Planet Interactive Fiction

I’m still to this day just blown away by continental drift and things like that, stuff that most people think sounds pretty boring.

— Will Wright

Gamers are both extremely dedicated to and really good at preserving the history of their hobby. Seldom has a month gone by in the fifteen years that I’ve been writing for this site that I haven’t had cause to feel grateful for their efforts. During the early years, I was most thankful for their lovingly curated archives of 8-bit disk images and the emulators to run them on our modern-day supercomputers; more recently, it’s initiatives like ScummVM and the welter of patches and fixes that make it easier to experiences games that are, for all that they may be infinitely more advanced than the ones I started out writing about, nevertheless decades old by this point, designed for versions of Microsoft Windows that fell out of support before some people who are old enough to vote today were even born. More recently still, projects like Wine and Lutris have allowed me to run these games on Linux, in many cases more easily than I could under Windows. And then of course there’s MobyGames, a site I have visited and will doubtless continue to visit almost every single day that I write about gaming history.

It therefore pains me just slightly to say that, for all the good they do, these same fans can create a somewhat distorted impression of the history they work so hard to preserve. The fact is that the version of our ludic past which you find chronicled on a site like MobyGames is often markedly at odds with the real facts on the ground from back in the day. The games which get most of the attention there, and garner multiple loving retrospectives in fan journals like Retro Gamer magazine, are seldom the ones that actually sold the best. Then as now, the best way to sell a lot of games was to make ones that appealed to people who don’t self-identify as gamers, who would have no idea how to even begin to interact with a DOOM or a Starcraft, to whom it would certainly never occur in a million years to visit a site like MobyGames. For these people, games are just a way of passing the time, not a passion or a lifestyle. And there are a lot more of them than there are of us, my friends. If you’re basing your understanding of which games were the most successful in their day on the ones that have the largest quantity of nostalgic reviews on MobyGames, Steam, and GOG.com, you’ve gone badly astray.

The canonical example of this disconnect is Myst. Widely dismissed by the hardcore set as nothing more than a slideshow of pretty pictures wired together with a handful of switch-flipping set-piece puzzles, Myst was the face of the multimedia revolution in personal computing in the eyes of Jack and Jill America during the 1990s. As a result, it became the best-selling single game of the decade. There’s a surprising number of other non-core-gaming successes of almost the same magnitude to be spotted if you only pause to look, most of them without the note of highbrow artsiness that has always elevated the discussion around Myst. The most successful game ever made by Dynamix — the studio behind such hardcore classics as Articfox, Red Baron, Betrayal at Krondor, and Aces of the Deep — was a far more populist offering called Trophy Bass, which as of this writing has precisely zero reviews on MobyGames. And don’t even get me started on Deer Hunter, the schlocky big-box-store sensation of the late 1990s, a punchline among hardcore gamers that just sold and sold and sold and sold.

A subtler example of the phenomenon — also one that gives a modicum more hope than Deer Hunter for the taste and intelligence of the proverbial unwashed masses, even as it cuts across some of the boundaries behind hardcore and casual play — is SimCity. Designed by Will Wright and published in early 1989 by a company he co-founded called Maxis Software, SimCity‘s combination of compulsive playability with the serious, adult-approved theme of urban planning famously inspired Time magazine to write its first computer-game review ever within mere weeks of its release. The sky was the limit from there. The rumpled, chain-smoking, mile-a-minute-talking Wright became a minor celebrity in his own right as magazines, newspapers, and even television shows piled in to cover this game and this man that conformed to none of their preconceived stereotypes. Reflecting on those heady days in 2013, Wright called SimCity “kind of the earliest example of a game that was leaning more to a mainstream audience. They were interesting people that were not necessarily into dragons or history or sports. And so they were into games that were more about reality than fantasy.” The only game of the time that gained as much traction among people who didn’t usually play games was Tetris. But there was only so much you could say about a game of falling blocks, whereas the literally-titled SimCity, a game which really did purport to simulate an entire city, opened up endless vistas of thoughtful exposition in middlebrow media.

This discourse was frequently self-contradictory. On the one hand, SimCity’s lack of explicit goals or winning states caused it to be deemed the harbinger of a new generation of “software toys,” a frivolous-sounding description which Will Wright nevertheless enthusiastically embraced. On the other hand, the same media was full of reports of university professors and city councils who claimed to take the software toy seriously enough as a simulation to apply it to their work. Wright was more ambivalent about this sort of thing, presumably because he knew all too well just how much SimCity was not based on anything real in any but the most abstract of senses. Still, he couldn’t quite find it in himself to say that these folks were full of it either. Not until years later did he feel he could come completely clean and admit that SimCity was really “a caricature of the way a city works, not a realistic model.”

Many people come to us and say, “You should do the professional version.” That really scares me because I know how pathetic the simulations are, really, compared to reality. The last thing I want people to come away with is that we’re on the verge of being able to simulate the way that a city really develops, because we’re not.

At the time, though, few proved able to grasp this reality that, just because something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck on a computer screen, that doesn’t mean it is an accurate simulation of a duck. “When I was running Lower Gomorrah, something that looked like a city and felt like a city,” pondered tech journalist Steven Levy, “was I really manipulating anything that bore formal resemblance to a city? How relevant is the imitation of the real thing?” (The answers to these questions, for the record, are “not really” and “not very.”)

But whatever its shortcomings as a real, honest-to-God simulation of urban spaces, there can be no doubt that SimCity should be numbered among the most influential games of all time. In this respect, it makes a stark contrast to Myst, which proved to be something of an evolutionary dead end after the inevitable flurry of largely unsuccessful clones (and one almost as successful direct sequel) had exhausted themselves. SimCity spawned a new gaming sub-genre known as the city-builder, a niche category to be sure but one that proved far more popular and enduring than first-person slideshow adventure games. And yet this constitutes the merest beginning of SimCity’s actual influence. By showing how a real-time approach could benefit even a game that wasn’t particularly interested in testing its player’s reflexes, it revealed new possibilities to designers, who went on to implement real-time in a wide array of strategy games, from Railroad Tycoon to Europa Universalis. And in popularizing and legitimizing the notions of “builder games” and “software toys,” it likewise changed design aesthetics forever; after it, even games that did boast the campaigns and stories and goals that SimCity had so conspicuously lacked felt obliged to provide a “sandbox” or “free-play” mode to satisfy the appetites that Will Wright had inculcated. In all of these ways and more, SimCity’s influence extends astonishingly far afield. For example, Sid Meier has gone on record many times to say that Civilization would never have come to be absent SimCity. (He actually tried very, very hard to make the original Civilization run in real-time before finally accepting that it just wasn’t a good fit with the other parts of the design.) Whatever your favorite modern game happens to be, the odds are better than even that it bears a trace of SimCity somewhere in its DNA.

In a more immediate context, though, the success of SimCity posed a dilemma for Will Wright: what would he and Maxis do to follow up a game that was being discussed in borderline worshipful terms in such unlikely media organs as InfoWorld, The New York Times, and Newsweek? Wright was determined to keep on keeping on with his idiosyncratic vision of games as intricate systems to be tinkered with and learned from rather than competitions to be won or interactive stories to be experienced. Why should he do anything else, given the money and celebrity that SimCity was garnering him? Maxis’s co-founder Jeff Braun, the business mind to complement Wright’s creative one, thought his responsibility was “to protect him [Wright], in a sense, and create a structure where he can do his thing. It really was not about me and what I thought would be successful. It was about Will and getting his creative thing out.”

At the Game Developer’s Conference in the spring of 1990, Wright made a presentation that says as much about his way of thinking about games as it does the heady tenor of the times. He proposed an industry-wide standardized file format “so that players could switch accomplishments from one imaginary world to another. For instance, one might be able to use the road system from SimCity in order to race in Vette!, or one’s approval rating for the former might be enhanced by one’s accomplishments in, say, Ultima VI.” (Had these three games ever been mentioned together in the same sentence before?)

Naïve and ultimately pointless though the proposal may be, it demonstrates something important about Will Wright. In his mind, all of the games he would make or enable to be made in the future would be in some sense part of a single larger, overarching game, an entire simulated universe. To Will Wright it was, to paraphrase Neil Young, all one game.

The dawn of the 1990s was an important period for environmental science, when talk of temporally and/or geographically localized effects like acid rain began to shift toward wider-frame discussions of human impacts on our planet over a scale of many generations; not coincidentally, it was at this time that the term “global warming” first entered the popular discourse in a big way. The original Civilization’s inclusion of global warming as a game mechanic, one of the few drawbacks it saw to its larger theme of boundless human Progress, is very much a reflection of the period in which it was conceived. This statement is even more true about Will Wright’s SimEarth, which appeared a year and a half before Civilization, in mid-1990. Rather than just incorporating one trending aspect of environmental theory as a mechanic, it aspired to be a full-blown simulation of the Gaia hypothesis about our planet.

Dating back to the mid-1970s, and with philosophical and spiritual roots stretching back thousands of year further, the Gaia hypothesis was the brainchild of a former NASA scientist named James Lovelock. It proposed that all of the Earth, both its living and its non-living components, ought to be seen and understood as a single interlocking system, almost a meta-organism unto itself. By Lovelock’s own description,

Gaia is a hard-science theory about the evolution of the Earth and the life upon it. In no way is it contradictory to Darwin; it extends Darwinism to include the evolution of the rocks, the atmosphere, and the oceans. Gaia theory sees the evolution of the material world and the evolution of the organisms as a tightly coupled process. Changes in the organisms always affect the environment, and vice versa.

The problem in the opinion of most mainstream scientists was that Lovelock was never able to adequately explain just how this symbiosis occurred, how the living could so comprehensively communicate with and affect the non-living. It sounded to them more like mysticism or religion than science, a point which they hammered home again and again. Said point is probably valid enough according to the principles of hard science, but the Gaia hypothesis remains immensely appealing and even inspiring as a thought experiment, almost regardless of its literal truth. This was expressed with surprising eloquence back in 1990 by gaming journalist Rusel DeMaria:

The Gaia hypothesis helps us to see this warm, blue sphere not as a rock which happens to support life in the middle of the forbidding void of space, but as an organism that has successfully sustained its own state of aliveness for billions of years. Are we part of the evolution of a super-organism? Will we be the beings that help that organism reproduce itself in space and throughout the galaxy? These are some of the questions I’ve considered since encountering Dr. Lovelock’s remarkable theory. My view of the world is forever changed.

James Lovelock was always interested in using computers to model and teach his hypothesis, believing that it was easier to understand Gaia if one could see it in action than if one could only read about it on the page. In the early 1980s, he and a colleague named Andrew Watson developed an extremely simple simulation they called Daisyworld, which modeled a planet that was host to only two forms of life: white daisies that reflected sunlight and black daisies that absorbed it. Therefore white daises would tend to make the planet cooler, all else being equal, while black daisies warmed it up. The fun, if you chose to call it that, was in tinkering with the daisy numbers and coverage to see what kind of climate resulted. Daisyworld was partly intended as riposte to those scientists who said that the Gaia hypothesis lacked a mechanism to explain how living things could affect the planet to the extent claimed. Alas, most of them were still not convinced: they said that such a simplified model was all well and good for understanding some aspects of the environment, not least human-caused climate change, but it didn’t begin to address the full scope of the symbiosis of the Gaia hypothesis.

But the point remains that Lovelock had a well-known interest in computer modeling. On that basis, Stewart Brand, a proudly unreformed hippie with a techno-optimist bent, the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, introduced him to Will Wright in the first blush of the latter’s SimCity fame. The two quickly decided to collaborate on a simulation of a living planet that would be far more sophisticated than DaisyWorld, that would model the evolution of a planet and all of the life that might eventually arise on it over billions and billions of years. This planet could be as similar to or different from our Earth as the player wished. At first, Wright and Lovelock thought to call their simulation simply Gaia, but bowed in the due course of things to the wisdom of Jeff Braun, who said that Maxis had the beginning of a wonderful brand in the name of SimCity and that they ought to exploit it. Thus Gaia became SimEarth: The Living Planet.

SimEarth was an almost achingly earnest exercise, a million miles away from what the average person on the street might imagine a videogame to be. The official strategy guide, written by the aforementioned Rusel DeMaria, included what might have been the only call to political action ever presented in this genre of books that were usually all about tips, tricks, and cheats to improve your score and impress your friends: “It is my hope that by bringing these issues to your attention, we’ll all be able to remember our priorities and perhaps take action to stop our destructive behaviors and find ways to live in harmony with our world.” Maxis promised to funnel a portion of the game’s proceeds into environmental charities. Lovelock wrote that he hoped SimEarth “might develop into something more [than just a game], a personal model that might become a guide for living right with the world. A way of testing for ourselves the long-term consequences of different ways of living.”

If there was a goal to be found in SimEarth, it must be to guide one’s personal Gaia along until it yielded intelligent life capable of surviving and thriving in harmony with the planet. Johnny L. Wilson, an ordained Christian minister who also happened to be the editor of Computer Gaming World magazine, took on the task of reviewing SimEarth himself. One might have expected him to be hostile to the very idea of a game where Darwinian evolution took such pride of place, but he declared that in the end SimEarth only reaffirmed his faith, by showing him that life could only evolve if he, in the role of the God of this simulation, tinkered with the system constantly to ensure that the fragile flora and fauna on his planet could progress from stage to stage. It wasn’t the dramatic creation narrative of the Book of Genesis, but it was good enough for him.

Of course, we shouldn’t get too carried away by SimEarth, any more than we should by SimCity. It may have been created with a more serious intent than SimCity, but all of the same caveats about its accuracy as a simulation apply; if anything, they’re amplified by the absurd vastness of its scope. Yet that need not have mattered so much if it could convince its players to think differently about our delicate planet and our relationship to it. Sadly, however, it never found anything like the same audience as SimCity, because it just wasn’t as relatable. Even colossal failures of urban planning could be fun in SimCity — in fact, sometimes the most fun of all. But if you failed to twiddle the knobs just right in SimEarth, you just wound up with a dead lump of rock rather than a cataclysmic fire or an epic traffic jam to gawk at. It was all so very slow and abstract, so divorced from real life as its players knew it.

This would prove to be something of a problem for Will Wright and Maxis going forward. Their earnest simulations of big ideas weren’t always all that obviously fun. Although SimEarth sold well initially, its momentum petered out as it became clear that this software toy was less joyously playful than its predecessor. The same fate would befall almost every Maxis game that didn’t bear the name of SimCity for a long time to come.

That said, Wright’s next game did include more whimsy and humor than were to be found in the stolidly portentous SimEarth. Like so many of his other games, 1991’s SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony was inspired by his readings in popular science: in this case, by the book The Ants by E.O. Wilson, the dark-horse winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. This time, however, Wright was not able to work directly with the man whose theories he was trying to bring to interactive life on the computer. Wilson neglected to read closely the letter Wright sent him proposing a collaboration, and was thus left to find out about SimAnt after it was finished, just like everyone else. But when he did, he praised its “sophistication and precision,” so it was all good.

E.O. Wilson was the man who first discovered that individual ants, although each possessed of only the most rudimentary forms of awareness, communicate over amazingly long distances using pheromones, resulting in a group intelligence that enormously transcends that of its constituent parts. Seen in a certain light, then, Wright’s first three Sim games were all grappling with what he liked to called “distributed,” communal forms of sentience: SimEarth on a macro level, SimAnt on a micro level, and SimCity somewhere in between. In SimAnt, you have to find the right ratio of breeders to workers to soldiers in the colony you build around your all-important queen. You also have to contend with a rival ant colony and other, bigger creatures that can wreak havoc on your insect society, such as a marauding tarantula.

Wright and the slowly growing team around him at Maxis did look for ways to make this simulation more relatable than SimEarth. If you need an action fix, you can take direct control of one of your soldier ants and charge into battle. Maxis even deigned to include a score and a high-score table. The ultimate achievement is to drive a hapless human and his dog right out of their house. Observing all of this, Computer Gaming World noted that there weren’t actually all that many differences between the life of your ant colony and “an exciting space-opera story line”: “The horrible, nearly indestructible insect-like monster in the movie Alien was, after all, a souped-up, acid-puking, survivalist ant from a mixed marriage with a scorpion.”

But, for all that ravenous insects — not to mention hive minds — had been a staple of science fiction since the very beginning, the answer to the question of whether people wanted to spend hours on end seeing the world through insectoid compound photo-receptors proved mixed. Although SimAnt did considerably better than SimEarth in the long run, selling over 100,000 copies, Wright was vaguely disappointed that its primary demographic wound up being “ten-to-thirteen-year-old” boys, the group best primed to respond to its squishy sound effects and shadings of the grotesque: “I was expecting it to be more older people that would appreciate how amazingly interesting ants are as an example of distributed intelligence. But in fact, I ended up appealing to twelve-year-olds who just loved playing with ants.” Ah, well… it’s better to have the “wrong” customers than no customers at all. The latter would be the case to an alarming degree for the two games after SimAnt.

Those two games marked the first times that Maxis applied the Sim branding to the work of other designers than Will Wright. By now, the studio had developed into a utopian collective of thinkers and dreamers, who barely felt they were a part of the commercial games industry at all and definitely didn’t feel like they had to abide by its usual rules. SimCity, that gift that kept on giving, ensured that, funding whatever esoteric experiments they wished to pursue.

A former Apple hardware engineer named Ken Karakotsios was responsible for SimLife, Maxis’s most esoteric simulation yet, which abandoned all of the concessions to accessibility that were to be found in SimAnt. SimLife was responding to yet another buzz in popular science, in this case over the prospects for digital “cellular automata” — or, to use the title of a popular 1992 book by Steven Levy, Artificial Life.

This notion of self-replicating digital organisms was an old one in computer science even then, having originated in the 1940s with John von Neumann. It was given a practical spin circa 1970 by the mathematician John Conway, whose Game of Life allowed the user to set up collections of “cells” in different configurations on a computer and then watch to see what patterns they created as they lived and died. The claims that were made on the basis of simple experiments like this one were either boldly visionary or wildly overblown, depending on your point of view. The Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, for one, was all-in, being convinced that this was the path to computer sentience.

To declare that the personoids are somehow “handicapped” with respect to us, inasmuch as they do not see or hear as we do, is totally absurd. With equal justice one could assert that it is we who are deprived with respect to them — unable to feel with immediacy the phenominalism of mathematics, which, after all, we know only in cerebral, inferential fashion. They live in it; it is their air, clouds, water, and even bread — yes, even food, because in a certain sense they take nourishment from it. To say they are imprisoned inside the machine is mere journalism.

But, as so often happens in fields of or adjacent to artificial intelligence, the boosters found it hard to explain how genuine consciousness was going to arise from their crude imitations of life.

This isn’t to say that cellular-automata couldn’t be useful and intriguing. Will Wright himself had employed some of these approaches in all three of his Sim games. Ken Karakotsios’s implementation of them was at bottom a dramatically expanded version of The Game of Life, which permitted the single cells to evolve into all manner of plants and animals, then compete and cooperate in various simulated environments while the player tinkered from on-high as much or as little as she preferred. It was interesting enough conceptually even if one hadn’t drunk all of the artificial-life Kool Aid — it was a decent simulation of the way that evolution is believed to work in the non-digital world as well — but the things that had made SimEarth problematic as a marketplace proposition were exaggerated even further here: it was all just so attenuated, so very abstract. And it didn’t help that, on a superficial level at least, it was plowing so much of the same ground as SimEarth, which had also allowed you to watch lifeforms evolve, albeit in the context of a grander world simulation.

Computer scientist Christopher Langton, the most prominent academic booster of cellular automata at the time, said that SimLife was “awfully close to being a useful tool for scientific research.” Yet it was competing with games, not with scientific tools. It became Maxis’s worst-selling release to date.

SimFarm, which was conceived and designed by a former Maxis playtester named Eric Albers, was more down to earth in all respects. As Maxis’s marketing copy put it, it was “SimCity’s country cousin,” simulating the life of a farm. But it turned out that digging irrigation ditches was less exciting than building roads, and that watching cows graze was less entertaining than watching human commuters go about their day. SimCity was kinetic; SimFarm just sat there baking in the sun, succeeding mostly in demonstrating why fleeing the farm for the bright lights and big city has long been such a staple of fiction and nonfiction. It didn’t sell much better than SimLife.

A meeting of great gaming minds. Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright, and Jeff Braun in Japan, October 1989.

Indeed, SimEarth, SimAnt, SimLife, and SimFarm combined struggled to come within an order of magnitude of SimCity’s total sales. Defying the usual logical of the computer-game marketplace, SimCity’s sales increased rather than decreased year by year, as more and more people who weren’t traditional gamers, hackers, or nerds brought computers into their homes, thanks to the excitement about CD-ROM and multimedia, the user-friendliness of the latest versions of Microsoft Windows, and, soon enough, the chatter about the burgeoning World Wide Web. SimCity subsidized everything else that Maxis did.

It had been widely ported from its first home on the Apple Macintosh. First it had made its way to the Commodore Amiga, then to MS-DOS, the platform where it really started to drum up the sales figures. After that came just about every other viable or semi-viable computing platform in the Western world, including even such aged refugees of an earlier computing epoch as the Commodore 64 (the machine on which Wright had coded his first prototype of the game), the Sinclair Spectrum, and the BBC Micro. But the next really key port after the MS-DOS one was to the new Nintendo Super Entertainment System, the much-anticipated successor to the best-selling single games console to date. When the SNES came to North America in August of 1991, SimCity was one of its launch titles, serving as an early demonstration that this console was capable of far more than the likes of Super Mario Bros.

It’s therefore ironic to note that SimCity’s biggest champion inside Nintendo was none other than the creator of Super Mario Bros., the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto. Wright had first bonded with him over the course of a week-long, exploratory visit to Japan in October of 1989. Nintendo then agreed to undertake the port themselves under Miyamoto’s guidance, “Nintendoizing” the game without losing its essence. Miyamoto inserted his American friend into the proceedings as “Dr. Wright,” who popped up from time to time to offer comments and advice, doing much to personalize a game that was, like all of Maxis’s software toys, utterly bereft of identifiable characters in its original form. Having SimCity on the SNES, which quickly became a bigger self-contained market for games than all of the existing computer platforms combined, was another huge boon for Maxis, even if the more cartoony look wasn’t going to do them any favors with the furled-brow Time magazine crowd.

At the same time that they were expanding onto a living-room console, Maxis was becoming a publisher of out-of-house games. These weren’t generally given the Sim branding but did tend to be aligned with it in spirit. Maxis provided an entrée to the American market for any number of international studios whose abstruse concepts had been given short shrift by other publishers. Their games ranged from A-Train, a Japanese-developed, finance-heavy Railroad Tycoon competitor that gave the lie to the idea that all Japanese games were simple and cutesy like Super Mario Bros., to a passive Russian “aquarium simulator” called El-Fish that was as proudly goalless — some might opt for the term “pointless” — as anything that ever sprang from the mind of Will Wright.

Many of these were worthy, even noble efforts in their way, even if they don’t float your humble author’s particular boat. But that fact kind of points out the problem with them: they were ultra-nichey titles that demanded players who were seriously interested in their unusual subject matter, at a time when the distribution systems of commercial computer gaming were not well-suited to such products. Maxis struggled even to get them into the stores where they might be bought. Few retail orderers were excited about wasting precious shelf space on El-Fish when that same shelf could be filled with yet more copies of DOOM and Myst — and yes, of SimCity as well.

In the summer of 1992, Jeff Braun traded 30 percent of Maxis’s equity and a seat on the company’s board for a cash injection of $10 million from Warburg Pincus Ventures. The deal was predicated on the understanding that some of the money would be used for a new SimCity that was more in tune with the expectations of the 1990s, one that could be sold to all of the people who had bought the first one all over again, at the same time that it hopefully reached large numbers of new people.

At the time, Will Wright had been tinkering for months with something that even the dreamy minds around him didn’t quite understand, a virtual dollhouse that he was building up from some of the core algorithms of SimAnt. By Wright’s own admission, Braun had to “drag” him away from it to do SimCity 2000. He wound up devoting more than a year of his life to the project, but he did so more begrudgingly than passionately, because his trusted business partner was telling him that Maxis needed this game in order to survive and make possible all of the other ones. “I was in management mode,” he says. “I had a pretty clear idea of what the design would be, since we were basically just doing a sequel, which is always easier. It was more just making sure the engineering was good and the performance was decent.”

Co-designed by Fred Haslam, who had previously worked with Wright  and James Lovelock on SimEarth, SimCity 2000 was a new software-development experience for Maxis all the way around. Prior to this point, Maxis had been as much a creative playground as a serious company, happily thumbing its nose at all of the established industry logic about what you needed to do to actually sell games. And, sure enough, they hadn’t sold all that terribly many games beyond the sui generis SimCity. Now, Braun told everyone, they needed to make their sequel to that game match a set of bullet points that were demanded by the marketplace, needed not to challenge anyone’s expectations unduly while they were doing so, and, most importantly of all, needed to have the finished product ready to go for the Christmas buying season of 1993. They managed all of these feats, but not without some friction and hard feelings. Some employees, finding the dictates to be a betrayal of everything they had thought Maxis stood for, quit rather than abide by them. Those who stayed became familiar before all was said and done with the nature of crunch, another new experience for Maxis people.

In the end, though, SimCity 2000 did exactly what was required of it, both as a computer program and as a commercial product. The most obvious improvement over its predecessor of four and a half years previous was in the visuals. An isometric view replaced the old top-down one, the onscreen color count increased from 16 to 256, and professional artists were… well, suffice to say that they were present this time. The difference really was night and day.

To the improved visuals were added an improved interface and a host of fairly commonsense gameplay extensions: hospitals and schools, new types of heavy industry and power plants, a plumbing system, subways and trains and other new transportation options. (One can detect some influence from Railroad Tycoon in these, feeding back into the game that had done so much to inspire it; game design has always been a dialog.) You could choose an historical starting date for your game and take advantage of new technologies as they became available: subways in 1910, buses in 1920, highways in 1930, etc., all the way up to microwave and fusion power in 2050. (If only…) As your city’s mayor, you could issue ordinances and read about your accomplishments and your follies in an in-game newspaper. It was all done well, but at the same time not overdone, being still eminently recognizable as the same SimCity that the old fans knew and loved. In the eyes of a business professional like Jeff Braun, it was the perfect sequel.

He was amply rewarded for his foresight in getting it out before the first SimCity cash cow had dried up completely. SimCity 2000 rocketed up the bestseller charts that Christmas of 1993 in just the way that all of those other recent Maxis games hadn’t. Then it kept right on selling for months and then years, another rare perennial in an intensely seasonal industry, a game so popular that it spawned three separate trade-paperback strategy guides from big outside book publishers. Although Maxis had as yet found only one way to actually make consistent money, they were fortunate in that it made them a lot of money. Having given SimCity another lease on life, they could go back to being weird… okay, no, let’s call it esoteric.

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Sources: The books Games That Sell! by Mark H. Walker, Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine by Chaim Gingold, SimEarth: The Official Strategy Guide by Rusel DeMaria, SimCity 2000: Power, Politics, and Plumbing (revised ed.) by Nick Dargahi and Michael Bremer, SimCity 2000 Strategies and Secrets (2nd ed.) by Daniel A. Tauber and Brenda Kienan, The Official SimCity 2000 Planning Commission Handbook by Peter Spear and Johnny L. Wilson, Game Design Theory & Practice (2nd ed.) by Richard Rouse III, and Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology by Steven Levy. Macworld of April 1990; Computer Gaming World of September 1990, January 1991, March 1992, September 1992, April 1993, July 1993, and November 1993; Retro Gamer 115 and 210.

Online sources include the collection of Maxis articles by Phil Salvador at The Obscuratory, Matt Barton’s video interview with Jeff Tunnell, and Tristan Donovan’s interview with Will Wright for the old Gamasutra site.

Where to Get Them: Of the Maxis games described in this article, only SimCity 2000 is currently available as a digital purchase.

Oaths & Ashes is a narrative-driven vampire visual novel set in present-night Berlin, after the fall of the city’s Prince left the Camarilla in retreat and the Anarchs fighting over the wreckage. You play two Kindred whose fates collide: Alice, a disciplined Ventrue sent in to keep the city from unifying, and Lenz, a burned-out Thinblood alchemist who survives on the Ashes – a drug refined from the ashes of destroyed Kindred. Their weapons are words, influence, supernatural Disciplines and forbidden Alchemy. Every choice you make will redraw Berlin’s map of power. It is a story about what people are worth when no one is left to hand them a title.

Wishlist it on Steam today!

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

When midnight strikes, public streets turn into racetracks and every turn has a price. In Los Santino, everyone answers to the call of adrenaline pumping speed, including you. Build your legend as a top racer or become another name lost in the huddle.

Velocity: The Race Begins is 30% off until July 9th!

Velocity: The Race Begins is an exciting 300,000-word interactive racing novel by Matt Ryland, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Choose the type of person you will become. Will you fight all for yourself? Or will you stand by family? Rise through an underground scene ruled by ruthless gangs, organized mafias, crooked cops, and other racers who think they own the streets.

• Play as male or female.
• Forge your skills behind the wheel! Work on your abilities to become the best racer in Los Santino! Craft your own style of racing!
• Tune the machine! Upgrade your ride, add Nitros, and blaze the highways in style!
• Challenge other racers to race to prove who’s the best!
• Pick your crew, join a family! Or tackle the underworld alone!
• Investigate the mysteries of Los Santino! Discover the disturbing truths hidden deep within the neon city!
• Try and avoid the heat! Engage in thrilling police chase where it’s you against the law!
• Romance or rival! Find love amidst the chaos!
• Make your name! Climb to the top the circuit and become the champ!
• Contribute to the chaos! Join a gang and love life on the wild side!

 Live your life a quarter mile at a time.

Matt 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.

As promised, the latest from the Visible Zorker project: Visible Starcross!

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

This was a fun one to work on. Infocom tackled the idea of epic sci-fi with verve, if not absolute originality. (Even at age 13, I thought "Huh, the author must have read Rendezvous with Rama.") The alien beings you discover are set-pieces, but each one is a cameo-sized micro-story within the spacecraft's long journey. An early example of we'd call "environmental storytelling" these days.

As it happens, I never owned a copy of Starcross. I bought a copy -- for a friend's bar mitzvah, with the shameless intention of immediately pirating it back for myself. (Don't worry, I traded him all my Zorks.) This means I do not have the treasured flying-saucer package, nor the wonderful mass detector chart (printed in un-Xeroxable purple and orange on silver paper).

But don't worry; I've redrawn that chart for your pleasure:

If you want to see photographs of the original map and packaging, visit the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History.

As for the in-game map display, I'll leave that as a surprise. Suffice it to say that the interior of a cylindrical space station was an entertaining mapping challenge.

By the way, this is the first known release of Starcross (release 15). Normally I prefer to use the Masterpieces release of each game for the Visible Zorker project. For Starcross that would be release 17. However, we don't have source code for r17, so I had to go back to r15 for this exhibit.

More readings on Starcross:

• The Digital Antiquarian
• Drew Cook
• Jason Dyer

And, as a bonus:

• Walkthrough by David Welbourn (just released this week!)

Upcoming work:

Visible Suspended will be the next public release on August 1st. Watch for robots!

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

For the record, NarraScope in Albany went great.

See you next month!

On Monday, June 29, 2026, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of interactive fiction at Patreon and Ko-fi.

Starcross (1982) by David Lebling

In this sci-fi game set in 2186, and you play as a miner of black holes. It’s a risky but potentially lucrative business. Your spaceship, the M.C.S. Starcross, detects a likely prospect, but the unknown mass turns out to be a gigantic alien cylinder. Explore it, brave its dangers, and claim a reward you didn’t even dream was possible.

This game was written in ZIL and was also published on the Masterpieces of Infocom CD.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Eclipse (2026) by Gianluca Girelli

In this sci-fi adventure, you play as Morgan Tyler, a 25-year-old citizen of the planet Thalos. Fhenor Darkscepter, once Thalos’s charismatic governor, is now its tyrant. In an desperate attempt to get help from Earth, you use an eclipse to mask your ship’s escape. But tragically, you crashland on an unknown hostile planet, and your ship is in pieces. Are you and Thalos now doomed?

This is an English translation and Inform port of the game “Morgan Tyler: Eclypse” (1986) written in The Quill and Illustrator, in Italian, by Bonaventura Di Bello. This version of the game is part of the The BDB Project. It is also the first game in the Morgan Tyler series.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Photopia (1998) by Adam Cadre (writing as “Opal O’Donnell”)

You and the author tell a story together about two girls: Alley and Wendy. It is a bittersweet puzzleless story that weaves together both pleasant fantasy and the tragedy of lost potential. Many of the story’s chapters are color-coded, and the uncolored sections are presented out of chronological order.

This story was an entry in IF Comp 1998 where it won both 1st place overall and the Miss Congeniality award. At the 1998 XYZZY Awards, it won both the Best Writing and Best Story awards, and was a finalist in five other categories (Best Game, Best NPCs, Best Individual Puzzle, Best Individual NPC, and Best Use of Medium). Furthermore, Photopia placed very highly in every edition of the Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time, and it also placed 2nd in the Top Five IF Games (Adventure Gamers, 2002).

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

The Cruel Count’s Castle (2026) by Drosselmeyer

In this escape game, you play as the Marchioness Laurentina, kidnapped by the cruel Count Chiropterio to languish in his castle’s dungeon, with a chain locked to your wrist and a rotten corpse as your benchmate, until you sign away your very soul. A fouler fate cannot be imagined!

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

The Antediluvian Weapon (2026) by Daniel M. Stelzer

In this small game of magical espionage, you play as Valentre of Lucenza, a spy teleported into a strongroom in Piostro to steal a recently-excavated weapon of the Antediluvians that makes things vanish. “Recover the relic, recover Manzio if you can, and get out of the palace.”

This game was written in Dialog and was an entry in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam of 2026.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Epic Expedition (2026) by dgtziea

In this simple game, all humans now live in outer space. As part of a expedition studying the ancient terrestrials, your ship drops you off to find and capture a small lifeform detected somewhere inside this old “Epic Burger” building. After the scientists study the specimen, they will release it unharmed.

This game was written in Adventuron and was an entry in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam of 2026.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

The Gnomish Treasury (2026) by Nell Shaw Cohen

In this cozy crafting game, you play as Nat Nimblebrush, the custodian of the royal treasury. Three crates of gnomish artifacts from a human warlord’s fortress have been carried into your workshop. It is your task to repair and label the artifacts, and then display them in the king’s galleries. It’s also a chance to impress your boss, your king, and your mentor.

This game was an entry in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam of 2026.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Violet (2008) by Jeremy Freese

In this one-room romantic comedy, you play as an easily-distracted 30-year-old graduate student in their on-campus Wisconsin office. I’m your vivacious and talented girlfriend, Violet. I hate that I had to give you an ultimatum, dundeecake, especially on your birthday, but your procrastination gave me no choice. Write a thousand words for your dissertation today or I’m flying back to Australia tomorrow morning. To help encourage you, I’m here, in spirit, as the game’s narrator. Please, wallaroo, just WRITE. For us? For me?

This game was an entry at IF Comp 2008 where it took both 1st place overall and 1st place for Miss Congeniality. At the 2008 XYZZY Awards, it won Best Game, Best Writing, Best Individual Puzzle, and Best Individual NPC; it was also a finalist in five other categories. This game also appears in several editions of the Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time lists.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

There is still one glaring weakness in Sharpee directly related to separating logic from text emission. Sharpee is intentionally a developer-first/author-second platform and I've leaned into that design. I often use the words, "The Sharpee Way," when talking to Claude.

As an exercise I had Claude review how text is created and manipulated in Inform 6/7 and TADS and how the same capabilities could be wrought within The Sharpee Way. The review was not kind, but not completely without hope either.

I had to keep Claude from going down hacked paths several times, but finally directed it to Phrase Algebra. We want the text emission logic to be deterministic from the turn results (event messages, message IDs, and parameters). This means that everything that is needed to emit complex combinations of text, including: punctuation, pronouns, lists, numerical wording, capitalization, and grammatical person - these all need to be accounted in this as-yet designed Phrase Algebra.

This is clearly a massive breaking change to the currently functioning platform and authors can skirt all of it with clever Typescript programming, so I cut the code as v1 and v2. v1 is now a maintenance branch and main is v2.

After that initial design phase, the ADRs and plans are identified and the implementation is nearing completion.

The Phrase Algebra

This required a large set of architecture decision records all coordinated on the primary goal. Post-turn logical and deterministic text construction.

Examples

These are examples of templates that either reside in the language provider package (lang-en-us is the default) or the author's story.

I suspect this will go through some growing pains and the syntax may find friendlier definitions, but this change gives the author the means to logically format text without concatenation logic, including being unconcerned about punctuation, capitalization, pronouns, and lists. Those just fall out naturally.

The Slot atom is the really interesting one. It allows other things to add data to an event message. So an NPC can add its own piece to an event message and that will automatically trigger extended formatting logic.

Of course this implementation may land flat and could induce a redesign, but Sharpee is still an experiment. V1.2 is very real and capable of delivering parser-based web IF, but I continue to find things to tweak and that's unlikely to change for the foreseeable future.

(Continued from my previous posts.)

One thing to keep in mind with mainframe adventure games is they were often experienced by players of that period in a state of “under construction”. This started directly with Crowther who left a literal “under construction” sign in the lower parts of his cave, where one of the exits simply crashes the game. This was kept to an extent by Woods (who left “under construction” in at Witt’s End) but Woods also had one release that included his own “under construction” sign, where the troll bridge would later be.

David Lebling’s map of the “250 point” variant of Adventure, at his GDC 2014 postmortem of Zork.

While the most recent version of a game (as complete as the authors have made it) is generally what modern players have, someone playing Acheton in 1978 (directly on campus at Cambridge) would not have the same gameplay as someone playing Acheton in 1981. It’s easy to forget we aren’t dealing with static works but moving targets, and David Lebling (see image above) only played a partial version of Crowther/Woods before starting on Zork.

This causes an extra issue: is what we are seeing not working because the author hasn’t implemented it yet, or is it a puzzle to be solved? In exploring the regions visitable by the train in Thissala (two very small, one very large) this question came up multiple times.

It’s not common to see literal Under Construction signs in games any more, although this area blocking off one direction of a street is from the 2026 demo for Nirvana Noir.

Before getting to that train, one issue that Rob mentioned in the comments (which I hadn’t even really dealt with yet due to a bug). Specifically, this has to do with the donation box at the church, which has a CHEVY key inside. As long as you don’t take the key, you are able to pick up the box.

Inside the old church
You are standing inside of an old village church. The interior of the church is lit from light filtering through the stained class windows high in the roof. Towards the front of the church you can see a small pulpet, behind which are rows of benches. Immediately in front of you is a small, brown, walnut table, that stands about 3 feet high.
On the table, is a beautiful veneer box, with a slot cut in the top.

SCORE
You currently have 0 out of 750 points, requiring 13 moves
You current classification is ABSOLUTE MORON.

GET BOX
Taken.

SCORE
You currently have 5 out of 750 points, requiring 15 moves
You current classification is ABECEDARIAN.

The change in points means it counts as a treasure (which goes… ???) Trying to make it out with the box results in death.

OUT
Old Church

NE
There is a loud crash of thunder, and as the sound reverberates through the lands, echoing off Minor and Major mountains, a deep dietal voice rumbles “THOU SHALL NOT STEAL”. There is a flash of lightening and as the bolt strikes you you find yourself still outside the old church …Unfortunately, you are now a pile of ashes, or to put it more simply … you are dead.

Notice there’s an extra turn here for you to do something (suggesting maybe there’s a puzzle-action here to survive) but is there really? Or is this an incomplete puzzle? Especially suggestive of the puzzle being unfinished is the fact that taking the CHEVY key out results in the player not being able to pick up the box (it is now described as fixed in place) which is clearly a bug, and putting the key back in doesn’t fix the problem.

Given there’s no clear place where treasures go I’m fine stalling on thinking about this anyway and moving on to the train station. I never was able to win the fight against the three enemies in the “niche” so I don’t know what clearing that space out does.

ATTACK PIRATE WITH SCIMITAR
Though you hit the pirate, it is still alive
The pirate, with an evil gleam in his eye, strikes and slashes, but you still live.
The giant rat circles … He bites you squarely … and you feel the life running out of you

The niche is not important for boarding the train; you can just wait at the regular station for long enough and it will show up. It seems to be on a two-hour cycle. When the game’s time is on 1:00 (or 3:00, 5:00, 7:00, etc.) the train visits the main station. At the half hour, it reaches “River’s End”, at the next hour it reaches “Dry Gulch”, and at the next half hour after that it reaches “Stark Beach” before returning back to the main train station.

WAIT
It is now 13:0
Now arriving on track number one, the VS+EL local train.

BOARD
Welcome aboard the VS+EL Railroad. Have a nice trip.

Main station (aboard the VS+EL)
This is the main station of the Very Short and Extremely Local railroad (the VS+EL RR). There is a small station house to the east of here.

WAIT
It is now 13:5
Main station (aboard the VS+EL)
This is the main station of the Very Short and Extremely Local railroad (the VS+EL RR). There is a small station house to the east of here.

WAIT
It is now 13:10
In the tunnel (aboard the VS+EL)

WAIT
It is now 13:15
Emerging from the tunnel (aboard the VS+EL)
You are emerging from a large tunnel dug in the base of Major Mountain. Behind you, you can see the entrance carved from the rock. In front of you is a large field.

For reasons that will become quickly clear, I’m getting River’s End (first stop) and Stark Beach (third stop) out of the way first before discussing Dry Gulch.

This map is the entirety of River’s End:

I wish I could say this area is clue-laden or at least filled with potential, but this really comes off as a stub that the authors intended to get back to.

Oceanside station
There is a small station platform here. To the distant south, you can see the ocean
Sitting at the station is the VS+EL local train

SW
Access trail
You have reached the access trail to Oceanside station. The station is on the branch line of the Very Short and Extremely local railroad

SW
Winding path
The path heads northeast/southwest

SW
Oceanside beach
You are standing on a small sandy beach along the shore. There is a trail heading northeast from here

Maybe there’s a boat or some other secret with the beach? DIG is a verb although the game very specifically asks you to have a shovel.

Stark Beach is similarly barren map-wise…

…although at least there’s more work put into the room description.

Stark Beach Station
Stark beach is known for it abundance of nude bathers and party people. To the west is a path that leads off to the beach.
Sitting at the station is the VS+EL local train

W
There is a rumbling sound and a distant whistle from a VS+EL RR train.
Stark Beach
Directly in of you, though seperated from you by a chain link fence, is a sandy white beach. Many beautiful women, and handsome men normally can be seen bathing in the nude, running around the beach, playing games of tag, and thoroughly enjoying themselves. There is a large bar at one end of the beach, where more naked men and women usually lounge and sipping tall cool drinks. At the other end of the beach there is a series of small tents where various men and women can go off to be alone. This is a way of life here at Stark Beach … when it is sunny … but it is overcast … threatening to rain … there is no one to be seen … and the fence is closed … too bad.
Lying in the sand here, is a beautiful silver bracelet, obviously dropped by a bather in a hurry to get to the fun.

I can’t tell if this is meant as a puzzle, a stub for further expansion (that never occurred), or a complete encounter. At least this location does dispense a treasure (the silver bracelet) although I have no way of getting it back out of the mountain past the gnomes. (You would think the teleporter from the parking lot at the start would do it, but I still have yet to get that working.)

In wild contrast stands the second slot in between the two beaches, Dry Gulch. In fact, while I would normally provide the full map, in the interests of actually getting a post out, I’m just providing part of it. There are parts that just keep going and lots of exits that lead to a boulder maze so testing every exit takes a while. Keeping in mind I’m not done interconnecting yet, here’s the general meta-map I have so far:

Leaving the train station just gives a straight shot to the north for a while:

Path in the middle of the Desert
You are standing on a north-south path in the middle of a bare and otherwise trackless desert. All around you are drab and dun-coloured sand dunes which stretch as far as the eye can see to the east and west. The sun is blazing down, and the air over the dunes shimmers with heat. A warm dry breeze is blowing, driving a layer of fine gritty sand and dust across the dunes and the path. There appears to be a range of mountains to the distant north, but it’s difficult to judge distances in the heat-haze; the image shimmers so much that it could be a mirage.

N
Path in the middle of the Desert
You are standing on a north-south path in the middle of a bare and otherwise trackless desert. All around you are drab and dun-coloured sand dunes which stretch as far as the eye can see to the east and west. The sun is blazing down, and the air over the dunes shimmers with heat. A warm dry breeze is blowing, driving a layer of fine gritty sand and dust across the dunes and the path. There is a range of mountains to the north, and it’s not too far away !

N
Entrance to sandstone Canyon
You are standing at the entrance of a large canyon cleft in the sandstone rocks of a mountain range. The walls of the canyon are steep and unclimable. The high and craggy mountains stretch away to the east and west of where you are standing. There seems to be a faint track leading along the foot of the mountains. A well beaten path stretches across the bleak desert to the south, and extends to the north through the centre of the canyon.

While the game has three authors, I suspect all of this section is by one author, and one who is keen on lovingly describing outdoor geology. Perhaps the thought process went: Crowther made a realistic cave, so let’s make a realistic desert.

Coloured rock canyon
You are standing on a North-South track in the middle of a sandstone canyon. The rock walls on either side are veined and banded with varied hues of sandstone, mainly reddish shades which lie between roseate and ocherous, but with occasional streaks of bluish-gray and green, which seem to indicate the bedding-planes of an upper Triassic, or possibly lower Lias, series of sediments. The colours appear to be glowing in the strong sunlight. It is altogether a beautiful and somewhat awe-inspiring sight.

A map of the central coloured rock canyon area:

The two red-marked exits lead to a boulder maze which I’ll talk about later (other exits lead to the same). While there’s plenty of long descriptions there’s very little here to do, other than swipe a “canvas sack” which seems to serve like the sack from Zork (it increases your inventory capacity). I incidentally tried hiding the prayer box from God by using the sack and it didn’t work.

To the northwest is a ghost town with two buildings, a bank (which seems to be truly and completely shuttered) and a general store. The only reason for the general store to exist, despite it having a map which allows going in an alternate exit…

…seems to be to get a hammer by smashing a case.

In front of store
You are standing in front of the Drygulch Equipment & Clothing (DEC) store, a large building which is partly ruinous and which has obviously seen better days, but which is at least still standing. Behind the wooden boardwalk at the front of the store is an adobe brick facade which is sadly chipped and crumbling. There are two windows and a door in the front of the building.

IN
Inside the store
The inside of this abandoned drygoods store has the musty odour which a wood and abobe structure acquires with long neglect. A high old-fashioned service counter runs north-south across the width of the store, effectively barring entrance to the back from this side. There is sufficient light coming in from the grimy windows and open door in the eastern wall to see the rest of the room quite clearly. Though the frontage is a substantial adobe brick wall, the rest of the store is built from dry wooden planking.
Against one wall of the room is a large glass display case.
It contains:
a geological hammer

BREAK CASE
The glass of the display case shatters into millions of glass splinters that fall between the cracks of the floor

We’ve certainly had game maps before with lots of window dressing (like The Hermit’s Secret) but the long prose means the empty space here feels very different: like the author of this section was making a simulation with game elements as an afterthought (perhaps literally, in that they intended to add things on a later pass). If you bypass the ghost town on a canyon rim path (or go by a hut I’ll show in a moment) you reach a Manager’s House where the incomplete aspect really becomes obvious.

Front of Goblin Mine Manager’s house
You are on a trail which runs along the southern rim of an east-west
canyon. Dug into the dirt of the hill slope beside the trail is the
rather imposing entrance hole of the habitation of the Goblin who manages
the Goblin Mine.

IN
Entrance hall
There is a doorway to the north, and a plain walled hallway extends to
the south.

S
Hallway
The corridor -like hallway extends to the north and south. There is a
doorway on the east side.

E
Study

That’s a room with no description at all! A trophy room and a kitchen are similarly left with no description.

Some of the locations lead to a maze. It is a classical “drop the objects to map” style.

You are lost amongst the giant boulders on a mountain plateau.

W
You are lost amongst the giant boulders on a mountain plateau.

N
You are lost amongst the giant boulders on a mountain plateau.

I’m missing a few exits on my map (given here with the objects I dropped at various spots), but I can say there is nothing here to find.

The sole purpose (other than making the map a pain overall) seems to be to lead to a “Windy view” where there is nothing of note other than scenery.

Windy view
You are standing on a small trail on the shoulder of a mountain. There is a magnificent view from here across a wild and windy mountain landscape composed of many colours of sandstone rocks. The mountains are cut into by a maze of twisting canyons. From where you stand you can go either north or east around the shoulder of the mountain. A very steep rockslide begins here and fans out south and west below you to the bottom of a distant canyon.

Look, I’m never thrilled when yet another maze-mapping happens in one of these games, but at least even a treasure at the end gives some tinge of reward. (Or earlier in this game, it was satisfying to find the mysterious cube at the center of a maze, which turned out to be the “respawn point” after dying.) When the map just exists for its own sake, I feel like I’m spinning my wheels.

I’m going to save the remainder of the desert when I get it finally final, but a few notes:

1. The east side of the central canyon leads to a “slide” which goes by a rusty key (haven’t found a use for yet, including taking back to the post box) and leads through many rooms up to a “tower”. The tower seems to serve no purpose beyond being scenery.

Where two paths meet before a ruined tower …..
High on a lost and rocky mountain ridge, open to the blue and windy sky, two paths from southeast and southwest meet before a roofless tower of broken stone dark built of massive granite blocks, alien to this land of honey coloured stone. The crumbling arch where once a door did swing lies open to the north of where you stand.

N
Inside roofless tower of broken stone ……
The walls rear high, but, shattered at the top, reveal the welcome light of open sky. Here below, surronded by these massive sombre walls, is dark and chill, except where one diffused beam of welcome light reveals the shadowed southern entrance arch.

It’s still possible some of these places will have purposes that eventually reveal themselves, but my game-sense is currently telling me no, there’s a tower here because the author thought it would make good scenery.

2. Near the Ghost Town, to the north, is a hut. Just like the Tower, no apparent purpose.

Hut
You are on an east-west portion of a winding trail which goes along the northern rimwall of a long brownish canyon. There is a small and somewhat delapidated hut beside the trail here.

IN
Hut
Diagonal beams of light from the harsh sun outside come through the cracks in the warped and twisted planks. This place appears to have been at one time the residence of a prospector or miner, now left to fall to ruin.

3. Near a Sweetwater Spring is the mine. I still have more to explore so I will report back later, but so far I haven’t found anything except more rooms.

Sweetwater spring
You are beside a small spring of clear water which bubbles up from the canyon floor. The canyon runs in a southeast-northwest direction. There are small trees growing all over the canyon floor on all sides except the west, where an extremely steep fan-shaped rockslide is piled up against the southwest wall of the canyon. The slide goes all the way up to the rim.

NW
In front of a mine
You are at the end of a canyon in front of a mine with a large iron door, and there is, chiseled into the stone, the legend
“PETEY COOPER’S OPAL MINE”
above the door. Up against the east wall of the canyon there seems to be the ruins of a building. There are piles of rubble and mining spoil all around. A fitful warm wind blows swirls of rock dust around your feet.

N
Inside mine entrance
You are standing just inside the entrance to an opal mine. To the south the sunlight spills in through the doorway onto the rocky floor. The mine passage heads north from here and begins to twist about.

Other than that, I’ve got all the same obstacles from before (skittish hen, post box, bank, curtain, power box, enemies in the niche) and I do suspect at least one of the items I’ve been nabbing in the desert will eventually help. However, I also suspect I’m running out of runway here, and the game is eventually going to reach a hard stop which may or may not be passable. For example, one room has a north exit mentioned in the room description that simply doesn’t work: does it lead to a single place or a full new area? Based on my calculation earlier with the exploration stat, there should be more rooms in the code out there, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be able to reach them.

If you hate GenAI, you probably want to skip this episode, though I would assume anyone reading my blog should already know what I do.

Sharpee has been stable-ish for a few months. I bumped it to 1.0 and started revising the repository documentation. It occurred to me to take a swipe at a full technical manual. I collaborated with Claude on what that might look like and the one big tutorial we have, Family Zoo, is the perfect "spine" for such a book.

So we started with an outline, then wrote out each chapter, and I've been editing everything word for word as we go. I took the first completed book to a docker container and a naive Claude (I have a lot of infra for my daily Claude usage so it knows a lot about me and Sharpee). This naive version wouldn't have any of that information. The idea was to turn on Claude, copy the book over, and let it "execute" the book with explicit instructions not to solve problems outside of copying the example code, reading the text, and following it without exception.

This ended up being way more useful than I expected. Not only will I have a completed, edited, and tested Sharpee Developer Manual, but it has also acted as completely user-oriented regression test of the platform. And we found things. Not a lot, but we found things.

• I split out the npx functionality from @Sharpee/Sharpee and created two build tools. The external tool is @Sharpee/devkit and the internal tool is ./repokit. Authors would run npm -g install @sharpee/devkit and get local sharpee commands for init, build, add browser.
• One of the formatters was off {items:count} and missing article integration.
• The list formatter was incomplete and also missing article integration. That needed a complete rewrite. Oxford commas are optional, but available.
• Some of the edge cases for Channel IO got lost in its implementation and those are now fixed.
• Extracted the themes into its own package so authors can easily override/add their own theme from a front-end developer perspective. The default theme is the DOS Infocom classic.
• There is a new @sharpee/runtime package that bridges between Sharpee and the target client (CLI, browser, desktop).

Sharpee V1.2 is shipped with a completed and tested developer manual. See https://sharpee.net for details.

I have no hot take, but I did post this last year:

Another Valve hardware announcement: the Steam Machine is back. I am immediately and predictably on board for it.

-- me, November 2025

So I owe you a followup post, which is, TLDR: "too rich for my blood."

I would guess that, back in the Devonian epoch of 2025, Valve was aiming this product at $600-$800, which would be an insta-buy for me. But obviously that's not the 2026 we're living in. In this 2026, I am quite sure that Valve has priced the new Steam Machine at break-even. They'll sell a tiny number and be thankful the damage wasn't any worse.

I like that they've made SteamOS available. That will be good for the hardcore hardware crowd, but I'm just not in that ecosystem. If I tried to homebrew a Steam Machine from parts, I'd undoubtedly spend $2500 and be lucky if it ever booted up.

Maybe things will ease up in 2027, in which case Valve (and Apple and a lot of other companies) will undo their price hikes. That would be nice. No bets right now.

Could I afford $1400 for a new toy? Enh. I have that much in my bank account. I have what passes for a stable job in this economy. But that's the hitch: in this economy. Nothing is safe, nothing is reliable, and I am looking at the extremely real possibility that I am already unemployable if I have to go back on the market.

Given that, big impulse purchases don't feel super-good.

(Don't worry, small impulse purchases are still on the menu.)

So what now? The short answer is that I have (a) a nice couch; (b) a big TV; (c) a Steam Deck that I never use. I even have a dock for the Deck. So I should hook them all together and try out some games.

The Steam Deck (first-gen) is not what you'd call a high-power machine. That's why I was hoping to replace it with a cube! But, hey, I play a lot of low-power games. I just finished The Red Pearls of Borneo (review coming soon!) and might work on EMUUROM some more. If the setup doesn't serve me on the next fancy-ass immersive adventure game, it'll still do plenty of puzzle games.

I tried this plan last year; it didn't work because last year's TV was antique and inadequate. I have since gotten a better TV -- not an impulse purchase; I spent two months thinking about it! -- so the plan needs another shot.

But first I need (d) a Steam Controller. That's the affordable part of Valve's current bundle and it definitely looks worthwhile.

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction met on Thursday, Monday, May 18, 2026 over Zoom. Attending: Kyrill Azernyi, JP Tuttle,  Zarf, Michael Stage, Josh Grams, Doug Orleans,  Allyson, hugh, and anjchang attended.  

Apologies, I accidentally lost the notes for this meeting. If you have notes and want to share them, feel free to contact me on @anjtinker… We mostly discussed Narrascope and Spring Thing… It was a lovely discussion and hope you can join us next time!

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction met on Thursday, April 27, 2026 over Zoom. Attending: Doug Orleans, Michael Stage, Josh Grams, hugh, Carl Muckenhoupt, Allyson, Zarf, Michael Hilborn, Stephen Jablon, and anjchang attended. A special welcome to Carl, who joined us with a link to his long‑running review archive, The Stack. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just a log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.

Links & Lightning Round

Carl kicked things off by sharing The Stack https://wurb.com/stack/

Michael followed with a recommendation from his current “non‑games for the talk” research: Don’t Escape: 4 Days to Survive https://www.gog.com/en/game/dont_escape_4_days_to_survive

Allyson reminded everyone that ClubFloyd continues every Sunday on ifMUD: https://allthingsjacq.com/interactive_fiction.html#clubfloyd
Instructions for joining collaborative plays: https://www.ifwiki.org/ClubFloyd

Spring Thing 2026 Highlights

Spring Thing was discussed, with several notable mentions:

• EnigMart, a game composed of many small EnigMarch‑style puzzles
• Strings, a cute little parser game was explored (tied for best in show)
• Our Lady of Thorns, another standout atmospheric entry (tied best in show)

We also talked about how Spring Thing’s identity continues to evolve. Historically, it was the home for longer works that didn’t fit IFComp’s soft two‑hour limit. This year, though, many entries are short, experimental, and atmospheric— blurring the old expectations and making the festival feel more like a playground for form.

EnigMarch & Puzzle Culture

It was noted that EnigMarch continues to influence the community, and Spring Thing’s EnigMart is a direct descendant of that tradition.

Ryan Veeder’s ongoing puzzle work came up again, especially with the upcoming Iron Chif battle on May 22nd: https://intfiction.org/tag/iron-chif

Ryan’s recent win was by a narrow margin, and the group is excited for the next round.

Tools, Toys & Works in Progress

Allyson has been experimenting with Josh’s ink‑based Visual Novel tool, which she described as “great” and fun to prototype with. This sparked a short discussion about lightweight VN tooling and hybrid IF formats.

Zarf shared updates on several fronts:

• Murder at the Birch Tree Theater, a thinky mystery game https://thinkygames.com/games/murder-at-the-birch-tree-theater/
• The Visible Zorker and ongoing work toward Visible Deadline https://eblong.com/infocom/visi/

He also mentioned travel plans for the Albany gathering for Narrascope. The train is cheap, but definitely a “leave Monday” situation.

Reading & Recommendations

A surprising amount of the group is reading Dungeon Crawler Carl, a long, pulpy, surprisingly engaging series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Crawler_Carl

It’s described it as “a grittier, less‑PC Harry Potter x Hunger Games”, and several attendees chimed in with enthusiasm.

Miscellaneous Mentions

• Universal Robot, a choice‑based game by Agnieszka Trzasko (creator of 4×4 Archipelago, a sci‑fi comedy)
• A few years back, Spring Thing’s Jelly was recalled fondly
• Josh shared a link to rtdcp8xzxnzi9c2t on IFDB https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=rtdcp8xzxnzi9c2t

The IFTF Discord also came up for those looking to stay connected: https://discord.com/invite/DPQYuDV

Closing Notes

As always, the meeting ranged from tools to festivals to deep‑cut IF history. The mix of experimental games, puzzle culture, and community reading habits made this month’s conversation especially lively.

Looking forward to seeing everyone next month.

Happy Pride! Choice of Games is proud to be gender-inclusive and LGBTQ+-affirming all year round, but during the month of June, we’re featuring writers whose work connects especially closely with those themes.

Today we’re sitting down with Harris Powell-Smith, author of five titles for Choice of Games, including the hit Crème de la Crème series.

The Crème de la Crème series plays with a setting that is traditionally single-gender – boarding school – but that in your world is gender-inclusive. Can you talk about that journey and how you arrived at the gender dynamics that you did for your gameworld?

Back when I was first figuring out the game, I considered creating a setting in which the player’s choice of gender affected the wider cultural setting. In an early CoG game, Choice of Broadsides, you can play as a male sea captain fighting while women aren’t involved with warfare, or as a female captain while men remain on shore. So a player’s choice of gender would shift the setting: if they played as a male student going to Gallatin, it would be a boarding school for boys, who were socially expected to conform to passive, decorative etiquette rules.

In the end I decided to go for a different approach because I didn’t feel confident in handling characters outside a male/female gender binary, or other non-cis characters in such a setting. Instead I embraced high social stakes unrelated to gender and orientation.

Once I decided to remove sexism, homophobia, and transphobia from the equation, it was clear to me that societal mores would present differently than they do in our world – so, for example, inheritance of titles, property, and wealth is very important in these societies, but genetic bloodline is less of a concern than ensuring you can trace your family’s title back for at least a couple of centuries. And some cultures in the setting include legal polyamorous marriages while others don’t, and so on.

All of this doesn’t mean the games are free of injustice! Inequality and unfairness of various kinds is rife in the Creme de la Creme universe, and it’s the player’s choice how they want to engage with that, which perspectives they sympathise with, and in what directions they want to shift their surroundings. The game world is a place where queer and non-queer characters alike can have plenty of dark-academia social and romantic drama that’s much more about their place in the world, personality clashes, romantic tastes, and the ever-present looming factors of class, wealth and reputation.

You’ve done a lot of excellent work in community building through your “IF Seal” Q&A column, moderation on the ChoiceScript forum, and fostering an active fan community. What kind of reader interactions are your favorites? Can you talk about a fan interaction that surprised you?

Thank you so much! IF Seal is on hiatus at the moment, but I hope the archives are useful for people with similar problems coming up. I’m planning to bring it back when things are a little less hectic!

I love hearing what players have to say about my games, and how they feel about their experiences playing. Sometimes it opens my eyes to perspectives I hadn’t considered but once I see it, it feels entirely intuitive.

Something really special is when fans are inspired by my work to write their own stories or games. I absolutely love hearing that and feel really fortunate whenever it happens.

I’ve also been incredibly touched and delighted when I’ve heard that something I wrote helped someone realise an aspect of their identity, or it helped them through a real-life experience. Someone told me that playing Honor Bound helped them while they were recovering from a hospital visit and that absolutely blew me away.

One of the recent posts on your wonderfully informative blog is about writing trans characters. Who are some authors of interactive or noninteractive fiction that you think are doing especially good work in that area?

I could spend days chatting away about trans characters but here is a small selection of authors’ work I’ve enjoyed that show trans characters, queer cultures, and trans people interacting with the setting they’re written in:

• Maya Deane – Wrath Goddess Sing is an excellent queer and trans Trojan War retelling
  
• Isaac Fellman – I’ve greatly enjoyed Dead Collections, an urban fantasy about vampires, and Notes from a Regicide, a science fantasy family saga; the characters feel very grounded both in their transness while the speculative elements tie in with it really well
  
• Athar Fikry – I really enjoy how this author’s worldbuilding interacts with queerness and transness around relationships, bodies, and destiny. In particular An Imp and an Imposter feels like a very queer and trans story to me, with reclamation of physicality and magical power
  
• Rien Gray – a brilliantly evocative writer whose exploration of trans characters in queernormative cultures (the Out of True sapphic Arthuriana series) as well as grimmer settings (The Scales of Seduction, a Medusa retelling; the Fatal Fidelity noir/romantic suspense series) are exemplary
  
• May Peterson – the Sacred Dark fantasy series is a great example of queer and trans characters surviving, thriving, and finding community and connection in repressive settings while having very dramatic fantasy adventures
  
• Malin Rydén – in the Fallen Hero IF series, the journey of the former-superhero clawing for agency and bodily autonomy resonates strongly through a trans lens

We’re asking all of our authors this: How has your representation of LGBTQ+ themes in your writing evolved over the course of your career?

Lately I’m exploring writing LGBTQ+ themes with more specificity. When I first started writing queernormative settings I wanted queer characters and families to feel “unmarked” rather than cis and straight characters being the norm and queer ones being unusual. I still very much enjoy writing in these kinds of settings, but I’ve been exploring in more detail about what it’s like living in them, how it feels to be trans in a non-misogynistic, non-transphobic culture, how healthcare works in such cultures, and so on. So in my recent games – in particular Honor Bound and my fantasy work in progress The Earth Has Teeth – I’ve enjoyed going into more depth with that, and thinking more about how characters’ gender and sexuality affects how they engage with the world.

I’ve also been exploring how LGBTQ+ characters handle living in less welcoming settings. In the past I wanted to write purely escapist settings with no bigotry, but in one project I’m working on, I’m writing in the contemporary world. It felt appropriate there to show some realities of being queer right now, negative and positive, and balancing both elements so that playing as a queer PC felt recognisable without being overshadowed with misery. It’s a very different approach and once that project’s announced I’ll be very interested to see how it lands!

Finally: how are you celebrating Pride this year?

Exploring my city, meeting up with friends, and probably buying more arts and crafts from queer makers than I have room for!

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

This week, we’re featuring five games by Harris Powell-Smith. Crème de la Crème, Noblesse Oblige, Royal Affairs, Honor Bound, and Blood Money are up to 40% off until June 29th!

• Crème de la Crème — Climb to the top of the class at your exclusive private school for socialites!
• Noblesse Oblige — Find romance amid secrets in a lonely estate! What will you sacrifice for love?
• Royal Affairs — Rule the roost at your exclusive boarding school, or be a royal disaster!
• Honor Bound — Guard students and secrets at an exclusive boarding school!
• Blood Money — By the power of your blood, you and your ghosts will take over the crime family!

(Continued from my previous posts.)

Last time I left off on getting immediately killed by a pirate when entering a niche at the train station. Predictably, you can also get killed by waiting for the train in the track while not going west into the niche.

It is now 13:5
There is a rumbling sound and a distant whistle from a VS+EL RR train.

WAIT
It is now 13:10
You have just been run over by a VS+EL RR train.

There are no other exits. I ran through my item list (rope, pendant, charm, keys, can opener, strange coin, beers, tuna syrian, scimitar, disks, plus the random items from the underground I mentioned last time) and while testing the STATUS command I found that eating the tuna syrian maxes out the player’s power.

STATUS
Current power level: 0
Current coordination level: 0
Current magic level: 0
Current wisdom level: 0
Current knowledge level: 0

EAT TUNA SYRIAN
mm..mmm… That sure did taste good

STATUS
Current power level: 100
Current coordination level: 0
Current magic level: 0
Current wisdom level: 0
Current knowledge level: 0

This seemed quite promising, and indeed it allowed surviving entering the niche and not getting killed right away. Unfortunately, the niche has a pirate, a spider, and a rat, and I have yet to take down all three before dying. This may simply be an RNG battle and I need to throw myself at it enough times.

ATTACK PIRATE WITH SCIMITAR
Your attack misses the pirate.
The pirate, with an evil gleam in his eye, strikes and slashes, but you still live.
The giant rat attacks … his teeth make contact with you … you are weakened … but alive
The hairy spider attacks … he gets you … but you are still alive

ATTACK PIRATE WITH SCIMITAR
Though you hit the pirate, it is still alive
The pirate, with an evil gleam in his eye, strikes and slashes, but you still live.
The giant rat attacks … his teeth make contact with you … you are weakened … but alive
The hairy spider attacks … but he misses

I’ve managed to kill two out of the three but not all three. I probably could keep track of STATUS while fighting in multiple runs to figure out the optimal order of killing the three enemies. I’d love to increase my “coordination” stat but the only thing I’ve been able to do is make it go down to -2 (there are two beers, drinking each one drops that stat by 1).

The giant rat circles … He bites you squarely … and you feel the life running out of you

As the darkness of death fades, and the light intensifies, you find yourself falling quickly at first then slower, then slower still until you find yourself looking down on a strange land. Below is a river, a long river, so long that even at this height the river stretches forever. About 1 mile from each bank of the river is a tall mountain range. You slow more until you are about 1 foot from the ground, and then you lite gently on the surface of an eerie world.

Rather than focus on that, I decided to roll with dying and see what would happen. I wasn’t reading closely enough before but it became quite clear the authors have sent the player to Riverworld.

Via Diaspar Books.

Riverworld is a series by Philip José Farmer which technically dates back to the 50s (when he first made some published stories, which were meant to be published, but the publisher vanished into the ether) but is mostly associated with his series of novels starting in 1971. When they die, people are sent to a planet with a seemingly endless river; the first book follows the explorer Richard Francis Burton immediately upon dying, including meeting up with Alice Liddell (of Alice in Wonderland fame); Alice later kills Hermann Göring. The second book involves Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) wanting to build a riverboat.

There are no historical figures here: we’re on a river, and we died, and we need to get out.

There’s some randomization (which I haven’t seen anywhere else in the game); the green position is where I started once, but there seems to be more than one potential landing place. Additionally, there’s a penny, dime, and quarter marked for their locations during one of my visits, but they, too, can be randomly distributed. For example, I found the penny once at the far northwest, at the “dead end”.

Fossils of bones
Molded into the ground rocks around you feet are the fossils of many a human that has been committed to the Riverworld. When resurrection fails, the bones are piled here by others, until they decay, or become fossilized.

NORTH
Thick mist
The ground, and the river, are almost undistiguishible here due to the dense fog that surrounds you. Upstream, you can barely make out what appears to be a bridge heading to the other side of the river.

The game follows the same pattern of “view” rooms (like the Volcano View in Adventure) by adding a Lakeview.

You are on a path that continues northeast and southwest. Directly in front of you is a large lake, that has a mountain range forming its perimeter. The lake is hundreds of feet below you and there is no trail leading down to it. In the middle of the lake is a large tower that stretches up into the clouds. From here you can barely make out the details of the tower, however, you can see that it is silver, and has a platform at lake level.

Weirdly, all the various “environmental effects” like the crows and the rhinos still can appear. I was incorrect before: it seems like these effects literally can happen in any room with no restriction, including in the afterlife.

Riverstart
As the terrain becomes more mountainous, the river comes to its head receiving its waters from the large lake directly in front of you. A low fog prevents you from seeing much on the lake. There is a path here leading to the northeast, and another leading downstream.
A silence of monks noisely passes

To the far northeast (marked in blue on my map) is a shore with a boat. It took significant work to be able to enter the boat; Rob mentioned in the comments the game specifically wants BOARD, and with no noun.

Inside the little boat
You are standing inside the little boat that floats on the great lake at the end of the river. There are two buttons here, on marked “T” and the other “S”, although no explanations are given.

This immediately was followed with more parser suffering as I eventually found the game doesn’t recognize T BUTTON but rather wants “T” BUTTON, with the quote marks there.

PUSH “T” BUTTON
Beep

WAIT
It is now 13:10
After a momentary delay, the boat glides off quietly towards the tower

There’s a prominent tower in Riverworld but it is at the north pole, so I’m unclear if this is meant as a reference. Also, the boat may be a reference to the second book, even though that’s a very different boat.

1975 Panther edition, via Amazon.

The island adds some new fresh hell to the parser battle by asking you to move with “clockwise” and “counterclockwise”.

DISEMBARK
The Silver tower
You have reached the silver tower in the middle of the lake. You are standing on the lake level platform. The platform continues around the tower at this level in both the clockwise and counterclockwise direction. There is a second platform visible high above your head
Resting in the water against the tower is a small boat

If the start point is “south”, there’s a rusted ladder on the “west” side, but the one on the “east” side is solid enough to climb.

Base of a stainless steel ladder
There is a stainless steel ladder here leading up to the upper platform.

U
Top of the stainless steel ladder
You are standing on the upper platform which continues clockwise and counterclockwise from here.

CLOCKWISE
Silver curtain of light
You are standing on the entrance platform that leads into the silver
tower. Inside you can see a large room approximately 10x10x10.

IN
Inside the silver room.
You are standing inside of a 10x10x10 room with silver walls. As you enter, the door behind you disappears. The room is illuminated with an eerie glow. One one wall is a small box with three slots on the top one small, one medium, and one large, and a slot on the bottom.

This is sort of a mini-episode which makes the puzzle straightforward: as you’ve lost all your items held while dying, the only items available are the penny, dime, and quarter. They go in the different slots by size (dime in small, penny in medium, quarter in large, and if you put something too large in a particular slot it won’t fit).

PUT DIME IN SMALL SLOT
Clunk … ding!

PUT PENNY IN MEDIUM SLOT
Clunk … ding!

PUT QUARTER IN LARGE SLOT
Clunk … ding!
There is sound faintly resembling that found in B-movies when the angels appear. There is a deep rumble beneath your feet … In the wall you are facing, there is a slowly widening circle of lights, and as the circle gets larger, the lights in the cube dim, and the hum gets lower but louder. As the lights circumference becomes tangent with the edge of the cube, the wall disappears, revealing a large room outside.

Inside the silver room
You are inside a humming silver cube (approximately 10 feet on each side).

Going OUT leads back to the humming cube. So this resolves the purpose of the humming cube building, meaning aboveground there’s still the mystery of the hen, the bank, and (maybe) where the treasures go.

1986 Easton Press edition, via jwkbooks.

Rob made vague comments that there’s something important with the church, but the only item with a noun even recognized is the box that had the CHEVY key. I tried, from a fresh start, dropping a treasure in the box but doing so just caused the score to drop from 5 to 0 (the triremes charm at the start counts).

Inside the old church
You are standing inside of an old village church. The interior of the church is lit from light filtering through the stained class windows high in the roof. Towards the front of the church you can see a small pulpet, behind which are rows of benches. Immediately in front of you is a small, brown, walnut table, that stands about 3 feet high.
On the table, is a beautiful veneer box, with a slot cut in the top.

SCORE
You currently have 5 out of 750 points, requiring 31 moves
You current classification is ABECEDARIAN.

OPEN BOX
The box is now open.

GET KEY
Taken.

PUT CHARM IN BOX
Done.

CLOSE BOX
The box is now closed.

SCORE
You currently have 0 out of 750 points, requiring 37 moves
You current classification is ABSOLUTE MORON.

There otherwise isn’t any room that seems score-worthy. It’s not a rush at the moment (I’m clearly not deep in the game yet) but it would be nice to be sure about just because of logistical coordination (that is, if I have a big pile of items, where should it go to be most efficient?) One last issue specifically with treasure is that back at the mountain, if you try to go over the bridge the opposite way (the one that signal flags needed to be used to open) you will get stopped if you are holding any treasure. This seems intended to keep treasures from coming out of the cave, but this even applies to any treasures you brought in yourself (like the previously-mentioned charm).

Major mountain ledge
The drawbridge is in the closed position, forming a path accross to Minor mountain

N
A little gnome stops you and says …”You may not leave carrying any valuables. They must be left behind.” Then he disappears.

Next time, I’ll try to deal with the monster trio (which may just be a matter of throwing clones at the problem until RNG goes my way) and get on board the train.

Last month I saw a reference to the "You Cannot Play This TTRPG Jam":

This is a game jam for games that do not exist. They won't ever exist. They will never be playable. They will suggest a game, create a space in which it seems like a game could exist, but where there is none. It might make someone wish that it were an actual, real, game, and may even inspire them to create one, but will never itself be a game.

-- Jam overview, Michelle Jones

That sounds like fun! I thought. So I put together a quickie.

The Aeonic Nebular Character Generator (downloadable PDF file)

Prepare your character for sci-fi roleplaying!

In the Aeonic ruleset, it is not, strictly speaking, possible to die during character generation.

(And now you know what classic TTRPG I am riffing on. Well, one of them. The title is a nod to Æon, which I mentioned a few weeks ago.)

I hope it is amusing. And by all means take a look at the other 98 jam entries as well. People had lot of fun with this idea.

Update: Even though the packages are working for most aspects of Sharpee, I am going through an alternate regression process and finding more issues. I'm already bumping it to 1.1.0 and likely to hit 1.2 this week. I restructured the Family Zoo tutorial to act as the spine of a Sharpee developer manual. I've taken the book to a naive docker container with no knowledge of Sharpee and had Claude "execute" the book as-is. This is has revealed gaps in Sharpee that behavioral testing did not. Everything is cleared through 19 chapters with a few more to go. There are currently 32 chapters, so I'm two thirds of the way there.

After a month-long break from Sharpee, I circled back and cleaned up the Channel IO loose ends, then restarted work on the Sharpee editor. Along with that work I reconfigured the npm packages to include a bootstrap package, an IDE protocol package so the editor can surface platform elements after a build, and a devkit package that turns into a CLI sharpee command which replaces the npx commands.

The IDE is a work in progress and currently a MacOS desktop application. I had been working on another IDE called Lantern that used Claude API calls to infer the code from an authors free writing. It was kind of working, but it didn't feel comfortable and the inference engine needs deeper AI knowledge than I currently possess. I may swing back to it because it's an interesting experiment.

The platform is ready for real stories.

GitHub: https://github.com/ChicagoDave/sharpee
Web: https://sharpee.net
Blog: https://sharpee.plover.net

(Continued from my previous posts.)

While I have explored the cave some and will share my results, I have not gotten that much farther; I’m intentionally saving part of the game for a later post, because I want to focus on the parser, world model, and trying to work around the game’s bugs.

Before getting into all those things (and the cave itself), one brief bit of business from the town that I had trouble mapping. Aula in the comments pointed out an alternate map idea, and once I realized what the authors were going for, I was able to fix it into a pleasingly symmetrical shape.

(Mind you, it’s still not fully logical; it seems like you should be able to go straight from the Old Post Office to the Restaurant given the paths intercrossing out from them, but I’ll take comprehendability over absolute geographic sense.)

With that out of the way, I tried visiting and solving as much as I could before depositing a giant stack of inventory right in front of the cave entrance and saving my game. This turned out to be a major problem.

Cave entrance
You are standing on a ledge on major mountain. The ledge is about six feet wide here and heads west around the mountain. There is a cave cut into the side of the mountain.
There is a long rope with knots here
There is a beautiful oak pendant with a cloud carved on its face here
There is a copper key here
There is a CHEVY key here
There is some dried out corn here
There is a pair of large signal flags here
There is a miner’s helmet here
There is a can opener here
There is a strange coin here
There is a full bottle of Brador beer here
There is a full bottle of Grolsch beer here
There is a tuna syrian here
There is a scimitar here
There is a square dowel here
There is a sheet of parchment here
There is a turquoise charm here
There is a white disk with black writing here
There is a black disk with white writing here

(The scimitar I neglected to mention last time — it’s lying near the mountain, and based on the game including stats I assume is used for combat, like the sword in Zork.)

SAVE
Filename: start
Error — filename must be less than 28 characters

…uh oh. I tried various iterations, like single characters, or going past 28 characters, but no joy. What mysteriously worked was going one step to the west.

W
Major mountain ledge
The drawbridge is in the closed position, forming a path accross to Minor mountain

SAVE
Filename: start
Game saved

This seems to be the threshold where the various messages about crows and so forth stop showing up. If the same file structure from Ferret holds, this is a break between “part 1” and “part 2” of the game, in order to cope with memory limits; in Ferret, the game managed by having a linear structure that forced you along with its parts, unloading previous parts as you loaded the next one and never going backwards. In this case, you very definitely can go backwards, so there must be some clever maneuvering behind the scenes to jump between areas.

At least that’s my theory. I found after further testing that the major mountain ledge is the only location I could save my game. Additionally, it meant I had a strange item in my inventory.

You are currently carrying:
@Sitting at the station is the VS+EL express train

More experimentation is required (and I haven’t tried saving in every single room in the game, yet) but I’ll tolerate this for now; just note this is a serious pain because it applies to both saving and reloading games. (Rob has an alternate method that I haven’t been able to get work. I suspect some emulator-level shenanigans here, as opposed to an “authentic” bug.)

Before making it that far, we need a working light source. The helmet with a light of course is suggestive, but LIGHT HELMET and TURN ON HELMET and SWITCH HELMET and many other variants I tried didn’t work. I finally came across “turn helmet on” which I think may be a first for this blog.

TURN ON HELMET
What a ridiculous thing to try and do

TURN HELMET ON
The light on the helmet is now on.

(That is, verb-noun is the standard, and “turn on” is sort of a two-word verb; having the “on” afterwards is the highly unusual part. Also, the “ridiculous thing” obviously isn’t ridiculous; this reflects a danger of parsers trying to be sassy in their error messages.)

Heading on in…

…immediately there’s a branch upward going to an east-west tunnel. This tunnel represents a train station. To the west is a “lost and found office” which suggests some way of getting back items due to unfortunate shenanigans.

The VS+EL RR Lost and Found Office.
Here, items dropped by passengers of the VS+EL are collected so that they can be reclaimed by them. There is a doorway leading out to the south.

To the east is the station itself, including a paper giving times.

Main station
This is the main station of the Very Short and Extremely Local railroad (the VS+EL RR). There is one track here that enters from a tunnel to the south, and exits into a tunnel to the north. There is a small station house here.

IN
Inside Main Station
You are standing inside the main station of the VS+EL Railroad.
On the floor is a yellowed paper.

GET PAPER
Taken.

READ PAPER

THE VERY SHORT AND EXTREMELY LOCAL RAILROAD TIME SCHEDULE

(subject to change without notice)

Main Station ………………….a :00 d :09
River’s End station ………….. a :30 d :34
Dry Gulch Halt ………………. a :55 d :03
Stark Beach station ………….. a :30 d :34

You can follow the track north. Trying to go into a side notch resulted in death:

In the railroad tunnel
You are in a very dark tunnel which is used by the VS+EL RR. At various points along the east wall of the tunnel, there are places to stand in in case a train happens to come along.

GO WEST
In a notch in the wall
The pirate moves in for the kill. He lunges at you and wounds you
fatally. Oh the blood … the death

As the darkness of death fades, and the light intensifies, you find yourself falling quickly at first then slower, then slower still until you find yourself looking down on a strange land. Below is a river, a long river, so long that even at this height the river stretches forever. About 1 mile from each bank of the river is a tall mountain range. You slow more until you are about 1 foot from the ground, and then you lite gently on the surface of an eerie world.

The train destinations are what I’m postponing the exploration on for now. The land of the dead also is fairly large, and I found one treasure just lying around while moving around at random.

Darkness dwell
This section of the river bank has been name Darkness dwell because of the minimal amount of light found here. Most of the river edge is illuminated from some source above, but for some reason, this is not so here.
On the ground is a 1979 dime

Going back to the cave we’re in and avoiding the upward branch, the tunnel swerves back around to get a dining room / living quarters area.

The middle of the dining hall has a curious device which seems to be in the department of “describe a real object and make the puzzle trying to figure out what it’s saying”. I think it’s an engine, maybe? (That would make sense based on the CHEVY key.)

Southwest end of the great dining hall
This is the great dining hall of the kings that is mentioned in local folklore. The dining hall stretches off for almost 50 feet. There is a doorway leading south out of the room.

NE
In the large dining hall
You are in the large dining hall, which continues to the northeast and the southwest. There is a doorway to the northwest. There is a oak table here, with decorative carvings in the top and four long legs.
Set on the table is a beautiful pewter tea-set.
On your right is a round cylinder with a square hole in it. All over it you notice small depressions.

A side branch leads to a “beach view” which is taking the “volcano view” idea again of making a real long room description. Also there’s nudity, like Warp.

Beachview
You have come out upon a small terrace that overlooks a sandy white beach many many feet below. After diner, and some entertainment, it is told that the king and queen would come out on this terrace to observe the moonlight and stars. However, being that this is daytime, the view is quite different. In the distance, on the beach, near the water, many beautiful women, and handsome men can be seen bathing, apparently in the nude. However at this distance it is pretty hard to make any details out. The people are running around the beach, playing games of tag, and thoroughly enjoying themselves. There is a large bar at one end of the beach, where more naked men and women are lounging around sipping tall cool drinks. At the other end of the beach there is a series of small tents where various men and women are constantly entering and leaving, most smoking some sort of thin cigarette, obviously quite content with their lives. There is a railroad station located directly in front of the beach, the sign on the front is marked “Stark Beach Station”, however it is impossible to see if there are any trains at the station. There is a doorway back into the tunnel to the west.

Only a little adjacent of here is a library, and one of the few puzzles from this section: there’s a curtain with hooks.

Library
This is the king’s library. Along each wall are shelves of books on all subjects, some old, and some new. Breaking the shelving on the east wall is a doorway, and on the north wall, a set of curtains.
Next to the curtains, on each side, are small hooks to hold the curtains
Sitting on one of the library shelves is a hardbound book

I have not been able to move the hooks, but I haven’t tried doing much with my items yet. I did a run through my verb list to see if anything was helpful.

POKE seems really promising, especially because it asks you to provide an object, but it asks for more detail:

POKE HOOKS WITH SCIMITAR
You must specify where on the hooks you want to poke

POKE END OF HOOKS WITH SCIMITAR
Sorry … I could not parse that

The game, incidentally, claims some aspects of the parser are superior to Adventure and Zork. I don’t know what they mean by this. It certainly has full-sentence capability but in the kind where it wants very specific sentences, guess-the-phrase on top of guess-the-verb.

At least READ BOOK works.

DREAMPARK by Larry Niven and Stephen Barnes

This is a book about a fantasy theme park kind of like Westworld, and things go awry kind of like Westworld. Given how cursory the mention is there might be some reference I need to know about, so I’ll eventually report in after I’ve read the book.

1981 hardcover, via eBay.

Past the dining hall (and an extra 1979 wine you can nab) is a pantry with a corkscrew, a rubber glove, and a dumbwaiter. There are colored buttons that presumably control the dumbwaiter, but it isn’t working by default.

Pantry
You are in the pantry off of the great dining hall. Here, as food was prepared in the lower kitchen, many servants would carry dishes out to the king and queens, and their royal audience. There is a doorway to the south, and a set of stairs to the east. In the northern wall, set in the stone, is a dumbwaiter. Next to the dumbwaiter is a pair of buttons, one orange, and the other purple.
Hanging on one of the walls is a corkscrew.
Inside the dumbwaiter, you can see the platform that raises up and down
Resting on the table, is a rubber glove

(I was unable to open the wine with the corkscrew, but again, the parser is a terrible struggle and I may just be phrasing things wrong.)

Down the stairs mentioned in the pantry is a kitchen and various other related rooms:

The kitchen describes one exit being to the north, but there is no exit to the north. I’m needing to test every single exit in every single room because with this much jank you simply can’t trust room descriptions to be totally accurate.

Kitchen
This is the subterranean kitchen in which food was prepared for service in the King’s dining room. There are doorways off to the north, south, and east, and a narrow passage off to the northwest.

To the northwest you can’t carry much (other than your helmet) and there’s a crystal vase inside I presume is a treasure. As you might predict, it is impossible to carry out; the dumbwaiter is there, so I assume the puzzle is simply to get the dumbwaiter working.

Supply room
You are in a small supply room off of the kitchen. There are a series of shelves lining one wall, and a dumbwaiter against an other. There is a narrow passage to the east, leading back to the kitchen.
Resting on one of the shelves is a beautiful crystal vase.

There’s a fuse elsewhere, and a “utility room” with a fuse box, so I would think the two would go together!

Utility room
You are in a small room that contains the controls for the water and air heating and cooling systems. The controls however are frozen solid, and the faceplates describing their functions are missing.
There is a doorway to the west, and a small fuse box in one corner.

My first struggle was even being able to refer to the “small fuse box”; neither “small”, nor “fuse”, nor “box”, nor “small box”, nor even “fuse box” work. (GET FUSE BOX > I see no box here.) Having dealt with enough games that play fast and loose with their vocabulary, I came across FUSEBOX (all as one word, not like the game displays it!)

GET FUSEBOX
It is securely fastened to its surroundings

Huzzah! Except I still wasn’t able to translate this into replacing a busted fuse; the game doesn’t allow LOOK IN FUSEBOX (even though it does work as a command, and is mentioned in the help) nor does it let you OPEN the fusebox. So I assume one just replaces the right fuse in order to fix the dumbwaiter and get the vase, but I have no way of implementing that yet.

Three last things to mop up: a walking cane (described as having a “loop at one end”) and a metal washer (no extra description at all) and one puzzle I technically sort of solved. There’s a comedy club, with a bad comedian. It almost seems like a “circle-of-hell” situation.

The room of the caged comedian
This room was used by the king and his guest as an entertainment room. There are a couple of large chairs at one end of the room, which is separated from the other half by steel bars (thus forming a cage).

W
You can’t go there
The commedian behind the cage leans over and says:
“When I was in college, I took my girlfriend to a dog show…. and she own first prize.”

E
You can’t go there
The commedian behind the cage leans over and says:
“I used to ask my mother if I could go out ice-skating … she used to tell me ‘wait till it gets a little warmer'”

I was simply testing out directions (since none are described, even) and this led me to waiting in the room long enough that the comedian offered a cigar.

The comic, impressed by your endurance, says “Hey … give that person a cigar … anyone who can stand my jokes desires a prize”

So I’ve got a cigar on top of everything else. This is one of the largest and most random sets of objects I’ve had to juggle in an adventure game. I’m just hoping this mostly goes the Time Zone route and makes the matches between object and puzzle easy to find when they happen; having this many objects all at once plus complex combinations could be a bear. Ferret did get this size of inventory but also was segmented in such a way that the object count didn’t go out of control (…plenty of other things did, though).

To summarize the problems underground:

1.) dealing with the train (which I assume will lead to brand-new large areas giving my mapping a further workout)

2.) the hooks at the library (is this a parser issue?)

3.) the fuse box/fusebox (also a parser issue?)

There’s still a locked post box, the bank, the hen who is skittish, and the strange humming cube to deal with aboveground. I’m also 99% sure now this is a gather-the-treasure-in-one-spot game, but I don’t know yet how to definitely be sure something is a treasure, nor where it should go to get credit.

Although I’ve played way too many games for way too many hours over the way too many years I’ve been writing these histories, it’s safe to say that I haven’t spent more time with any one game than Heroes of Might and Magic II. Partly this was down to circumstance. Heroes II showed up on the syllabus just as I was embarking on one of my periodic digressions, a long series about international communications networks and how they culminated in the World Wide Web. Without the need to write in detail about a new game every fortnight, I was freer than I usually am just to play whatever I felt like playing. And what I felt like playing at that time was Heroes II. I beat every single Heroes II scenario in my Heroes of Might and Magic Millennium Edition set, some alone, some in multiplayer mode with my wife Dorte, who became almost as obsessed as I was. I must confess that my usual rule of no more than two hours of gaming per day was strained at times, shattered completely at others. But we were still in the midst of the pandemic then and there wasn’t much else for me to do with my free time, so I figured it was okay to set self-discipline aside for a while. Maybe it was even good experiential research, in that it re-familiarized me with that strange hungover feeling you get when you’ve spent hours and hours peering into an imaginary world behind your monitor screen — like butter that’s been scraped over too much bread, to steal a phrase from Tolkien. (For what it’s worth, I’ve found that the best cure for this condition is the same as that for a conventional hangover: a long walk in nature.)

I played and enjoyed Heroes III a lot as well, but not quite as much as Heroes II. Again, I’m sure that this was down to circumstance as much as anything else. By the time I got to that game, the pandemic was over, I was busier with real life again, and my two-hour rule was firmly back in place. Then, too, I had played a lot of Heroes of Might and Magic by that point, and was perchance finally growing tired of the basic concept in the abstract. So, when I say that I don’t like the more conventionally “gamer-dark” Heroes III art style as well as the previous game’s brighter, more cartoony vibe, and say that I am not entirely convinced that its new factions and other additional complexities really add that much to the experience, take that with a grain of salt. My opinion might be just the opposite if I had encountered these games in the opposite order.

Anyway, all of this had led me to ask two questions. Why did I find these particular games so appealing, given that I’ve never been all that hugely taken with world-conquering strategy games in the abstract? And what else is out there in a similar vein that I might also enjoy?

To try to answer the first question first: I think I like the unreality of fantasy strategy. I’m not at all averse to games that depict the real world, mind you, but I do start to have a problem when such games tackle weighty subjects in a thoughtless way. Call me a woke snowflake, but I just don’t want to play a Nazi general preparing Europe for the Holocaust or a Spanish conquistador subjugating the native inhabitants of the New World. I know too much about what those job descriptions entailed. I have no objection to playing a wizard, however — not even an evil one. For I know that the elves and dwarves he kills do not and never have actually existed.

The rest of this article constitutes the merest beginning of an answer to that other question I asked, about what else is out there when it comes to turn-based fantasy strategy. As most of you doubtless know, games fitting this broad description have been around since the dawn of personal computers. Knowing that I couldn’t possibly play all of them, I decided to confine this investigation to the late 1990s, the era of Heroes II and III and the period we still find ourselves in in the larger chronology of these histories. I picked out three examples of the species that are generally regarded as worthy: Warlords III, Age of Wonders, and Disciples: Sacred Lands. Let’s give them each a spin and see how we go, shall we? Maybe one of them will turn out to be Just Right for me or for you.

As the name would imply, Warlords III is the third entry in a series, one that was designed by the Aussie Steve Fawkner and developed by a little Australian studio called Strategic Studies Group. But just to keeping things from becoming too straightforward, there are actually two games that bear the name of Warlords III, both of them published by Red Orb Entertainment, a brief-lived subsidiary label of the venerable Brøderbund Software. Warlords III: Reign of Heroes was released in 1997, only to be superseded the following year by Warlords III: Darklords Rising, which sported more unit types and additional campaigns. In a sudden outbreak of good taste, it also excised its predecessor’s hilariously cheesy cutscenes, featuring real human actors — by a generous definition of the term “actor,” that is — dressed up in crude latex monster suits. One of the enduring mysteries of the 1990s is why anyone ever thought this sort of thing was a good idea…

I must say that I adore the name Strategic Studies Group (SSG from here on), a wonderful example of the longstanding grognard determination to dodge the insinuation that they were engaged in anything so frivolous as making and playing games. No, friends, these are strategic studies of the battlefield, which in this case just happens to be filled with orcs and zombies and dragons in lieu of tanks and infantry and airplanes. (See TSR, or “Tactical Studies Rules,” and SSI, or “Strategic Simulations, Incorporated,” for other canonical examples of the trend.)

I’ve mentioned SSG only in passing before today; The Wargaming Scribe has done the best job of documenting their story that I know of. As he tells us, the company was founded in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, by two military-history and wargame buffs named Ian Trout and Roger Keating. They enjoyed a noteworthy international success right out of the gate in 1983 with their wide-frame conquer-the-galaxy game Reach for the Stars, the forerunner of interstellar 4X strategy games like my beloved Master of Orion. (I think that I tend to gravitate to this sub-genre for the same reason I do fantasy strategy: no messy, complicated real history to prick the conscience and muck up the joy of megalomaniac conquest.)

After Reach for the Stars put them on the map, SSG settled down to become a reliable purveyor of historical wargames, a kind of Aussie counterpart to the American SSI. Trout and Keating’s strong suit was the artificial intelligence that powered their computer opponents. In an era when even games like the landmark Civilization were able to offer up a challenge only by augmenting the rudimentary algorithms governing their computer players with an ever higher stack of material advantages, to the point that the human and the computer were in effect playing different games entirely, Trout and Keating obstinately refused to cheat in this fashion. Their computer players were widely acknowledged to be the craftiest in the business, capable of genuinely surprising human players from time to time with a clever bit of subterfuge or an unexpected ambush — no mean feat on an 8-bit machine with as little as 64 kilobytes of memory.

Fantasy strategy was added to SSG’s portfolio after Steve Fawkner sent the founders an early version of Warlords I for their consideration. The story goes that an unimpressed Ian Trout threw the disk in the trash — only to have his son come along, fish it out, and spend hours playing the game. On the basis of his testimony as to its merit, Keating and Trout gave it a second look, and eventually hired Fawkner to develop it further. This proved one of the best decisions they ever made. Released in 1989, Warlords I was simple and clean in a way that no SSG game had been since Reach for the Stars. Not coincidentally, it sold better than any SSG game since Reach for the Stars. Warlords II followed in 1993, and also did well by the company’s modest standards.

For the third installment, Fawkner and his colleagues updated their paradigm in some ways to suit the changing times. Instead of relying strictly on randomly generated maps, Reign of Heroes offered up a ten-episode pre-scripted campaign, complete with the aforementioned cheesy cutscenes. In other areas, however, Fawkner stuck to his guns. Most notably, he refused to add player-managed tactical combat. When two armies meet on the strategic map, the computer resolves the outcome with a series of virtual dice rolls that flash across the screen while you wring your hands and hope for the best from the sidelines.

Believe it or not, this screen shows a battle in progress.

Once you get past the tacky cutscenes, which probably cost as much as the rest of the game combined if industry norms held true, Warlords III can seem almost like a shareware game. The in-game graphics are best described as rudimentary — in my opinion, actually worse than those in the previous games, which had a colorful low-res charm that these lack. The writing in the tutorial and campaign gives cause to wonder whether the author has entered a contest to see how many overwrought clichés he can pack into a small volume of sentences.

It was 1252 years since the founding of the Selentine Empire when the greatest threat to the free races of Etheria reared its ugly head (1). In the icy wastelands (2) of the far north, Lord Bane, Master of the Undead, and Lord Sartek, Keeper of the Chaos Beasts, had formed an unholy alliance (3). Like a plague (4), they swept down from the northern tundra, crushing the citadels of the High Elves beneath their bony feet (5).

(Not bad for three sentences…)

But we aren’t supposed to care about any of this, we are told by a small but devoted cult of Warlords III admirers. This game is all about the gameplay.

In practice, it feels very much like a board game. You start out with a single hero, and can recruit more as a scenario goes on, but, unlike in Heroes of Might and Magic, you’re free to move your armies — or “stacks,” as the game prefers to call them, thus maintaining the tabletop feel — without a leader at their head. Although the maps in the campaigns are fixed, there is a lot of randomness embedded within them. For instance, you can accept randomized quests on behalf of your heroes. These often entail plundering the dungeons, ruins, barrows, and other such archetypes of fantasy architecture that are scattered around the map for randomized treasure and experience; in keeping with the nature of the combat, the results of any given expedition are revealed to you with a simple onscreen message. The scale of the strategic maps is usually huge, with dozens of towns to dispute with your foes in addition to the other points of interest, but the lack of a tactical component means that the game plays quickly even by comparison with Heroes of Might and Magic.

All of this is… fine, I guess, but I struggled to grow invested in it. I admit that I didn’t get far enough into the campaign to say whether the much-vaunted SSG artificial intelligence makes a difference. With no way to control my units on the battlefield or in the dungeons, I felt like I was playing half a game while someone else played the other half for me and told me what happened. Meanwhile the aesthetics did nothing to make me want to spend time in this world. I tip my hat to anyone who has gotten past these initial impressions and embraced the great game which I am told is lurking underneath. But, speaking personally, Warlords III flew pretty wide of my strike zone.

Next up is Age of Wonders, which came out late in 1999. Designed by Lennart Sas and Arno van Wingerden, it was the first game ever from a Dutch outfit known as Triumph Studios. It was published in North America by Gathering of Developers and elsewhere in the world by GOD’s biggest shareholder, Take Two Interactive.

The impression its opening cutscene gives is the polar opposite of Warlords III‘s: digitized cheese is replaced with lush hand-drawn art (even if it does unveil a dubious new innovation in videogame babes, the first female suit of armor to display the poor girl’s nipples as bas-reliefs). The dramatically different aesthetic sensibility obscures the ironic reality that Age of Wonders owes a massive debt to the older, uglier Warlords series.

Indeed, Age of Wonders makes for a fascinating study in game design as dialog and evolution, in that almost all of its elements are so obviously lifted from earlier exercises in turn-based fantasy strategy. The core of its movement and logistics is Warlords III, with the same stacks of up to eight units, one or more of which may be heroes who can go up in levels and gain skills and equipment. We likewise have the same large maps strewn with towns to conquer, resources to corner, and dungeons to delve.

But when armies meet one another on one of these maps, there emerges an important difference. You have the option to let the battle resolve itself automatically — i.e., Warlords-style —  but you can also oversee the fray yourself in a tactical game that smacks strongly of MicroProse’s much-loved classic Master of Magic. There’s a global magic system here which is straight out of that game as well. You receive a certain number of mana points per turn, derived from the number of magical wellsprings you control on the map. You can invest your mana into researching new spells for your magic-using heroes or have them expend it by casting the spells they already know. Some of these spells are triggered from the strategic map, where they can remain in effect for many turns as long as you have the necessary mana to sustain them. Others are one-shots for use on the battlefield. And some spells, such as heals and buffs, can be used in either situation.

When you add in a town-management layer that falls somewhere between Warlords and Master of Magic in complexity, you wind up with a considerably heavier game than Heroes of Might and Magic. Speaking of which: the influence of that series can be most readily detected in Age of Wonders’s interest in set-piece storytelling, which extends far beyond the procedurally generated maps of Master of Magic or the halfhearted, poorly written campaigns of Warlords III. The campaign here is presented as a literal storybook, in which you can choose to join the side of one of two elvish factions, one peaceful and idealistic and the other warlike and pragmatic, who are each responding in their own way to an invasion by a new race known as… wait for it… the Humans. Rather than handing you a simple linear ladder of scenarios to overcome, the game lets you make choices at the macro-level from time to time, even gives you the opportunity to switch sides mid-campaign.

Age of Wonders’s commitment to its fiction is impressive. The diligent and inquisitive player will come to realize that even the standalone scenarios constitute an extended story; if you play them in the order of the dates which stand in their descriptions, you wind up living through a prequel to the main campaign. The atmosphere throughout is slavishly Tolkienesque high fantasy — not exactly the highest-hanging fruit in gaming, but this game pulls it off with more panache than most. Aesthetically speaking, Age of Wonders has aged remarkably well. The art and the music seem as lovely today as they must have the day it was released. (The one odd exception is the sound effects during the tactical battles, which sound like they were lifted from old Three Stooges reels.)

Age of Wonders supports any screen resolution you care to throw at it, including widescreen ones. It ran happily for me in my monitor’s native resolution of 3440 X 1440, making it only the second game I’ve come upon in this fifteen-years-long-and-counting journey through time about which I can make such a statement. The interface elements don’t scale, and became so small at that resolution that the game is effectively unplayable, at least for someone with middle-aged eyes like me — but still, the fact that it works at all right out of the box is amazing.

For all that, though, I couldn’t quite make friends with Age of Wonders either. My problem with it comes down to what the legendary game designer Sid Meier has immortalized as “the Covert Action Rule,” after a flawed and otherwise forgotten game of his that came out in 1991. Meier believes that the reason his attempt to do for spies what his earlier Pirates! had done for corsairs didn’t work as well was that its mini-games were ironically too well-developed, such that they could take too long for the player to complete. By the time she finally gets back to the overarching strategic layer, goes the theory, she’s forgotten what she was doing there, has lost that ineffable sense of flow. “One good game is better than two great ones” stuffed into the same box, goes one of Meier’s oft-quoted design principles. Of course, game design is as much art as science, and the Covert Action Rule is a real problem right up until the point when it inexplicably isn’t. Speaking for myself, I don’t even think it’s the principal issue with the game Covert Action itself.

But I do think that it’s my problem — mileages will obviously vary here — with Age of Wonders. Those tactical battles you get dropped into when armies clash are very slow. Your units usually start out well away from the enemy, far enough away that just maneuvering them into range can require several turns of careful micro-management. Worst of all are the dungeon-delving expeditions, in which you find yourself trying to move up to eight units one by one through a series of twisty little passages, hoping not to get any of them caught out by the monsters that might be lurking around every corner. It takes forever. When you’re finally dumped back into the overland map after one of these extended interludes, it can be downright disorienting, as if you really are trying to play two completely different games at the same time.

These big, bland tactical maps can be kind of tiring just to look at.

It’s true that Age of Wonders has the option to auto-resolve the battles if not the dungeon-delving. But doing so seldom produces the results you can achieve by taking charge yourself, even as the scenarios tend to be mercilessly tough by the middle stages of the campaign, requiring you to make use of every advantage at your disposal. And anyway, as I already noted in the context of Warlords III, I don’t find auto-resolving the battles very satisfying either.

So, yes, I’m a tough crowd to win over. If Warlords III feels to me like too little game, Age of Wonders feels like too much of one, full of side-quests that are more burdensome than fun. I will say that I’m curious to try the sequels to Age of Wonders at some point in the future; I understand that Triumph Studios made an effort in them to address some of my complaints, by starting tactical fights with the armies closer together and by eliminating the manual dungeon-delving entirely. For this reason, the sequels are definitely on my syllabus.

In the meantime, though, I sort of promised you a Goldilocks game right there in the title of this article, didn’t I? I’m a hard guy to please by this point in my life, after playing games for more than 40 years, but I’m not a hopelessly jaded player. It is possible to strike a balance that makes me happy, as Heroes of Might and Magic proves… and as does Disciples: Sacred Lands.

Disciples comes to us by way of a Canadian company called Strategy First, which was founded in Montreal around 1990 by Don McFatridge and Steve Wall. After playing supporting roles in the industry for a number of years, they decided to try to make a go of it as a full-fledged developer and publisher late in the decade, peddling lower-budget, nichier games than those that tended to interest the established publishers. Disciples, which was released at about the same time as Age of Wonders, was created by a small French-Canadian studio, previously known as Micomeq, which Strategy First had recently acquired.

The game was designed by one Danny Bélanger. Sometimes dismissed by reviewers even today as just a low-budget Heroes of Might and Magic clone, it actually has a mind and personality that are very much its own. Its most obvious fresh idea is its approach to territorial gain, the source of its subtitle. (The name “Disciples,” on the other hand, has nothing much to do with anything here as far as I can tell; the developers seem to have chosen it just because they thought it sounded cool.) You don’t manually tag the gold and mana sources on the map with your armies to claim them for yourself, as you do in most other games of this style. Instead there is a zone of influence around each town a player owns, which widens its circumference gradually at a rate of one square per turn. This process continues until the expanding circle of influence is blocked, by the territory of a rival, a border of the map, or a mountain range, ocean, or other impassible landmark. Thanks to this system, you can tell from a glance at the map which faction is winning: the human Empire’s territory is lush green, the Undead Horde’s bleak and dark, the dwarven Mountain Clan’s a snowy white, and the Legions of the Damned’s a fiery red. In fact, many of the scenarios have victory conditions that crown as the winner the first faction whose terrain fills a given percentage of the map. It’s a unique and enjoyable mechanic, with the potential added bonus of staving off the late-game tedium of conquering the last few enemy towns left on the map.

The symbol of the evil Legion of the Damned faction (as seen on the mini-map at top right here) is the Danish flag. I’m not sure what to make of that…

Doing a clean sweep of the whole map would be almost impossible anyway, because each faction’s capital comes complete with a single super-strong unit that cannot be moved but is virtually impossible to defeat. In effect, then, you never really have to worry about losing your capital. This is especially nice in multiplayer sessions, as it means that no one has to suffer the indignity of being knocked out of the game early and then sitting around waiting for the other players to finish, feeling like the world’s biggest loser all the while.

As in Heroes of Might and Magic, units here can only move if led by a hero. Each of these can have from zero to five subordinates, depending on his or her Leadership level. In another break from other games of this general type, even the underlings here are explicitly cast as individuals, not groups, and have the ability to level up and get stronger just like the main heroes as they fight battles and win experience points, as long as you have built the appropriate upgrades in your capital to enable their advancement. (These features led Strategy First to call Disciples a full-fledged CRPG in some of their press materials, but this is going rather too far.) Each faction has a different selection of hero and underling types that can be purchased in its towns — as many of each as you can afford — and then further customized as they gain levels. (Pro tip: more Leadership is always the right choice for your heroes whenever it’s available.) The game is quite well-balanced on the whole, with no faction having a truly decisive advantage.

Now, to address the Goldilocks in the room: there is tactical combat in the game, but it’s extremely simple even in comparison to Heroes of Might and Magic, much less Age of Wonders. Each unit has exactly one attack to inflict upon its enemies, or, in the case of defensive units, one heal or one buff to apply to its comrades. Your job in combat entails nothing more than deciding whom your units hurt or help when their turns come up, by clicking the appropriate enemy or friend. Maneuvering on the battlefield is not a consideration, for the very good reason that it’s impossible. The whole exercise is so ridiculously simple that at first you might think it rote, nothing but a more click-intensive version of Warlord’s automated battles. Give it a chance, though, and you’ll find that it’s not entirely bereft of Sid Meier’s proverbial Interesting Decisions. Whom do you choose to attack first? Whom do you heal or buff? These decisions can be the difference between victory and defeat in a close fight.

The combat screen. I’ve just hit all of my enemies with an area attack, although my hero missed one of the polar bears. (Ah, well… we’re supposed to be trying to save the polar bears, right?) Two members of my party here are specters, who paralyze a single opponent for one turn rather than damage him. I just have to decide whom to paralyze. That’s where some dilemmas start to creep in…

There’s a magic system here too, a highly streamlined take on the Master of Magic approach. You have to research spells before you can cast them. You can’t use these spells in battle (other than if your unit has a “built-in” magic spell as its one and only move), but you can use them on the strategic map to soften up enemy stacks before you attack them, to buff your own units, or to do other things, such as revealing a section of map hidden by the fog of war or, conversely, hiding a piece of it from your opponents once again. With the tactical combat being so basic, success often hinges on what you do before a fight begins.

The spell book. Each faction has one type of mana that it favors and its own unique set of spells to research. The only way to obtain other spells is to trade for them.

Disciples isn’t what anyone would call an overly complex game, but it has more subtleties to it than you might think. Dorte and I had more fun with this game in multi-player mode than we have with any since Heroes III. (She found Warlords III too ugly and dull and Age of Wonders too complicated to want to play them with me.) We’re not particularly cut-throat competitors, especially against one another, so we appreciated being able to approach the scenarios more as a race for third-party towns and territory than a mano a mano fight to the death.

Of course, there are aspects of the game that could stand improvement. On the whole, Disciples’s flaws are the inevitable byproducts of a small team working within a budget of well under $1 million Canadian. The artificial intelligence of your enemies could be better, as could the single-player campaigns in general. There are four of these, one for each faction, albeit consisting of just four scenarios each. I found them to be pretty much incomprehensible in terms of narrative, just a lot of portentous word-salad speechifying adding up to nothing. They must relate to one another somehow, must be parts of some grander story, but I certainly couldn’t explain it to you even after watching all of the cutscenes on YouTube. Nor do I care enough to want to try — which is always the worst indictment anyone can level against any piece of fiction, isn’t it?

Within the campaign scenarios, the developers attempt to compensate for the poor artificial intelligence by stacking the odds more and more wildly against you; this is, in other words, another one of those asymmetric strategy games which SSG so decried. Even so, I never found the one campaign I actually completed — that of the Empire faction — all that taxing.

The capital-management screen for the Mountain Clans. It changes as you build more structures, but to tell the truth that’s something I scarcely notice. The graphics in this game aren’t actively bad, but are kind of anonymous-looking, with a palette dominated by dull browns and grays.

The above means that Disciples is easier for me to recommend as a game to play with a friend or two than as a single-player experience. When played with others, the stupid enemies no longer matter so much and the disarmingly elegant core rules are allowed to shine. Disciples hits that sweet spot of being easy to pick up but… okay, not exactly hard to master, but not trivial either.  I love it when I discover a new game that Dorte and I can enjoy together. And it’s always great to see a small team with original ideas come up with something as well put-together as this. The graphics and sound they could afford are not those of a AAA game — not even a AAA game from 1999 — but they’re just good enough not to be actively distracting, living somewhere between those of Warlords III and Age of Wonders.

Everyone’s mileage will vary, but for me, Disciples is the keeper of this trio. Fast-playing and straightforward, it’s the perfect game to share with someone else on the patio on a warm summer day in between sipping on a cool beverage and shooting the breeze. I like it. I like it quite a lot. And I very much look forward to trying out Disciples II.

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: This article is a bit more experiential than a product of deep research, but there are a few online sources that proved exceptionally useful. These are The Wargaming Scribe’s write-up of SSG and Reach for the Stars, an old Gamespy piece by John Keefer on “Developer Origins,” a Game Daily interview with Don McFatridge, a Home LAN interview with McFatridge, and a Kotaku interview with Steve Fawkner. Also the February/March 2000 issue of the French magazine Cyber Stratege.

Where to Get Them: Warlords III: Darklords Rising, Age of Wonders, and Disciples: Sacred Lands are all available as digital purchases at GOG.com.

(Continued from my last post.)

As is tradition with one of these gigantic cave-delving based games — and there is cave-delving, even though it wasn’t clear at first — let’s spend some time outside first.

To recap from last time, the game starts with you in a parking lot with little direction. Nearby is a dowel rod, a charm with triremes, two disks that allegedly allow teleportation (when magically charged), and a $10 bill. Going west from the road with the bill (and the two to the north) gets you lost in a forest.

The lost-in-forest part that I didn’t map before turned out to be unmappable. You just alternate between “you are hopelessly lost in the woods” and “you are lost hopelessly in the woods” no matter which directions you go, and then you get pulled out by a ground keeper. That doesn’t mean it is necessarily a red herring — maybe there’s some magical item that applies while there — but it could be. I don’t know how similar this game is to Ferret yet in that sense.

Going east leads to the white house from Zork, but with the stairs rotted away and only a can opener and a parchment left behind. The parchment indicates a great evil to be defeated (which I’ll explore the lore of in a later post) and that we need to find a magical flute.

WARNING: We may never reach the flute. Rob played this last year and was not able to visit all the rooms (based on the exploration counter) but there are bugs that need working around and possible some puzzles obtuse enough that we’ll need the crowd here to help out. Assuming no endgame, the goal is to simply get as high a “knowledge” score as possible.

Colorized version of the Zork I map with the “white” house. Atari User April 1987, from Atarimania.

What I hadn’t realized when I first encountered it (I hadn’t thoroughly tested exits yet) is that the forest behind the house (and even, to an extent, the waterfall) is copied off of Zork as well. This means there is a whole new outside section attached to the house. I’ll break it up into South Side Forest and East Side Forest.

The South Side Forest is fairly uneventful, but it’s worth noting that when you try to go to the far west, there’s a fence and the parking lot seen past it; this is a game which tries to form connectivity across its landscape (and isn’t afraid to put down a whole grid of “filler” rooms to make things match up).

To the south there’s a cliff; if you follow the cliff you can get to a waterfall.

There is a set of rock steps leading down onto a narrow ledge below which passes under the waterfall caused by the river Dipestia (to your east) falling over the cliff. The sound of the fall is almost deafening here.

D
Small ledge on the cliff
You are standing on a narrow ledge. The ledge leads east from here and passes directly under the waterfall. Although you may get wet, it appears safe to pass along.

E
Directly under the waterfall
Here the ledge passes directly under the waterfall and continues east. The wall of the cliff and the ground beneath your feet are damp. The sound of the waterfall is almost deafening.

E
Middle of nowhere
You are standing on a small obtrusion sticking out of the cliff. To the east is the narrow path from where you came. Behind you is the cliff. In all other directions is nothing but open air. Looking out from the cliff there is nothing, and looking down reveals no bottom to the base of the cliff.
On the ground is a oak pendant with the image of a cloud carved on the front surface.

The oak pendant with the image of a cloud carved on the front surface goes with the triremes charm, most likely; any bets if we’ll find a fire necklace and a rock on a ring?

Aragain Falls postcard, Zork User Group, via the Zork Wiki. The waterfall is southeast of the house just like Zork; there’s no obvious waterfall or other secret exit in Thissala.

The East Side forest is mostly also “filler” rooms, although it has the ground keeper’s hut and a henhouse.

There’s some corn near the henhouse and you might think to feed the corn to the hen, but the hen is “too nervous”. I assume there’s a puzzle here; there’s no obvious golden egg to steal or the like, though.

Clearing in the woods
Lying on the ground here, is a small pile of dried out corn.

GET CORN
Taken.

E
Outside of the Hen House
You are standing outside of a small shack which is used as a hen house. There is a ramp leading up into the building, which has no door to allow the hens to come in and go out. The place is obviously still being used for it has a certain air about it to indicate so.

IN
Inside the hen house
There are two windows in the hen house, one looking east, one looking north, both overlooking the river, and a long ledge along the south wall
Sitting on the shelf is a small nest
It contains:
A large hen, quietly staring at you.

FEED HEN
The hen does not trust you, and refuses the food.

The keeper’s hut is empty, and that’s even after the rescue from getting lost. Again not sure what kind of game we’re dealing with here, but I at least get the sense this is just for environmental flavor (and to motivate a person suddenly showing up).

Ground keeper’s hut
Directly in front of you to the north is the ground keeper’s hut. Because the weather is so warm, there is no door covering the doorway

N
Inside the ground keeper’s hut
You are standing inside of the keeper’s hut. There is one window to the north that overlooks the great Dipestia river. Beyond the river you can see a large mountain. There is a doorway to the south

Barring any secret exits or ways to fly past the cliff (which wouldn’t be surprising) that leaves the original dirt path as the only way to go. It leads to a “Y” in the path: “One leg leads northeast, another northwest, and the path also heads south.” Northwest leads to a town and mountains after, so let’s deal with northeast first.

Non-descript building
You are standing in front of a rather non-descript building made of brick. There are many small windows along each side of the building.
There is an open doorway into the building to the north, from which you can hear a dull hum.

The building is mostly a maze.

The interesting part is (if you consult the map) you can make it to the center of the maze just by going north, but you can’t get out by just going south. Originally I thought I might have been trapped in by a “hum” sound that permeates throughout, but it’s just a classical maze that can be mapped by dropping objects.

You are in a hall way of the non-descript building.
There is a dull humming noise that appears to come from everywhere.

N
You are in a hallway of the non-descript building.
The humming noise is louder than normal here, and appears to be coming from the room to the north.

N
Strange room
You are in the eastern part of a large, strange room. There is nothing here except the doorway out to the east. The humming is intense here.
A murder of crows fly overhead, appearing from the north and vanishing to the south

(The murder of crows can show up anywhere — the game does not recognize outside vs. inside.)

W
Silver Cube
This is the western half of the strange room. Directly in front of you is a large silver cube, with each side approximately 10 feet long. The humming is coming from the cube, although not from the inside … the actual cube is humming. There are no openings in the cube, no handles, and no writings on the cube.

The cube has no obvious entrances and can’t be taken. I’m not sure yet what to do here. It’s the most blatantly magical aspect to the game so far.

Returning back to the Y junction and heading northwest leads to “T” junction, with a branch that seems intended to invoke the Volcano View from Crowther/Woods.

Riverview
You are standing on a small peninsula that juts out into the swift river “Dipestia” (loosely translated it means division protecting from pestiferous spirits). As far as the eye can see, in either direction, the river is uncrossable. The far north bank is edged by a heavily overgrown field dense in timothy and flora unlike any other. The field is in the shadow of a great snow capped mountain which causes a crepuscular glow to illuminate the ground. Upstream to the west, the field narrows as the river curls around the mountain. Downstream, the field abruptly ends at a forest which, unlike the forest on the southern bank, with its trees of bole and fawn, consists of an incredible blend of color, surpassing even that of deciduous trees in autumn, adding blue and white, and colors that are indescribeable. Directly across the river various wild animals graze insouciantly on the riparian plants. To the southwest is a dirt path. Through a clearing in the trees on the southern bank, in the distance, can be seen an unaturally straight edge of reddish-brown.

I don’t think the game is filled with descriptions like this; in Crowther/Woods this is a reward of sorts for getting deep enough into the caves, whereas here it serves more to build the initial atmosphere. I appreciate the game gives a source for “Dipestia” even though the etymology is imaginary (it could be adjacent to something real, of course, if anyone has a suggestion).

Past the view is the town, where the map is very messy and I can’t promise this is 100% free of errors.

My guess is the authors (or single author responsible for this spot) had a “real” map they were trying to render into text-adventure form but it naturally came out messy; I still don’t know what’s with the weird swerve around the Restaurant, going southwest to end up on a road to the “east”, though. It could be a simple error that was never fixed, but there’s enough strange paths I would say at least some of it has to be intentional.

I should also emphasize — and it is easy to miss this because some games stick solely with compass directions — that in/out are directions in play, and you can’t enter most of the buildings without those two directions.

Hardware Store
The old village hardware store stands much the way it did 50 years ago. The building is made of wood planks, painted red. There are no windows visible from where you stand, however there is a doorway in directly in front of you.

IN
Inside the hardware store
The old hardware store has a plank and peg floor. All of the original furniture has been removed. There is only one door in the room, and that leads outside
Lying here is a long rope with knots tied in it at regular intervals.
There is a copper key here
Resting on the counter is a miner’s helmet. The helmet has a powerful light on the top.

The buildings have a curious abandoned-but-not-abandoned feel going on with them; clearly the groundskeeper is around (and we’ll run into a gnome in a second) so the owner of the hardware store is just fine with us taking things? Or maybe we’re just being very bold in stealing?

The copper key incidentally goes to a “modern” building in the southwest part of town which is still cryptic, even though I’ve solved what may be the only puzzle associated with it.

Modern building
You are standing outside of an comparitively modern building. There is a sign on the building above the door that reads “Bura di change”.
The door into the Bura is closed

UNLOCK DOOR
Click.

OPEN DOOR
The door is now open.

IN
Inside the Bura di change
The room is completely devoid of furniture. There is a small slot cut out in the north wall. Above it is written “IN”. A door leads out.
The door is currently open

The $10 bill fits in the slot. If you make the deposit, you get a “strange looking coin” with no further description.

There is a strange whirling sound from within the wall, which is followed by a short grinding noise. Then from the slot in which you put the dollar, a strange looking coin drops out, and falls to the floor by your feet

Next to the modern building is an “old church”. It has a box with its own slot; opening the box reveals a key marked CHEVY (which I would presume goes to a car, but I haven’t seen a car). The restaurant with the confused exits includes a couple items waiting for you to snatch:

Inside the restaurant
The resturant furniture has for the most part been removed. There is, however, a small counter and a stool left; these were not removed because they are attached firmly to the floor
Resting on a shelf in the corner is a full bottle of Brador
On the shelf is a full bottle of Grolsch
On the shelf is a tuna syrian with everything (hold the mushrooms)

(Both bottles have beer.)

The food (“tuna syrian with everything”) just lets you eat it, which brings up the softlock-or-not question: are we supposed to eat the food, or are we supposed to save it for later? I of course always save it, but every once in a while I’ve hit a puzzle where eating a consumable gives extra energy (The Hobbit being the most notable game where not eating food led to trouble).

Finally there’s a post office (with a single deposit box I haven’t been able to unlock)…

Inside the Old Post Office
You are standing inside of the old post office. Against one wall is a counter. This is was at one time a very busy post office (according to local lore) but now it is deserted. All of the postboxes have been destroyed except for one, which has a set of buttons on the front with a large brass faceplate around them, and a hinge on the left side.
The post office box is securly closed.

open box
The box is apparently locked.

…and a bank.

Inside the local small bank
Fastened against the wall in the corner is a set of chairs. Secured to the floor is a small counter that was at one time used by townfolk to fill out deposit and withdrawl slips. On the north wall is a button marked in letters now barely visible “Ring bell for service”. In the corner of the room is a staircase going down.
Surrounding the stairway down, is a metal cage, with a closed door
in the front

IN
A little gnome pops out and says “Sorry … you cannot enter without the appropriate withdrawl form”

The gnome makes me think we are again dealing with the ghost-geography of Zork making itself felt.

From the gamebook Zork 2: The Malifestro Quest. Image from Internet Archive.

That’s nearly everything outside (at least nearly everything until I find I accidentally missed an exit, leading to another 50 rooms or so) but at the northwest side of town we can go further, eventually to the mountains.

Along the way up to the mountains there’s a “shack” with some signal flags.

Path through a field
You are walking throught a large field, along a winding path heading southeast and north. The field seems to extend forever to the west, but to the east you can see a very large mountain. There is also the sound of water coming from the east.

N
Outside of the old shack
You are standing outside of an old, rundown shack with no windows visible from where you stand. There is a doorway in facing you, but the door has obviously fallen off of its hinges and is no where to be seen.

E
Inside the little shack
Although there are no lamps, there is enough light from the eastern window to see. On the wall, written in ink, is a message that says “Peter Mac slept here”. The place smells of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey.
Propped up against one wall in the shack is a pair of large signal flags.

The signal flags get used shortly after: there’s a climb up the mountain, but at top top there’s a drawbridge controlled by a gnome.

Highest plateau
You are on the highest plateau, which is considerably larger than the two lower ones. Directly below you you can see the Dipestia which flows from the NE to the SW where it curls around Major mountain, to south. Across, but higher up the northern face of other mountain, there is an observation booth with what appears to be a small gnome looking out at you using binoculars. Directly below the observation booth, at the level of the ledge you are on, is a wooden drawbridge.
The drawbridge is in the open position, making it impossible to cross over to Major mountain

WAVE FLAGS
It is obvious that the little gnome saw you waving the flags for he waves back at you. He then disappears into his observation hut. A second later, there is the sound of great motors turning and slowly the drawbridge lowers into place.

S
Major mountain ledge
You are standing on a ledge on major mountain. The ledge is about eight feed wide, and heads east around the mountain. Above you you can see a small observation booth. Accross the river is Minor mountain.
There is a drawbridge here, anchored into the face of Major mountain.
The drawbridge is in the closed position, forming a path accross to Minor mountain

E
Cave entrance
You are standing on a ledge on major mountain. The ledge is about six feet wide here and heads west around the mountain. There is a cave cut into the side of the mountain.

S
Sloping tunnel
You are in a long sloping tunnel that heads south into the depths of the cave

The cave that follows is dark; the game warns of danger if you don’t have a light source. This leads to the first time I’ve died in the game. (The game is much gentler than Ferret in general, telling you about falling down a cliff being a bad idea rather than describing a grim plummet.)

You were warned. Without the light you seem to have gotten yourself killed.

As the darkness of death fades, and the light intensifies, you find yourself falling quickly at first then slower, then slower still until you find yourself looking down on a strange land. Below is a river, a long river, so long that even at this height the river stretches forever. About 1 mile from each bank of the river is a tall mountain range. You slow more until you are about 1 foot from the ground, and then you lite gently on the surface of an eerie world.

Thick mist
The ground, and the river, are almost undistiguishible here due to the dense fog that surrounds you. Upstream, you can barely make out what appears to be a bridge heading to the other side of the river.

The main thing I’m not clear on yet is if this is a “Treasure Hunt” in the capitalized sense, where the goal is to gather specific items and if you find 50 of the right ones you open you reach the endgame (…presuming it works). More exploration next time! And maybe a few more substantial puzzles; so far getting the strange coin and getting the drawbridge to move have been my only wins.

Happy Pride! Choice of Games is proud to be gender-inclusive and LGBTQ+-affirming all year round, but during the month of June, we’re featuring writers whose work connects especially closely with those themes.

Today we’re sitting down with Charli Battersby, author of Kidnapped: A Royal Birthday and Cheerleader’s Choice: New York Spirit.

Cheerleading is an environment that can sometimes be very heteronormative, but can also play with ideas about gender. How did you approach those issues when you were writing Cheerleader’s Choice?

Female cheerleading is definitely heteronormative. Even on LGBT teams. And male cheerleading used to be heteronormative too. In fact the first cheerleaders were all-male teams, and it was very manly to put on your school colors and cheer for your fellow manly heterosexual men.

Now there’s a stereotype that all male cheerleaders are gay; which was pretty much true on the teams that I was on. I knew one straight male cheerleader and a handful of bisexuals. The rest were gay, but many of them are big, burly athletes who definitely refute the stereotype of effeminate gay men. I’ve known a couple who are built like football players. In Cheerleader’s Choice some of the men are real bruisers, and they are partially based on real people. The Pink Titan is based on a seven foot tall drag queen who performed at a cheer fundraiser I attended at The Stonewall. He’s a really nice guy, but I wouldn’t want to go up against him in the Thunderdome.

For my fictional team, I made it a little more diverse than you’d see in the real world. Even on LGBT cheer teams the straight female “Allies” vastly outnumber the lesbians. And there’s always been a problem with LGBT organizations, in that bisexuals are tolerated but often unwelcome. Especially bi men who are currently dating a woman.

So my fictional team, New York Spirit, has a couple of prominent characters who are canonically bisexual, and one character who’s canonically a lesbian. Many of the other characters don’t directly state their sexuality, so the player can imagine what they like.

As for gender and cheerleading… That’s a bigger issue for me. And it’s something that is hard to have an honest conversation about. When I started cheerleading in 2017, I was the only trans person on my LGBT team. They’d been around for 15 years before I showed up (Uninvited) to try outs.

There are often gay male cheerleaders who dress up in women’s uniforms as a joke, but trans cheerleaders were extremely rare until recently. After I quit my first team, they rapidly acquired a replacement token trans person, who was kicked off the team two years later. This year they forgot to make a post about Trans Day of Visibility, so I’m not optimistic about them learning any lessons.

“Trans Rights” is a less fashionable cause these days. I think a lot of politicians and athletic organizations will flip-flop about allowing transwomen on them. And many trans people will stop publicly identifying as trans once the backstabbers start sharpening their knives. I do know a few athletic organizations that are on the vanguard of the fight, so I think there will always be a place for trans athletes, if we look hard enough.

The character Rikki in my game represents all of the rage and resentment that I have towards the hypocrisy of certain former-teammates. And, the character Olivia is a composite of all the fake allies I knew. There is a very cathartic scene near the end of the game…

You’ve played a lot in dystopian settings: not only does Cheerleader’s Choice have a surprisingly dark sense of humor and a dystopian setting, you’ve also written a stage play set in a bunker after a nuclear apocalypse, and you co-created an animated series set in the Fallout world. What draws you to dystopia? What kinds of stories can you tell there that you can’t in other settings?

At a glance it might look like “Heated Rivalry with cheerleaders.” But it’s more like “Watchmen meets The Warriors.”

If you like dystopian comedy in the vein of Terry Gilliam, Paul Verhoeven, or Kurt Vonnegut, you’ll be able to appreciate the game as social satire. The cheerleaders are trying to be optimistic as the world burns around them. Look close at the game’s cover art, and that’s literally what’s happening.

It’s written so that you can come into it with no preexisting knowledge of cheerleading. You can even play a character who hates cheerleaders.

But it’s also a personal love letter to the sport of cheerleading. Probably not appropriate for your tween daughter… but cheer moms and cheer dads will love it!

I’m a lifelong fan of dystopian and post-apocalyptic stories. Sometimes these dystopias inadvertently seem better than the real world. That was a problem with this game; the real New York was getting increasingly absurd over the years the game was in development. I couldn’t make up political scandals fast enough to outpace the real ones!

My play That Cute Radioactive Couple is a very dark comedy about a married couple trapped in a “Bachelor Bunker” built for one person. And it was written several years before the COVID pandemic. The lockdowns forced a lot of real couples into that exact situation. The characters are a loving couple trying to accept their deaths, and specifically how they want their spouse to die too. Do they starve to death together in the bunker? Should one of them commit suicide so the other can live a little longer? Would you want to die first in your marriage, and leave your spouse alone, or would it be more selfless to be the one who lives?

Also, I assure you, it IS a comedy.

That play got me the job at Shoddycast. I’m the writer and co-creator of their The Storyteller: Fallout series. Which is a project I dearly love. I still run into people who watch it ten years after it was released. I love meeting the fans in random places!

And I was delighted that some of the voice cast from the Fallout games agreed to reprise their characters for us. Hearing Courtenay Taylor, and Wes Johnson, and Erik Dellums performing dialog that I wrote, that was a dream come true for me as a fan!

I’ll smugly boast that Shoddycast’s Fallout show has a higher rating on IMDB than Amazon’s Fallout show. And that’s because it was made with love by fans, for fans.

As for stories that I can tell in a dystopian settings… These are great for stories where the protagonist is the only sane person in the world. Like Winston Smith in 1984, where he seems like the only person who understands that this is not how the world is supposed to be. The thing that keeps the real world from genuinely becoming a sci-fi stories is that lots of people understand that this is not how it’s supposed to be.

When we blindly accept “The New Normal” that’s when we’re on the fast track to Soylent Green.

So I like to write comedies about living in a dystopia. You can either laugh about it, or you can run amok with an ax.

In addition to being a writer and game designer, you’re also an actor! Your blog about being a background actor is wonderfully informative and hilarious. What’s one thing that you think would surprise people about being a background actor?

On the blog I constantly talk about the food on a movie set! It can be a very glamorous experience portraying the role of “Nondescript Pedestrian #78.” Even when you’re an extra, you can get the movie star treatment. Catered meals, a glam squad doing your hair and makeup. I even had my own trailer once, just because I had ONE LINE on a TV show.

And since this is a Pride Month piece, here’s a bonus surprise. You’d be astonished how hard it is for transwomen to get cast as extras. At least as anything besides “LGBT type,” and “Trans Hooker.”

My blog chronicles how I’ve taken multiple casting companies to court just so I can play “Blurry Pedestrian #200.” I have had to file seven different human rights cases over this. The industry likes to have high-profile trans representation as guest stars, and principal cast. But they don’t care about trans extras and Stand Ins.

G.L.A.A.D. doesn’t hand out awards for having trans extras in a big blurry crowd.

And no, the casting company that casts the Fallout TV series wouldn’t let me work on that show. I’ve also never been cast as a cheerleader. But it’s gotten a little better since I started taking people to court over this issue. I’ll be cast as “Cheerleader #6” or “Vault Dweller #21” eventually.

We’re asking all of our authors this: How has your representation of LGBTQ+ themes in your writing evolved over the course of your career?

I’ve been openly trans since the 1990s and working as a writer for that long too. Back then you did not get a medal for being the first openly trans person at your job. You got fired.

Writing a single trans character in a project was controversial. I’d constantly hear, “That’s denying a role to a real woman” or “This isn’t a drag show.”

I’d sneak around that by including a female character who could be trans, and then I’d play the role myself.

Nowadays, everyone’s shoehorning trans characters into their stories, so I try to be the irreverent court jester and say things that I don’t think a cis-gender person could say. In Cheerleader’s Choice the trans cheerleader, Rikki, goes berserk several times and engages in violence towards gay men and fake allies.

The “Violent Trans” stereotype is something that’s hard for anyone to talk about; the game came out right in the middle of a series of shootings and stabbings committed by trans people, so I think other writers are afraid to address the fact that a lot of trans people, including me, have intense rage.

Again, we can laugh about it, or we can run amok with axes.

There’s also a scene in my game where a villain disguises himself as a drag queen, then the heroes chase him through the West Village and get in a brutal fight, while constantly screaming “We’re not committing a hate crime!”

A lot of writers would never write something like that. But I haven’t heard any complaints about that scene.

There is another scene that I debated removing from the game because it tackles a very serious issue that trans people aren’t supposed to talk about. One of my fictional cheerleaders has an unstable gender identity; it’s never directly stated if she’s trans or not. But there’s a scene where the canonically trans character says, “People like her make people like me look crazy.”

The player has to choose how to address this. It’s one of several scenes involving trans characters where there isn’t a simple solution. There is a lot of division within the LGBT community, and even within the trans community itself, but few writers address it.

From a game mechanics perspective, I include a dialog option early in the game where the player can say that they don’t have “Gaydar” and can never tell when someone’s gay. If you choose this, you’ll have special dialog options where your character doesn’t realize that you’re on an LGBT team. This is intended for laughs, but I suspect some players will use it un-ironically.

And if you’re trans, your character has a “Transponder” instead of Gaydar which gives you special lines of narrative and dialog that even the gay characters won’t see.

Finally: how are you celebrating Pride this year?

I’ll be in the Coney Island Mermaid Parade for sure. And still scrubbing off the glitter in July.

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

This week, we’re featuring two games by Charli Battersby. Cheerleader’s Choice: New York Spirit and Kidnapped! A Royal Birthday are up to 40% off until June 22nd!

Cheerleader’s Choice: New York Spirit — Be heroic! B-E heroic!
Kidnapped! A Royal Birthday – Escape your captors…endure your rescuers!

Public attention, as well as the attention of groups such as this, has been focused on the design and application of large, expensive “super computers.” Our national preoccupation with size and power makes this fact understandable. However, the minicomputer, which I define as a stored program computer selling for under twenty-five thousand dollars, is deserving of much more serious attention than it has heretofore been given.

— Robert L. Hooper, from a paper presented at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference

In the late 1960s, there was a technological gold rush in “small computers”. The PDP-8, developed at DEC by a team led by Edson de Castro, gave in 1965 both proof of concept and proof of market that a computer meant for a desk rather than a room was now feasible.

From Christie’s, a PDP-8. It was essentially the PDP-1 from 1959 but made into the bare minimum; it used a 12-bit design rather than the PDP-1 18-bit design.

By the end of the decade, small computer companies sprouted up in the legions; the Tracy Kidder book Soul of a New Machine claims “one every three days” in 1968 which is a bit of an exaggeration but not by much. You can compare it to the dot-com boom of the late 1990s; you could also compare it to the dot-com bubble popping, since most of these companies died.

The gold rush wasn’t restricted to the US; the Nixdorf 820 was from Germany. Image via the Computer History Museum.

A list of minicomputers from 1968 to 1972 includes plenty of companies (…Linolex, Minicomp, Multidata…) with “no data” indicating they were amongst the fallen.

The top competitor to DEC was spun out of DEC itself, as Edson de Castro, allegedly annoyed he couldn’t go forth with a new 16-bit design for a computer, left to form his own company (taking some DEC people with him), Data General. They made their public debut late in 1968 with a system they called the NOVA.

From a 1968 brochure, via the Computer History Museum.

The roll-out was at the Joint Computer Conference in December, where they had the mock-up unit above (finished two days before the conference started). One of the founders, Henry Burkhardt III, programmed it with Spacewar, demonstrating it was just as capable as a room-filling PDP-1. The conference was full of a technical audience and this is who they sold it to. They were just inside the front doors, across from IBM.

(The conference included Engelbart doing his “Mother of All Demos” which — in addition to showing off the invention of the mouse — showed hypertext, word processing, video graphics, and even collaborative editing in the style of modern Google Docs. You can watch a video circa 1968 here. It was purely for showing off research, which gives a good notion of the audience; you can find other sessions from the same conference here.)

Despite Data General having fantastic pedigree on their technology, poaching from DEC itself, it was still hard to stand out, and Data General went for pizzazz. The brochure I clipped the picture from above also included glamour photographs of the C-suite, trying to make them look like harbingers of a new age.

The President (de Castro) and one of the Vice-Presidents (Herbert J. Richman).

Contrast with a DEC pamphlet at the same time, which only includes one picture on the front, and is mostly text and a chart showing sales growth.

Their combination of competent technology and edgy marketing pushed them to the forefront of the market, and they went public at lightning speed (November 1969).

NOVA computers ready to ship in 1969, in “Building 1”. From Interface, May 1983, Data General’s internal magazine.

They got a reputation as the “bad boys” of the industry; a modern analogy would be to tech companies with the motto “move fast and break things”. Even from the very start they hired people with little guidance; consider the early programmer John Henderson hired from Bell Labs:

So Burkhardt gave him [Henderson] a pile of rough technical data on the NOVA and some examples of other companies’ software documentation and told him to go write some software manuals. It was a textbook example of how to mismanage a newly hired employee: assign a poorly defined, highly frustrating job, provide very little guidance, no well-thought-out schedule, and then ignore the “new hire” for weeks. But, Henderson loved it. He thrived in this atmosphere, and worked outrageous hours. Data General got a huge pay-off on its investment in giving a talented young person a chance to tackle challenging problems with very little bureaucratic interference. The process was to be repeated time and time again.

As Bill Foster (at Data General in 1976-1979, their greenest years) explains:

I was given very few orders from my boss. Just get the job done. I loved reporting directly to the president of the company — Edson de Castro, The Captain. The founder of what by 1976 had become one of the most exciting and successful computer companies in the world. Although I had a great job at Hewlett Packard I was way down the totem pole at that huge company. At DG I was close to the top. Close to being a star!!

At HP you felt secure, no matter how bad you screwed up. It would have taken an act of bloody murder to get fired. The contrast with DG was extreme. Employees were kept on edge. Your job was simple: help the company make a profit — that’s why you’re here. We were all given a lot of rope. But if you screwed up just take that rope and hang yourself before someone does it to you. It was clear that everyone was expendable.

The general chaotic handling of management really set in when Data General was ready to upgrade from 16-bit architecture to 32-bit architecture, and there were two competing teams within the company working on the same thing. This is the source of the events from the book Soul of a New Machine, and while the history is somewhat relevant to today’s game (the current existing version is on 32-bit) it’s past our scope. This is because our authors came from a different group altogether.

Instructions for the Eclipse MV/8000, the 32-bit project that was actually finished. The group was meant to only update the system without bit change but did the modification secretly, and kept compatibility with 16-bit systems. Image from Internet Archive.

Thissala’s authors were David Auerbach, Paul Chiasson, and Peter Macaulay, all members of Data General’s Corporate Systems Engineering Group. They were not working on new system architecture (or causing havoc with unreachable goals for new system architecture). If you don’t know what a Corporate Systems Engineering Group is, there’s a Data General job posting from Computerworld (September 15, 1980) that explains the idea:

CSE is a systems support group responsible for software support activities which require centralized control and are worldwide in scope. as such it provides a unique opportunity to provide technical leadership and direction through a team of sophisticated software professionals, over a broad range of state-of-the-art products.

In other words, they worked on the custom technical support for businesses. Of the three authors (David Auerbach, Paul Chiasson, and Peter Macaulay) I haven’t seen any mentioned in the literature on Data General, and in general Peter Macaulay is the only one that I’ve been able to find at all. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and went to Manchester for an Electrical Engineering degree, followed by a Master’s at Brunel.

In 1978, Peter’s spirit of adventure brought him across the Atlantic to the United States, where he made his home in Bellingham, MA. His love for exploration never waned, from piloting small aircraft to sailboats, hiking in the mountains of Ireland, New England, and Japan, he was always eager to embrace new cultures and experiences.

There’s still time for more historical information to surface, as this will be a multi-post game. It is allegedly very large. It claims 1000 rooms and 400 objects. The reason for the “claims” there is that the game seems to be unfinished; it is possible there are portions designed but too broken to reach; it is even possible the 1000 rooms/400 objects were planned but not fully made. We have version 0.60 which was ported to 32-bit Eclipse and the change notes read like a work in progress, including this:

The monster are again wondering the different sections. They will attack, but with no strength as of now. There was a bug reported that I believe is now fixed. This should prove or disprove this.

There’s instructions here how to play and some extra historical context by Rob on how the game was discovered; in 2025 the Novas are Forever site started uploading a series of drive dumps, and one of them had a number of lost items, like a novel variant of Adventure, a multi-player RPG called Quest, and an early version of Ferret. Prior to last year, Thissala was entirely unknown and not written about in any histories at all. (This is despite Soul of a New Machine making a big deal out of Crowther/Woods Adventure; there was a strong culture around the game at Data General. I’ll get into that connection more when I’m deeper in the game and have more context.)

ASIDE: I incidentally recommend the link in that post by gschmidl which already has everything set up to play Quest; change the third to last line in the mv.ini file which talks about Quest into

EXPECT “\n)”; SEND “dir :games\r”; CONT

which will land you (after booting the emulator up with mv mv.ini) into the games directory. You can then type games to get a menu or enter the name of the game you want directly. You still will want to follow Dan’s instructions for quitting out: type bye, pick y on the prompt, and then q for a total shutdown.

One extra caveat is that the game has “idle” messages if you don’t type for a while, which is annoying when you’re adding to notes or a map in a second window. I used the program Game Pauser to alleviate this (somewhat).

Tracy Kidder discovers the twisty maze of little passages, all different.

Finally, let’s get into the game, shall we?

Middle of the parking lot
You are in the middle of a large parking lot that stretches off in all directions. In the distant north you can see a large mountain. To the northeast you can hear the sound of water.
At your feet lies a long square dowel.

This follows the Crowther/Woods tradition of not being clear about the goal until you look at the help info, but even then the game starts with its cards close. The HELP command asks you to type THISSALA for a description of the game.

The fundamental difference between THISSALA and other games is that the goal in THISSALA is not just to get all the treasure, but to accomplish a substantial feat, that is, to save the world from the forces of evil, and restore the power of good. Hidden somewhere in the land is a parchment describing the tale of THAMOS and MAKASSAR. This scroll holds the initial clues to what must be done.

(The scroll, fortunately, is easy to find, although I’ll save it for the end of this post.)

The help also specifies some statistics, more than other text adventures from this time: POWER (strength), COOR (agility), MAGIC (magic ability increased via specific books), WISDOM, KNOWLEDGE (percent of the game explored). WISDOM is explained with “who the hell knows?” so maybe it’s there for fun?

status

Current power level: 0
Current coordination level: 0
Current magic level: 0
Current wisdom level: 0
Current knowledge level: 0

It incidentally takes 8 rooms visited to increase the knowledge level by 1, so assuming it’s out of 100%, there are in reality “only” 800 rooms rather than 1000. That still puts the game as enormous. (Ferret beats that by about double, but keep in mind Ferret took six months to beat.)

You can incidentally mop up the 8 rooms fairly quickly by just walking around the parking lot you start the game in.

The room descriptions are not elaborate but the game already has thrown four items out, two which seem to be a complex mechanism.

First is the long square dowel. That’s all the game says. (There’s no “examine” feature, like the Cambridge mainframe games; the “on the ground” descriptions of objects try to be elaborate enough to cover.)

Go northeast and you’ll find a beautiful turquoise charm with the outline of a triremes on it. The game does not understand “wear” or “use” although you can wave it (to no apparent effect).

Parking lot (NE)
You are at the northeast corner of the parking lot. To the east there is a tall fence. To the north is a dirt trail.
Near the fence, is a beautiful turquoise charm with the outline of a triremes on it

(I assume the authors meant like the boat, but “a” triremes? Is that just a typo?)

To the east and southeast of the center are a black disk and a white disk. Both have instructions.

Magic stepping disk. To use, place on ground, and step on.
Warnings:

Disks must be used in pairs. You had better know where the other disk is
Disks will have to recharge at various times, not always dependent on usage
Disks require, and drain, magic power

I did some serious fussing but I was unable to work out the parser command to use the disks.

step on black disk
I don’t understand the word ‘step’

stand on black disk
I don’t understand the word ‘stand’

step on
I don’t understand the word ‘step’

step
I don’t understand the word ‘step’

get on black disk
Don’t be silly

stand on black disk
I don’t understand the word ‘stand’

I have yet to do my verb list test; probably next time. One last item of note before leaving the lot is there is the occasional random message, like

A thunder of rhinoceroses pounds by and miraculously, neither you nor anything around you is damaged

or

A murder of crows fly overhead, appearing from the north and vanishing to the south

I don’t know if these are meant just for color, or meaningful. If you don’t pause the game the backscroll can get filled with this kind of nonsense:

Excuse me … but are you still playing?

Hello … hello … is anyone still there?

Excuse me … but are you still playing?

Psst … hey you …

(Hence the Game Pauser. Although if someone knows a clever way to make Powershell just go idle when it isn’t in focus, that would also work.)

Heading north from the only exit away from the lot (north from the NE corner), there is a $10 bill along with a warning.

Dirt trail
You are on a dirt trail that runs north and south. There is a small
sign on the western side of the path
Lying in the path is a $10 bill

read sign

WARNING
DENSE FOREST TO THE WEST
DO NOT STROLL FROM PATH
IN THAT DIRECTION

Heading west leads into what seems to be a relatively standard Adventure clone (the kind with passages all different, too boot) but I haven’t had the energy yet to tackle it. If you wander long enough you’ll get help.

n
You are hopelessly lost in the woods

w
You are lost hopelessly in the woods

w
You are hopelessly lost in the woods

s
You are lost hopelessly in the woods

s
The game and ground keeper appears in front of you and says “Whats a matter … are we a little lost” and then muttering something about damn tourists, he leads you back to the junction in the paths

The aforementioned junction is just north of the dirt road.

Junction in the paths
There is one dirt path leading north, one leading south and a stone walk leading to the east. There is an old sign stuck in the ground on the eastern side of the path.

read sign

HISTORIC HOUSE —>

The historic house in question is the one from Zork.

Zork User Group map, from The Gallery of Undiscovered Entities.

Most of the map is removed, though, indicating a long-decayed piece of the past.

West of house
You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.

n
North of house
You are facing the north side of a white house. There is no door here, and all the windows are barred.

e
Behind house
You are behind the white house. In one corner of the house there is an empty window with no glass in it.

w
Kitchen
You are in the kitchen of the white house. A table seems to have been used recently for the preparation of food. A passage leads to the west and a dark, boarded staircase can be seen leading upward.
To the east is a small empty window with no glass.
On the table is a can opener

w
Living room
You are in the living room. There is a doorway to the east, and a large wooden door to the west, which appears to be nailed shut.
Lying on the floor of the living room is a sheet of parchment
In the very center of the room is an oriental rug.

You can try moving the rug and opening the trapdoor, but you find if you try to go down that there is now a 30-foot drop instead (the game doesn’t kill you! it just warns you of the decay). The whole purpose of the section is to dispense the can opener and the parchment. The parchment gives the actual true plot of the game. It’s rather long but I’m still reproducing the whole thing, because there might be subtle hints.

Oh yee that find me … lend me your thoughts for an instant. Ensconce your eyes on this document, for you maybe the last to do so. Read and imbibe and if you be coureageous follow what follows, my tale and time are short, so I must write quickly.

Many years ago, a colony of explorers settled this region. They grew quickly in number and strength till they were larger and stronger than any people around. They were ruled by a kakistocracy for almost 100 years, during which time they expanded their geographical boundries by war and conquest. Eventually one leader emerged, his name was Makassar he was the most evil – and he continued and expanded the kakistocracy’s policy of conquest and terror. And that continued for thirty years.

At that point, a new leader replaced the just dead Makassar. His name was Magog, and he developed his abuse of humanity by turning on the weaker of his own people. He kidnapped children for his slaves and stole wealth for his pleasure. It was that same year that born to two mountain dwellers was Thamos, who could trace his lineage back to Thamos of Egypt, son of Tuktanfontmarranthon.

And after 20 years of Magog, Thamos came down from the mountain on the back of a great turtle, passed through the woods and accross the Dipestia and entered into Makassara. And he carried a carved oak flute. The good people, the abused, and beaten, joined behind Thamos, while the evil followers of Magog threw rocks and insults. The evil outnumbered the good, and the good were beaten and slain.

Seeing this, Thamos used his one magic power, and passed his hands in front of the people, and the world stopped. Thamos turned to his followers and spoke:

        We shall sleep for many a year … and wait the music of the flute.

Thus spoke Thamos. Then he turned to the evils and said:

        You shall remain awake … and continue your ways … but never again bear offspring.

Thus spoke Thamos. Then he turned to me and said:

        Scribe … record accurately … cache well your parchment … for in your writings be our destiny … speak of the sleep … but more strongly of the flute for it is our future.

Thus spoke Thamos. He then raised his flute in his hand, then lowering his hands the flute remained suspended in the air. And Thamos said:

        Go

The flute ascended and disappeared over the trees and into the mountains. And Thamos said to me:

        Now hide your document … and return … you have but minutes before you sleep.

Thus spoke Thamos. And I followed.

Our goal seems to be to defeat a great evil by finding a flute that was used to put the people of Thamos to sleep. Thamos of Egypt is incidentally a reference to an obscure Mozart piece. The king is fictional.

The name-clash could be coincidence, but I don’t think so, since we’re on a quest for a magic flute, and (in contrast to Thamos, King of Egypt) The Magic Flute is one of the most famous of Mozart’s pieces.

I have at least a month blacked out for playing this game, it may go for two or longer depending on how much works and how much is broken. As I’ve only played the introduction for now, please keep speculations to this portion of the game; however, you can generally consider this a many-person game like Ferret where everyone can contribute as much as they are able.

This is a temporary post for anyone attending my talk on the 1st year of Japanese adventure games. This links to my discussion of each one I have been able to write about in depth.

For those not attending, there will be a YouTube upload eventually! (Although for my regular readers, there won’t be anything new! But maybe you’d like to hear me talk anyway.)

Omotesando Adventure

Mystery House

Mystery House II

Diamond Adventure

Takara Building Part 1

Cosmo Cross

The Phantom Ship / Yuureisen

The Palms

Puzzle Adventure

My next game will start tomorrow.

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

Cover from an early Apple release, via Mobygames.

To continue directly with the most immediately clear solve: the way the barrel works is as a teleporter. It’s not a new location at all, but rather is the dark place between the dungeon and the magician’s room. You can go east or west to get out; the reference to finding a nearby fire to light the candlestick is to the fire in the magician’s room I had already used before. The barrel is a 100% optional shortcut.

Speaking of optional, while struggling with a lack of vase I found one more optional puzzle, back at Lady Vainly.

The main thing to note here on the game is there are two kinds of interaction

1. using TALK and getting some sort of comment or hint

2. randomly using GET on some item that the character possess, and rather than them getting angry at you they just tell you what they want in exchange

I had already discovered the GET earlier with the cookie at the baker (if you just TALK, it says nothing about the idea of trading chocolate moose for cookies) but it still wasn’t in my normal grab of tricks to simply swipe stuff in front of a character and see their reaction. With Lady Vainly you can try to GET the picture she is standing next to.

This is a BEAR. It strikes me as the sort of thing you’d find in a more generalized children’s game (not an adventure) but that seems to be the philosophical approach to the design in general (which is fascinating, and I’ll get more into that element after finishing the game).

She will give you the picture after you name BEAR, and she notes it is already signed. This picture is highly valued by the guard; I had plenty of items to give out (trying to be very efficient on my journeys) but I used this on my last pass before making it to the Peak of Shards.

Past that, I decided the chocolate moose would only be solved once I came across the right item, and I finished trying to give the COAT to every single character in the game (all who have unique messages to that in particular!) The fortune teller gave a message that hinted you needed the coat for yourself, not for a trade.

That meant I was left with the pesky vase. I had earlier thought it might be hiding in the “treasure room” in the maze, but was not having any luck.

I tried referring to every item in the picture, being very unclear as to what nouns even to use; for example, trying to open a BAG (noun doesn’t exist) or move what appeared to be a TAPESTRY (noun doesn’t exist) or a CURTAIN at the back (noun does exist, but the game just says to try walking that way). I was thorough enough that I discarded this for a while and tried USE COLOR in every single room in the game, looking for an invisible vase appearing. No luck.

It was time to whip out the big guns.

This is a page from Kim Schuette’s Book of Adventure Games, the most popular book of hints from the 80s (including maps of every single area in Time Zone, for instance). I checked the back hints for the vase that holds shadows, and was mystified to see a mention of the vase in a cupboard. The only cupboard I remembered was in the magician’s room, but trying OPEN CUPBOARD and GET VASE led me to finding no vase. Hmm.

That thing I thought was a tapestry in the treasure room was actually a cupboard.

Even after the fact, that doesn’t look like a cupboard to me. What’s with that black portion on the bottom?

The funny side effect of all this is you can find the vase almost right away in the game; for such a player, the mystifying part might be its use, but I had already staked out where to find the shadow of a child.

I found this deeply unsettling.

Returning the shadow to the witch…

…I now had USE INVISIBILITY and USE VISIBILITY as spells. Finally I could wander the castle! It turns out the trapdoor-navigation lets you visit most of the rooms; only a handful were inaccessible. The first is past a guard stationed by the kitchen, which goes to a church. Since I heard the hint already about the location of the shard, I automatically got it added to my screen just for entering the room.

To the far east is another previously-unseen room, the King’s Royal Chambers.

Going south from here leads to a place the jester hangs out, but also a moose on the wall.

The moose is what the baker wants, but the cookie just serves as another bribe for the guard, so I ended up not using it.

The Royal Chambers have a locked door to the north and trying to unlock the door indicates Voar locked the door and swallowed the key, so I admit I spent a little time trying to trick him into eating a cookie while invisible and causing him to throw up the key somehow. Except: I still had the lockpick! (The game isn’t into object re-use otherwise, so it took me more time than it normally might have to come to this realization.)

Having applied it on every single other room, knowing to USE COLOR to the painting was immediate.

That’s all the shards in the castle! Following my guess earlier, I then went to the tavern to see if Brother Jon was there to teach sign language. (There’s a hint from the bard about getting wine after you’re prepared, although I only realized the connection after the fact.)

Having entering the tavern be a softlock prior to this point (since you get everything stolen, including required items) is astonishingly rude even for a game not targeted at children.

TALK now enters a mini-game. It’s just Simon but with hand motions. Q/A/Z for high/medium/low on the left hand, O/K/M for high/medium/low on the right hand, copy what the Father is doing enough times and you win.

Solved the first time, but I honestly preferred an easy mini-game to the nonsense I had to deal with while fishing.

Now, with ring in hand, you can go over to the forest and TALK to the old man when he shows up.

This allows you to get to the endgame section, which is mostly linear.

Once past the mist there’s a bridge (I was worried there was a puzzle here where you can fall, but it’s just meant to look epic) and then one side route where you can meet someone fishing at a stream and get a hint.

This is a random encounter like the others, so there may be nobody here. The map is designed so you can accidentally loop back here; I met the person here on the second-loop round.

The mountain then gets cold as you travel upward, and there’s a “tight squeeze” where you can only carry one item. This is meant to make you actively think about the coat as being useful (that is, the puzzle otherwise would likely be solved by most players “passively”; by actively making them choose the coat, the puzzle isn’t just solving itself).

Above is a trap: trying to take the mirror shard now leads to a wailing alarm and you get captured. You need to WAIT for the right shard to appear in order to complete the picture. This entire setup does not make sense to me in a plot-coherence sense (why, if Voar was able to secure the mirror with fake mirrors, does he even have the real one show up at all?) but the entire game has played it loose with plot beats so I just rolled with it.

Or at least I tried to, but as mistertaster had been warning me in the comments, the shards don’t actually fit together correctly. I admit I went a bit meta; there’s that picture from the later printing…

Via the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History.

…and one of the shards from that picture shows up if you wait long enough.

While I wasn’t clear before without playing the game, all the references to non-violence in the historical background hinted to me this was aimed as a “children’s game”. I now think this is the case and it isn’t a bad thing. It led to:

• strong emphasis on visuals that looked like they were supposed to, with many animations
• emphasis on interacting directly with the visual environment (not that words are bad, but the game took a genuinely original approach that went past anything Sierra On-Line had done yet)
• many straightforward puzzles throughout where you either told directly what is needed as long as you ask correctly (a crystal ball for the fortune-teller, grain for the inn-keeper) or at least the connection is not hard to make (fish for a cat)
• more feedback on giving items than is standard for a game of this era, so there’s some engagement even when the player is doing the “wrong thing”

Essentially, the authors leaned more to the easy side of things; while there were some hard and even obnoxious puzzles (the vase being the most extreme example) it was framed by enough simplicity I didn’t feel like I was being crushed. There was enough environmental atmosphere (and optional encounters) that it was genuinely enjoyable to just bop around the map looking for something new. Despite it not being in the character-in-an-environment format Sierra On-Line would start following after King’s Quest (evolving into the “point-and-click” adventure), it followed a similar sensibility (and was even willing to show the main character during the mini-games).

Mind you, not everything went well. I understand why the authors put a limit on the number of times Voar could catch you (otherwise all the work putting bribes for the guards lacks in importance) but in the end it’s like Hezarin trying too hard to keep a player from guessing at a puzzle solution and breaking the game; there isn’t enough benefit to punishing the few people that will go 25+ loops, so all it really does is create anxiety for players.

(Long term time limits are, in general, a horrid design choice. Fallout originally had a time limit for finding a water chip at the start and then ripped it out. I’ve been tempted to play Xtal Soft’s breakout CRPG, Mugen no Shinzou, but the game gives a turn limit of 30,000 meaning you might be 80 hours into the game and have to restart because you weren’t efficient enough. Something like Ancient of Domains of Mystery works better because “corruption” increases over time, but it can be managed rather than forcing a hard stop to the game.)

Some historical points to tie up before closing things off:

I had promised to bring back Michael Kosaka. Specifically, he is mentioned in the manual for doing the art for the joust.

This would normally just be side trivia, but it’s more interesting than normal because his later career (as I already indicated) generally emphasized sports games, including Budokan: The Martial Spirit from 1989 (for Electronic Arts) which has combat with some aspects of the jousting in it.

Only a few years later he was positioned as Commissioner of the EASN.

From the Video Game History Foundation, Inside Electronic Arts Sports Network, Volume 1, Issue 2.

You can thus draw a direct (if faint) line between The Coveted Mirror and the modern Electronic Arts sports empire.

Also, both Eagle Berns and Holly Thomason kept up a relationship with Penguin. Holly did the graphics for the Macintosh version of Transylvania; Berns worked on COMPREHEND (Penguin’s later “general” system for adventure games) as well as the Mac version of The Graphics Magician.

While it’s a little harder to find than her Penguin Software work, Ms. Thomason made another original game: In Search of the Secret Stone (Creative Publications, 1986). It is an “educational” game quite directly this time meant to teach mathematics, but it is also quite clearly an adventure game with graphics in the same style as The Coveted Mirror.

Back of the box, via the Internet Archive.

Finally, it’s worth at least looking at the screens for the Japanese translation of the game. Starcraft did the translation (just like with the Sierra On-Line games, such as the Time Zone game where they re-drew every single screen). What I find fascinating here is they tried to do heavy localization, changing the setting to Japan and radically modifying the graphics. Two screenshots of the PC-98 version via Mobygames:

According to Rob in the comments, it changes gameplay aspects as well, like removing the mini-games, removing the 25-capture limit, and making the vase visible in the treasury. The pickpocketing is both more forgiving and meaner at the same time: it doesn’t happen instantly when you enter the tavern, but if you wait long enough you’ll get pickpocketed without any kind of warning.

FM-7 box cover from Mobygames.

Coming up: An absolutely enormous game that was lost until quite recently.