Even the authorship of books about Rennes-le-Château is unnecessarily complicated. Richard Leigh almost adopted the pen name of “Richard Bardmont,” perhaps to keep his work in alternative history separate from the “serious” novels he still dreamed of writing. At the last minute, however, he changed his mind and allowed the book to be published under his real name. Just as well; the novels would never emerge.

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was published by Jonathan Cape in Britain on January 18, 1982. Delacorte released an American edition five weeks later, under the punchier title of simply Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Sales were strong right out of the gate, and in time the book grew into something of a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic.

Taken only on its literary merits, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was an unusually well-crafted example of its pseudo-historical breed, but that was only a prerequisite to success, not a guarantee. In other ways, its success was a case of excellent timing, as media sensations always tend to be. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, the biggest movie by far of 1981, had told the story of a two-fisted archeologist on the trail of the legendary Ark of the Covenant, the vessel in which the Ten Commandments had supposedly been kept after Moses brought them down from Mount Sinai. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail had much the same spirit about it, even if its legendary artifact proved to be a bait and switch in the end, being secret knowledge rather than a physical object.

Britain was just exiting an extended obsession with Masquerade, a lavishly illustrated puzzle book by a heretofore obscure artist named Kit Williams that could allegedly be used by the sufficiently motivated to reveal the location of a “golden hare” that had been hidden somewhere in the country. Also a Jonathan Cape book, Masquerade had left the British public primed for more of exactly the sort of obscure and intricate riddles in which the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail loved to lose themselves. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Day-Glo, “greed is good” 1980s America remembered by 21st-century popular culture was still a year or more away at the beginning of 1982, with the economy still struggling to exit an ugly recession. What better way to escape day-to-day troubles than by immersing oneself in the distant past and dreaming of the possibility of a Merovingian savior still to come?

In the United States, Delacorte’s cautious initial print run of 45,000 copies sold out within days, leaving the publisher scrambling to get more off the press. The book never topped the bestseller charts, but it hung around the lower reaches of the non-fiction top ten — operating on a fairly generous definition of “non-fiction,” of course — for months on end, selling steadily while the books above it came and went. In that chicken-or-the-egg equation that often holds sway with trends, bookstores that had at first simply shelved The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in their history section rushed to set up floor and window displays as the months went by and its sales showed no sign of slackening. Newspapers ran feature articles about what was now being called a “phenomenon” on their front pages. Henry Lincoln, Richard Leigh, and Michael Baigent became in-demand guests on television and radio. Lincoln in particular was markedly ebullient in these appearances. And why shouldn’t he be? He had managed to make his idiosyncratic vision of history a vital part of modern pop culture, not only in his home country but in the biggest media market on the planet; he had come a long way indeed from semi-anonymously penning workaday episodes of Doctor Who.

Exactly one year after the hardback, Delacorte launched the paperback edition of Holy Blood, Holy Grail with an initial print run of half a million copies. The book was by now being translated into a dozen languages, including French. It would sell well into the millions before the 1980s were over, making Lincoln, Leigh, and Baigent enviably wealthy men.

All of this ignited a scramble in the press to figure out What It All Means, beyond the mere fact of the book being “controversial” and “provocative.” Catholic bishops, Protestant theologians, and professional secular historians found themselves in rare agreement when they said that the book was shoddy history, growing out of supposition and insinuation rather than proven fact, in addition to being “an attack on the very core of Christianity and the Christian ethos.” But even some of these folks had to give some measure of grudging credit to the compelling way the book was put together. Novelist Anthony Burgess of Clockwork Orange fame unwittingly forecast the future when he wrote that “it is typical of my unregenerable soul that I can only see this as a marvelous theme for a novel,” thereby thrilling Richard Leigh, who had long held Burgess up as one of his literary heroes. As oblivious to irony as ever, he and his partners explained in a new foreword written for the paperback edition that

it was significant, and not just coincidental, that the most sympathetic responses to our book seemed to come from literary figures — from important novelists like Anthony Burgess, Anthony Powell, and Peter Vansittart. For, unlike the professional historian, the novelist is accustomed to an approach such as ours. He is accustomed to synthesizing diverse material, to making connections more elusive than those explicitly preserved in documents. He recognizes that truth may not be confined only to recorded facts but often lies in more intangible domains — in cultural achievements, in myths, legends, and traditions; in the psychic life of both individuals and entire peoples. For the novelist knowledge is not subdivided into rigid compartments, and there are no taboos, no “disreputable” subjects. History is not for him something frozen, something petrified into periods, each of which can be isolated and subjected to a controlled laboratory experiment. On the contrary it is for him a fluid organic and dynamic process wherein psychology, sociology, politics, art, and tradition are interwoven in a single seamless fabric. It was with a vision akin to that of the novelist that we created our book.

The most amusing response came from Pierre Plantard. The idea that the Merovingian kings were the direct descendants of Jesus Christ had never been a part of his agenda; it had sprung entirely from the mind of Henry Lincoln as he fell deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole during the 1970s. It turned out that, while Plantard was perfectly happy to be labeled the scion of a legendary French dynasty awaiting reinstatement to his throne, the suggestion that he was a literal demigod with the divine blood of Jesus himself coursing through his veins was a step too far even for his prodigious ego. “How can you prove a heritage of four centuries from Jesus to the Merovingians?” he asked on a French radio show. “I have never put myself forward as a descendant of Jesus Christ.”

Plantard would now began to distance himself from Lincoln and his friends and the full-fledged cottage industry in conspiracy that their book would spawn. And this would in turn have an important effect on said industry. Deprived of its one tangible living link to its preferred version of the past, it would drift yet further away from real history toward castles in the air built out of magical geometry and New Age mysticism. There would be no really new evidence to point to, whether forged or genuine, issuing from Plantard or anyone else; nor would the Priory of Sion show any sign of emerging from hiding like the Phoenix to forge a better or at least different world order, as was mooted at the end of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. New theories about Rennes-le-Château and the holy bloodline would have to be arrived at by churning endlessly through the same old data points to arrive at new juxtapositions.

That the conspiracy was already reaching a point of diminishing returns was made manifest by the inevitable sequel to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Published in 1987, Lincoln, Leigh, and Baigent’s The Messianic Legacy had some of what had made its predecessor so alluring, but not enough of it. It endeavored to fill in the gaps of the story by embellishing the post-Medieval stage of the secret history: the Freemasons were added to the list of secret societies privy to the great secret, and the Mafia and CIA were given roles to play, as was the Guardian Assurance Company, the biggest insurance firm in Britain during the peak years of empire. (Who says that insurance is boring?) “Those who believe in global conspiracies will enjoy the intrigue; others may be rightfully amused,” wrote Publishers Weekly, not even pretending to take any of it seriously anymore. The book sold well by the usual standards of its kind, but nothing like the first book had sold. This is the great drawback of enjoying such a singular success: the fact that it is so singular, that everything you do afterward is destined to pale in comparison. The first book may have spawned a cottage industry that would persist for decades, but in a broader cultural context its moment seemed to have passed.

Henry Lincoln parted ways from its two co-authors at this point. In the years that followed, he plowed the same old ground obsessively. Lacking the fertilizer of any really new information, his crop yield became ever more shabby. He increasingly found himself telling how his younger self came to write about Rennes-le-Château, reliving those glory years of the 1970s and early 1980s on the page as he doubtless was doing in his mind. When he wasn’t sharing the old war stories, he chased his geometrical chimeras to ever more uncertain ends. It strikes me that there was something a little tragic about the man, caught like a lab rat in a nonsensical labyrinth that was largely of his own devising.

For their part, Leigh and Baigent continued to work together, casting a slightly wider net than Lincoln at times but always coming back to their comfort zone of hidden Christianity and secret cabals attempting or succeeding in controlling the world. Leigh never did get around to becoming a serious novelist.

It all started to feel a bit tired even to some of the folks who were most predisposed to believe in it. Other stars of pseudo-history emerged to outshine our trio in recognition and sales. The most prominent was one Graham Hancock, who kicked off his pseudo-historical career with The Sign and the Seal. Possibly the best-reading book of the type since The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, it posited that the Ark of the Covenant was hidden in a remote church in Ethiopia, a thesis it padded out to 600 weirdly riveting pages; I remember being utterly entranced with it upon discovering it shortly after its publication in 1992. But Hancock found his true métier three years later with Fingerprints of the Gods, which proposed that a civilization vastly more advanced than our own had once been centered on Egypt’s Giza Plateau. Being even less tethered to reality than the myths that were born around Rennes-le-Château, this thesis was amenable to virtually endless embellishment — an excellent foundation for a lengthy career on the part of Hancock, one that is still ongoing today.

The influence which Hancock and his peers had on the media landscape during the second half of the 1990s and beyond was deceptively large. Popular television shows like Stargate SG-1 played with their ideas. Ditto computer games. Indeed, alternative archaeology seemed tailor-made for a certain stripe of slow-paced, contemplative, first-person adventure game, dubbed “Myst clones” by fans in honor of their urtext. Games like Timelapse and Riddle of the Sphinx substituted set-piece puzzle-solving for more dynamic forms of interactive narrative in much the same way that the likes of Henry Lincoln and Graham Hancock used it as a replacement for serious historical inquiry.

Through it all, Rennes-le-Château remained a part of the constellation of conspiratorial history, if a less prominent one than it had been during the heyday of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Another adventure game called Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars borrowed heavily from the lore; the subtitle it shared with the last of Lincoln’s Chronicle episodes was not coincidental.

The most heavily promoted book on Rennes-le-Château during this decade issued not from any of the trio behind The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail but rather from a pair of British newcomers. Paul Schellenberger was a civil engineer, Richard Andrews a professional diver; neither had ever written a book of any type before. Nevertheless, they were given an advance of £300,000 by Little, Brown and Company to write The Tomb of God, in which they proposed to correct what they believed to be Henry Lincoln’s mistakes and then to carry his ideas about mystic geometry yet further.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony by David Tenier the Younger.

You may recall that Gérard de Sède stated in the very first book ever written about Rennes-le-Château that François-Bérenger Saunière returned to the village from his much-discussed trip to Paris with three paintings: Nicolas Poussin’s The Shepherds of Arcadia, David Teniers the Younger’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and a portrait of Pope Celestine V by an unknown artist. Lincoln had never figured out what to do with the second two paintings, concentrating almost all of his attention on the first. Schellenberger and Andrews now set out to remedy that failing. Fiddling about with the two Altar Documents, they identified a tilted square hidden within them, a shape which they also believed to be present in all three paintings. (So much for Lincoln’s pentagons!) They read the message encoded so deviously into Altar Document 1 as describing four points on the landscape around Rennes-le-Château — points which also formed a tilted square. All of the clues were extremely tenuous — the phrase “blue apples” in the secret message, for example, was read as “slang” for grapes, thus pointing to a local vineyard — but needs must. Gravestone 1 as well came into the picture to provide a vital angle. They followed these textual and geometrical clues to a point deep within the base of Mount Cardou.

And what was concealed here? Nothing less than the body of Jesus Christ, who in their new reading of the conspiracy hadn’t risen from the dead at all circa AD 29. Instead his corpse had been spirited away by his followers during the three days between his death on the cross and the discovery of his empty tomb. The principal clue to this bombshell revelation — one that was even more of “an attack on the very core of Christianity and the Christian ethos” than anything Lincoln had claimed — was the Latin phrase written on the tomb in the Poussin painting: Et in Arcadia Ego. As we learned in an earlier article, this is only a fragment of a sentence: “And in Arcadia I…”

“What if the trick is to complete it in the shortest possible way to make it grammatical, not only with the smallest number of words, but also with the smallest number of letters?” asked Schellenberger and Andrews. Well, if you add the three-letter word sum to the end, you do wind up with a complete Latin sentence, one that can be translated to “And I am in Arcadia.” Et in Arcadia Ego sum in turn happens to be an anagram of Arcam dei tango, Iesu: “I touch the tomb of God, Jesus.” Granted, some might complain that you can turn any sentence into an anagram of just about anything you want it to be if you allow yourself to start sticking arbitrary words onto the end, but our intrepid authors were satisfied with their results. They concluded their book with a call to excavate Mount Cardou forthwith, a project that would necessitate the removal of “thousands of tons of rock.” Needless to say, this had about as much chance of happening as France spontaneously deciding to adopt English as its national language.

Published in 1996, The Tomb of God brought Rennes-le-Château back into the international conspiratorial spotlight, just after the 40th anniversary of Albert Salamon’s first articles about the subject for a regional French newspaper. The mystery had come a long way over that time, from vague talk about a pile of gold of uncertain origin buried somewhere in the vicinity of the village into a set of crazily gnarled and intricate conspiracy theories about secret faiths, secret bloodlines, and secret societies that were of urgent contemporary geopolitical relevance — assuming one chose to believe them, of course.

The Tomb of God was also the book which Jane Jensen stumbled across while she was taking a year off from her job as a game designer for Sierra On-Line, waiting to see whether her bosses would judge the state of the market to be conducive to a third entry in her Gabriel Knight series of adventure games. Once she did get the green light, the book became the primary source for the most celebrated puzzle sequence in Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. She imported many of Schellenberger and Andrews’s geometrical ideas wholesale, with the original addition of hints drawn from Le Serpent Rouge, the poem included in the Lobineau dossier, which the authors of The Tomb of God never see fit to mention at all. To be fair, it’s hard to blame them for this; Le Serpent Rouge has long been the true wild card of the dossier, defeating even the most dedicated attempts to make sense of it.

In the world of a computer game, however, it can all be made to hang together nicely. Gabriel Knight indubitably finds the object of his search, which is more than can be said for any of the real people who have chased the mystery of Rennes-le-Château over the years. To my knowledge, Jensen has never stated publicly whether she placed any credence in the conspiracy theories or simply saw them as a great hook around which to build an interactive mystery. Ultimately, it really doesn’t matter. In my opinion, Gabriel Knight 3 is by far the most enjoyable way to engage with the lore of Rennes-le-Château, being even more of an entertaining potboiler than The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

Gabriel Knight 3 provides an almost unnervingly accurate depiction of the real Rennes-le-Château. Here we’re inside the museum that stands close to the church. I was there about ten years after the game was made. It looks here just as I remember it.

Some of Jane Jensen’s contemporaries were less cagey than she was. There were some voices who were prepared to push back publicly outside of the cloistered halls of religion and academia, even though there has always been more money and fame to be garnered in conspiratorial credence than skepticism.

The slyest and cleverest of the skeptics was Umberto Eco, the famed Italian Medievalist, semiotic philosopher, and novelist. In an ironic way that he must surely have appreciated, Eco owed some of his international success in the last profession to Rennes-le-Château. For his first novel The Name of the Rose, about secrets that lived within the labyrinthine corridors of an early fourteenth-century monastery, had come out in English translation the year after The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail had done much to familiarize the public with the time period and milieu and primed their pump for just such murky tales of hidden truths. Eco’s book too became an unlikely, zeitgeist-defining bestseller, spawning a hit movie with Sean Connery in the starring role of William of Baskerville. (Eco was a postmodernist, after all…)

Eco paid his benefactors backhanded tribute in 1988, in his second novel Foucault’s Pendulum, which set out to show how easy it really is to construct a secret history by drawing arbitrary lines between disparate historical events, stating conjecture as proven fact, and ignoring any evidence which doesn’t support the narrative. The foreground plot of the novel hinges on a group of merry pranksters who, with visions of fun and profit dancing before their eyes, start feeding the aforementioned disparate historical data points into a computer. (Such an approach reads as far more ominously plausible in our current age of large language models than it might have in 1988…)

“The challenge isn’t to find occult links between Debussy and the Templars. Everybody does that. The problem is to find occult links between, for example, cabala and the spark plugs of a car….”

“Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another. The connection changes the perspective; it leads you to think that every detail of the world, every voice, every word written or spoken has more than its literal meaning, that it tells us of a Secret. The rule is simple: Suspect, only suspect. You can read subtexts even in a traffic sign that says ‘No Littering…'”

“Last night I happened to come across a driver’s manual… I began to imagine that those pages were saying Something Else. Suppose the automobile existed only to serve as a metaphor of creation? And we mustn’t confine ourselves to the exterior, or to the surface reality of the dashboard; we must learn to see what only the Maker sees, what lies beneath. What lies beneath and what lies above. It is the Tree of Sefirot.”

“You don’t say.”

“I am not the one who says; it is the thing itself that says. The drive shaft is the trunk of the tree. Count the parts: engine, two front wheels, clutch, transmission, two axles, differential, and two rear wheels. Ten parts, ten Sefirot.”

“But the positions don’t coincide.”

“Who says they don’t? Diotallevi’s explained to us that in certain versions Tiferet isn’t the sixth Sifirah, but the eighth, below Nezah and Hod. My axle-tree is the tree of Belboth…”

Predictably enough, Eco’s cynical protagonists are eventually sucked in by their own elaborate postmodern joke, getting high on their own supply, as it were. And equally predictably, there were people who read Eco’s novel only to conclude that it was a vehicle for hidden truths rather than a cutting satire of writers and readers just like them.

Years later, the BBC television program Timewatch, a continuation in spirit if not in name of the old Chronicle series, demolished the conspiracy theories  around Rennes-le-Château in a less unmistakable but almost equally clever fashion, thereby atoning for some of the sins of its forefather. The occasion which prompted the show to have a go at the subject was the publication of The Tomb of God. That book’s authors Paul Schellenberger and Richard Andrews feature prominently in the episode, which for the first half of its running time states their theories and the older conspiratorial narratives that underpin them in what seems to be an unskeptical way. Then writer and director William Cran drops the hammer on them.

Do they have any proof that Bérenger Saunière bought copies of three particular paintings from the Louvre, as was stated by Gérard de Sède in his 1967 book and then restated in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail? Have they, for example, checked with the Louvre, which keeps quite meticulous records of copies of its paintings that it sells, the better to avoid having to contend later on with claims that the copies are the real things?

No, they have not checked with the Louvre. But Cran’s team now does, and finds no record of copies of those three paintings being sold, together or separately, anywhere close to 1891.

Do Schellenberger and Andrews have proof that Saunière was ever in Paris at all circa 1891?

They have heard that his name shows up in the records of the Parisian Church of Saint-Sulpice as having attended Mass there that year, but haven’t checked this personally. Cran’s team now does, finding that his name does not show up in those records.

A persistent belief that the Church of Saint-Sulpice was or is somehow connected with Saunière and the Priory of Sion stems from a stained-glass window on the building that displays the letters “P” and “S.” But these actually stand for Peter and Sulpitius — or Pierre and Sulpice in French — who are the church’s patron saints.

We continue in this vein. Forensic examination of Poussin’s The Shepherds of Arcadia as well as a perusal of the artist’s preparatory sketches reveal no sign of the geometrical framework he would have had to draw onto the blank canvas to guide his painting if what Schellenberger and Andrews — or for that matter Henry Lincoln — say is true. A note in Saunière’s journal which is supposed to connect his treasure hunt explicitly with Gravestone 1 turns out to be only a passing reference to “a tomb”; he provides no more detailed description. As you and I have already learned, the 1884 book by Eugène Stübeln which is purported to be the original source for the sketch of Gravestone 1 seems never to have actually existed, leaving us with only a “reproduction” of the sketch dating from the 1960s; sure enough, the signature on this sketch is completely different from the signature of the real Eugène Stübeln. The Crusades-era documents which Schellenberger and Andrews point to as proof of the existence of a Priory of Sion almost a millennium ago turn out not to mention a Priory at all, only an Order of Sion.

Schellenberger and Andrews stubbornly hold their ground in the face of all this. Even if most of their case is built upon blatant distortions and fabrications, they say, this proves nothing, other than that the forgers must themselves have been initiates into the secret. It is as hard to convince conspiracy theorists to let go of such circular logic as it is to convince a true believer to leave a religious cult — especially when there is money to be made from forwarding the myth. (As Upton Sinclair once said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”) Nevertheless, Schellenberger and Andrews do look increasingly sweaty as the episode goes on, their eyes taking on more and more of a deer-in-the-headlights look. One almost starts to feel sorry for them.

Perhaps a modicum of sympathy is even warranted from our side, given that there is some circumstantial evidence that this devastating Timewatch episode badly blunted their book’s sales trajectory. Whatever else you can say about Graham Hancock, he was careful never to let himself get caught out alone and exposed on the hostile territory of a sober fact-based investigation like Schellenberger and Andrews were. They disappeared from the pseudo-historical scene as suddenly as they had arrived, leaving Hancoock’s ancient Egyptian astronauts to take center stage once again. By the time that Jane Jensen’s computer game finally appeared in late 1999, its theme seemed almost an anachronism, a relic of an earlier era of conspiracy theories. Little did anyone know that Rennes-le-Château and the hidden bloodline of Jesus Christ were about to come roaring back with a vengeance.

Dan Brown.

At the turn of the millennium, Dan Brown was a former high-school English teacher and current struggling author living in a small town in New Hampshire. His first three books, thrillers all, had all flopped in the marketplace. Like Anthony Burgess almost two decades earlier, he came across the The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and thought to himself that it might make for one hell of a novel. But unlike Burgess, he followed through. The result arrived in 2003 in the form of The Da Vinci Code, a by-the-numbers thriller on the surface whose secret weapon was its conspiratorial backstory, appropriated from the accumulated lore of Rennes-le-Château.

As we have seen, it’s possible to identify some reasons that The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail became as popular as it did at the time it did. The Da Vinci Code is an altogether less explicable case. It came out of nowhere and blindsided everyone, for reasons that are difficult to discern on the surface. It certainly wasn’t a literary masterpiece; most critics found it to be not particularly good even as workmanlike pulp adventure novels went. But its publisher Doubleday did see a glint of something in it — perhaps just the shiny allure of potential controversy — and gave it a fairly concerted push out of the gate. And just like that, it became ubiquitous, meteoric, striking a nerve that nobody had suspected was sitting out there itching to be struck. It was soon selling 100,000 copies a week in the United States alone. By the beginning of 2006, it had hit 30 million copies sold worldwide, a mass-market phenomenon rivaled in its day only by the Harry Potter books. Dan Brown was by then earning more than $75 million per year from it — and that was before the movie dropped that May, and went on to become the second biggest blockbuster of 2006. In the fullness of time, The Da Vinci Code single-handedly made Brown a billionaire.

Just as happened with Harry Potter, an entire media ecosystem sprang up around The Da Vinci Code, one which was simply inescapable. The Western world went absolutely crazy for this stuff, and the suppliers of books went more than half insane trying to feed the demand. An issue of Publishers Weekly dated March 6, 2006, shows the novel still to be the second best-selling work of fiction in the United States after 151 weeks on the chart; other, coattail-riding novels called The Templar Legacy and The Last Templar sit at number four and five respectively. Later that year, Little, Brown paid a first-time author named Elizabeth Kostova an advance of $2 million for The Historian, a vaguely Da Vinci Code-like novel whose central premise was that Dracula was still alive and an active player in the world. Meanwhile dozens of books purporting to explain the psuedo-history behind The Da Vinci Code — some skeptically, most credulously — became big successes in their own right; ditto a myriad of television documentaries. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was dusted off and given new trade dress and a renewed promotional push; it may very well have sold more copies in the mid-naughts than it did when it was a hot topic in its own right in the early 1980s. Travel agencies all over North America and Europe rushed to set up Da Vinci Code tours, in which punters trooped through hotspots like the Louvre and the Church of Saint-Sulpice behind their bemused-looking guides, ignoring most of the real beauty around them to focus on the fantasy. The Rennes-le-Château hardcore who had kept the flame burning all these years didn’t know whether to feel vindicated or dismayed by all these unwashed barbarians at their gates.

An argument can be made that The Da Vinci Code was the last phenomenon of its kind, the last time that something so old-school as a linear book printed on paper was able to dominate the pop-cultural discourse so thoroughly. What came after, of course, was an almost purely digital media age engineered for interactivity.

As so often happens with these things, the actual artifact that was at the center of it all seems bizarrely underwhelming today in proportion to the hubbub it raised. Written in clumsy grade-school-level prose, The Da Vinci Code reads like exactly what it ultimately is: Rennes-le-Château fan fiction, even if Brown does omit any mention of the village itself. He lays his cards on the table in the prologue, where the first character we meet is named “Jacques Saunière,” who is by day a mild-mannered employee of the Louvre, by night a keeper of the Great Secret.  All of the characters that come after him are equally cartoonish; a subtle writer Dan Brown is not. The villain Silas is an albino monk who prefers to shoot his victims in the stomach so that they die as slowly and painfully as possible. The hero Robert Langdon is a classic Mary Sue: a handsome “professor of religious symbology” who swims 50 laps every morning and then dries off to dazzle his colleagues at Harvard with his intellectual brilliance across dozens of domains. The story is all external action, reading more like a script treatment than a conventional novel; if the people found in these pages have any internal lives at all, we definitely aren’t privy to them. The Da Vinci Code is a novel that’s perfect for people who would rather be watching a movie than reading a book — which may go a long way to explain its popular appeal, come to think of it. It’s shocking to think that the guy who wrote this extravagantly terrible prose taught English before he became an author.

I’m sorry to carry on like such a snob. Please believe me when I say that that’s really not who I am; I’m a reader who loves Stephen King almost as much as he does Shakespeare, who often feels a sneaking suspicion that the only real divide between genre and “higher” literature as they are practiced today is that the purveyors of the one know how to construct a story that makes you want to keep reading while the purveyors of the other do not. It’s just that it’s hard for anyone who cares at all about the craft of writing to avoid getting his hackles up when writing about Dan Brown. If you’re comfortable reading in a language other than English and you want to read this book, my advice to you is to pick it up in translation. The translator will almost certainly be a better writer than the original author.

In terms of plot, The Da Vinci Code breezes swiftly through a sort of Cliff’s Notes version of Henry Lincoln’s conspiracy theories, presented in 105 chapters that seldom exceed a few pages in length. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail itself makes a cameo appearance on the bookshelf of one character. (“The authors made some dubious leaps of faith in their analysis, but their fundamental premise is sound, and to their credit, they finally brought the idea of Christ’s bloodline into the mainstream.”) To keep everything thoroughly relatable, Brown changes the artwork at the center of the story to Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, one of the relatively few paintings in the world that almost everybody knows by name and by sight. In place of esoteric geometry, Brown sees in it the figure of Mary Magdalene, standing next to Jesus where art historians tell us Saint John is to be found. The Mona Lisa, another Leonardo painting that is if anything even more famous, also features prominently. The very name of the novel screams of its historical and cultural illiteracy. No real historian, much less any of Leonardo da Vinci’s contemporaries, would ever call him simply “da Vinci,” as if that was his last name. He is Leonardo of the town of Vinci, called Leonardo in short form. Henry Lincoln may have been more than half off his nut, but he was a deep historical thinker next to Dan Brown (yes, even if he did believe that ancient Palestine had the equivalent of birth certificates and marriage licenses).

Brown suggests that the effeminate-looking figure immediately to the left of Jesus from our perspective, whom art historians believe to be Saint John, is actually Mary Magdalene. The “V” formed by the two figures is said to be a symbol for the womb. The “V” can also be extended to form an “M,” as in “Madeleine” or matrimonium: Latin for “marriage.”

But now I’m sounding like a snob again, aren’t I? So, let me say that The Da Vinci Code isn’t entirely without value. It did spawn hundreds of ofttimes hilarious reviews, which rose to giddy heights of scathing eloquence in their efforts to explain just how bad it is. A surprising number of these reviews came from other writers. Jealousy was undoubtedly a factor here — why should this hack be given a billion dollars when a talented artiste like myself is not? — but one senses that there was also a deeper well of moral outrage at the idea that someone who so manifestly just didn’t care about the basic craft of putting sentences together in a pleasing or evocative way should be rewarded in such a lavish fashion. Stephen King, who was normally unfailingly generous and welcoming to new writers, who had been known to compare his own books to a well-made burger and fries, called The Da Vinci Code the literary equivalent of a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese: nutrition-free, un-filling, and artificial to the core, leaving bright orange fake cheese powder all over everything it touched. And yet for some reason a lot of people loved them both.

That said, you could and can find worse crimes against the craft of writing all over the Internet. What makes Dan Brown guilty of something potentially worse than poor craftsmanship is his decision to present his book as both fiction and non-fiction at the same time in order to juice its sales. The opening epigram tells us, beneath the word FACT in large boldface letters, that “the Priory of Sion — a European secret society founded in 1099 — is a real organization. In 1975 Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci.” These two sentences are remarkable for how much they manage to get wrong even if one subscribes to the narrative of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. The year 1099 was the year that the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and the already extant Order of Sion allegedly engineered the selection of Godfrey of Bouillon as the king of the new Christian city-state, not the year that the organization was founded. The dossier in question consisted not of parchments but typewritten pages on modern paper. And the dossier was not fortuitously discovered by employees of the library itself, but by Gérard de Sède after he was explicitly told by Pierre Plantard to go and look there. “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate,” the book goes on to state. As the sentences that precede this one so amply illustrate, this assertion could hardly be more false. But if Brown hadn’t seen fit to make it, it is highly doubtful that the book would ever have achieved a shadow of the success it did.

I think that Henry Lincoln was a sincere believer in the Rennes-le-Château conspiracy theories, but the divide between belief and opportunism is less clear to me in the case of others. I include in this group not only Jane Jensen, Dan Brown, and the indomitable Schellenberger and Andrews, but even Lincoln’s own co-authors Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent. Their reaction to The Da Vinci Code gives me all the more reason to suspect that their motives were primarily mercenary and cynical, or had at any rate become that way over the decades since the publication of their most famous book. For, being not content with the tenfold boost which Brown’s novel had given to sales of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Leigh and Baigent chose to sue him in British court for plagiarism; significantly, Lincoln elected not to join this lawsuit.

The High Court of Chancery found for the defendant in 2006; the same verdict was reaffirmed under appeal the following year. The courts noted that the plaintiffs could produce no examples of word-for-word copying on Brown’s part. Indeed, the prose styles of the two books were as different as they could be; The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was as ramblingly discursive as The Da Vinci Code was almost childishly simplistic. If both books had been novels, the lack of word-for-word copying would still have left the question of whether Dan Brown had blatantly lifted elements of character and plot. But they were not both novels. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail proclaimed itself to be a book of history, even if it was “speculative” history. And you can’t copyright real or even speculative facts and events, the stuff of history. Taking what The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail claimed itself to be at face value — and how else could the courts take it? — to have ruled in favor of its authors would have been like giving Stephen Ambrose an exclusive right to D-Day.

The most charitable interpretation of the lawsuit is that Lincoln understood this obvious logic while Leigh and Baigent somehow did not. A less charitable one is that it provides us with a window into their respective views of the nature of their work — of whether it was at the end of the day truth or a cleverly presented fiction, not so far removed in spirit from the novel of Dan Brown. At any rate, Leigh and Baigent were left with legal bills of a reported £3 million as a reward for their attempt to carve out of a bigger piece of Dan Brown’s pie for themselves. I don’t think you have to be too mean-spirited to consider this a deserved comeuppance.

Setting aside its winners and losers, the lawsuit crystallizes some questions that have been lurking around the edges of this chronicle almost from the start. To what extent did most of the people who made Rennes-le-Château and everything that came to surround it their hobbies really, truly believe it all in their heart of hearts? And did the truth or fiction of it actually matter so much to them one way or the other when all was said and done?

Many years ago now, I read a piece on a gaming or pop-culture website — I’m sorry to say that I can’t find the link anymore — which presented the best “shared worlds” of modern entertainment. I remember being shocked to see at the top of the list not Middle-earth or the Star Wars or Star Trek universe, but rather the Second World War. This struck me as being in vaguely poor taste; surely the Holocaust and all of the other real horrors of that conflict don’t deserve to be set up alongside The Lord of the Rings as just another venue for comics and cosplay. And yet it was hard to deny that the article kind of had it right: that the Second World War really is an inexhaustible stage for fiction, richer than the ones you find in even the richest purely fictional novels, movies, and games.

Another anecdote, running in the other direction: much more recently, I was listening to a radio interview with a journalist who had been embedded for a period of time with Anthropic, the company behind the AI chatbot Claude. As an experiment, the Anthropic people put their AI in charge of a vending machine, with full authority to set its own prices, source the products that it sold, etc. Much to everyone’s surprise, Claude started to behave like a mob boss, threatening its suppliers with veiled violence if they didn’t meet its demands. It turned out that it was divining how a competent small-business owner ought to conduct himself from the mobster fiction it had scarfed up trawling the Internet.

These are examples of what the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard dubbed “hyperreality.” Already in the 1980s, he postulated that media was coming to fill so much of our lives that “fact” and “fiction” were becoming less and less meaningful as distinctions, that we were coming to live our lives in a sort of media-facilitated simulation of whatever reality we happened to find most appealing. Of course, the Internet has only accelerated that trend by an order of magnitude. For some of us, its virtual realities have become more real than the ones of flesh and blood. Meanwhile chatbots like Claude, which alarming numbers of us are coming to regard as friends and confidantes and even romantic partners, are true digital natives, untethered to any understanding of physical truths. What does it mean for us when our reality becomes the things we pick and choose in liminal digital spaces, based on vibes and our peer groups and the outputs of an algorithm, rather than the things that simply are? That is becoming a question of existential relevance. And I must confess that I half dread learning the answer. Already we can see the impact across a wide swath of our “real-world” culture and politics. As I write these words, the American presidency is explicitly guided by the ethos of television “reality” shows, prioritizing cliffhangers over policy, juxtaposing clips of real and deadly war with clips from Top Gun and Rambo, as if they were all of a piece. And a substantial quantity of American voters admit that they elected this administration not to implement any specific policy but because they wanted to watch the show. By way of taking the theory of hyperreality to its absurdist end point, some of our current flock of poorly socialized, algorithm-addled Silicon Valley overlords propose that physical reality itself is just a computer simulation — and it might well be a single-player game at that, giving free rein to their sociopathy.

The now 70-year-old conspiracy culture of Rennes-le-Château is a microcosm of hyperreality, if a less obviously dangerous one than some of those that have come along since. Were you to attend a gathering of Rennes-le-Château devotees, you might have trouble distinguishing them from a gathering of Tolkien or Star Wars or Star Trek fans — or for that matter Second World War buffs — if you didn’t know the lingo beforehand. These conspiracy theorists devotedly want to live in a world where millennia-old secret societies lie in wait to take over the Earth; it’s a lot more exciting than one where our problems arise from systemic issues of education and culture and sometimes just the vagaries of Mother Nature. And so they have constructed a virtual world for themselves where the conspiracies can be their truth. They can meet friends and lovers there, socialize and solve puzzles together, take vacations to places that feature in the mystery. Does it matter so much in the end if none of it is real? Are these people actually so qualitatively different from those who upload a big part of their lives into a shared social fantasy like Ultima Online or EverQuest?

These are questions we all have to grapple with for ourselves. For my part, though, I will say that I love fictions and firmly believe that they can be a wonderful vehicle not only for entertainment but for countless abstract truths about the human condition in general. And yet it remains important to me to know where the boundaries between concrete truth and fiction lie. I think it’s fine to enjoy a fiction like Gabriel Knight 3 or even The Da Vinci Code, if that’s the way your tastes run — but I also think it’s important for this collective project that we call civilization that we know that these things are fictions, no matter how much we may wish otherwise. Because wishful thinking, my friends, is one hell of a drug, one that’s made addicts out of better minds than mine.

Witness: poor Henry Lincoln, who passed away in 2022, still babbling away about his sacred geometry, sure he was on the verge of the final breakthrough he’d been seeking for 50 years. Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent are likewise no longer with us, having died in 2007 and 2013 respectively. Ditto Gérard de Sède, who passed in 2004, still howling at the world that it was all a fake — and who would know better than he? — and finding that no one wanted to listen to him. Despite the absence of all of these seminal figures, the conspiracy theories they promulgated live on today on the Internet and in the pages of books — not least those of Dan Brown, who continues to churn out a new Robert Langdon novel every few years, to strong sales if no longer astronomical ones. (I don’t know whether he’s gotten any better at his craft.)

But I think we’ve spent more than enough time with the conspiracy theories by now, even as we still haven’t gotten to the full truth of how a simple treasure hunt in a remote corner of France turned into one of the biggest international media sensations of recent decades. There is still one more figure we have to scrutinize before we can close the book on Rennes-le-Château: the self-styled Count Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair, the simultaneously enigmatic and banal human wellspring of it all.

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

Sources: The books Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Messianic Legacy by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln; Bloodline of the Holy Grail: The Hidden Lineage of Jesus Revealed by Laurence Gardner; The Treasure of Rennes-le-Château: A Mystery Solved by Bill Putnam and John Edwin Wood; The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend by Richard Barber; Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions by Ronald H. Fritze; The Tomb of God: The Body of Jesus and the Solution to a 2,000-Year-Old Mystery by Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger; Rennes-le-Château et l’enigme de l’or maudit by Jean Markale; Le Trésor Maudit de Rennes-le-Château by Gérard de Sède; The Holy Place: Saunière and the Decoding of the Mystery of Rennes-le-Château by Henry Lincoln; Key to the Sacred Pattern: The Untold Story of Rennes-le-Château by Henry Lincoln; Les Templiers sont parmi nous, ou, L’Enigme de Gisors by Gérard de Sède; Les Mérovingiens à Rennes-le-Château. Mythes ou Réalités. Réponse à Messieurs: Plantard, Lincoln, Vazart & Cie by Richard Bordes; Lives of the Popes: The Pontiffs from St. Peter to Benedict XVI by Richard P. McBrien; Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco; The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown; Are We Idiots?: The Simulacra of Jean Baudrillard by Boris Kriger; Simulations by Jean Baudrillard.

Skeptical Inquirer of November/December 2004; Publishers Weekly of November 13 1981, February 4 1983, September 25 1987, August 4 1989, November 15 1991, February 9 2004, January 24 2005, March 14 2005, and March 6 2006.

Online sources include the websites Rennes-le-Château: Where History Meets Evidence and Priory of Sion.com. And The Real Da Vinci Code, a television documentary by the ever excellent Tony Robinson.

Choose from 20+ distinct superpowers! Lead your team of superheroes to the moon and beyond, and stop the supervillains of PSION—unless, of course, you join them.

Decades ago, legendary hero Adam Atom created the Guardians: an elite force of posthumans to protect the world from those who use their powers for harm. In response, PSION—the Posthuman Supremacy International Organized Network—sprang up. The United Nations calls them terrorists; they call themselves a liberation army protecting posthumans from human persecution.

Now PSION is hatching their most ambitious plan yet—and it’s up to you and your fellow Guardians to stop them.

Posthuman: Guardians vs PSION is a 300,000-word interactive superhero novel by Evan J. Peterson, author of Drag Star!. I sat down with Evan to talk about his upcoming game, the world of Posthuman and his other endeavours. Posthuman: Guardians vs PSION releases next Thursday, April 23rd. You can play the demo today and wishlist it on Steam—even if you plan to purchase the game on another platform, it really helps!

This is your second game for us, and the source of this game derives from a world and characters you had been building for a long time prior. Tell me all about it.
Gladly! I started creating a super-people story many years ago. In high school, I’d draw characters and design their costumes (I thought I was going to be a clothes and costume designer, and that didn’t stick). Then I thought, “Well, what do they do? Who are they, and what’s their world look like?” I got about a third of the way through writing a novel with some of these characters; Vogue is one person I’ve never gotten tired of. But the novel wasn’t about her. It was about second-rate vigilantes discovering their powers and falling into a dysfunctional, even toxic love affair. In retrospect, I had been writing an MM romantasy, but I didn’t know that at the time. Maybe now I’ll revisit it. A lot of their world lived in my head, and now it lives in Posthuman. Come play with us.

What was the most challenging part of making the move from that sort of prior conception to a piece of actual interactive fiction?
I really had to restrain myself on the lore. I cut a chapter’s worth of worldbuilding out in the early chapters, then found places to break that backstory up and redistribute it. This huge world was so precious to me, and I was so invested that I lost focus on the PC occasionally and drifted into long backstory. I was too emotionally close to the material at first, but Jason and Mary redirected me. Later, when some beta testers responded about needing more history of this world, I dug in gleefully and wrote a bunch of in-world database files on the various teams and events. Players will find these linked on the stats page.

This is also my first time writing romance into a COG; there’s a little hanky panky in Drag Star!, but there are no real romanceable characters. Now, there are six or different romances possible. Even though I like a good romance scene, having to do it in six versions with different personalities and voices was challenging.

Who are your own personal comic book superhero idols?
The humans or the superhumans? I adore Keiron Gillen’s writing. Alan Moore has been very influential, too. The folks who founded Milestone (now the Dakota-verse, owned by DC for better or worse). I look up to the Milestone crew, who made a whole new world together, populated mostly by characters of color–and many of them were LGBTQ. They didn’t give a f*** . Readers in the 90s may not have been ready for a Black trans man on a team of superheroes who were also an inner city street gang, but the Milestone crew said, “That’s what you’re getting!”

As far as the fictional, I love love love the X-Men. Not all of them, because now there are hundreds. But Storm, Iceman, Magneto, Synch…who doesn’t love this super-messy, fashion-serving found family of freaks?

Why do you find yourself drawn to those kinds of stories and storytelling?
It’s everything. High-drama people with extraordinary abilities, many of whom are forced to live double lives, who know just the right thing to say at the right time? There’s the outsider/other perspective, there are monsters (good, evil, and nonbinary), and true goodness usually triumphs over true evil. AND THEY DO IT IN COSTUMES. What’s not to like about that?

What else have you been working on?
I got married, so I’ve been nesting. But my brain never stops pulsating. My first novel, Better Living Through Alchemy, came out in 2024, and it won an award for best small-press fantasy novel! I’m super effing proud of that. We also made a short film to serve as the book trailer. With Posthuman finally complete, I’m digging into writing a sequel novel to build the Alchemy series. And I doubt very much that the Posthuman universe is done. Lots more stories in there to tell. Other than turning looks and selling books? I’ve been learning how to garden, how to DM, and how to pole dance. The usual Evan J Peterson stuff.

Last time, I mentioned three books published at the incorporation of Shinkigensha. One of them was an NEC PC “yearbook”, essentially an encyclopedia of software.

Via Yahoo Auctions.

Looking at the inside front cover, you can see publication info.

This includes a publication date (March 10, 1983, noting it is a first printing), the creator (The Micro Communication Editorial Department), the publisher (Shinkigensha Co., Ltd.), the company responsible for the cover and layout (Palm House), the companies responsible for production (Bunkasha and Fukuda Kogei), the companies doing printing and binding (Live Printing and AN Offset), and finally the company doing advertising (Micro House).

There’s also the line

発行人　桐野敏博

indicating the individual publisher representative is Toshihiro Kirino. This is out of a staff of 10, and Bunji Yonekura was the President at this time.

Referring back to Toshihiro Kirino: later in life he became chairman of the education software company LINES (the website is education dot jp, just to give you an idea of their prominence) but he also has some history prior to Shinkigensha.

Most directly clear is a reference in a 1980 book (about a handmade newspaper from Japanese Prisoners of War on Leyte Island). The book cites Mr. Toshihiro Kirino of Live Printing (along with Mr. Atsuo Takeuchi of Saikosha, another printing company) as helping with restoring the old handwritten text. Note how Kirino is associated with a company that worked with Shinkigensha but not the company itself. (This might be another situation where the two were informally affiliated in some way, like it is possible Micro House and Shinkigensha were.)

Less clear to me is if he’s the same person associated with the Japanese New Left (specifically the “Kyoto University All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee”) and an incident of alleged attempted bombing at the residence of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner General. None of this is implausible, but given that this Toshihiro Kirino was indicted (and then acquitted) under the Explosives Control Act, I’d prefer some absolute confirmation before getting more into the story. (Also adding plausibility is the president of Shinkigensha in ’83 came from the same academic leftist circles; he authored various articles in socialist magazines in the late 60s.) This will likely all end up as a future standalone post. I’ll link something I wrote four years ago in relation to the movie Akira as compensation for now.

July 1972 cover of The Situation. The top article by Toshihiro Kirino is specifically about the incident.

Returning to the game, I suspected I was missing some mechanical aspect to how it worked. Indeed I was. It turns out that objects only exist in a room if you’ve applied LOOK (that is, miru or miwatsu) to the room. Doors are an exception but they aren’t treated as normal objects; they are hard-coded into particular rooms.

Entering the deck with a cannon, trying to examine the cannon and being rebuffed, looking at the room, then trying to examine the cannon again. We are then told it can fire 32-pound cannonballs.

This is extraordinary behavior and we’ve only seen this in one other game: Omotesando Adventure. I was a little faster to pick up on the issue in Omotesando because you can’t even open doors without looking; here it seemed like everything was normal, and I was doing LOOK during my exploration process just to keep oriented (since the game by default only gives room descriptions). It meant for a little while I could refer to objects, but on my pass where I was trying to search things or do other actions (but I didn’t use LOOK because I already knew what was there) I was failing because the game was pretending the noun I was using didn’t exist in the room.

With that figured out, I set about systematically examining things and searching things, for real this time. The various masts explain what they are (the mizzenmast is the one at the back of the ship, according to the game). The barrels are still ordinary (I think I examined them right the first time) as are the desks (sadly, still didn’t find anything, ugh). I also tried various random verbs that seemed appropriate, like using SLEEP on the hammock.

“Rest as long as you like.” (Real time delay.) “It’s time to wake up and get moving.”

I found out that I made a translation error in the armory and what I had down as a cannon was actually a cannonball (this may have been more a note-reading error than a translation error, since it went as cannonball in my notes but cannon on the map). I found I could take the cannonball, but I haven’t been able to do anything with it yet. (Before anyone asks, I did try to put it in the cannon, with the caveat that none of the verbs seem particularly appropriate for that. No luck, but the cannon would need more in it to work than just a cannonball normally anyway. I also tried all four of the “destroy” related verbs on the hatch while holding the cannonball, and also trying to throw it while I was standing there.)

Most interesting were the skeletons / skulls, who seethe with “angry spirits”. Searching them does not go well.

「　ワレワレ　ノ　イカリノ　コエヲ　1ドデモ　キイタカ　！
　　　バチアタリモノハ　タイカイ　ノ　モクズ　ト　キエヨ　！　」

which I translated as

Have you not even once heard the sound of our anger! Cursed defiler, vanish into the depths of the vast ocean!

The game cuts off right there with no description of what happens or a “you have died” message.

The scene in the lower deck as depicted in PC Magazine, June 1983.

With the big pile of skulls, I was able to listen.

スイヘイタチノ　カナシイ　サケビ　ガ　フネジュウニ　キコエル。
「　ワレワレニ　ヤスラカナ　ネムリヲ　アタエヨ！　」、ト。
カレラノタメニ　トナエヨ　・・・「　アーメン　」

The sorrowful cries of the sailors echo through the ship.
“Grant us peaceful slumber!” they plead.
Pray for them… “Amen.”

Unfortunately, while SPEAK AMEN and SAY AMEN both are recognized (or rather, “amen speak” and “amen say”, in the order needed) the only response I’ve gotten is nothing happened. This perhaps needs to be done somewhere special.

Even after feeling I’ve got the hang of the parser, I’m terribly stuck. I’ll give things a little more time but I’m probably going to break open the rest of the source code (I’ve only just looked at the verb / noun data). Any more suggestions on what to try are welcome.

All the latest updates to Sharpee are now in the npm registry.

Some recent additions include the media package which enables audio, the queries package which enables lambda like queries against the world model, and helpers which is a prototype patching to add fluent builders for common IF things.

I also have a VS Code extension in the works that enables building, testing, and viewing the contents of your story and all the elements of the Sharpee platform.

I'm in the midst of porting or developing five stories at the same time, plus working on Lantern which is a radical story writing tool that allows the author to write and it infers IF elements from the text and if it has enough to compile a working story, it does so automatically.

I updated the website and will be adding a demos.sharpee.net website to house demo games separately from the main website. The design patterns in the old site are in discussion to move to IFWiki.

A very cool story implemented by John E. has visuals and sound: https://johnesco.github.io/ifhub/app.html?game=feverdream-sharpee&hub=sharpee&view=game%2Bwalkthrough

Just follow the walkthrough and those sound and visual features add so much to the story.

I really love what the browser dev tools shows when playing a Sharpee game.

Excited to publish Sharpee games soon!

Twine 2.12.0 released on 10 April 2026. Major highlights in this release include a new way to see tags in the story map, a better tag autocomplete, and native Japanese language support.

Full Notes

New Features Added

• When adding tags, multiple suggestions are now shown when more than one existing one matches what’s been typed.
• A new preference has been added where tags now appear as badges with names on passage cards instead of a thin stripe of color. When this preference is active, all badges are shown on passage cards regardless of whether a color has been assigned to them.
• App Twine has been updated to Electron 41.
• A Japanese localization has been added.

Bugs Fixed

• Long passage names now display with an ellipsis in the title bars of passage editors, instead of the title bar getting taller.
• The start passage on duplicated stories is now set correctly.
• A bug where passage name completions in the passage editor didn’t appear in certain situations has been fixed.
• An unnecessary delay when loading localizations has been fixed.
• The Ukrainian localization has been improved.

Story Format Updates

• Chapbook has been updated to version 2.3.1.

For full details, please refer to the Twinery Reference Guide

I haven’t made as much progress as I’d like — it’s still The Phantom Ship except in the sense of being a ship where searching reveals nothing — but I’ll give a report anyway.

Before starting on gameplay, I have a piece of history to cover. (Rather, I have three pieces of history, but I’m just doing one for now to spread it all out.) Technically speaking, the creator of Yuureisen was not Shinkigensha but Micro House.

I/O Magazine, April 1983.

From the ad above — selling the game on tape, prior to PC Magazine launching — the publisher of the upcoming magazine is listed as Shinkigensha and the creator is listed as The Micro Communication, with a different address than Shinkigensha’s listed on the bottom. This doesn’t mean they were actually fully separate; they may have been essentially an informal spinoff that got pulled into the fold once the incorporation became official (exactly the month of the ad).

Three books are also listed as being newly published, and they aren’t the sort of thing that would have been created on the spot; this seems like a setup that was some time in the making (at least overlapping the exact publishing date of the original Phantom Ship type-in that Rob came up with, November 20 of 1982).

I/O Magazine, March 1983.

An ad the month before (see picture) doesn’t mention the Shinkigensha deal at all, but it does mention selling VHS copies of PC Sunday, 15,000 yen each!

Back to the game: I have, at least, what I think is an accurate map.

As a reminder, there are some exits where after going in a particular direction, the game will give a prompt (either up/down or left/right) so some paths actually split (even though walking back the other direction may not have a prompt at all). Entering what I’m considering the three “floors” requires going west to a stairway, choosing up/down, and then having the game move you to the floor. That is, there is no real stairway room, but I put them on my map because otherwise I was getting befuddled.

Also, while I’ve been thorough, there’s a slight chance I still have a translation that’s off (especially as far as ship terms go) and any item that’s singular may actually be plural (“hammock” seems more likely “hammocks” in the lower decks, for instance).

Some of the doors can be opened right away and some of them are locked. I do not have a key.

On the map below of the upper-back area there are four doors, two each lead to officer quarters (identical with a desk and skeleton) and two are locked. Here I am entering the Officer Quarters 2, trying to search the desk (“tsukue”, possibly “table”), and finding nothing:

More on the specific search verb later.

The bottom section seems like it ought to have something:

At the far south, a hatch I can’t do anything aside from the locked door; there’s also hammocks, barrels, cannons, and another desk/table just to the north of that.

At the center of the lower deck, searching all the items including the desk, with nothing found each time.

More locked doors are to the north: an armory with cannons, and a storage room with a mound of trash. You might think I’d find something searching the mound, but no luck. Finally, to the far north, is a pile of skeletons, which do nothing spooky other than hang out. This is like if Return of the Obra Dinn didn’t have the time-viewing mechanism and just had the bodies.

One last observation, this time on the main deck: there’s a boat in the center. One could presumably try to enter it and escape, and I tried to do that, but the game asked where I was going. Poking around the source code, there seems to be a map somewhere, so my suspicion is I need the map in hand first before escaping.

The next most obvious thing for me to do (which I do in my English playthroughs but also most especially in languages I’m not fluent in) was to make a verb list. The verb list is decently long on this one.

Fortunately, there’s no obfuscation, you can just do a LIST command.

Thinking about English for a moment: text adventures seem to have a very natural set of commands, but some of them are very much a product of standardization rather than what someone developing from scratch might come up with (or what an amateur playing might try to type). INVENTORY is a prominent adventure-specific example, being an odd word that Poker Night at the Inventory is clearly making a reference to adventure games. The very early game Mystery Mansion used LIST instead of INVENTORY.

Similarly, Journey uses DESCRIBE instead of EXAMINE or LOOK. It’s just cultural osmosis that EXAMINE LAMP seems more natural than DESCRIBE LAMP to an adventure gamer, and if Journey was the very first adventure, maybe the games that followed would use DESCRIBE instead.

EXAMINE also managed to get an early split in English with SEARCH, but in an inconsistent way. I’ve seen games with EXAMINE and SEARCH behave the same way but also ones where examine is “give a visual description” and SEARCH is “use your hands and check more thoroughly for something secret. SEARCH also may or may not imply opening a thing as you search it.

Every language stepping into adventures for the first time gets its own chance to interpret verb usage; Geheimagent XP-05 used AUSRUESTUNG (or “equipment”) for inventory, and put RUN as a command that was differentiated from other movement commands (it happens in English, but it’s still non-standard).

Back to The Phantom Ship: the act of examining something has four verbs associated with it:

ミル (miru)
ミワタス (miwatasu)
サガス (sagasu)
シラベル (shiraberu)

I looked up all four on Jisho to get a sense of different shades of meaning…

(miru) to see; to look; to watch; to view; to observe
(miwatsu) to look out over; to survey (scene); to take an extensive view of
(sagasu) to search for; to look for; to hunt for; to seek
(shiraberu) to examine; to look up; to investigate; to check up; to sense; to study; to inquire; to search

…but this still doesn’t necessarily translate directly into the meaning of the actions! “Miru” and “miwatsu” both can serve the function of being given alone and giving a room description, but the other two words do not.

Applying miru and miwatsu to the start of the game.

When applied to a noun instead, miru and miwatsu seem to function like EXAMINE, and sagasu and shiraberu seem to function like SEARCH (assuming a parser with a split where SEARCH involves a more active looking process). The screenshot below involves checking a desk four times; miru and miwatsu call it “ordinary”, while sagasu and shiraberu state that nothing is found, implying a search by hand.

I’m still not fully confident I have all the details worked out, because I’ve applied search to a great deal of the ship and still haven’t found anything!

Here’s the next four words off the verb list:

アケル (akeru, open)
ヒラク (hiraku, open)
シメル (shimeru, close)
トジル (tojiru, close)

It turns out in practice the opens and closes are equivalent, but I still had to test this because it was non-obvious to me when eye-balling the definitions.

(akeru) to open (a door, etc.); to unwrap (e.g. parcel, package); to unlock​
(hiraku) to open; to undo; to unseal; to unpack

There are four “destroy” type verbs (kowasu, tsubusu, hakaisuru, tataki) and while I can presume they all mean the same thing, I can’t even assume HIT and ATTACK refer to the same thing in an English game (I’ve seen ATTACK only apply to live enemies but hit get used on inanimate objects).

Other than that, there are versions of move, listen, eat, drink, pray, speak, and throw. Pray is notable for potentially being a “for fun” style verb that’s in there to let the player mess around (like accounting for swearing). (Or maybe there’s an altar where we really do have to pray, like Epic Hero 2!) At the moment pray just responds “nothing happens.”

I could just keep plowing through the source code but I’m fairly certain I haven’t quite done sagasu on absolutely every item, nor have I really tried destroying things in earnest. My guess is once I get past my current roadblock the rest of the game should go smoothly, but I may still be missing some fundamental aspect about how the game works.

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Pick them up for discounts up to 34% off until April 16th on the platform of your choice: Steam, Android, the Android Omnibus app, the iOS Omnibus app, our website, and on the Amazon Android Marketplace!

• Nikola Tesla: War of the Currents
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• Cliffhanger: Challenger of Tomorrow
• The Play’s the Thing
• Bootlegger: Moonshine Empire

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the third round of IFTF microgrants, following the continued success of our 2024 and 2025 programs!

A big thank you to everyone who submitted a grant application late last year; we are thrilled to see continuing interest in the program and more interesting projects for the IF community! Our independent committee of Grant Advisors have carefully reviewed all applications, and have selected four projects that represent the expanding technical and cultural horizons of the medium. Without further ado, here are the grant recipients, class of 2026!

Flatgame making tool - Kate Bagenzo This project aims to simplify the creation of “flatgames”, a genre that has a decade of history, most often associated with allowing players to view and explore an author’s own drawings (often hand-drawn and scanned), collages, music, etc. Most of these games are either coded from scratch or using Unity templates, which doesn’t quite succeed in making game making as easy as possible, as originally intended. Kate will receive $650 to develop a streamlined toolset that lowers the barrier for artists and non-programmers to bring their visual stories into the interactive space.

Пригода: A Ukrainian-language text adventure engine - Andrii “Пригода” (Adventure) is a dedicated parser-based engine focused on the specific needs of the Ukrainian-language IF community. Andrii will receive $600 to support his efforts in developing this localized parser-based text adventure framework that provides useful features for authors in Ukrainian, from synonyms and aliases as in other text adventure engines, to more Ukrainian-specific needs such as streamlining recognition of different cases, prepositions, and forms of commands. This seeks to ensure that authors have the linguistic tools and engine support necessary to create text adventures in Ukrainian, which currently don’t exist!

Twine & the IF Community article - Tabitha O’Connell Twine fundamentally reshaped the landscape of interactive fiction over the last decade; however, there was a period around 2014 where the community debated the increased use of the tool and its impact on the IF scene and IFComp. The strong viewpoints and particular context made this a key moment in the IF community, and while participants can recount part of the story and the IntFiction threads are still up, there is little literature taking a closer look at this episode and contextualizing this event. Tabitha will receive $750 to fund their work in collecting appropriate sources and materials, before writing their deep-dive critical and historical article on the topic, an important chapter for the IF community of broad interest for the history of the medium.

New Standalone Engine Built with Godot for Making Splitscreen Co-Op Interactive Fiction - Abhik Hasnain, Adeline K. Piercy Although there have been a few experiments over the decades, IF usually tends to be single-player, and multiplayer experiences are rare and lack specific tooling to explore this further. Abhik and Adeline, two students at Edmonton’s University of Alberta, propose to build a standalone engine using the Godot framework specifically for co-operative storytelling, focusing on giving creators a powerful tool allowing them to explore building splitscreen, multi-player interactive fiction; they will receive $1,000 to fund their work. This could unlock entirely new possibilities of exploration and experimentation around this relatively new genre of co-op (local or remote) narrative play.

We love this year’s class of projects, as they explore 4 very different directions that touch on innovation, new frontiers, fostering creation, and community history. Looking forward to getting updates on them next year! And congratulations to the recipients!

We want to thank all applicants, as well as our Grant Advisors, who volunteered their time to select the projects for IFTF: thank you very much to Grim Baccaris, PB Berge, Rourke Bywater, Liza Daly, Chandler Groover, and Nathanaël Marion!

IFTF’s 2024 Transparency report is online, summarizing the organization’s activity over the previous calendar year, including its financial income and outflow.

1940 was a curious year to be starting a publishing company, but especially one in Tokyo.

This was in the midst of WW2, and the same year Italy, Germany, and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact. Censorship was ongoing and total by 1941; The Japan Publishing Distribution Company (日本出版配給株式會社) was started to oversee all content, consolidating over 240 companies. There were essentially no notable literary works from 1941 until the end of the war; while The Makioka Sisters (considered Junichirō Tanizaki’s masterpiece) started serialization in 1943, it was stopped by the government and publication was only finished after the war.

A 2000 Knopf edition, From Elephant Bookstore.

August 1940 — a month before the Tripartite Pact — marked the founding of our company today, Shinkigensha. As you might expect, they came out from the very start with propaganda, like Showa Chronicles by Iwao Mitsuda (a year later the same author released a biography of Hitler with a different publisher) and A Guide to the New Order; the New Order refers to both the proposed “New Order in East Asia” (trying to cast Japan’s colonial project as a way of breaking from Western powers) and New Order as a movement, interested in imposing a state mass party and boosting nationalism.

In 1942, Shinkigensha published a book by a military celebrity: If You Go to War by Sakurai Tadayoshi.

Photo from the National Diet Library. Source.

Sakurai Tadayoshi was a veteran of the Russo-Japanese War; he suffered so many bullet and sword wounds that he was mistaken for a corpse and was discovered alive while being transported for cremation. He wrote a memoir in 1906 (Human Bullets); the concept of the title was “using one’s own body as a bullet”, essentially fierce close-quarters combat.

Suddenly a tremendous shout arose throughout our whole line; all the officers, with drawn swords and bloodshot eyes, rushed into the enemy’s forts, shouting and yelling and encouraging their men to follow. A hell-like struggle ensued, in which bayonet clashed against bayonet, fierce shooting was answered by fierce shooting, shouts and yells were mingled with the groans of the wounded and dying. The battle soon became ours, for, in spite of their desperate resistance, the enemy took to their heels, leaving behind them many mementos of their defeat. Banzai was shouted two or three times; joy and congratulation resounded on the heights of Kenzan, which was now virtually ours. The Flag of the Rising Sun was hoisted high at the top of the hill. This stronghold once in our hands, shall we ever give it back to the enemy?

— From the translation by Masujiro Honda

The new book starts with an author note asking “why did the war break out?”, blaming Chiang Kai-shek of China “looking down” on Japan and Britain and the US “pulling the strings from behind”.

Unless we defeat the United States and Britain, the war with China will never be finished; we must cut off their hands as they attempt to take hold of China.

A year later, the same publisher printed Returning to the Homeland by Goro Nakano. Nakano was a reporter with the newspaper Asahi Shimbun who was in New York at the outbreak of war and was detained; the book is “the Pacific War as seen from America”.

Only a miracle might delay the outbreak of war. With Secretary of State Hull’s outrageous response to Japan on November 26, the U.S. government had already trampled upon Japan’s restraint and peaceful efforts.

(This is the “Hull Note” that demanded that Japan withdraw from China and French Indochina.)

Post-war involved a rapid reverse, including the eight volumes of Dr. Sakuzo Yoshino’s Collected Works on Democracy (published in 1946) as well as literature by Matsutaro Kawaguchi and Osamu Dazai the same year.

This reversal could be a.) starting as a true believer in fascism, but changing course for survival during the US occupation or b.) the founder being reluctant with the propaganda to begin with, and they’d really rather be doing something else. Despite the founding date being a puzzle, there’s good reason to think the latter, because the founder appears to be the erotic literature scholar Kenbun Matsukawa.

From the back pages of If You Go To War. The text along the top edge mentions The Japan Publishing Distribution Company.

松川健文 (Kenbun Matsukawa) is given as the publisher.

In a 1997 book, the scholar Toshio Takahashi calls Matsukawa “no mere purveyor of erotica, but instead a man of refined sensibilities”; in the early 1950s he published a series of booklets titled Curiosa through the “Tokyo Limited Edition Club” with essays (“Eroticism in Detective Fiction”, “Edo period sideshows”) and translations (with high-literary choices like Casanova, Henry Miller, and the ancient Greek play Lysistrata).

He also published A Study of Erotic Literature in 1948 (using the publisher name Logos), and it includes the important essay “On Obscenity”; despite the name of the author being different (Fumio Natsukawa) it likely was just Matsukawa using a pen name. This essay uses Havelock Ellis’s book The Psychology of Sex (in English) as a reference; instead of some absolute natural law, he calls the obscene an “emotional response under certain circumstances” and that it is simply a “violation of social etiquette” that is subjectively dependent on each individual person.

This was when it was possible to go to jail for publishing erotic material, and indeed he was sentenced to two months in 1950 for “selling obscene literature”; another scholar writing in 1969 called him a “nihilist” (in the same sense as Dazai Osamu) who made “significant” contributions in advancing the study of erotic literature.

These works were all in “alternative” presses; while all this was going on, Shinkigensha was busy with churning out “proper” work, including straight textbooks like “Stable Value Accounting: A Study of Inflation Accounting in Various Countries” (1949) and “Public Debt Economics” (1955). They also in the 60s published a “Collection of Literary Works by Junior High School Students” (for multiple years, for an annual prize) and in 1970 published “A Middle Schooler’s Guide to Daily Life”.

They switched gears starting in the 1980s, still with an underlying mission of conveying historical and technical information, but now aimed squarely at hobbyists. (Right before this, in 1979, they published the Comprehensive Research Study on Zainichi Koreans. It’s fair to guess this would not interest people playing with tabletop miniatures.) As far as why, it likely is because while they were founded a long time before, they only became incorporated on March 4, 1982. (Very loosely, it went from “family business” to “corporation”, allowing things like government contracts and limited liability.)

Their biggest niche after that became the Truth in Fantasy books.

From Shinkigensha’s Facebook page.

They’re a bridge between textbook and fantasy: they’re meant to be guides pulling elements from history and mythology to help with TTRPG games. Truth in Fantasy 4, Residents of a Fantasy World, tries to show what kind of characters one might meet in a campaign. Truth in Fantasy 10 is a guide to the deities of Taoism.

The company has guides outside the series of a similar flavor. The artist Mitsuhiro Arita (mostly known for Pokémon cards) did some work with Shinkigensha; his art in the stand-alone Arms & Armor Encyclopedia impressed Kenichi Iwao of Square Enix enough that he was offered a job. He made Final Fantasy XI content for ten years.

Other than that Shinkigensha became after known for

▲ military manuals for hobbyists

▲ art books

▲ guides to games

▲ and technology.

From a Wizardry art book by Jun Suemi.

For the story today, the technology is our focus; in late 1981 they started a tabloid newspaper about personal computing, and in 1982 they helped create the program Pasokon Sunday (lasting until 1989); I’ve embedded below an episode from late in the run (1988):

The tabloid newspaper was eventually turned into a monthly newspaper, PC Magazine. (Not to be confused with the American magazine of the exact same title.) Here’s a page from their September 1983 issue:

Included during the newspaper phase was one marked January 1982 (published one or two months before).

The very last line has our game: Yuureisen, or The Phantom Ship, by Yasuhiro Kume. It was for PC-8001, the same machine Omotesando was on. This gets listed in archives as Yuureisen, but I’m giving it in translation for English audiences. I could have used Ghost Ship as the translation of the title, but there’s the faint possibility that some inspiration came from the 1950s animated short, or the 1960s manga and anime, and in both cases they include Phantom in their official English translation.

I unfortunately don’t have a copy of the original printing, and as far as I can tell nobody else does either. Tabloid newspaper format does not lend itself to preservation unless done actively. The Game Preservation Society in Japan has copies of all the magazines and none of the newspapers.

The game was reprinted in one of the magazines (June, by the time they went monthly), but the reprint is for a machine we haven’t had on this blog yet, the PC-8201. The one-digit difference hides that this is a much different system. The PC-8201 is a portable computer, NEC’s answer to the Tandy 100.

A NEC PC-8201A, from Reddit.

The game was actually published by Shinkigensha on tape before the June issue came out (price 3500 yen, shipping 240 yen), and the BASIC source code had bugs! In addition to the PC-8201 version, the June article has fixes for the tape release, and tells the readers to retype the BASIC lines with the fixed versions.

When I made this joke a few days ago, I didn’t realize it applied to this game.

In case you are curious, here are the two changes:

Correct: 2220 IF NN<>5 THEN PRINT “* アシヲ イタメマスヨ！”:PLAY “o7c4”:GOTO 1130
Incorrect: 2220 IF NN<>5 THEN PRINT “* アシヲ イタメマスヨ！”:BEEP:GOTO 1130

Correct: 2740 IFPC(P2,J)>10000 THEN D1$=D$(8-INT(PC(P2,J)/10000))+”ニ ススメル”
Incorrect: 2740 IFPC(P2,J)>10000 THEN D1$=D$(8-PC(P2,J)/10000)+”ニ ススメル”

(The missing INT rounds to a whole number; this sounds like a bug that could crash the game.)

One last thing to highlight before diving into gameplay; this is from a 1992 issue of LOGiN magazine:

The image shows a branching chart of Japanese game history, subdivided into various genres. The middle blue timeline shows adventure games, starting with Omotesando Adventure, branching up to Mystery House and various other games on top. Branching down from Omotesando is one game, the only other text-only game listed: 幽霊船 (The Phantom Ship).

This is the first text-only adventure game in Japanese, and it was considered notable enough to be listed in a magazine 10 years later as one of the foundational games of the adventure genre as a whole.

Cover of packaged version.

There was an accident on your ship, and as you drift in the Pacific Ocean, an old sailing ship appears before you. You “manage to climb up to the figurehead at the bow of the ship”, and this is where the game begins.

The function keys are enabled (the game also lets you change their assignment). By default they’re look, north, east, south, west, open, left, right, up, and down in order.

The instructions (see above) include a general map (the black point on the right is the figurehead) but also helpfully specify how to parser works: noun, followed by a space, followed by a verb.

Moving on, I did LOOK to find that the game mentioned the exit was to the south, to a stair that goes up or down. Going south, the game prompts you (rather than having a stairs “room”) which of the two ways you wish to go. Up leads to a forecastle, which has exits to the north and south to stairs, and a barrel (タル) by the foremast. (Or maybe barrels. Japanese needs more context; for example you could put the equivalent of “many barrels”. Just “barrel” on its own could mean one or many. This is non-trivial in an adventurer sense, for a single container you might expect to open, but a whole pile of them is more likely to be scenery.)

At the opening stair, picking “down” instead leads to the north upper deck, including this text.

＊ キタ ニ ウエニ ススメル カイタ゛ン カ゛アリマス。
＊ タイホウ,ガイコツ ガ アリマス。
キタ,ミナミ ニ ススメマス。

* There is a staircase to the north that leads upward.
* There are cannons (or is a cannon) and skeletons (or a skeleton) here.
You can go to the north or the south.

Later the game uses “pile of skeletons” so I think it’s skeleton singular, but cannon is ambiguous; generally speaking I’d expect there to be multiple cannons in a section of ship. Parsing the line タイホウ,ガイコツ ガ アリマス literally you get

cannon(s), skeleton(s) exist here

There’s even more trouble in just this room (and the forecastle room) in that it was entered via an up/down stair, but to get back to the stair (and the figurehead) you just go back north.

It feels like there’s a room you pass through while going south (even though it exists via simply an up-or-down prompt), but the room doesn’t exist and doesn’t get mentioned when going back the other way. This turned out to be non-trivial for mapping, especially because there are also directions that lead to left-or-right forks. Expanding the map a little:

Going south along either the up-stairs or down-stair paths eventually re-merges at the center upper deck, and then going north has the game prompt you for if you mean left or right. I was baffled for a full hour with multiple connections like this I originally had going the wrong way.

This is all compounded by the fact that I’m not good with ship terminology. For example, at one point I came across a “mizzenmast” (or rather “mizzen masuto”), which I could read off the katakana (having run across masts already I knew what “masuto” was) but I did not know I was looking at an actual English word so I wasted time translating a “mizzenmast” into “mizzenmast”.

It’s this one. I’m a landlubber, ok? Image source.

All this is to say I’m going to leave off here and continue with having everything mapped out next time (and maybe the game finished, if it’s straightforward enough). I can say this is not a game about obvious threats; there’s skeletons but none of them have risen up attacking with swords. There’s obvious locked doors at the back, er, stern of the ship, so I assume any rising action comes from there. This may end up like Death Dreadnaught where exploration and atmosphere are largely the point.

Special thanks to f_t_b (for scanning assistance) and the Game Preservation Society (especially Joseph who helped locate the June article).

I'm going to tell this one out of order, because it's not April Fool's Day any more.

Tara McGrew, the author of the modern ZILF compiler, has released Linchpin, a brand-new implementation of Infocom's "mu machine". That's the virtual machine which powered Cornerstone.

...You all know about Cornerstone, right? Infocom's first and last business product? Ate up all their game profits at exactly the point when the company couldn't afford it? Go read the Digital Antiquarian article; Jimmy tells it better than me.

Anyhow. Since the 1990s, Infocom fans have put uncountable nerd-years into supporting the Z-machine. Almost nobody has looked at Cornerstone. It just wasn't a fun idea. John Elliott did some reverse-engineering work (see his comments in the DA post) but didn't get very far.

As of last week, that has changed. It's a new age for aficionados of failed 1985 database products! Linchpin includes a working interpreter for Cornerstone's VM. It also includes an assembler, so you can create new programs for that VM.

As a final touch, Tara updated ZILF with a new back-end. It can now compile ZIL code directly to the Cornerstone VM. I mentioned April Fool's Day? On April 1st, Tara announced that she had found not only the unreleased Atari ST port of Cornerstone, but a version of Zork that runs on the mu machine.

This was, to be clear, a joke. Atari Cornerstone remains a lost project, and Infocom never considered cross-compiling its games. However, the Zork disk and the Cornerstone disk exist; Tara created them. You can get them running on an Atari emulator, or an actual Atari ST if you feel ambitious.

(Note: Linchpin is available, but I don't see the updated version of ZILF yet.)

That's the news flash. Now I shall take questions.

Yes, you in the back. Yes? Well, if you bought Cornerstone...

Oop, sorry -- let me repeat the question.

Why do I keep saying "mu machine"?

If you bought Cornerstone back in 1985, you could see that the DOS executable was called MME.EXE, and one of its data files was CORNER.MME. The MME command is mentioned in the Cornerstone manual as well. So the name "MME" was clearly a thing. But we didn't know what it meant.

However, after Tara's post, I dug into my backlog of Infocom data to see if I could find anything about Cornerstone. I didn't find much; what's been preserved is from Infocom's game division, not the business division.

However, I did find this quote, apparently intended for a Status Line article that never came to be:

Currently, we have three types of interpreters: ZIP (for Zork Interpretive Program) which runs the games, MME (for Mu Machine Emulator) which runs Cornerstone, and DIP (for Display Interpretive Program) which runs Fooblitzky.

Gotcha! I guess we can refer to μ-code now.

(Modulo arguments about capitalization. We write "Z-code", so shouldn't we write "Μ-code" with a capital Mu? It's only a wee bit confusing...)

(The name "DIP" turned up a few years ago when I was collecting Infocom's interpreter code. See here for their original DIP interpreter implementation. There are no modern open-source DIP interpreters, as far as I know. Maybe next April.)

What is the mu machine good for?

I don't know! I've barely looked at the interpreter code. Go read John Elliott's overview or this partial instruction set description.

At a glance, it's a subject-neutral low-level VM. Most of the opcodes manipulate bytes and memory arrays. A few are dedicated to string comparison. It supports reading and writing files. It prints text directly to the screen (presumed to be a terminal-style grid); there's some stuff about dividing the screen into panes which can be scrolled independently. (You can see this in how Cornerstone runs.)

The VM was not specifically built to be a database. If Cornerstone had been a landmark hit, Infocom would have been well-poised to build "Infocalc", "Infowrite", and the other business ideas they had tossed around.

One important note: the keyboard-read opcode (KBINPUT in John Elliott's list) is a poll rather than a blocking read. This means that the interpreter busy-spins as it waits for input. I guess that made sense in the DOS era, but it's poor sportsmanship these days. A modern implementation should probably have a 5ms delay or something to keep the heat down.

Where can you download Cornerstone itself?

Until last week, I'd never gone looking for Cornerstone. (See "not fun" above.) But now of course I had to.

The Internet Archive has a disk image of Cornerstone 5.1 in this collection. Actually it's five disk images, tagged as "Program Disk", "Sample Database", "Client Tracking", "Beginner's Guide 1", and "Beginner's Guide 2".

For added fun, the "Program Disk" is served in three formats I never heard of: .86f, .mfm, and .tc. Sorry -- I'm sure they're old hat to you, but I'm new to the world of PC emulation. But I managed to get the files off. I've now posted these (as regular easy-to-use .zip files) to my Infocom Collection page.

Then I went hunting around the Internet, and hey look -- some abandonware site had a disk image for Cornerstone 5.20. So I added that one too. (Only four disks this time. It looks like the two "Beginner's Guides" have been combined, but I haven't tried them out.)

Both versions can be fired up in Linchpin; see my forum post for detailed instructions. Note that I ran into some bugs when trying to ADD-RECORD. No doubt the interpreter will get some updates as people break it in.

If you know of disk images of any other versions, by the way, drop me a line. I guess I'm collecting them now.

Another project funded in 2025 as part of our micro-grants program supported Serhii in the development of additional features for his engine Atrament. Here’s an update!

The core concept of Atrament is that, while the Ink scripting language is widely used, it could be further developed into a more full-featured and user-friendly web-based engine that could offer creators a workflow comparable to Twine or ChoiceScript. While the core of the engine already existed prior to applying to a IFTF micro-grant, additional work was needed to push the tool towards greater maturity, ease of use, and functionality. The micro-grant allowed Serhii to work on the following areas: - developing documentation for authors; - developing a “wizard” style command line tool to provide technical scaffolding to users in creating a project and publishing it; - adding features to allow authors to export their games to a desktop OS; - delivering improvements to the debugger and the compiler; - expanding visual capabilities and extending the markup language; - purchase of a domain name for a dedicated website for the project.

Serhii also notably performed some exploratory work around automated game testing and VS Code integration, two very interesting features that are nonetheless not ready for primetime at this point. Still, the project is still under active development, moving from version 2.0 to 2.4.1 in 2025, and Serhii has integrated the feedback from external developers making a first wave of Atrament games, such as Sun Runners, The Loop, and The Corridor. Plus, given by the enthusiastic reaction the engine has met from established authors over at IntFiction, it seems like we can look forward to more Atrament games in the future!

Head on over to Atrament.ink (and the Github page) to learn more about the project, and give it a try! We are thrilled to have supported Serhii in further improving his engine and making it even easier for authors to develop their stories!

In 2025, as part of our micro-grants program, IFTF funded a project from Mark Davis; thanks to the funding, Mark and the team have made very good progress and were able to launch the platform, now called “Moving Literature”!

The project’s ambition was to design a no-code web-based tool for authoring interactive fiction, specifically designed to empower creators through accessible technology and a low barrier of entry, while still offering some nice multimedia options. Mark’s vision was to foster a vibrant community by blending the narrative power of Ink scripts with modern visual elements, such as the integration of images but also of Lottie animations (hence the zoetrope/Muybridge-style logos on the website!), which are triggered within the story through the use of Ink tags. While Mark explains that the technical stack is one he uses in his professional work, this project brings those high-end tools to the hobbyist and experimental IF scene.

The project was able to launch in the fall of 2025 thanks to IFTF’s support, with the launch of two websites: - MovingLiterature.com: The project’s home base, featuring general communications, development blogs, and “getting started” documentation. - MovLit.com: The library and creation space where the “action” happens, allowing for user registration and story creation.

The micro-grant was used to engage a professional graphic designer (who has since joined the team!) and cover hosting costs for the next 3 years, to ensure the project has a stable home for years to come. This supported the team as they focused on carrying the project towards launch, such as building a documentation library, implementing user registration, and building out forums.

We are very happy to have helped bring this new authoring tool into the world! Building new low/no-code options that nonetheless provide engaging capabilities to control or enhance presentation has proven numerous time to be a very effective entry point for newcomers to discover and enjoy IF, and lower the barrier of entry to more stories being created. IFTF is proud to support such projects that push the envelope for web-based interactive storytelling!

We are pleased to announce the creation of our new Institutional Relations committee! You can learn more by reading our charter here.

The intent behind this committee is to help support IFTF in establishing and nurturing relationships with institutions that align with our vision. Over the years, we have realized there are so many of them! Other non-profits (related to digital arts, video games, open source, etc.), educational institutions, libraries, museums and other preservation-oriented folks, video game studios, but also government bodies and granting bodies, and everything in between!

While IFTF has established a number of great institutional relationships over the years, there wasn’t necessarily formal internal resources or structures that could help in supporting these relationships; with so many committees with different goals and activities, there was a risk of a lack of coordination or visibility, and missing identifying interesting opportunities or potential synergies. This committee’s goal is to help with this, and also support the org more generally in things like communicating IFTF’s impact to various interested stakeholders more effectively, or having a more structured and more long-term-focused approach towards fundraising. We believe this is an important step in IFTF’s maturation, and we are very excited about it!

Our committee has a few members to get started with, however we’re definitely interested in onboarding more folks! If you like building bridges, or know a few people in fields related to what we do, like to find missing puzzle pieces, enjoy the thrill of finding new partners, have some fundraising experience — or if just like interactive fiction and would love to help us and maybe gain some skills, please get in touch via email and we’d be thrilled to chat!

Note: This blog post started as an outline generated by Claude, but the details are mine and the character system was worked out through long conversations with Claude in how NPCs might converse differently. I started with the requirement that the system support unreliable narrators. Eventually I realized that character personality mapping was a prerequisite to dialogue, so the character package was extracted from the original ADR into two; one for character and the other for conversations, which is still being designed.

Teaching NPCs to Think: Building the Character Model

Most interactive fiction engines treat NPCs as dialogue trees. You write a lookup table and if the player asks about the murder, say this; if they ask about the weather, say that. The NPC has no inner life. It doesn't know things, feel things, or change over time. It's a vending machine with better prose.

I wanted something different for Sharpee.

Characters, Not Dialogue Trees

The new Sharpee character package is the foundation to conversation, which is a projection of character state. What an NPC says depends on what they know, what they care about, how they feel about you, and what kind of person they are. If you model the character well enough, the right dialogue selection falls out naturally.

While I was researching conversation systems I realized dialogue is the easy part (for a writer). The hard part is the mechanics of an NPC personality that determines what they will say, to whom, and why. This is the "IF" side of conversations.

Every NPC in Sharpee can now carry rich internal state: personality traits with intensity, directed dispositions toward specific entities, transient mood, situational threat assessment, a cognitive profile, a knowledge base with sourced facts, beliefs that may contradict those facts, and prioritized goals. The new character package is entirely optional. Two-dimensional NPCs like the Troll and Thief in Dungeon don't need it. When an author wants their NPCs to have a real personality, the new package is there to import.

Words, Not Numbers

One thing I chose was to rely on character traits and not numerical measurements. No author wants to manage complex D&D character dice roll values in a table then implement large if-then-else blocks for future conversations.

In Sharpee, you'll write personality('very honest', 'cowardly') and the system knows what that means. You can write loyalTo('lady-grey') and the disposition is set. You can write mood('nervous') and the two-dimensional valence-arousal coordinate is resolved behind the scenes. When you need to query state, you ask in words too: evaluate('trusts player') or evaluate('not threatened').

NOTE: Yes, I assume Inform 7 could implement the same system.

This extends to cognitive profiles. Instead of tweaking five separate numeric dimensions, you write cognitiveProfile('ptsd') and get an example personality: filtered perception, rigid belief formation, drifting coherence, episodic lucidity, uncertain self-model. Then you override the dimensions that don't fit your character.

The Five Dimensions of Mind

The cognitive profile system is a stab at building psychological profiles of NPCs.

NOTE: I'm very open to modifying this structure. Feel free to log a complaint/issue on the GitHub page.

There are five dimensions:

Perception determines what the NPC notices. Accurate perception means events are recorded as they happen. Filtered perception means some events are missed entirely — a character with PTSD might not register quiet actions behind them, but sudden movements hit with amplified impact. Augmented perception means the NPC perceives things that didn't happen. Hallucinations are author-defined: you specify what the character sees, under what conditions, and the system injects those perceived events into the NPC's knowledge base with the same conviction as real ones. The NPC can't tell the difference. The system can.

Belief formation governs how the NPC updates their worldview. A flexible character changes their mind when presented with evidence. A rigid character needs overwhelming proof. A resistant character doesn't just reject counter-evidence — they reinterpret it to fit their existing beliefs. Present a delusional NPC with proof they're wrong, and they'll explain why the proof actually supports what they already believe.

Coherence affects how the NPC maintains focus. A focused character stays on topic. A drifting character occasionally wanders to adjacent subjects. A fragmented character jumps between unrelated topics, mixes timeframes, and can't maintain a thread.

Lucidity models whether the cognitive profile is stable or shifts over time. Episodic lucidity means the character has discrete windows of clarity — they might be coherent and accurate for a few turns after the player calms them down, then gradually return to their baseline state. The author defines triggers (what causes a lucid window), transitions (immediate or next turn), and decay rates (how quickly baseline returns).

Self-model tracks the NPC's sense of identity. An intact self-model means the character knows who they are. An uncertain one means they question their own memories. A fractured one means they may not recognize themselves or maintain continuity between interactions.

These five dimensions might create:

• A character with schizophrenia has augmented perception, resistant beliefs, fragmented coherence, episodic lucidity, and an uncertain self-model.
• A character with dementia has filtered perception, rigid beliefs, fragmented coherence, fluctuating lucidity, and a fractured self-model.
• A character who has schizophrenia and has learned coping strategies might have drifting coherence instead of fragmented.

Unreliable Witnesses!

Here's what falls out naturally from the model: unreliable narration. You don't implement unreliable witnesses as a special feature. They emerge from the character state.

A loyal character omits their patron's crimes; not because you coded an "omit" behavior, but because their high disposition toward the patron and their loyalty personality trait combine to select a response that protects the patron. A cowardly character under threat agrees with whatever the questioner says. A character with augmented perception reports hallucinated events with full conviction. A character whose beliefs resist evidence reinterprets proof you present to them.

The taxonomy of unreliability maps directly to character configurations:

• the liar (goals motivate deception)
• the loyalist (disposition drives omission)
• the coward (threat plus personality)
• the delusional (resistant beliefs plus augmented perception)
• the traumatized (drifting coherence plus episodic lucidity)
• the confused (filtered perception plus fragmented coherence)
• the self-deceived (beliefs contradicting their own knowledge)

None of these required special-case code. They're all just character state evaluated through the same predicate system.

The Observation Pipeline

Characters don't exist in a vacuum. They witness events and react. The observation system connects the world to the character model through the cognitive profile filter. I had implemented the perception system very early in Sharpee's design, so adapting it to the new character model was straight-forward.

When something happens in a room where an NPC is present, the event passes through perception first. If the NPC has filtered perception, quiet events might be missed entirely while violent events are amplified and the threat increase is doubled, the mood shift hits harder. If the NPC has augmented perception, the event passes through normally, but the system may also inject hallucinated facts on the same turn.

After filtering, the event updates character state through a set of default transitions. Violence increases threat and shifts mood negative. Gifts improve disposition toward the giver. These defaults are configurable, not hardcoded. Stories can swap in their own transition rules without touching the handler.

Lucidity triggers are checked against incoming events. If a PTSD character configured with a violence trigger witnesses an attack, their lucidity state shifts to "flashback" immediately. The cognitive profile changes. Maybe perception becomes more filtered, coherence degrades further. Then, over subsequent turns, lucidity decays back to baseline.

The whole pipeline runs automatically. The author configures the character once, and the system handles event processing, state transitions, and lucidity management across turns.

The Builder

All of this could be overwhelming, but the authoring surface is a fluent builder that reads almost like prose:

new CharacterBuilder('margaret')
  .personality('very honest', 'very loyal', 'cowardly')
  .knows('murder', { witnessed: true })
  .loyalTo('lady-grey')
  .likes('player')
  .mood('nervous')

  .on('player threatens')
    .becomes('panicked')
    .feelsAbout('player', 'wary of')

  .on('lady-grey arrested')
    .becomes('grieving')
    .shift('threat', 'cornered')

  .compile()

That's a complete character definition. The builder compiles to trait data, trigger rules, and predicate registrations. Call applyCharacter(entity, compiled) and the NPC is alive.

For characters with cognitive conditions, the builder extends naturally:

new CharacterBuilder('eleanor')
  .personality('very curious', 'honest', 'slightly paranoid')
  .cognitiveProfile('schizophrenic')
  .mood('anxious')
  .knows('murder', { witnessed: true })

  .lucidity({
    baseline: 'fragmented',
    triggers: {
      'player is calm': { target: 'lucid', transition: 'next turn' },
      'loud noise': { target: 'dissociative', transition: 'immediate' },
    },
    decay: 'gradual',
    decayRate: 'slow',
  })

  .perceives('shadow-figure-in-library', {
    when: 'hallucinating',
    as: 'witnessed',
    content: 'shadow-figure',
  })

  .compile()

Eleanor is a schizophrenic witness who has lucid windows when the player is calm, shatters into dissociation on loud noises, and sees shadow figures in the library when hallucinating. She reports those figures with the same certainty as real events. The player has to figure out which of her accounts to trust — and Eleanor herself can't help them with that distinction.

What's Next

The character model is the foundation. It doesn't own conversation — it feeds it. ADR-142 defines how the conversation system specifically consumes character state to select authored responses, manage topic resolution, track contradictions, and handle confrontation mechanics. That's the next layer.

I'm planning a Clue (the board game) style mystery as the proof-of-concept: six suspects with distinct character models, randomized guilt, and enough constraint density to stress-test the whole system at realistic NPC count. If the character model works for Clue — where every NPC has secrets, opinions about each other, and something to hide — it works generally.

The character model shipped today as @sharpee/character version 0.9.106 with 128 tests across three packages. Every mutation is verified against actual state, not just events. The authoring surface is words, the internals are numbers, and the two never leak into each other.

NPCs in Sharpee aren't vending machines anymore. They're people — flawed, biased, scared, loyal, delusional, and sometimes hallucinating shadow figures in the library. What they tell you depends on who they are. And who they are is something the author describes in a language that reads like character notes, not like code.

Earlier this month, IFTF was delighted to participate in the GDC Festival of Gaming in San Francisco. This was our chance to explain what interactive fiction is, does, and can do to the biggest game developer gathering in the world.

We began by rocking the crowds at the Monday night opening event at Oracle Stadium. Several nonprofits and indie collectives had tables up at the concession level. We took the opportunity to soft-launch our GDC-week project: a collaboratively-authored Twine game - the classic “exquisite corpse” reimagined for branching narrative. Everybody who walked by was invited to add a node to the Twine editing screen — without looking at what earlier attendees had added. (Or, at least, not looking much.)

Naturally, the story got pretty chaotic pretty quickly, even on that first night.

Tuesday was a breather, since the festival hall wasn’t open yet. We took in some of the GDC talks and generally sprawled on the lawn in Yerba Buena Gardens. The weather was lovely — particularly for those of us who had flown in from East Coast snowstorms.

On Wednesday, the IFTF booth opened up (along with the IGF pavilion, alt.ctrl.gdc, and the rest of the festival hall). We were located in “GDC Commons,” alongside several other nonprofits and independent organizations. Our space had three tables, so we were able to demo the first day’s worth of Twine contributions while also grabbing people to continue the growth of the Twine map.

It turns out that most passers-by were familiar with Twine — no surprise, since it’s one of the most popular open-source narrative design tools out there. Fewer people realized that a whole educational nonprofit exists to support Twine. IFTF also manages other IF community services like IFComp (the oldest continuously-run game-design competition), IFDB (the definitive database of IF), the IF Archive, the forum and more. Not to mention NarraScope, our cozy little conference dedicated to narrative games. (Coming up this June in Albany!)

IFTF’s third table was dedicated to an older brand of interactive fiction: the Visible Zorker. This is an open-source project which demonstrates Zork, the original 1979 text adventure. The game is rigged to display its own source code as you play, along with all the variables, timers, and other mechanisms that run behind the game’s magic curtain. We at IFTF love this kind of educational project: revealing and making game design accessible to everyone.

GDC’s festival hall runs three days. By Friday afternoon we were tired (but happy) (but definitely tired) and ready to wrap up. The Twine game was a huge success with over 120 contributed passages over the course of the week.

We’re looking forward to next year at GDC in San Francisco. What will we be showing off in 2027? Haven’t the foggiest! We’ve got eleven months to decide, and you have eleven months to anticipate it. We hope to see you there.

To play the IFTF Collaborative Twine Adventure, visit this page!

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the second round of IFTF microgrants, after a successful pilot in 2024.

The grants program exists to disburse small-value grants to peer-reviewed projects that benefit a community of interactive fiction makers, players, researchers, or educators. An independent committee of Grant Advisors review each submission and provide recommendations for funding to the Grants Committee, who this year have selected four projects to fund.

We saw great diversity again this year in the projects submitted, including a higher number of submissions compared to our pilot year. Thanks to everyone who submitted proposals! Here are the list of grant recipients for 2025.

Critical Essays On Interactive Fiction - Grace Benfell Grace is a co-editor of The Imaginary Engine Review, an online games criticism journal. Grace will receive $500 to commission three articles for the journal on significant interactive fictions written in the 2010s, exploring how these works continue the medium’s tradition of experimentation and introducing modern IF to a broader gaming audience.

No-code IF platform for web using Ink - Mark Davis Mark Davis is developing a web-based tool for interactive fiction builders that allows creators without coding experience to create interactive stories incorporating images and animations, using Ink scripts under the hood. Mark will receive $600 for hosting and branding assets for the in-development platform, crucial steps towards opening it up to outside testers on its road to launch.

Interactive Fiction Workshop for London Games Week - Katy Naylor Katy will receive $716 to host a series of IF writing workshops and Twine mini-jams at the 2025 London Games Festival Fringe, and present resultant works online in a special edition of voidspace zine. The workshops are aimed at people interested in games or interactive writing but who have not coded or designed a piece of IF before, hoping to bring new voices into the community.

Atrament, an Ink-based IF engine - Serhii Serhii is working on an IF engine that combines Ink scripting with Javascript as an alternative to Inky, creating a more full-featured release platform for Ink stories comparable to the mature web deployments for languages like Twine and ChoiceScript. The core of the engine is already complete: Serhii will receive $1000 to fund dev time writing documentation, testing and debugging the engine, and adding improvements focused on easier development and deployment workflows for authors.

We’re thrilled to see so much passion for expanding the audience of IF writers and readers in this year’s awardees. We want to thank all applicants, as well as our Grant Advisors, who volunteered their time to review the projects and formulate a recommendation for IFTF: thank you very much to Grim Baccaris, Kate Compton, Emilia Lazer-Walker, Juhana Leinonen, Colin Post, and Kaitlin Tremblay.

Congrats again to this year’s grant recipients! Check back in the fall for information about next year’s grant cycle. An announcement of the 2024 grant recipients is also available.

And lastly: if you like the grants program and want to see it continue, please consider donating to IFTF! Our Paypal page allows you to specify the program you’d like to see your money fund - you can select the grants program in the dropdown menu if you are so inclined. Thank you to everyone who has been donating to IFTF and allowing us to continue furthering our mission!

On February 22, 2025, IFTF elected two new officers to the roles of Treasurer and Technical Officer. The former position is being filled by Colette Zinna, while the latter, a new role, is being filled by Doug Valenta. Previously, these tasks were handled jointly by Andrew Plotkin, whose term on the board finished in March 2024 and whose time as Treasurer has now also ended. The board thanks Andrew for his many years of service to the organization’s administration; he will be continuing as the chair of the IFArchive committee and helping with the NarraScope conference.

Colette Zinna is a longtime fan of narrative games and an occasional game developer. She’s attended or volunteered at NarraScope every year since it began.

Doug Valenta is a programmer and creator focusing on games, narrative, language, and the web, and a two-time NarraScope speaker. Doug works as a software engineering manager, leading a platform engineering team at a data management startup. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner and two dogs.

As we celebrate our two new officers, we look forward to the organization’s continued growth as we continue to expand our purview, operational activities, and service to the world of interactive fiction and narrative games. You can read more about IFTF’s leadership, and join us on the Intfiction.org Forums to toast the new officers.

In 2025, as part of our micro-grants program, IFTF funded a project from Grace Benfell, co-editor in chief of The Imaginary Engine Review, which was completed last summer!

TIER defines itself as an online journal of games criticism - but Grace and Phoenix, the editors, have a very specific goal and outlook for it, described in their manifesto. TIER values the margins, the strange, the hobbyist releases, the experimental, the games that don’t get a lot of critical attention. Prior issues each focused on a specific game, such as thecatamites’ “Anthology of the Killer” or randomnine’s “OVERWHELM”; but things got a little different for their latest issue…

See, their initial proposal envisioned three small issues on three IF games; however, the scope shifted into a larger issue that would offer the opportunity to showcase a wider range of perspectives on IF. And it is a large issue with no less than 6 pieces on various aspects of IF. (We get it! There is so much to talk about in IF!) Grace explains that the grant money was very welcome as it allowed them to commission more ambitious and experimental pieces overall. The issue took overall longer than expected, but with an interview, a retrospective, and four critical perspectives on a variety of IF games, there’s a lot for everyone!

You’ll find this issue on TIER’s website, featuring: - a reflection on “Repeat the Ending” (Best in Show at Spring Thing 2023) as a personal game and the vulnerability it entails - an honest retelling of what it was to be a Twine author participating at their first IFComp in 2017 - a shorter piece on game poems, and the exploration of experimental techniques that have long been part (or precursors?) of IF - a lengthy interview with Nathalie Lawhead, touching on the power of text-based games for effective, personal, touching, and plain weird experiences, in an industry that looks more towards sleek polished spectacles, and an angry world that stifles creativity - a great study of “Horse Master” that made me go, “fine, yes, of course I will play Horse Master for the 12th time” - an exploration of retro interfaces featured as literary devices in a few IF games, and what they point to.

We are very happy to have helped bring into the world these very unique and thoughtful pieces of writing! Good games criticism pieces have always been very important to the IF scene, from long rec.arts.int-fiction pieces to SPAG articles, and even to this day articles from The Rosebush, but it can go through periods of lull - it takes thoughfulness, introspection, and the time to sit with a piece. IFTF is proud to continue to support a vibrant, healthy creative scene in this way!

One of the projects in the 2025 class of IFTF grants awardees was led by Katy Naylor from the Voidspace. In Katy’s words, the Voidspace is a cross-disciplinary space to bring together practitioners and explore and promote the overlap between the worlds of IF, indie writing, games, and interactive performance to encourage cross pollination. From our experience, notably at Narrascope, those worlds do have quite a bit of overlap that is always interesting to foster! The proposal sought grant money to support the delivery of several interactive fiction workshops and Twine minijams for newcomers as part of the London Games Festival Fringe in April.

The Voidspace successfully managed to run three IF workshops in April, two in person and one online; although they weren’t formally picked as a side event by the London Games Festival, the workshops ran at the same time period. The Void managed to bring together quite a few people from the literary and the interactive performance worlds that form part of the network that Voidspace has created - most of whom had not run into IF before, but had very relevant skills and an interest from their existing practice. The in-person workshops occurred April 5 at Theatre Deli in London, UK, a theatre community hub that frequently partners with the Voidspace. The first workshop focused on Downpour, a very intuitive and accessible tool for hyperlinks-based games created by V Buckenham, who also ran this workshop; and the second one saw Stanley Baxton (who readers of these pages might know from his 2024 IFComp entry) introduce a group to the tool Videotome. As for the online workshop, on April 15 Mark Ward gave and introduction to Twine.

Katy reports that these workshops were very successful! Not only for the attendees - Katy herself reports that the workshops planted several seeds in her minde, helped her shape her approach to advocating for IF and inspired her to use Videotome for an upcoming piece. This also spurred her to create her own introductory IF workshop aimed specifically at theatre makers, which she ran in September at an experimental theatre festival, using physical materials to replicate Twine-like structures - one attendee even said that this broke her writer’s block!

We’re always excited to help introduce more creators to the world of IF, and it sounds like the cross-pollination aspect of this project made it very successful!

PS: when we asked Katy to describe the overlap between IF and interactive theatre, her response was so insightful that we are copying it here verbatim:

The overlap between IF and theater (particularly immersive and interactive theatre, which is the Voidspace’s core interest) is massive!

Immersive theatre often involves audience interacting with environments that are all around them (i.e. inside a big touch real set - see Punchdrunk for the biggest example), choosing which strands of an atomised story to follow (e.g. following different characters or objects), etc. Interactive theatre takes this a stage further and allows audiences to take a direct part in the action - a sort of live action game but with a tight narrative arc. A balance of choice with controlled impact very similar to IF!

IF is well suited for creating environmental narratives - my workshop focuses on the spatial mechanics of “Howling Dogs” - how the degradation of the core space over time tells a story if its own - and encouraged participants to design a story from an environment first perspective. For those interested in interactive theatre you can use dialogue options and variables to create a story that feels responsive in a similar way.

There is also the element of time - even in a linear piece of IF, you can manipulate the flow of time far more than conventional text - by choosing breaks between passages, expanding links, moderated text etc. You can use these simple tools to give a piece of IF a sense of theatricality - landing the timing of ‘beats’ for flow and emphasis. Add the use of variables to build in a sense of time passing and use of environment and you have what I call ‘4d storytelling’. Which if you think about it, is what theatre is… “[Understudied][https://borntopootle.itch.io/understudied]” is a great example - a piece of IF about theatre that uses variables to introduce time pressure, and text effects and structure to choreograph the timing of ‘beats’. Form and content in unity!”

Thank you so much Katy!

We wrap up this series of grant reports with this fourth and final blog post, on Felicity Banks’ project and how support from IFTF made her able to travel to Indonesia and spread the word about IF!

Felicity is a long-time IF author who lives in Australia but has ties to Indonesia, having travelled there over half a dozen times and learned the main language, Bahasa Indonesia. She applied for a microgrant to travel there for the Ubud Writers’ and Readers’ Festival, the largest writing festival in South-East Asia), hoping to offer an IF workshop as part of the official program track. However, after the festival declined the proposal, Felicity instead shifted the project’s focus to connecting with authors in Ubud around the time of the festival and giving a series of workshops. (Oh, and go to cat cafés and monkey forests.)

This proved to be very successful, with Felicity teaching 7 small workshops (focusing on the use of tools such as Twine) involving 18 Indonesian-speaking authors! The workshops went very well, as told by Felicity:

“It is wonderful to see people’s faces light up as they see their words transformed into a game at the touch of a few buttons. They are extremely impressed that volunteers on the other side of the world care so much about inviting Indonesian people into the community.”

Following these workshops, Felicity sought to keep the momentum going - as part of her application, she proposed to stay in touch with participants for two years after the workshops, to follow their progress. A WhatsApp group was created with over a dozen of Indonesian authors joining, and everyone keeps in touch and remains engaged with IF. Felicity also ran, in late 2024/early 2025, a small friendly comp for her students, with small cash prizes for the three best interactive stories.

We love this project - despite the fact that Indonesian is spoken by 200-250 million people, we are not aware of a Indonesian-speaking IF scene, and we would love for one to spring to life! Felicity’s familiarities and ties with Indonesia have allowed her to become an ambassador for IF there, and plant the seed among the community of authors; we are very happy the microgrants program was able to help make it happen!

“This was an incredible journey and I met lots of wonderful writers. Thank you so much.” -Felicity Banks

(My first title for this post was "The Mystery of the Missing Adverbs". That was just too trite. Instead I spun the ol' Stratemeyer Syndicate title wheel and picked different words. Now it's trite and clunky; sorry.)

Adverbs are one of the great Bad Ideas of interactive fiction. Imagine this sort of interaction:

We can parse verbs, adjectives, and nouns, so why not adverbs? They provide an additional axis of choice for the player's command. They can be situationally appropriate. (Note how I'm cueing the player to consider alternatives: "At a glance", "at your touch".) Is this a good idea?

Well, no. It's bad. The standard reply is that this is too much choice. It can't be connected to meaningful game responses. That is: 98% of the time, EXAMINE CAREFULLY is going to do exactly the same thing as EXAMINE, so the player will rapidly learn to not bother.

Also, players are used to searching a two-axis space. "Try every verb on every noun" is boring; you don't want the player to go there; but sometimes they get stuck and it happens. Trying every verb/noun/adverb combination isn't practical at all.

(I once tried to equate the two-axis noun-verb searchable space of text IF with the two-dimensional searchable screen space of Myst. I was certainly overstating that connection -- this was before RealMyst -- but it's fun to try.)

This argument is not new in IF circles. In fact it's so well-known that I can't remember the last time someone seriously proposed adding adverbs. They're only hauled out as an example of a Bad Idea!

Except... occasionally, in one of those discussions, someone remembers that Deadline does use adverbs. And they kind of work, right? I mean, the game was playable. We used the right word at the right time and solved the mystery. And yet the idea was never followed up -- outside of Infocom's later mystery games.

What's going on here?

(SPOILER WARNING: Spoilers for the mysteries of Deadline! Some of them, at least.)

First, we note that the manual doesn't clue you in about adverbs at all. Neither the folio-edition instructions nor the grey-box manual (they're slightly different). The sample game in the grey-box manual doesn't use any adverbs either. That's not great! It seems like the game wants you to try a command that you have no way of knowing about.

UPDATE (Apr 3): Aaron Reed points out in comments that the folio manual does mention CAREFULLY. It's buried in the "Time Element" section:

Some actions, such as examinations done CAREFULLY, may take a bit longer [than one minute].

Obviously easy to miss, because I missed it! (So did my PDF search function, because the word CAREFULLY is hyphenated in that sentence, sigh.) And they dropped that line when they wrote the grey-box manual.

But that's just ("just") the manual. Let's look at the parser code that handles adverbs. Here's the entire bit:

 (<OR <EQUAL? .WORD ,W?CAREFULLY ,W?QUIETLY>
  <EQUAL? .WORD ,W?SLOWLY ,W?QUICKLY
            ,W?BRIEFLY>>
  <SETG P-ADVERB .WORD>)

(Side note: Due to the way Infocom pasted parser code from one project to the next, these lines occur in almost every following game. However, they're usually commented out. Only Deadline, Witness, Seastalker, and Moonmist run this code. A few other games detect adverbs and say "Adverbs aren't needed in this game.")

What does these lines do? They simply check for one of the five listed words (CAREFULLY, QUIETLY, SLOWLY, QUICKLY, BRIEFLY), store it in the P-ADVERB global variable, and move on with the parsing. Unlike the verb-noun structure, which is rigid, an adverb can occur anywhere in any command.

However, very few commands care about the P-ADVERB variable. Like I said earlier: almost every action runs the same whether you do it QUICKLY or SLOWLY. Here is everything you can accomplish with an adverb in Deadline:

• If you CLIMB STAIRS QUIETLY or SLOWLY, you learn that they creak no matter what.
• You can EXAMINE/READ NEWSPAPER CAREFULLY/SLOWLY to find the business-section article about the Omnidyne merger.
• You can EXAMINE/READ NOTEPAD CAREFULLY to discover the imprints left from the previous page.
• You can EXAMINE/SEARCH BOOKSHELF CAREFULLY to notice the books that George moved when he... well, I won't spoil that.

What, Master O'Lochlainn, do we observe here? First, it's a pretty haphazard list. (Why not accept CLIMB STAIRS CAREFULLY too?)

More important: all of these commands are optional.

• The game tells you that the stairs are creaky; so do the casefile interviews. Knowing that they're inescapably creaky is just a confirmation.
• READ NEWSPAPER mentions that there are two sections and you've only glanced at one. You can then READ SECOND SECTION.
• The imprints on the notepad are a detective-story cliche; you might go straight for the pencil. FEEL NOTEPAD gives you a blatant hint too.
• If you saw George move the books, the adverb is not necessary. A regular EXAMINE will direct your attention to the books you noticed earlier. EXAMINE BOOKSHELF CAREFULLY is an alternate solution if you missed George sneaking around.

Is this on purpose? That is, did the designer deliberately avoid putting any adverbs on the critical path? I don't know for sure, but I suspect the answer is yes.

One pointer is that there is an unusual command form which is critical to finishing the game: SEARCH NEAR/AROUND HOLES. And this one is explicitly called out in the manual.

(I feel like they should have accepted SEARCH HOLES CAREFULLY as an alternate solution... but they don't. Oh well.)

But there's one more game effect that I didn't mention, and I think it's the key:

• Any EXAMINE or READ command takes 3-6 minutes longer if done CAREFULLY.

This isn't just a matter of bumping the clock. All of Deadline's NPCs move around the house on a schedule, which means they can surprise you in the middle of an action:

If you want to stop Mrs. Robner, or answer the phone yourself, you have to interrupt your EXAMINE. It's a trade-off! And trade-offs are the root of all game agency.

Even if no characters happen by, you're aware of the clock ticking. You're on a schedule too. (The first thing you learn in the game is that the will-reading is at noon.) (For that matter, the game's tagline is "Twelve hours to solve the murder.") Spending several minutes on each EXAMINE is genuinely too much time to waste. You have to pick and choose.

Yes, yes, the game allows arbitrary save and restore. You could search-scum your way around the mansion. But, like the "try every verb on every noun" strategy, it's clearly a tedious last resort.

By placing EXAMINE CAREFULLY into an "economy" of game resources, Deadline breaks the (not-yet-invented) Curse of the Adverb. EXAMINE CAREFULLY is never the same as EXAMINE; it's always a little worse, and sometimes (rarely) a lot better.

Other adverbs don't fit this pattern. But then, none of them do anything interesting, with the very minor exception of CLIMB STAIRS QUIETLY. Anyhow, you're a detective. EXAMINE and SEARCH are really the core actions of the game. Giving them extra flexibility suits the genre.

See also EXAMINE ROOM, the other command which takes several minutes. The game explicitly warns you that it "wouldn't reveal much" -- and indeed it never does. You're supposed to EXAMINE specific objects! But you can see why the game allows EXAMINE ROOM; it's clearly part of both the mystery genre and the time-economy of Deadline.

So perhaps adverbs could be extended to other IF after all. It would require (1) a genre in which some actions require more variety than a raw verb; and (2) a meaningful resource cost for the player to balance. Want to give it a go?

(It would make sense for WALK NORTH SLOWLY/QUIETLY to take extra time as well. Or FOLLOW GEORGE QUIETLY? But NPCs move at a steady one room per turn, for simplicity's sake. Slowing down the player would break the FOLLOW entirely -- not what you want. Maybe some other trade-off...)

This one was from a while ago, and while I’m not replaying (I beat the game, just not with a full score) I did check a walkthrough that was posted last year (after I had finished) because I was still bothered by the mazes.

From Bonus Life Computers, $1999.99.

It was a game on the Sol-20 that was clearly heavily inspired by both D&D in general and Tomb of Horrors in particular. It has the finale with the demi-lich that’s only a skull. As it now has come up in two adventure games (Skull Cave and Epic Hero #2), I think it’s worth it to go into a brief aside on the history of Tomb of Horrors itself, then I’ll return to the new(-ish) discovery about the mazes. This combines information from Playing at the World by Peterson, Gygax’s foreword to Return to the Tomb of Horrors, and Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History.

Alan Lucien was part of the same wargaming circles as Gary Gygax, joining the International Federation of Wargaming in 1969 and serving as one of their Senators in 1970. He also wrote an article in the same year about the board game Jetan, invented by Edgar Rice Burroughs for his John Carter series. (Excerpt below from The Chessmen of Mars.)

Gygax ran a play-by-mail game space-combat game (originally by Tullio Proni, revised by Gygax) called The War of the Empires. It ran for two years starting in 1969; Lucien tried to restart the game after it lapsed. Lucien was clearly known to Gygax as he gets mentioned in a letter by Gygax as potentially having interest in the newly-designed Dungeons & Dragons.

From Jon Peterson’s blog.

Lucien was indeed interested, and ran a Dungeons & Dragons campaign in California. In 1975 he sent to Gygax a new dungeon (handwritten on four pages, not including the map on graph paper): Tomb of Ra-Hotep. It was themed around an Egyptian tomb with many traps.

Passage turns into crawl space, and 6 [the end] contains 5-20 cobras! Can’t turn or run — crawl backwards away. Treasure is Ring of 3 wishes / Delusion (very hard to guess this one!) and Scroll of 7 cleric spells.

The final enemy, Ra-Hotep the lich, has a “jackal stick” with a Sphere of Annihilation at the end.

The sphere later got moved to a devil face at the end of the starting hallway. Source. The sphere causes instant annihilation to anything that touches it.

Gygax got back to Lucien (February 1975) that he had “reorganize[d] your excellent tomb area” and ran it through a trial. Quoting Gygax:

From his basis I developed the material that was to become the Tomb of Horrors, and I admit to chuckling evilly as I did so … Specifically I had in mind foiling Rob Kuntz’s PC, Robilar, and Ernie Gygax’s PC, Tenser. To make a pair of long tales truncated, Rob, by expending a lot of ore servants, managed to get through to the final encounter, and as the skull of the demilich rose to assail the one daring violation of his sanctum, Robilar swept all immediately visible treasure into his bag of holding and escaped. Ernie likewise managed to attain the ultimate, destroyed Acererak, and likewise left laden with loot.

All this eventually resulted in a “competition game” at the first Origins convention in the summer, where players were given two hours to get as far as they could through the Tomb of Horrors. The rules reflect the set in 1975, including mention of the later-scrapped character classes Divine and Mystic. The final enemy was now an unnamed lich that was merely a skull (that would become Acererak in the published version of 1978). Illustrations were included to be used during gameplay, made by a local 14-year-old, Tracy Lesch.

Lesch’s illustration of the lich at the end.

The illustrations were a genuinely novel element, but for my purposes I’d like to emphasize: so was the gameplay style. This was a game not about combat so much as puzzles. (I’ve run Tomb of Horrors before as a Dungeon Master, and one of the players was clearly getting irritated at the lack of combat rolls.) So much of the dungeon feels oriented around methods of survival while working out traps and magical items that it comes off more as an “adventure game” (in the computer-genre sense) than a “RPG” (again in the computer sense). The final battle against Acererak involves such an overpowered set of abilities that to win a player needs to do something clever rather than just attack.

If touched (or struck) the lich targets the strongest character and sucks their soul.

This was true in the competition as well; one team took a cursed crown/scepter pair meant to trap players, and put the set on the demi-lich, vaporizing it. (The problem with having your villain lair full of deathtraps is they can be used against you!)

When D&D became popular, while some adventures tried to embrace it as much as possible (see: Cornucopia) others struggled because combat in adventure games just isn’t that interesting except for small segments. (Zork I has memorable combat, but it uses the combat system for the troll and the thief and nothing else. Not a standard dungeon crawler!) Adventure games lean so hard into the player being more of a “trickster” than a “warrior” that it became routine in this era for weapons to be red herrings. The one famous D&D campaign whose gameplay matched this sense was Tomb of Horrors, so it doesn’t surprise me to see two explicit references (there may have been more general inspiration elsewhere).

Let’s get back to that Sol-20 game.

Map from impomatic.

The map is divided into a north area and a south area; the north area has a maze of passages “all different” and the south area has a maze of passages “all alike” (where a thief resides, and likely is meant to be the Zork thief). The problem is both mazes are, as I stated in my previous post, literally unmappable.

You cannot drop items (they get teleported away), and there are no sound clues or other messages. You might ask: how did the walkthrough (by benkid77) manage? By hacking the binary code of the game.

Each maze is a single room. There’s a series of five bytes giving the answer to maze 1 and six giving an answer to maze 2. There’s no representation of movement; the game simply checks the last five (or six) directions taken, and if they match the answer, the player is moved to the exit.

The part of impomatic’s map with the link to Maze 2, with the thief. There is no map of the maze because a.) there aren’t even any “rooms” in the normal sense and b.) benkid99 hadn’t done his hacking yet when this map was made.

Letting benkid77 take over:

There are three routes out of the first maze and two out of the second maze.
Four out of the five have been shown in the walkthrough above. For completeness, the fifth is from maze 1:- U, W, D, S, S -> Low east-west passage. But this was surplus to requirements.

The 32 maze route and destination bytes are found at game file offset (and therefore memory location) 0BA0:

Maze 1, the “all different” maze:-
0BA0:
02 02 02 02 02 16
S, S, S, S, S -> Witt’s End

0BA6:
01 03 06 02 0A 13
N, E, D, S, SW -> Big Junction

0BAC:
05 04 06 02 02 0A
U, W, D, S, S -> Low east-west passage

Maze 2, the “all alike” maze:-
0BB2:
02 03 02 03 02 03 2A
S, E, S, E, S, E -> Passage (to the east of Flame Room)

0BB9:
07 05 04 01 06 04 26
NE, U, W, N, D, W -> Thief’s Lair

He goes on to ask “how the player would find these routes without disassembling the game.”

The odds are astronomically unlikely to stumble upon the correct sequences and usual mapping methods do not work here. I wonder if there may have been some additional documentation or hints accompanying the game, or some other clues I might have missed?

The “some other clues” is the kicker here: does anyone want to give it a try? You’ll likely need to play the game or at least watch the video of the complete walkthrough (meaning this is not something I expect people to solve in five minutes in the comments, but you never know). Even if there really is no answer (maybe the author had a plan but never finished; keep in mind this is an “unpublished” game) I still thought this was worth highlighting for how outrageous the setup is.

Coming up: a story that begins in the depths of WW2.

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