games were originally written on.

While at university it stayed as a “private game”, where his friends would “stay up until 3 A.M. to get to the end”. He then tossed the tape in a shoebox and unearthed it many years later (2007) and managed to rescue the audio. He then used that copy to make a Windows port.

No paring down to six rings for simplicity/size: our goal is to find all 20 rings (3 to the elves + 7 to the dwarves + 9 to the humans + the One) and toss them in Mount Doom. The map is still a grid, but 36 by 36, that is, there are over 1,000 rooms. Just for perspective, here’s what the empty grid looks like:

Some of the rooms are blocked off; this is similar to a “worm tunnel” design like On the Way to the Interview was, but with the added condition that you can go in diagonals (NE, NW, SW, SE).

You’re in Hobbiton.

S
You’re in the southern part of the Shire.

S
You’re wandering aimlessly through north-western Middle-Earth.

S
You’re standing on a foreign shore.

SE
The trees are too dense here.

NE
You’re wandering aimlessly through north-western Middle-Earth.

Even with 64K of memory I would not expect massive room descriptions; it’s almost as if the “reading lens” that usually gets used in text adventures is getting zoomed-back a bit to consider regions; however, individual rooms are still important, and in fact in my current state trying to go east direct from Hobbiton I am blocked by three entirely different death-rooms (which I’ll show off shortly).

The two “Road w/ rider” rooms both involve death unless you HIDE:

You’re following the Great Eastern Road.

Suddenly you hear a horse coming up the road.

HIDE
As long as you don’t move, you’re hidden from sight.

You see a darkmantled figure on a black horse appear on the road.
It passes by and dwindles into the distance.

Remember, diagonals are possible, but they would make the map too messy so I’m not including them. You can avoid the darkmantled figure with the opening steps NE, SE, NE, SE but that unfortunately doesn’t avoid any of the other three deaths I’m stuck on.

You’re in Hobbiton.

NE
You’re wandering aimlessly through north-western Middle-Earth.

SE
You’re crossing the Brandywine Bridge.
In the south-east you see the rim of the Old Forest.

NE
You’re wandering aimlessly through north-western Middle-Earth.

SE
Towards the south you can see the misty contours of low hills.

E
You’re on the Weathertop.

A dark shadow is creeping up the hill!

HIDE
There’s noplace to hide here.

The ringwraith pierces you with his freezing blade.

So you’re dead.

Death #2 involves the barrow-wight:

You’re standing among misty barrowdowns.

A tall dark figure like a shadow against the stars leans over you.
You’re in the power of a Barrowwight!

You find yourself lying on a stone bed.
A sickening pale hand is holding a shining sword, ready to pierce you!

S
Your opponent does not let you pass.

With a triumphant cry the sword is thrust forward.

From the Lidless Eye set of the Middle Earth Collectible Card Game.

Death #3 involves being swallowed up by Old Man Willow:

You’re walking through the Old Forest.

Overcome by a sudden drowsiness, you rest against a huge willow-tree.
Slowly you sink away into a crack in its bark…

S
You’re stuck in the bark of Old Man Willow.

(Not technically a death, but at least a softlock for the moment; still the most promising one to muscle through.)

Now, looking back at the map, you may notice some exits going west. You can take an entirely different route, and in fact, there’s enough rooms out there I don’t have it mapped out yet. An excerpt just to give an idea:

You’re in Hobbiton.

W
You’re standing at the foot of a slender tower.

CLIMB TOWER
From the tower you can see a great harbour towards the west.

GO DOWN
You’re standing at the foot of a slender tower.

W
You’re in the Grey Havens.

W
That way you’ll leave Middle-Earth.

Too bad the ships aren’t here, otherwise we could do The Lord of the Rings: The Heavily Abridged Version.

Lots of mapping likely before next time!

Again from the card game.

Published 02:52 • 10 days ago

Thursday, 28. August 2025

Choice of Games LLC

“Star Crystal Warriors Go!”—Is your magic strong enough to save reality?

We’re proud to announce that Star Crystal Warriors Go!, 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 9/4! It’s tough fighting evil by moonlight and being an ordinary kid by daylight! Can you save your city’

We’re proud to announce that Star Crystal Warriors Go!, 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 9/4!

It’s tough fighting evil by moonlight and being an ordinary kid by daylight! Can you save your city’s dreams from monsters, halt a magical plague in its tracks, and still help your new club prepare for the best school festival ever?

Star Crystal Warriors Go! is an interactive magical girl anime novel by Holly McMasters, with additional content by Brian Rushton. It’s entirely text-based, 250,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

You were just an ordinary teenager at Northside High School—going to classes, hanging out with your friends, spending time with your dad, occasionally staying up too late watching your favorite TV show.

Then a talking animal unlocked your magical powers.

Now, thanks to the Star Crystal in your heart, you can transform into a Stellaria, a magical warrior tuned to the light of the constellations. You’re one of the very few with the power to defeat the terrifying monsters that you call Nightmares. It’s just in time, too, because Nightmares are creeping into your city, corrupting people’s dreams to weaken the veil between the Dream Kingdom and the waking world and spreading a terrible sleeping plague. If the veil falls, the Dream Kingdom will engulf reality and the Nightmares – ruled by the terrifying Empress Nyx—will take over your world.

Fortunately, you’re not alone. Your friends in the waking world will always stand by your side, and there are other Stellaria out there fighting against the Nightmares—some of whom might be closer than you think! How will you push the Nightmares out of your city? Will you strike them down with your magic, use your wits to turn them against each other, or heal the darkness in their hearts with the shining compassion in yours?

As you learn the truth behind the Stellaria and the Nightmares, you’ll also learn the truth about your own past: your own dreams are filled with visions of a crystal castle and a love that feels like a memory. But even with the very fabric of reality at stake, you still have to go to classes, keep your grades up, and plan the school festival. How will you balance it all?

Play as male, female, or non-binary; gay, straight, bi, or asexual.
Customize your outfit, weapon, and the color of your magic for a truly spectacular transformation into a Stellaria!
Wield the power of dreams! Fling sparkling colored light, animate objects, bend reality, and more!
Romance your loyal compassionate best friend, the new kid at school with a mysterious secret, or even a dangerously beautiful Nightmare!
Bond with your talking animal companion.
Uncover the mysterious past of the Dream Kingdom, cure a magical plague, and withstand the temptations of the Nightmares.
Plan the best spring festival that your school has ever seen—if you can negotiate with the Student Council!

Will you keep your heart’s Star Crystal full of hope and defeat the Nightmares, or will you fall to despair and join the darkness?

We hope you enjoy playing Star Crystal Warriors Go!. 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.

Published 14:12 • 10 days ago

Wednesday, 27. August 2025

The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction

July 2025 PR-IF Post Mortem

July 2025 PR-IF Meeting Attendees The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday, July 21, 2025 over Zoom. JP Tuttle, Doug Orleans, Mike Stage, zarf, anjchang, Josh, Matt Griffin (with special guest Gussie), and Hugh, welcomed newcomer. Brad. Note: Thank you to these meeting notes written from notes by both Josh and Mike Stage. NarraScope Impressions Discussion Topics Videotome

July 2025 PR-IF Meeting Attendees

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday, July 21, 2025 over Zoom. JP Tuttle, Doug Orleans, Mike Stage, zarf , anjchang, Josh, Matt Griffin (with special guest Gussie), and Hugh, welcomed newcomer. Brad. Note: Thank you to these meeting notes written from notes by both Josh and Mike Stage.

NarraScope Impressions

Matt ran NarraScope, and attendees shared positive feedback. Members are eager to watch missed talks once posted on YouTube.
Some noted occasional difficulties connecting or staying connected via Discord to NarraScope’s talk channel

Discussion Topics

Videotome and Visual Novels
Josh referenced a 2022 piece by Freja Campbell on creating Videotome, a design engine for visual novels:

Blog post: https://itch.io/blog/454075/words-friction-syntax-stuff-i-thought-about-when-making-videotome

Matt discussed playing games built in Videotome. More info: https://communistsister.itch.io/videotome

Recent Games and IF

Mike highlighted the release of Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer, a sequel to the 2016 point-and-click detective game Kathy Rain, available on GOG and Steam.

Josh shared several IF games he’s been playing:

sweetfish’s games: https://sweetfish.itch.io/

Night Confessional: A mechanical phone-booth confessional automaton game, winner of Best Narrative in the NarraScope showcase.

In Other Wordles: A shifting Wikipedia page about Wordle.

Eider Cake: Pixelated medieval manuscripts in Decker, featuring bird characters.

From ParserComp:

Swap Wand User (Neo-Twiny Jam, 500-word limit): Players swap equal-length words to unscramble sci-fi vignettes about memory loss. https://passerine.itch.io/swap-wand-user

Eye by Arthur DiBianca: A cryptic limited-parser game where players deduce the puzzle and rules. https://adibianca.itch.io/eye

Dan Fabulich created a hints page for Eye: https://intfiction.org/t/walkthrough-gradual-hints-for-eye-by-arthur-dibianca/75695

Poetry and Interactive Media

Matt recommended Nick Montfort’s All the Way For the Win, a poetic stunt for fans of three-letter words: https://penteractpress.com/store/all-the-way-for-the-win

Angela Chang showcased her 3D interactive VR poem about seltzer, where bubbles contain words that can be popped (erasure poetry) and the perspective can be changed: https://anjchang.com/seltzer/

Interviews and IF Competitions

Someone shared Manon’s interview with SV Linwood, who won IF competitions with games like Long Way to the Nearest Star, Dr. Ludwig and the Devil, and Cut the Sky: https://the-rosebush.com/2025/07/interview-with-sv-linwood/

Technical Innovations in Games

Hugh discussed GPU-hardware image compression formats, enabling smaller file sizes for standard images and reasonable sizes for very large images. This sparked ideas for detective games where players zoom into a large canvas to find clues.

This led to a discussion of Zarf’s process for digital implementations of Jason Shiga’s comics, such as Leviathan: https://zarfhome.com/leviathan/

Published 22:29 • 11 days ago

Tuesday, 26. August 2025

Renga in Blue

HOBBIT (1975, 1979)

Today, we move back in time to 1975: personal computers were only starting to become real; the Altair wasn’t out until the very end of the year. This means if you wanted to play a coin-op game like Shark Jaws you could go to an arcade… …but for a computer game, you’d need access to […]

…but for a computer game, you’d need access to a large mainframe or minicomputer, likely through a university or a remote terminal connected to one. There were still many people who had no computer access at all.

“Chicago, 1975” by Greg Wass, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

This meant that at the second running of Windycon, a Chicago area fantasy/sci-fi convention…

…when they mentioned a computer installation, this was an opportunity to try something novel.

Source. One of the panels for the con, “Why is a Classic?” had “A. J. Budrys, George R. R. Martin, Lloyd Biggle, Gene Wolfe and others”.

An attendee, Joe Power, had just started as a freshman at Michigan State.

Someone on the con committee had arranged to have some remote terminals tied into some college’s time-share system upon which you could run a primitive version of Star Trek and another, very similar game with a fantasy motif (called HOBBIT). These were printing terminals, not CRTs (the ADM-3a was still about a year and a half away at that point.)

To re-iterate what ends up being a vital point, they were playing on printers, not screens. When someone (not Power) was playing HOBBIT, the game crashed, and Power subsequently got the source code by accident: he “managed to get a listing of it while trying to restart it.”

Power would eventually re-write the original FORTRAN code into his own game, first working on a TRS-80 (“a much cleaner version of the code and played roughly the same as the one I’d played”), then on a Sorcerer that was in a shop, rewriting the game from scratch and adding features based on his playing of Dungeons and Dragons. While he originally got a publishing contract to sell it “by Christmas” of 1979, that fell through, and he ended up sending the code to be printed in the July/August 1980 issue of Recreational Computing magazine.

Source.

In that magazine he mentions not only the original author of HOBBIT, but two other people who got the source code.

The article names “Chip Bestler” as the original author, who later transitioned to be Caitlin Bestler, making her the (currently) second known such person in videogame development. Bestler was deeply involved in the fantasy/sci-fi fan scene, being an editor on two zines (Effen Essef, Windyapa) and being part of Chicago’s bid for Worldcon in 1982.

ASIDE: The record is held by Ellen Kuhfeld, who wrote the University of Minnesota version of Spacewar. She wrote an article in Analog (pre-transition) back in 1971 that discusses the two versions; you can play the original MIT version here and a reconstruction of the Minnesota game here. The third known person is Jamie Fenton, who did the arcade games Amazin’ Maze and 280 ZZZap in 1976 (and helped finish work on Sea Wolf when the main developer, Tom McHugh, got sick); Fenton is most famous for the 1981 game Gorf.

Sketches for an unpublished Blackjack game by Fenton. The document dated November 24, 1974 is the same week as the convention. Source.

The excerpt earlier also mentions Kevin Williams and Dana Kaempen, who made a port for HP mainframe. Via “K. Williams” (who I’ve confirmed is Kevin), a version of original HOBBIT showed up for TRS-80 in the tape magazine CLOAD in August 1979. Based on Power’s description of the game, it hews to the original 1975 experience.

IN THIS GAME YOU BECOME A HOBBIT THIEF TRYING TO STEAL THE ORB OF ZOT FROM THE CASTLE OF THE EVIL WIZARD.

To be clear, HOBBIT is not an adventure game. However, the history ends up tying in with an adventure game (which we’ll get to in my next post) in a curious way, such that to do a complete history I needed to see what HOBBIT was like first. If anything, it feels most related to classic mainframe Star Trek mixed with some Wumpus, but let me play the game first, get into comparisons later–

The game is played on a 9 by 9 grid scattered with quite a few “warps” (that teleport the player), as well as gems, amulets, flares, demons (the enemies), and an Oracle. The rooms that don’t have any of those things just have “gems” (which can be used to bribe enemies or ask questions of the oracle). Commands are single letter directions (N/S/E/W) and (W)ait, (M)ap, (F)lare, (L)amp, (T)eleport, (K)ill, and (Q)uit. I ended up using the M key quite a bit, but you can imagine someone playing on a printer would not want the full map printed every step.

An example map. The special items are the same as in Wizard’s Castle.

The overall goal is to first find a Runestaff (which will be in a room that looks like it has a demon when looked into, but that’s a facade); the Runestaff allows teleportation, so the can then try to teleport to the right room (one of the rooms that teleports the player randomly otherwise) to find the Orb of Zot. The game’s instructions explain it like thus:

ALSO HIDDEN IN THE CASTLE ARE THE RUNESTAFF AND THE ORB OF ZOT. THE ORB IS DISGUISED AS A WARP AND THE ONLY WAY TO GET IT IS TO TELEPORT INTO ITS ROOM DIRECTLY. IF YOU TRY TO MOVE INTO ITS ROOM YOU WILL GO PAST IT IN THE SAME DIRECTION. TO TELEPORT YOU MUST USE THE RUNESTAFF WHICH IS DISGUISED AS A DEMON. BE CAREFUL WHEN YOU TELEPORT, HOWEVER, BECAUSE YOU LOSE ALL YOUR AMULETS AND GEMS (NOTE: YOU MAY ALSO DROP SOME GEMS EACH TIME YOU MOVE).

In most games of the Wizard’s Castle line the Lamp gets a lot of use — it can be used to peek in an unexplored room to see what is inside. The big catch here is that if there’s a demon, it can see you if you peek in, and charge.

This reminds me of waking up the Wumpus.

Getting charged seems common on higher difficulties especially. If you have one of the magic items it protects you, so the real reason to use a lamp would be to avoid warps, although I’ve found it better in general just to eat the teleport and resume walking from wherever the landing spot is. (This is especially because of how the Orb of Zot works, which I’ll get to later.)

(K)ill will try to do away with a demon for good, which involves simply invoking one of your items. Use an item enough times and it will run out of charge, meaning you need a different one.

The oracle will tell you — assuming you have the opal eye, or are willing to spend 20 gems — where one item is (except, unless I’m missing something, the runestaff or Orb of Zot, which aren’t given numbers). For example, on this screen I ask about the flares…

…and the map in progress below shows (in the last leg of the route) me going from the oracle to the location specified.

This is on difficulty 7 out of 9.

The flares will show all nearby numbers and are essentially the most powerful item in the game. They will not cause enemies to charge.

For the flare use above, here’s the actual result, with six of the squares revealed at once:

On lower difficulties, unless you get slammed early by a demon you’ll probably win (the lamp is worth using until you get one of the magic items to protect yourself). On higher difficulties, winning is harder, because the main obstacle is time.

This does not feel like Tolkien. It’s more like you’re facing off against Baba Yaga.

Hence why the flares are so useful: they explore the map in the fastest time possible.

As mentioned in the instructions earlier, the Runestaff and Orb of Zot have special conditions for finding them. The Runestaff will be in a room that appears to be a demon when looked at via lamp or flare (but isn’t). You don’t have to fight a demon to get the runestaff — you just walk in the right room and there it is.

The Orb of Zot is at one of the warps. At the Zot-Warp it works in a special way, by “jumping” the player over the square rather than hurtling them across the map. An example:

On the screenshot above, the Orb of Zot is at (5,2), so when you get the Runestaff you should teleport there, which essentially wins the game.

To summarize, the procedure for winning is:

a.) find at least one magic item (Ruby, Norn Stone, etc.) which can be used to resist demons

b.) trudge your way through the map and hope you find the flares; if you see the Oracle, ask about the flares (4), otherwise make sure to hit every demon and warp to check for the Runestaff and Orb of Zot

c.) as soon as you get the Runestaff, focus on entering into every warp until you find the one that has you “jump” to the next square as opposed to making a bigger warp; once you locate that, teleport to that exact square with the Runestaff.

Once you have the Orb of Zot you can still keep playing if you want to mop up more gems for points.

Regarding the Star Trek comparison — I’m not going to do a full history, but you can read through a playthrough here. While the placement on a grid could easily be coincidence, the thing that makes me fairly sure Bestler was making a reference is the flares. The Enterprise is on a large grid, and you activate a “long range scan” to see what happens to be nearby:

From Ahl’s Basic Computer Games.

While I can’t confirm (Caitlin Bestler died of cancer so I can’t ask her) I get the impression that the original HOBBIT was made separate from Dungeons and Dragons as a concern and is more along the lines of trying to convert the old computer games like Star Trek and Hunt the Wumpus to have a slight bit of fantasy flair. It is only historical inertia that we always associate “fantasy setting” with RPGs; Power, of course, started molding the form to fit that of the CRPG genre.

I incidentally did not bring up HOBBIT last time I talked about Tolkien games, but that’s because the connections are very tenuous and little more than namechecks (given Cthulhu is one of the demons, it’s playing pretty loose with the lore). However (just previewing my next post), imagine someone playing the game and disappointed that the references are so light, so they make their own version which really is Tolkienesque, and then someone else comes along and adds even more and — well, let’s save all that for next time.

Special thanks to Ethan Johnson and Kate Willaert who shared their research on Jamie Fenton and Ellen Kuhfeld. Ethan blogs at History of How We Play and Kate is at A Critical Hit!

Published 21:19 • 12 days ago

Planet Interactive Fiction

Saturday, 06. September 2025

Friday, 05. September 2025

Footnotes[+]

Thursday, 04. September 2025

Wednesday, 03. September 2025

Tuesday, 02. September 2025

a memorable incident in the development of an interactive fiction critic.

authors are not to be trusted.

a free audience and the production of meaning.

the wolf who cried boy: a work insisting upon its own credibility.

translucency.

the humiliated professor and other true tales of terror.

playing the game that is The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode.

there really is a hidden nazi mode.

well, now you know.

is credulity a game mechanic?

a note on care and the absence thereof

a player’s review of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode.

sources.

Monday, 01. September 2025

Welcome to the 31st Annual IFComp!

Sunday, 31. August 2025

Saturday, 30. August 2025

Friday, 29. August 2025

Thursday, 28. August 2025

Wednesday, 27. August 2025

Tuesday, 26. August 2025

**playing the game that is The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode.**

**a player’s review of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode.**