Let's Tell a Story Together

(A History of Interactive Fiction)

ebook generated by Rick Reynolds

Copyright 2006 by Jimmy Maher

Ebook Copyright 2011

Chapter 1: What is Interactive Fiction

“Will you read me a story?

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

– Adam Cadre, Photopia (1998)

In its broadest sense, interactive fiction can be considered any form of storytelling which involves the reader or listener as an active participant. Among other things, improvisational theatre, tabletop role-playing games, and of course computer games of many stripes all qualify. For my purposes in this essay, though, I will define interactive fiction - henceforth referred to as IF - much more narrowly in applying its commonly accepted meaning among a unique group of writers, programmers, readers, and players who create and exchange interactive stories on the Internet. In their world, IF is a unique form of computer-based storytelling which places the player in the role of a character in a simulated world, and which is characterized by its reliance upon text as its primary means of output and by its use of a flexible natural-language parser for input. The term originated, many years after the birth of the genre it describes, in the early 1980s with a company called Infocom. At that time, games of this sort were commonly known as “adventure games” or “text adventures,” the latter to distinguish them from the graphical brand of story-based games which were just beginning to compete with text-based titles in the marketplace of that time. Indeed, both terms are commonly used to this day, although they generally connote a rather “old-school” form of the genre that places most of its emphasis on the more gamelike, as opposed to literary, potentials of the form. Infocom decided that interactive fiction was a term which more accurately described their goal of creating a viable new literary form, and following that company’s demise the term was appropriated by a modern community of text-based storytellers who in many ways see themselves as heirs to Infocom’s legacy.

The single feature which distinguishes an IF game from any other kind computer game is its reliance upon a parser for input. A parser is a computer algorithm that converts simple sentences entered by the user in English, or any of a fair number of other languages for which games have been written, into an instruction that the computer can understand. The computer then updates the status of the story accordingly and reports the latest developments to the player through a textual response, to which the user can reply with another command. This cycle continues ad infinitum, until the players “wins” the game by succeeding in some overarching goal; “loses” the game in some fashion often but not always involving the death of her in-game alter ego; or simply quits playing, perhaps to return some other day. While text is the primary method of input and output in any true IF game, the form does not preclude the inclusion of multimedia elements to augment the story being told. IF games can and occasionally do include graphics, music, sound effects, and even animated “cut scenes.” Games have even been written which allow the player to input commands by choosing from lists of words with a mouse, rather than typing. If this trend is taken too far, however, and the parser is replaced with a purely point and click system, or the game’s graphics replace its text at its primary method of communication with the player, that game ceases to be IF, at least for purposes of this discussion.

I will be writing abstractly about quite a number of games in this essay. As you read, I encourage you to seek these titles out and give them a try in order to add your own opinions and first-hand observations to my own and hopefully thereby to see a more complete picture of IF, past and present. Virtually all of the free games that I will mention are available from the IF Archive. Games from IF’s commercial era are unfortunately not so easily acquired, as all of them are now long out of print, but there are sources for the intrepid. Some have been officially released as freeware by their authors, and are available from the IF Archive; many can be found on Ebay and the various online shops specializing in out-of-print software; and virtually all can be found on the Internet’s network of so-called “abandonware” sites that offer free downloads of softwares that are still officially under copyright protection but that have been “abandoned” and are no longer sold by their publishers. Should you choose to avail yourself of these sites, you should understand that you are breaking the letter of the law and engaging in software piracy. Unfortunately, the reality is that this is the only reasonably practical and efficient way for the interested player to acquire many of the rarer titles discussed in this essay. The complete failure of the computer game industry to maintain a back catalog or historical archive is absolutely shameful, and will be a huge hindrance to scholars as they begin to study the origins of this tremendously important new form of entertainment.

The best way to truly understand IF is to experience a game in action. With that in mind, I would like to invite you, my reader, to do just that with me. The game we will use for this purpose is Earth and Sky by Paul O’Brian, a modest and charming little tribute to classic superhero comics first released in 2001. Earth and Sky is a well-designed, polished piece of work, but not terribly unusual in any other respect. In this it actually suits our purposes quite well, providing as it does some fairly typical gameplay. You may wish to simply read the transcript of some typical interactions with Earth and Sky that I am about to provide. If you are feeling more ambitious, though, you may wish to download the Earth and Sky game file and an appropriate interpreter to play it, and play along with me. Such a strategy will give you the best picture of what IF is really like.

In order to play Earth and Sky, we must first lay some technical groundwork by downloading an appropriate interpreter. Contemporary IF games can be created in any of several freely available IF-specific programming languages, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses. The developers of these language share ideas freely in a web of interrelationships that is as much about cooperation as competition. The universal advice from the IF community to one who is thinking of creating her own IF game is to try several of these language out and choose the one that best suits her potential game’s requirements and her own aesthetics.

Most IF programming languages do not create finished games that are directly executable on any given computer. They rather produce portable game files that can be played on a wide variety of computers and computing devices, as long as an interpreter is available for that machine. There are several advantages to this approach beyond the obvious one of portability. To wit: the player can customize her interpreter with her chosen fonts and colors and know that it will remain the same across all games requiring that interpreter; since the game files are not natively executable, viruses and other security threats are not a major concern; and since much of the functionality to run the games resides in the interpreter, download sizes for the individual games are kept small. Balanced against these advantages is just one significant disadvantage, that being the requirement that the first-time player acquire a suitable interpreter before she can begin to play at all. Complicating this somewhat more is the fact that each of the several viable IF development languages requires its own type of interpreter. While there have been efforts toward the creation of a single, universal interpreter capable of playing virtually all IF, they have not reached their fruition as of this writing.

Earth and Sky is written in one of the most popular current IF languages, Inform, created by Graham Nelson in the early nineties. Games written in Inform run on a virtual machine (or VM) called the Z-Machine. The Z-Machine is a complete computer, albeit one that exists only as a software simulation running within an interpreter. It places special emphasis on those tasks associated with playing IF, and gives no attention at all to many others. Game files designed to run on the Z-Machine are frequently called Z-Code files. Since the Z-Machine’s design specifications are available to anyone, there are a substantial number of interpreters simulating it. Your first task to begin your journey into the world of IF is to download one appropriate to your chosen computing device and operating system. If you are running Microsoft Windows 95 or later, I recommend an interpreter known as Filfre, written by myself and available from The IF Archive, a huge repository of games, tools, and information that serves as a sort of Library of Congress for the IF community. You can download Filfre using the following URL: http://home.grandecom.net/~maher/filfre. If you are running Macintosh OS-X or some variant of Unix or Linux equipped with the X-Windows graphical interface, I recommend Andrew Hunter’s Zoom, available at http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/interpreters/zoom. Interpreters are also available for a variety of other operating systems, including Macintosh Classic, Microsoft DOS, Amiga, Palm-OS, and even Java-capable mobile phones. See the IF Archive directory http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinfocomXinterpreters.html for a complete listing. Several interpreters, with feature sets ranging from minimalist to baroque, are available for virtually all of the operating systems I have mentioned. Should you choose to continue with IF, I strongly encourage you to try out the various interpreters available for your platform of choice and select your own favorite.

Having downloaded and installed an appropriate interpreter, we must now acquire the Earth and Sky game file itself. This can also be found on the IF Archive, specifically from http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/eas.zip. Once you have uncompressed the archive into a directory of your choosing, open the file Eas.z5 from your newly-downloaded interpreter. (The .z5 file extension indicates that Earth and Sky is a Z-Machine version 5 game file. There have been eight versions of the Z-Machine created over the years, all with slightly different capabilities. By far the most commonly used version for modern games is version 5, followed by version 8, which is used for very large games. Virtually all current Z-Machine interpreters can play version 5 and version 8 games, and generally games of several other versions as well.) If all goes well, you will see the game’s introductory text. Earth and Sky, and with it your own discovery of IF, has begun.

The following is a transcript of actual interaction with Earth and Sky, with my commentary interspersed. Said commentary appears in italics. All other text comes directly from a session with Earth and Sky, and appears here in the way it would look to the player. If you are playing along on your own computer, feel free to deviate from the transcript I provide and experiment. Experimentation and interactivity are after all the essence of IF, and, particularly in a very forgiving game like Earth and Sky, carry with them no dangers at all, only potential rewards.

It’s been almost a month since your parents disappeared.

One Tuesday, they just didn’t come home, and there’s been no sign of them since. For the University and the rest of the town, the mystery is beginning to pall. To those people, it’s as if Claire and Scott Colborn suddenly stopped existing – strange and inexplicable, to be sure, but forgettable in the long run.

But for you it’s as if the ground beneath your feet stopped existing, and you’ve been plummeting in freefall ever since. Your brother Austin, though, has been a rock through the whole experience, handling the numbing details, the endless meetings with useless detectives, even sorting through Mom and Dad’s lab in hopes of finding an answer. Now you stand outside the lab door, clutching his note, hardly daring to hope that such an answer may have arrived at long last.

EARTH AND SKY

Earth And Sky: Episode 1

Serial interactive fiction by Paul O’Brian

First-time players should type INFO or read the easinfo.txt file

Release 2 / Serial number 011204 / Inform v6.21 Library 6/10

Outside the Lab Door

You stand in one of the many beige, featureless corridors of the Physics building. The hall continues west, and reaches its eastern terminus here, at the door to Mom and Dad’s lab.

The lab door is closed.

A card reader is mounted to the wall beside the door.

If you are playing along, you will see after this introductory text a blinking cursor on your screen sitting next to an “>” symbol. This is referred to as the IF command prompt. We will enter on the keyboard the actions we wish to attempt in the game world using imperative phrases in a sort of simplified, “pidgin” English. This mode of interaction may look strange to you at first, but it will likely become second nature very quickly.

The game is now waiting for us to tell it what we would like to do. Absolutely nothing will happen in the world of Earth and Sky until we do so. We could spend hours contemplating our next move, go away to eat dinner, or even take an around the world cruise. The game will still be waiting for us upon our return. When we finally enter a command and press enter, a small amount of time passes in the game’s world, which is updated to reflect our actions as well as any other events that may be happening outside of our direct control. At this point, a single turn is considered to have passed.

>open door

It seems to be locked.

Not a very auspicious beginning to our IF career, but then nothing is ever quite as easy as that, in real life or in IF. Notice that IF games do not care if your inputs are entirely grammatical, as long as you say enough to get your point across. Articles (such as “the”), punctuation, and capitalization are all entirely optional, and are, in the interests of convenience and brevity, omitted by most experienced IF players.

Let’s see if we have anything that might help us get that door open. We will do this by using one of a handful of IF verbs that have something of a special meaning within the games. Inventory can be entered at virtually any time to see a list of everything you are currently carrying and wearing. Because this command is used so frequently, it can abbreviated to simply i if the player so chooses.

>inventory

You are carrying:

a note

an access card

a sweatshirt (being worn)

a pair of sweat pants (being worn)

your sneakers (being worn)

That access card looks like it just might do the trick. Before we try it out, though, let’s take a closer look at some of the other items on our person.

>read note

This note was waiting for you when you got home today. It reads:

Emily –

Meet me at the lab as soon as you can. I’ve found some things that we need to talk about immediately.

– A

We must be Emily. Let’s take a closer look at ourself.

>examine me

You haven’t been looking your best lately, but you find it hard to care. Austin won’t mind your casual clothes, though – he understands that fashion isn’t exactly topping your priorities right now.

Examine is one of the most commonly used verbs in IF. It can also be expressed as look at, inspect, and possibly several other ways. This practice of providing several synonyms for most words is a commonly accepted requirement of any good modern IF design, its intention being to give the game every opportunity to understand what the player is attempting to do, regardless of her choice of words. Many earlier IF games were not so forgiving, often accepting only one word or phrasing for any given action. Thus the hapless player would often find herself having figured out the correct action to take, but still stymied due to not having expressed that action in a particular way. This is known as the “guess the verb” syndrome, and is universally frowned upon in modern IF. Even in a puzzle-laden, gamelike work of IF, the challenge should arise from the environment it portrays, not from attempting to work out how to please a finicky parser. That said, parsing a language like English, with all of its illogicalities and its many ways of expressing any given thought, is an extremely difficult problem to solve, and there is still plenty of room for improvement.

Like inventory, examine is used frequently enough that a handy abbreviation can be entered in its place. To save ourself a bit of typing, we will use that abbreviation - x - from now on in place of the full word.

They say that clothes make the man, or in this case woman. Let’s take a closer look at our clothing.

>x sweatshirt

This sweatshirt is large, baggy, and grey – just the way you like it. It’s also emblazoned with the University’s name in tasteful green letters.

>x pants

Just your average black sweat pants.

>x sneakers

These sneakers were probably made by some starving Vietnamese mother on slave wages, but you try not to think about that.

Okay, let’s try out that access card.

>slide card through reader

The green light glows, and there is a click from inside the lab door.

Eureka!

>open door

You open the lab door.

One of the things that can seem strange to IF beginners is the genre’s method of moving from place to place. IF games are laid out as a series of discrete locations, or rooms. A room in this context could be an open field or part of a forest just as easily as an indoor location. To move about within the game’s geography, the player uses compass directions.

When entering a room, the game will print a description of the environment and its contents. Potential exits to other rooms are generally part of this description. You can repeat the currently inhabited room’s description at any time by simply typing look. Look is another of those common IF commands which has an abbreviated form, in this case l.

At the moment, we know that we want to go through the door, but, as it has been a while since we first read the beginning room’s description, we may not remember in what direction that door leads. Let’s find out by using l.

>l

Outside the Lab Door

You stand in one of the many beige, featureless corridors of the Physics building. The hall continues west, and reaches its eastern terminus here, at the door to Mom and Dad’s lab.

The lab door is open, revealing the enormous room beyond.

A card reader is mounted to the wall beside the door.

For convenience, IF games give each room a name so that the player can remember it easily, as well as to make things easier if the player feels the need to map the game’s geography. That will not be necessary in this game, as it involves only a few locations. Some epic games, however, especially those of the old school puzzle-intensive stripe, can contain dozens or even hundreds of separate rooms. For them, careful mapping is essential if one does not wish to wander about hopelessly lost.

Our current room’s description informs us that the door we would like to enter leads east. In keeping with the modern IF community’s philosophy of being as forgiving of input variance as possible, there are multiple ways we could proceed through it. Go east, walk east, go through door, enter door, or even simply east are perfectly acceptable. However, since you will spend so much time moving about within many IF games, abbreviations are also provided for all of the compass directions: n for north, ne for northeast, e for east, and so on. In many cases up and down are also valid directions of movement, abbreviated u and d respectively.

With that said, let’s go east!

>e

You take a deep breath, and step across the threshold into the lab.

E A R T H

A N D

S K Y

Part 1: Suit Yourself

Lab

Ever since Dad got shortlisted for the Nobel in physics and Mom’s patents started making millions, the University has pretty much given them carte blanche. Consequently, this lab space is cavernous, tens of thousands of square feet, with ceilings reaching nearly five stories high. Some parts of this giant room are occupied by giant equipment, dizzyingly complex hunks of machinery at whose function you couldn’t even begin to guess. Other parts are empty, save for a few tables and terminals. A ring of windows near the ceiling looks out on the distant stars. Doors lead south into the storage room and west into the hallway.

You look around for Austin, but he’s not here. Typical. Well, knowing your perpetually late brother, he’ll be along soon enough.

Amidst the general chaos of the lab, a legal pad seems to have fallen from one of the tables.

The hallway door is open.

The storage room door is open.

The lab door clicks and swings shut.

Note that we are now in a room simply (but appropriately) titled Lab, and that the game has described the appearance and contents of that room for us. We can ask the game to repeat that description at any time by typing look or just l. It certainly looks like an interesting place. Since Austin is apparently running late, let’s poke around a bit, shall we?

>get pda

Sorry, but that’s either not here or not important.

A typo! Curses! As handy as PDAs can be, it appears that there are none present, at least in this room. Notice that the game informs us of that as concisely and politely as possible, then simply returns another input prompt. No harm has been done.

Let’s try again to type what we intended on the previous turn.

>get pad

Taken.

Once again, synonyms and alternate phrasings for this common action abound. Take pad, pick up the legal pad or pick the pad up, for instance, would all be equally valid.

Since we are now carrying the legal pad, it should show up in our inventory. Let’s make sure…

>i

You are carrying:

a legal pad

a note

an access card

a sweatshirt (being worn)

a pair of sweat pants (being worn)

your sneakers (being worn)

Very good! Let’s see what is written on the pad now, and then investigate the lab area a bit more.

>read pad

The first page contains a few notes scribbled in your father’s familiar cryptic handwriting:

ES: Str – OK

Imp res – OK

E res – ??? – probs

SS: Flt – OK

Fog – OK

E – OK

Per N, bac strange. Hi-spd? Panspermia?

Also: c T re: sightings. Could b big. Portal poss. at mtn site?

The rest of the pages are blank.

>x equipment

If you had a couple of days, unlimited curiosity, and several years worth of calculus and physics classes, Austin could probably explain some of this equipment to you. As it is, you prefer to be awed by its mysterious grandeur rather than the impressive feats it can no doubt perform. Luckily, Mom and Dad never pushed the science with either of you, so even though Austin ended up their protégé and you became a contented English major, he never got special treatment from them.

>x door

Which do you mean, the hallway door or the storage room door?

IF players generally try to save typing by entering their commands in the most concise possible way. Sometimes, however, we take this too far and simply do not give the game enough to understand exactly what we mean. In this case, there are two possible doors in the lab that we might be trying to examine. The game does not know to which we refer, and therefore politely asks us for clarification. This is known as disambiguation.

>storage

This door connects the lab with its small storage room.

We have given the game the clarification that it needed, and it proceeds appropriately.

>s

Storage Room

If Mom had her way, the storage room would be a neatly organized gallery of supplies, spare parts, and backup media, all efficiently arranged on the room’s many metal shelving units. However, with Dad using the lab, that’s not likely to happen. Oh sure, everything is on the shelves, but finding something could take the better part of a day. A door leads back north to the lab.

The storage room door is open.

A wooden chair sits in the middle of the storage room, with some bright blue fabric draped across it.

>x fabric

This appears to be a form-fitting bodysuit of some kind, tailored to fit a female body. It is bright blue, with cloud-patterned streaks of white. A combination cowl and mask is attached at the neck of the suit.

>get suit

Taken.

>put on suit

[first removing the sweatshirt]

You’re not about to undress with the door open – Austin could show up at any moment!

>close door

You close the storage room door.

>put on suit

[first removing the sweatshirt]

[first removing the sweat pants]

[first removing the sneakers]

Putting on the superhero suit implies that we want to remove our everyday student’s outfit. As a modern game, Earth and Sky is thoughtful enough to do that for us without making us enter the commands to do so one at a time.

You slip into the blue bodysuit. It’s not a perfect fit, but it’s better than you’d expected, skintight in some areas and only slightly looser in others. The feel is warm and comfortable, and the suit covers almost your entire body, even your hands and feet. When you pull the cowl and mask on, you feel a strange tingling sensation in your scalp.

>open door

You open the storage room door.

Austin pokes his head through the door. “Hi Em – sorry I’m late. Come join me in the lab whenever you’re ready.”

You find yourself doing a double-take as the door shuts. Was Austin wearing a mask, too?

>n

[first opening the storage room door]

Lab

You are in Mom and Dad’s lab. As usual, the majority of the equipment in this enormous space is more or less a mystery to you. Also here are a few tables and terminals; a ring of windows near the ceiling looks out on the distant stars. Doors lead south into the storage room and west into the hallway.

The hallway door is closed.

The storage room door is open.

You can also see Austin here.

Just as you thought, Austin is wearing a bodysuit similar to the one you’ve donned, complete with cowl and mask. The only difference is that while yours is blue with cloudy white patches, his is a black-speckled grey, shot through with streaks of orange and yellow.

“I see you’re wearing the suit already,” Austin says. “Good. I would have asked you to put it on before I told you this, anyway.”

He shows you a notebook he’s been carrying. “I found this notebook, along with these stylish outfits, late last night. I was checking out all the ongoing experiments in hopes of… well, I don’t know what I was hoping for. All I know is that nobody seems to know what happened to Mom and Dad, and nobody can even think of any reason why they would have disappeared. So I’ve been combing through the lab, trying to reconstruct what they were working on at the time it happened.”

He leans back against a towering piece of steel machinery, allowing himself to slide down it and sit on the floor. “They were working on a lot, Em, let me tell you – most of it so far beyond my own scientific experience that it took me a long time to even grasp the point of each experiment. Dad’s cryptic notation style didn’t help much either. So last night, when I started checking out a piece of equipment that didn’t seem to have any purpose at all, I figured it was just my own ignorance again, that I didn’t know what the thing was. Then I stumbled on a tiny little latch, and the whole thing swung open. Em, it was hollow inside. And stuffed into that cavity were these suits, with this notebook.”

He opens the notebook and begins to read aloud:

Earthsuit: provides

* greatly enhanced strength

* resistance to electric shock

* invulnerability to impact (nearly)

Must be Mom’s notes, you think to yourself. Dad would’ve written something like “inv 2 imp (~)”. Austin flips a few pages, then reads again.

Skysuit: provides

* flight

* electrical discharges (blasts)

* fog

“The rest of the pages are filled with notes and diagrams that are way beyond my grasp. But near as I can figure, these are the suits those notes talk about. I’m wearing the earthsuit, and you’re wearing the skysuit.”

Please select a reply:

1) “I don’t understand. What’s this all about?”

2) “Did they also make a monkeysuit? Maybe with ‘greatly enhanced banana-eating ability’?”

3) “I had to wear this goofy suit just to hear you recite from a notebook?”

4) “But this is just so bizarre. You think Mom and Dad were planning to make us into some kind of superheroes?”

Select an option or 0 to say nothing >> 2

The problem of creating believable character interaction is perhaps the thorniest in IF. Various developers have come up with various solutions, or at least compromises. Earth and Sky chooses to use a menu-based conversation system at this point. This comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages, which I will discuss in more detail much later in this essay.

In some games, selecting different dialogue choices might send the plot off in radically different directions. Some choices might even lead to the player’s death, or at least losing the game. Earth and Sky is both rather simple in structure and specifically designed to be friendly for newcomers, however, and so there are no truly “wrong” choices in this dialogue menu or the ones that will follow. Most will lead to only minor plot variations, so feel free to choose differently from me if you are playing along. The thrill of discovery is among the greatest pleasures IF has to offer.

“No,” he smirks, “but there are some notes in here about an armanisuit, with greatly enhanced fashionability. Seriously, though – these suits are no joke. I’ve been experimenting with mine. Watch.”

Austin turns around to face the device he had been using as a backrest. It’s some sort of steel tower, probably fifteen feet tall and two feet in diameter. He squats in front of it, embraces it, and smoothly unbends his knees, lifting the entire thing as if it were made of balsa wood.

“This thing must weigh almost a ton,” he says through gritted teeth, “but I can lift it like it was a piece of furniture. It’s a little awkward to keep balanced, but I can do it.” As if to prove the point, he bends his knees again until the tower is in its original resting place, then turns to face you.

“Remember that tingling you felt when you put on the cowl? The suits respond to mental commands. I bet if you decided you wanted to fly up to the ceiling right now, you could. Why don’t you try it?”

>x austin

Austin was never one to conform to the whims of fashion, but right now he’s dressed much more strangely than you’ve ever seen him. He’s wearing a grey jumpsuit, speckled with black and shot through with streaks of yellow and orange. The outfit seems to include a cowl and mask, which covers Austin’s brown eyes.

Conversation in Earth and Sky is not entirely limited to menus. It is also possible to ask or tell Austin about various subjects…

>ask austin about flying

“All indications are that you can do it in that suit. Just think ‘UP’.”

…within limits, of course.

>ask austin about politics

“Em, I’d love to chat, but there are more important things to do at the moment.”

>fli

That’s not a verb I recognize.

Another typo! If at first you don’t succeed…

>fly

The moment you think it, the ground silently drops away beneath you, so fast and so smoothly that it almost feels as if a wire is pulling you up to the ceiling. But there is no wire, and only air beneath your feet. You have risen…

High Above The Lab

You are hovering in the air, several stories above the lab floor. The beams and girders of the ceiling are so close you could touch them, and the windows display a magnificent view of the campus and ocean. Far below, Austin looks up at you from amid a sea of equipment. Good thing you’re not afraid of heights.

Notice that Earth and Sky interprets the air above the lab as a separate room with its own description. This approach to geography may seem odd at first, but will quickly become second nature as you continue to play IF.

>look through window

From here, the windows command an incredible view. To the east, the campus spreads out before you and the main roads reach to the horizon. On the other side, moonlight glimmers on the vast ocean.

>make fog

That’s not a verb I recognize.

Modern IF games try very hard to accept as many variations of potential inputs as possible, but there are unfortunately still occasions when you will attempt to phrase an action in a way that the game’s designer did not anticipate. Earth and Sky is generally very forgiving, but even its parser can be tripped up occasionally. Let’s see if that might be the case here by trying a variation of the previous command…

>fog

At your mental command, fog swirls around you, billowing out and silently engulfing the room. Because of the size of the lab, however, it quickly thins into a light mist. Austin appears not to have noticed.

>land

As smoothly as you rose, you descend once more.

Lab

You are in Mom and Dad’s lab. As usual, the majority of the equipment in this enormous space is more or less a mystery to you. Also here are a few tables and terminals; a ring of windows near the ceiling looks out on the distant stars. At the moment, a thin mist floats in the air. Doors lead south into the storage room and west into the hallway.

The hallway door is closed.

The storage room door is open.

You can also see Austin here.

“Well, it’s clear that the flying functionality is operational,” says Austin.

“Now let’s test out some of that suit’s other capabilities. The notes mention a fog power – the flying worked when you decided to fly, so let’s see what happens when you try to fog something. Why don’t we start by having you just think FOG? I have a hunch that will probably cloud up the general area.”

Please select a reply:

1) “Sure thing.”

2) “Oh, there’s a useful superpower. ‘They’re getting away! Quick, Fog-Woman, worsen their driving conditions!’”

3) “Okay, but all this moisture had better not make my hair really frizzy.”

4) “I already did, when I was up at the ceiling. Look at the mist in the air.”

Select an option or 0 to say nothing >> 4

Austin looks around. “Oh. I didn’t notice that. Would you mind doing it again, from down here this time? I’d like to actually watch it take place, from close up.”

>fog

You concentrate on fogging the area, but nothing happens.

That’s strange. Our fogging power was working just a few turns ago. Let’s try it one more time.

To repeat our previous command, IF games allow us to simply type again. An even shorter form is that command’s abbreviation, g.

>g

You concentrate on fogging the area, but nothing happens.

Still no luck. Let’s see if Austin has any insight.

>ask austin about fog

“I don’t know exactly what the fog power entails. Why don’t you give it a try?”

Perhaps we need to wait until the mist from our previous fogging has dissipated before we can use this superpower again. To wait around doing nothing for a turn in an IF game, the command wait can (appropriately enough) be employed. Wait can be abbreviated as z.

>z

Time passes.

You notice that the mist has pretty much dissipated.

Let’s give it a try now…

>fog

At your mental command, fog swirls around you, billowing out and silently engulfing the room. Because of the size of the lab, however, it quickly thins into a light mist.

“Excellent!” says Austin. “Looks like the suit can generate a limited amount of fog when you just give the basic mental command. It’s not enough to do much in this room, but it might be quite handy in a more confined space.”

Austin walks to a corner of the lab, retrieving a huge wooden spool that probably once held some of the cables powering Mom and Dad’s various big machines. He carries it casually, in one hand, the way you might carry a cup of coffee. He then sets it down in front of you, saying, “Perhaps the suit allows you to fog specific objects as well. Why don’t you focus your thought on fogging this spool?”

Please select a reply:

1) “Alright, I’ll give it a shot.”

2) “Why don’t you focus your thought on not being so freaking bossy?”

3) “Hang on, I want to try something else first.”

Select an option or 0 to say nothing >> 3

“Knock yourself out,” says Austin. “Whenever you’re ready to try fogging this thing, we’ll continue.”

>fly

Once again, the ground drops away as you soar upwards.

High Above The Lab

You are hovering in the air, several stories above the lab floor. The beams and girders of the ceiling are so close you could touch them, and the windows display a magnificent view of the campus and ocean. At the moment, a thin mist hangs in the lab’s air. Far below, Austin looks up at you from amid a sea of equipment. Good thing you’re not afraid of heights.

>zap window

The lab is plenty well ventilated as it is.

>zap austin

Nothing happens. Perhaps Austin is too far away.

>land

As smoothly as you rose, you descend once more.

Lab

You are in Mom and Dad’s lab. As usual, the majority of the equipment in this enormous space is more or less a mystery to you. Also here are a few tables and terminals; a ring of windows near the ceiling looks out on the distant stars. At the moment, a thin mist floats in the air. Doors lead south into the storage room and west into the hallway.

The hallway door is closed.

The storage room door is open.

You can also see Austin and a large wooden spool here.

>zap spool

You extend your hand, and a sizzling bolt of bright blue electricity arcs between you and the large wooden spool. With a thundering KER-POW, the large wooden spool disintegrates, leaving only a smoking scorch mark.

Austin leaps backward in surprise. “Good Lord!” he exclaims. When he has recovered his composure a bit, he says, “So that’s the electrical blast. It’s certainly impressive, I’ll say that. There must be upwards of 10 megajoules of energy in that blast – enough to blow most things to bits. Remind me not to get on your bad side!”

You notice that the mist has pretty much dissipated.

>fog austin

At your mental command, fog swirls around Austin, silently engulfing him in a cloud of thick, grey vapor.

“Verrrry funny,” says the cloud. It blunders about the room for a few moments, finally bumping into and encompassing one of the lab’s many tables. There is the sound of sliding papers, then a deep whoosh whoosh whoosh emanates from within the cloud, and you are buffeted by powerful waves of air. Within seconds, the cloud has cleared, revealing Austin waving a six-foot table as if it were an oriental fan.

He sets the table down. “Okay, wiseass, you’ve made your point. Clearly, you can fog specific things, and even specific people. And I’m guessing that if you use it on somebody who can’t overpower it, it’d probably be a pretty good weapon. I still think the spool would’ve been a better test subject, though,” he says grumpily.

“You’ve certainly made it abundantly clear that the blast power works, so I think we’ve tested all the suit’s capabilities at this point.”

Another way to communicate with other characters within an IF game is to show or give them objects they might find of interest. Let’s see if Austin has any insight into the decidedly cryptic page of notes we picked up earlier.

>show pad to austin

“Typical Scott Colborn notes – I’m sure they mean something to him, but for anybody else they might as well be written in Greek. Well, anybody else who can’t read Greek. You know what I mean.”

“Well, I guess the suit checks out,” says Austin. “We’ve tested every power mentioned in this notebook, and they all seem to work. I have no idea what Mom and Dad intended their original purpose to be, but they’re not here to tell us, and the suits seem to fit us fine. So let me ask you this, Emily: How would you feel about using these suits to investigate the situation ourselves? I don’t much feel like a superhero, but in a sense, that’s what we are when we’ve got these suits on. Maybe we can explore avenues that aren’t exactly open to the police. What do you say?”

Please select a reply:

1) “Okay, you’ve convinced me. Let’s do it.”

2) “No. I’m sorry, but I just think it’s a bad idea.”

3) “We can’t be superheroes! We don’t know a thing about investigating a crime! How is shooting lightning and lifting heavy things going to find us clues that the police can’t find?”

4) “I can’t be a superhero! I don’t have long, flowing hair or gigantic breasts!”

5) “You can’t be a superhero! You’re not covered with steroid-enhanced bulges!”

6) “I can’t be a superhero! I’m scared to death of fighting!”

7) “We can’t be superheroes without snazzy-sounding code names, now can we?”

8) “I can’t be a superhero! I’m in horrible shape! I probably couldn’t even run around the block!”

9) “We can’t be superheroes! What if we get hurt?”

10) “We can’t be superheroes! How will we wear these suits without being noticed?”

Select an option or 0 to say nothing >> 10

“Yeah, the whole ‘secret identity’ problem. I always thought it was a little silly for comicbook superheroes to hide their identities, but maybe we ought to do that, at least until we find Mom and Dad. Otherwise, there might be a lot of uncomfortable suspicions around us, not to mention around Mom and Dad’s research.”

“I agree, but that doesn’t answer my question,” you say.

“Oh, right. Actually, Mom and Dad seem to have thought of that, too. I tested wearing street clothes over the earthsuit before you got here; when enough of the suit is covered, the visible parts fade into transparency, and the cowl does some kind of holo-projection thing so that your hair and face look normal, too. It’s really cool. You should give it a try sometime. The only problem is that you can’t use the suit’s powers when it’s covered like that – I think it uses mostly photoreceptors to power itself. But that’s probably for the best, since without the cowls visible it’d just look like us doing those superpower things. Anyway, I hope that addresses your objection.”

Please select a reply:

1) “Okay, you’ve convinced me. Let’s do it.”

2) “No. I’m sorry, but I just think it’s a bad idea.”

3) “We can’t be superheroes! We don’t know a thing about investigating a crime! How is shooting lightning and lifting heavy things going to find us clues that the police can’t find?”

4) “I can’t be a superhero! I don’t have long, flowing hair or gigantic breasts!”

5) “You can’t be a superhero! You’re not covered with steroid-enhanced bulges!”

6) “I can’t be a superhero! I’m scared to death of fighting!”

7) “We can’t be superheroes without snazzy-sounding code names, now can we?”

8) “I can’t be a superhero! I’m in horrible shape! I probably couldn’t even run around the block!”

9) “We can’t be superheroes! What if we get hurt?”

Here we have a “repeating” dialogue menu. This is fairly common in IF, and allows us to have an ongoing conversation with Austin by selecting various choices. Note that selections we have already chosen are removed from the menu each time. This makes sense, as we probably do not want to repeat ourself.

Select an option or 0 to say nothing >> 8

“Heh. I know what you mean. Still, with these suits, it’s not like we really need to be in good shape. You can fly wherever you want to go, and this suit keeps me strong enough to run or jump or whatever without getting particularly winded. It probably wouldn’t hurt us to start working out a little more, but it’s not like we have to be Olympic athletes before we can use these suits.”

Please select a reply:

1) “Okay, you’ve convinced me. Let’s do it.”

2) “No. I’m sorry, but I just think it’s a bad idea.”

3) “We can’t be superheroes! We don’t know a thing about investigating a crime! How is shooting lightning and lifting heavy things going to find us clues that the police can’t find?”

4) “I can’t be a superhero! I don’t have long, flowing hair or gigantic breasts!”

5) “You can’t be a superhero! You’re not covered with steroid-enhanced bulges!”

6) “I can’t be a superhero! I’m scared to death of fighting!”

7) “We can’t be superheroes without snazzy-sounding code names, now can we?”

8) “We can’t be superheroes! What if we get hurt?”

Select an option or 0 to say nothing >> 7

“Cool code names, eh? Well, since it’s an earthsuit and a skysuit that give us our powers, how about something that incorporates those elements? Like, I don’t know… Earth-Man and Sky-Girl?”

“First of all,” you say, “why is it that you get to be a Man, and I’m just a Girl? Also, Earth-Man sounds like something a Star Trek alien would call you.”

“Okay, fine. What’s your idea?”

“I think rather than try to sound like cheesy comic book superheroes by appending things like ‘Man’ or ‘Lass’ or ‘Captain’ or whatever, we ought to keep it short and elegant. How about just Earth and Sky?”

“Earth and Sky. I have to admit, those do sound pretty cool. Okay, Earth and Sky it is. So now that we have our cool code names, will you help me investigate this disappearance?”

Please select a reply:

1) “Okay, you’ve convinced me. Let’s do it.”

2) “No. I’m sorry, but I just think it’s a bad idea.”

3) “We can’t be superheroes! We don’t know a thing about investigating a crime! How is shooting lightning and lifting heavy things going to find us clues that the police can’t find?”

4) “I can’t be a superhero! I don’t have long, flowing hair or gigantic breasts!”

5) “You can’t be a superhero! You’re not covered with steroid-enhanced bulges!”

6) “I can’t be a superhero! I’m scared to death of fighting!”

7) “We can’t be superheroes! What if we get hurt?”

Select an option or 0 to say nothing >> 1

“All right!” says Austin. “Tell you what – I know you’re helping Aunt Nina in lab tomorrow. Let’s meet afterward and come up with a plan. Oh, and try to avoid kryptonite between now and then.” He grins, and you roll your eyes.

E A R T H

A N D

S K Y

Part 2: Shake, Rattle, and Roar

When your parents first suggested that you work as a research assistant for Nina Icolari, you were pretty skeptical. Sure, she’s a close friend of the family, so much so that you grew up calling her “Aunt Nina.” Yes, you get along with her just fine, in some ways even better than you get along with Mom and Dad. And yes, you need the money. But Aunt Nina is a world-class biologist, and as fun-loving as she may be in the rest of her life, when she gets to work she’s a driven scientist who needs competent help. Hardly an auspicious position for a non-science-minded English major such as yourself, but so far, you’ve been pleasantly surprised. The work is a bit pedestrian, but the pay is good, and Aunt Nina never gets impatient with you. Today, though, she’s doing an extremely important materials transfer, and you get the sense that when she gives you an order, you’d better snap to it…

Observation Booth

This small chamber is an adjunct to the materials handling room, designed to allow observation and some degree of remote control over the equipment in that room. On the north wall is the long, rectangular pane of thick glass that separates the two rooms, and below that is a control panel. Opposite the edges of this large window, on the south side of the room, a couple of tall window-slats let in the sunlight. To the west is the door out to the hallway.

We have now completed the first of Earth and Sky’s three parts. Earth and Sky is very forgiving in that there is no way to get permanently stuck or to make the game unwinnable through imprudent actions. Still, death is always a possibility even in this game, especially as in its remaining two-thirds you will progress from merely trying out your superpowers to battling villains in best comic book fashion. With that in mind, it might be a good idea to bookmark our progress here so that we do not have to start the story over completely if we should meet an unhappy fate. We can do this through the save command, which will bring up an interpreter-specific menu that will allow us to store the game’s current state into a small file on our computer. We can then return to that exact point in the story at any time by entering the restore command and selecting the desired save file from the menu that results. It is possible to have as many save files as you desire for any given story, limited only by the storage capacity of your chosen computing device. Experience teaches IF players to save early and save often to avoid replaying large sections of a story, especially if that story is more complex and less forgiving than Earth and Sky.

>save

Ok.

Hopefully the time we have spent together playing Earth and Sky has given you a fair picture of just what IF is and how it works. I will leave this hands-on transcript now to focus on historical and theoretical matters for the rest of this essay, but I encourage you to finish Earth and Sky on your own. After all, Austin and Emily still have evil plans to thwart and monsters to crush in this game, and, should you enjoy that, Paul O’Brian has written two sequels featuring the same characters and their search for their missing parents that are also well worth playing.

Much of the remainder of this essay will be structured as a chronological narrative of IF’s development over the years. We will begin this history in the next chapter with a discussion of two important IF progenitors, followed by the world’s first work of true IF, Adventure.

Chapter 2: The Birth of a Genre

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.

Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.

– opening text in Adventure (Crowther and Woods, 1976)

Eliza

In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, a researcher and computer programmer at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, released an unusual program into the then rather small world of computing. Entitled Eliza, it was billed as a “simulation” of a session between a Rogerian psychotherapist (the titular character) and her patient (the user). A typical session with Eliza might look something like this:

How do you do. Please state your problem.

>> I spend too much time with computers.

Why do you mention computers ?

>> You are one.

Does it please you to believe I am one ?

>> Yes.

You seem to be quite positive.

>> I suppose I am.

How long have you been ?

>> 31 years.

I’m not sure I understand you fully.

>> Join the club.

Please go on.

>> You don’t make too much sense yourself.

We were discussing you – not me.

If you have experienced IF before, or you have spent time with the sample transcript I provided in Chapter 1, you have probably noticed that Eliza’s mode of communication is basically identical to that of IF. Eliza is most emphatically not true IF, however. It simulates no universe, and does not truly understand the player’s input in any meaningful sense. When we actually peer under the hood, we find that Eliza is really little more than a clever parlor trick. It scans the user’s input for a few dozen key words and parrots back a set of stock responses based upon what it finds. It does not take long for the player to realize Eliza’s limitations, as responses that at first seem rather shockingly apt quickly begin to repeat, and eventually enough complete non-sequiturs appear to destroy the game’s mimesis entirely. (At this point some less charitable souls might suggest that Eliza actually provides quite a good model of interaction with many psychotherapists, but we shall avoid such controversy here.) The modern player might wonder how Eliza ever managed to cause the stir it did in the computing world when its limitations are so quickly obvious. Such a player much remember, however, that the idea of any sort of interactive computer program seemed quite revolutionary in the batch-processing world of 1966.

Eliza is of great significance in the history of IF, for it represents the first use of the general IF model of interaction as a textual dialogue between the player and the game. When later developers began to design true IF, they would borrow the interface conventions used by Eliza and the legion of so-called “chatterbots” that would follow it. Many early IF games in fact seem to see the player as issuing instructions to another who inhabits the game world, rather than the player inhabiting the world herself. Such games often end each turn by asking the player, “What do I do now?” and will respond to a pointless or non-understandable input by saying something along the lines of, “I can’t do that right now.” This mode of interaction, although rarely seen in IF today, probably stems from IF’s roots in Eliza and her successors.

The ideal of simulating a conversation with a sentient entity is still very much alive in modern IF circles. Parlor tricks are no longer acceptable, however, and managing to create believable interaction honestly is a tall order indeed. Perhaps the most successful attempt so far, and a game which could be considered a distant spiritual cousin of Eliza, is Emily Short’s Galatea, a work we will return to in a much later chapter of this essay.

Hunt the Wumpus

Perhaps the most significant foundational work for IF arrived in 1972 in the form of a unique little game called Hunt the Wumpus. This game sets the intrepid adventurer lose in a network of caves, all rendered with textual descriptions, and tasks him with hunting down and killing a fearsome creature known as the wumpus, a monster that is “rather vague in physical detail” (Yob 247), as the game’s creator Gregory Yob himself admitted, but that is deadly if encountered directly. The caves are rendered, in classic IF fashion, as a series of discrete nodes or “rooms,” connected to one another by passageways. The standard IF convention of moving about through the use of compass directions is not in place, however. The player is rather told which room number she is currently in and to which rooms she can travel from there. There is also no parser in place. On any given turn, the player has only two choices: to move or to shoot an arrow. A typical session with the game might look something like this:

Bats nearby!

You are in room 14

Tunnels lead to 4 13 15

Shoot, Move or Quit (S-M-Q)? m

Where to? 4

You are in room 4

Tunnels lead to 3 5 14

Shoot, Move or Quit (S-M-Q)? m

Where to? 5

You are in room 5

Tunnels lead to 1 4 6

Shoot, Move or Quit (S-M-Q)? s

No. of rooms (0–5)? 4

Room #? 1

Room #? 2

Room #? 3

Room #? 4

1

2

3

4

Missed!

You are in room 5

Tunnels lead to 1 4 6

Shoot, Move or Quit (S-M-Q)?

As you can see, the game’s mode of communication is decidedly simplistic, not to say cryptic. The challenge of Hunt the Wumpus arises from the fact that the player’s character does not have a prayer if she gets into a fair fight with the wumpus. She must use a more devious method to hunt down her prey. Luckily, she is equipped with a rather high-powered bow that can fire arrows through up to five adjacent rooms. Winning a game of Hunt the Wumpus involves first carefully exploring and mapping the cave system and all of its twisted interconnections, being careful to avoid the wumpus while doing so. The game will warn the player when she is in a room adjacent to the beast by saying, “I smell a wumpus!” Note the use of first person here, possibly an artifact of games like Eliza. To make the process more difficult, bottomless pits and bats are also scattered about the cave system. Stepping onto a pit means instant death, while bats pick up the player and randomly drop her at some other location in the maze. Finally, the wumpus itself occasionally wakes and moves about under certain circumstances.

Hunt the Wumpis is really just an elaborate logic puzzle. Once the player has mapped out the cave system, she must maneuver her character into position to kill the wumpus with a shot from her bow. She has limited room for error here, for she carries only five arrows with her. Further, if she attempts to fire an arrow into a non-connected room it will ricochet unpredictably and may even fly back to kill the player.

Primitive as it appears, Hunt the Wumpus is nonetheless a much more sophisticated piece of programming than Eliza, and much closer to our modern conception of IF. Whereas Eliza merely spouts back stock responses based upon the player’s last input, Hunt the Wumpus actually simulates a universe in the computer’s memory, albeit a very simple one containing only a few objects. The player’s actions directly affect the state of that universe. One could even say that a winning game of Hunt the Wumpus has a narrative arc of sorts, beginning with exploration and mapping, leading to planning and positioning, and finally climaxing with the kill shot that ends the game in victory. The building blocks of IF are all here. All that is needed now is a true parser.

Hunt the Wumpus has had enormous influence on IF over the years, for both good and ill. It is probably not a coincidence that the first work of true IF, Adventure, was also set largely within a network of caves, or that so many of the games that followed Adventure chose similar settings. Hunt the Wumpus is essentially an exercise in mapping, and many IF games have taken this to heart by making their geography a huge part of their challenge. For years, almost every IF game felt obligated to include a maze section. These sections - the “twisty little passages” famously described in Infocom’s Zork I - were made up of many non-descript rooms all exactly alike in their descriptions, and connected to one another in hopelessly jumbled ways. In other words, going north within a classic IF maze and then going south rarely returns the player to her starting position. Everyone who has been playing IF for any length of time knows how to solve these mazes, and doing so does not require intellectual brilliance on the part of the player, merely patience, care, and a good supply of graph paper for mapping. For that reason, mazes - at least ones that are not executed with some particularly clever twist or other - are considered annoying busy-work by most and are almost universally pointed to as examples of what not to do when designing a modern work of IF.

Nostalgia being what it is, however, Hunt the Wumpus is generally held in much higher esteem today than those games that imitate its more annoying aspects. Occasional revivals of the game even appear on the IF scene, notably Andrew Plotkin’s Hunter, in Darkness and Muffy St. Bernard’s Wumpus 2000, both of which took the bare stub of a story upon which the original is based and expanded it into full-fledged IF games. Many years earlier, two other hackers named Will Crowther and Don Woods probably spent considerable time with Yob’s game before combining its world modeling with some of Eliza’s interface conventions and mixing the whole thing together with the world’s first true IF parser to create Adventure.

Adventure

During the early seventies, Will Crowther had three passions that in combination led to the creation of Adventure. He was a computer programmer who in the course of his employment by BBN in Boston would create some of the foundational software that led to our modern Internet; he was an avid spelunker who with his wife Pat frequently traveled to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky to explore and map under the auspices of the Cave Research Foundation; and he enjoyed playing with friends a new tabletop game called Dungeons and Dragons, during which he took on the persona of a character named Willie the Thief for adventures in a Tolkienesque fantasy world (Hafner 206). Like many other hackers, Crowther considered the possibility of creating a computer game with some of the characteristics of Dungeons and Dragons for quite some time, but he was seemingly spurred into action only by an unfortunate event, namely the failure of his marriage. The newly divorced Crowther now began working on his ideas in earnest. He hoped to create an interactive textual simulation of caving, with some magical elements ala Dungeons and Dragons thrown in for spice, to give to his two young daughters whom he missed greatly and could see only occasionally. In his recent book-length study of IF, Nick Montfort theorizes that Sandy and Laura Crowther, aged five and seven, probably became the first players of a true IF game when they interacted with the first version of Adventure via an ASR33 Teletype connected to a DEC PDP–10 minicomputer in 1975 (Montfort 85). That original version unfortunately seems to have been lost, as much searching by myself and others has failed to turn up a copy. However, by all accounts it was quite austere by the standards of what would follow. Its geography was based largely upon that of the real Mammoth Cave that Crowther knew so well, and it was laden with caver jargon. Crowther apparently thought of his creation as little more than a trifle to amuse his daughters, and thus it was never polished into anything like a completed state. After Crowther and his daughters had had their fun with it, it was left to languish in various software repositories on the ARPANET, the predecessor to our modern Internet, to be toyed with the by the occasional curious hacker.

In 1976, one such hacker on the other side of the country, Stanford’s Don Woods, discovered Crowther’s game and was immediately smitten by its potential:

“Adventure made users feel like they were interacting more with the computer,” said Woods. “It seemed to be responding more to what you typed, rather than just making its own moves, like a silent opponent. I think this attracted a lot of players who might otherwise have been turned off the idea of playing ‘against’ a computer. This was playing ‘with’ a computer” (Hafner 207).

It probably did not hurt that Stanford’s computer science department was at the time in the midst of a full-blown Tolkien revival phase, to the point that the main printer there had been modified to handle three different types of Elvish fonts (Levy 140). Woods decided he would like to realize the potential he saw in Crowther’s work by squashing the bugs, expanding it, and generally making it into a complete, playable game. His first obstacle in doing so was the fact that he did not know Crowther and had no obvious way of contacting him, for, while Crowther had left his name on the program, it had apparently never occurred to him that anyone might want to actually get in touch with him about it. Woods’ eventual solution to the problem was to send an email to user ID “crowther” at every single domain on the then rather small ARPANET (Adams). Eventually he received a response from BBN in Boston giving him the permission he sought, and Woods set to work. The game he ended up creating, which was spreading like wildfire around the ARPANET by early 1977, looks like this:

YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING.

AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND

DOWN A GULLY.

enter building

YOU ARE INSIDE A BUILDING, A WELL HOUSE FOR A LARGE SPRING.

THERE ARE SOME KEYS ON THE GROUND HERE.

THERE IS A SHINY BRASS LAMP NEARBY.

THERE IS FOOD HERE.

THERE IS A BOTTLE OF WATER HERE.

get keys

OK

get lamp

OK

get food

OK

get bottle

OK

exit

YOU’RE AT END OF ROAD AGAIN.

go downstream

YOU ARE IN A VALLEY IN THE FOREST BESIDE A STREAM TUMBLING ALONG A

ROCKY BED.

go downstream

AT YOUR FEET ALL THE WATER OF THE STREAM SPLASHES INTO A 2-INCH SLIT

IN THE ROCK. DOWNSTREAM THE STREAMBED IS BARE ROCK.

go downstream

YOU ARE IN A 20-FOOT DEPRESSION FLOORED WITH BARE DIRT. SET INTO THE

DIRT IS A STRONG STEEL GRATE MOUNTED IN CONCRETE. A DRY STREAMBED

LEADS INTO THE DEPRESSION.

THE GRATE IS LOCKED.

unlock grate

THE GRATE IS NOW UNLOCKED.

open grate

IT WAS ALREADY UNLOCKED.

d

YOU ARE IN A SMALL CHAMBER BENEATH A 3X3 STEEL GRATE TO THE SURFACE.

A LOW CRAWL OVER COBBLES LEADS INWARD TO THE WEST.

THE GRATE IS OPEN.

Woods’ more Tolkienesque additions to Adventure, which include a troll, elves, and even a volcano standing in for Mount Doom, begin to appear as the player gets deeper into the game. The ultimate goal, and what semblance of a plot the game possesses, is to collect a number of treasures from the cave and return them safely to the surface. Needless to say, this is easier said than done.

Woods’ original release of the game was written in Fortran, which had no capacity for outputting lower-case letters. The parser was also extremely primitive, being capable of understanding only two words in simple verb-noun combinations. Nevertheless, all of the core elements of IF are present. The player is cast in the role of a character in a simulated world which is described in text, albeit ungrammatical upper-case text, and a true parser is used for input, albeit one of a simplistic and often infuriating design.

Attempting to play Adventure in its original form as a modern IF player is something of an exercise in masochism. The game is a veritable catalog of modern IF game design sins. As Carl Muckenhoupt writes in his review, “It has a verb-noun parser, minimal detail, two big annoying mazes, magic words, nonsense puzzles, and occasional death without warning.” Nevertheless, he concludes, “Download it anyway. You cannot consider yourself a true adventurer until you’ve played this game. (Muckenhaupt).” I am not sure I agree with Muckenhaupt. I think a short while spent mucking about with the game, perhaps with a walkthrough in hand to enable one to see the good bits quickly, is more than sufficient for any but the most dedicated IF historian. I think the simple fact that a game that was once fascinating now seems more annoying than anything else points to the growth that IF has undergone since 1977. In his classic essay “The Craft of Adventure,” Graham Nelson describes IF as “a crossword at war with a narrative.” Every IF game comes to terms with this uneasy balance in its own way, and every IF designer must decide how much emphasis to place on the gamelike qualities of her work, generally meaning puzzles, versus its literary qualities. There is no one perfect balance. This player, to choose one example, has certainly enjoyed games that ranged all along this particular continuum. Nevertheless, when a game fails to give at least a modicum of attention to literary sensibilities, and emphasizes puzzles that are difficult in an annoying or unfair way, it tends to win few friends in the modern IF community.

Neither Crowther nor Woods are truly at fault for their game’s failings. They were after all paving the way, with no corpus of game design theory to fall back on, and they were writing for an audience with very different expectations than the average modern IF player. Steven Levy compares playing Adventure to assembly language programming: “In a sense, Adventure was a metaphor for computer programming itself - the deep recesses you explored in the Adventure world were akin to the basic, most obscure levels of the machine that you’d be traveling in when you hacked in assembly code” (Levy 141). Levy means this as an endorsement of Adventure’s intellectual challenge, yet a new author who advertised, “Try my game! It’s just like assembly programming!” in modern IF circles would likely find few takers. Like most of the games that would follow it for the next several years, and unlike the best works of modern IF, Adventure is nothing but an elaborate puzzle box, with no sense or pretension of literary value.

Whatever its failings in modern eyes, Adventure caused something of a sensation in the computing world of 1977. Here was that rarest of all rarities, something truly new. Within months, one Jim Gillogly had ported the game from DEC Fortran to portable C code, making the game available to a host of new computer systems while, not incidentally for fans of proper English everywhere, conferring upon it the blessing of lower-case letters. Stories abound of computer science departments virtually shutting down for two weeks while everyone struggled together to solve Adventure’s many fiendish puzzles and “beat” the game. Graeme Cree’s review of the game for SPAG magazine conveys something of the glow of discovery that still surrounds the game today among those who were there:

Playing a game 70’s style was very different from playing today. Since there were few personal computers, playing a game usually involved a trip to the local university computer room, generally after hours, with a bag lunch in tow (since the session would usually last quite a while). My own first experience with Adventure involved late-night trips to IBM with my programmer father. The long trek through dimly-lit windowless corridors to the terminal room was practically an adventure in itself, and since you couldn’t just go and play whenever you wanted to, the game had plenty of opportunity to grow larger in the imagination in between sessions (Cree).

Hackers being hackers, as soon as many people completed Adventure they immediately set about improving it. By 1980, a bewildering number of iterations were to be found all over the computing world. Some attempted to improve the game qualitatively by grafting in a parser that could understand more than two words; some preferred to improve it quantitatively by adding more rooms and more puzzles to an already large game; many, of course, did both, and many of these “improvements” led to a game that was less playable than the original. Eventually, players started separating versions by the number of points that could be scored for solving puzzles, which provided a handy way to keep track of the game’s relative size. A player in the original could score a maximum of 350 points. Successive versions, sometimes building on one another and sometimes not, increased this number steadily over the years following the original’s release. The ultimate example of the game, in terms of size at least, arrived in 1992 when David Malmberg created a 1000 point version to demonstrate the capabilities of his Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT) shareware IF development system.

Adventure was one of the first games to appear on the personal computers that began to hit the marketplace at the end of the seventies, and at one point during the early eighties there were at least half a dozen competing commercial versions available for purchase. Among those selling Adventure at this time was a small company called Microsoft that got into the act when it produced a version of the game to bundle with the operating system it had written for IBM’s first Personal Computer. Even the game’s name was not static. In addition to Adventure, various versions referred to themselves as Colossal Cave, Humongous Cave, and Jewels of Darkness. Along the way, Adventure loaned its name to a whole genre of computer games - adventure games, naturally enough. In the early days, the term was synonymous with IF, but when graphical adventures hit the marketplace they borrowed and eventually co-opted the name. Ironically enough, when one sees discussion of “adventure games” today it is generally the point-and-click, graphical style of games ala Myst that are being referred to, rather than the textual genre of which the original Adventure game was the first example.

Even though he is noted as a proponent of strong intellectual property rights, Bill Gates did not bother to compensate Crowther and Woods when his company Microsoft “borrowed” their game for commercial release.

As for Crowther and Woods, their choice not to seek any copyright protection for their work, although understandable in an era when the very notion of copyright protection as applied to computer software was something of a foreign notion even to those working in the field, meant that they made virtually nothing from the game. Out of all of the companies who released commercial versions during the first decade of the personal computer, only one - the Software Toolworks, later renamed Mindscape - sought out the game’s original creators to award them a royalty for writing not only the most important work of IF ever (because it was the first), but one of the most important and widely distributed computer games of any type ever created (Adams). I work in the information technology field in a job that puts me into contact with older, “legacy” computer installations quite frequently. For years, I have made something of a hobby of typing “ADVENT” - the shortened abbreviation by which the game is known on most systems - at random command prompts when the opportunity arises. A surprising number of systems, even today, still have the hoary old classic buried in their recesses.

Before leaving Adventure, there is one final anecdote too fascinating to ignore. During the early eighties, a student in German literature at the University of California San Diego named Mary Ann Buckles was exposed to the game and the cult of players it had engendered, and was fascinated to enough to write her PHD dissertation on the subject. In it, she refers to Adventure as “the first major literary work of the new computer medium” (Buckles ix), and states that it “can be treated as literature because it is written in words, conveys stories, and can evoke powerful emotional involvement in the imaginary world it embodies” (Buckles 3). She concludes that “interactive fiction can develop into a serious artistic medium” (Buckles ix). For Buckles to be making these arguments in an academic thesis published in 1985, at a time when computer games were considered strictly children’s toys even among many who were creating them, is not only astonishingly insightful but equally brave. Sadly, most of her peers in academia were actively hostile to her work. In a recent interview, Buckles stated that, in her fellow scholars’ view, “You either had a soul, or you worked on computers” (Hebert). They “just didn’t like it - it wasn’t their thing. They’d never heard of the topic. They didn’t know what to do with it” (Hebert). Buckles was so disillusioned by the rejection of her peers that she retired from academia altogether to take up a career as a massage therapist. She deserves enormous credit for her foresight in seeing the potential of IF in particular and interactive narrative in general. In a supreme irony, her alma mater UCSD is now at the forefront of the study of so-called “new media.”

Sources for Further Investigation

Games:

Adventure. 1976. Will Crowther and Don Woods.

An MS-DOS executable created from the original Fortran source is available at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/pc/adv350de.zip.

A more modern, user-friendly re-implementation by Graham Nelson is http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Advent.z5.

Eliza. 1966. Joseph Wiezenbaum.

A faithful re-implementation in Java of Wiezenbaum’s original was written by Charles Hayden, and can be found on Dennis G. Jerz’s page devoted to the game at http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/canon/eliza.htm.

Galatea. 2000. Emily Short.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Galatea.z8.

Humongous Cave. 1992. David Malmberg.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/agt/hugecave.zip.

Hunt the Wumpus. 1972. Gregory Yob.

A re-implementation of the original by Magnus Olsson is available at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/wumpus.z5.

Hunter, in Darkness. 1999. Andrew Plotkin.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/huntdark.z5.

Wumpus 2000. 2004. Muffy St. Bernard.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/wump2ka.z5.

Zork I. 1980. David Lebling and Mark Blank; Infocom.

Released as freeware by Activision, and available at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Download/zork1.zip.

Other Sources:

Adams, Rick. “A History of Adventure.”

http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/a_history.html.

Buckles, Mary Ann. “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame Adventure.” University of California at San Diego PHD Thesis, 1985.

Cree, Graeme. Review of Adventure. SPAG Magazine Number 8 (February 5, 1996).

http://sparkynet.com/spag/a.html#advent.

Hafner, Katie and Matthew Lyon. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. Simon and Schuster: New York, 1996.

Hebert, James. “Accidental Traveler in a Brave New World.” Sign on San Diego (January 22, 2006).

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/features/20060122-9999-lz1a22buckles.html.

Jerz, Dennis G. “Colossal Cave Adventure - Will Crowther (c.1975); Will Crowther and Don Woods (1976).”

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/canon/Adventure.htm.

Jerz, Dennis G. “Eliza - Wiezenbaum (1966).”

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/canon/eliza.htm.

Jerz, Dennis G. “Hunt the Wumpus - Gregory Yob (c.1972).”

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/canon/Hunt_the_Wumpus.htm.

Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Penguin: New York, 1994.

Montfort, Nick. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. MIT Press: Cambridge, 2003.

Muckenhoupt, Carl. Review of Adventure. Baf’s Guide to the IF Archive.

http://wurb.com/if/game/1.

Nelson, Graham. “The Craft of Adventure (2[nd] ed.).”

http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/info/Craft.Of.Adventure.txt.

Wiezenbaum, Joseph. “Eliza - A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine.” Communications of the ACM Volume 9, Number 1 (January 1966).

Available online at http://i5.nyu.edu/~mm64/x52.9265/january1966.html.

Yob, Gregory. “Hunt the Wumpus.” The Best of Creative Computing, Volume 1. Ed. David Ahl. Creative Computing Press: Morris Plains NJ, 1976.

Available online at http://www.atariarchives.org/bcc1/showpage.php?page=247.

Chapter 3: Bringing IF Home

“I’m in a temple” is as detailed as it gets, but Adams’ games are distinguished by weirdly errant grammar, a wide vocabulary, and a talent for arranging diverse objects in a room to portray it.

– Graham Nelson (2001)

Even as Adventure was taking the world of institutional computing by storm, another revolution was beginning. Computers were coming home. In 1975, the first commercially available microcomputer arrived. For $397, the hobbyist could purchase an Altair 8800 in the form of “a box of parts, circuit boards, and some poorly written instructions” (Veit). If he was handy with a soldering iron and had luck on his side, several hours labor would yield a functional computer with 256 bytes of memory and an input-output system consisting of a bank of toggle switches and a row of lights. The new technology advanced quickly. By 1978, Altair was already long gone, but several other companies had stepped into the breach to offer relatively practical, usable home computers that even came pre-assembled. Most of these machines had fairly similar capabilities, including perhaps 16 kilobytes of memory and a simple 8-bit microprocessor. Audio cassettes were used for storage. The average cellular phone today possesses vastly more computing power, but in their day these machines were little marvels, and the idea of having a computer of any description available for hacking in the home was a dream come true for a whole generation of hobbyists. Many justifications for their purchase – word processing, education, and home finance among them – were offered to spouses and parents, but once the machines were in the home many turned their attention to making them play games.

Since Adventure was the hit of mainframe world at the time, it was only natural that many would seek to bring similar games to the home computer. This was however a rather daunting prospect given the current technology level of home computing. Primitive as it is by the standards of modern IF, Adventure was still vastly too complex to fit into the miniscule memories of this first generation of machines. Those who took up the challenge of bringing IF home would be forced to trim away every unnecessary word in their games and use every clever hack available to save memory. The first to succeed in bringing a playable work of IF to the home computer was Scott Adams.

Scott Adams and Adventure International

In 1978, a little game called Adventureland arrived on the miniscule Tandy TRS–80 entertainment software scene. It borrowed its theme from the mainframe Adventure, requiring the player to collect a number of treasures in a Tokienesque landscape, but its implementation made the earlier game look positively lush and user-friendly. Adams described its inspiration thus:

…soon Mr Adams was captivated by Colossal Caves and Adventure. “I saw the games on a mainframe, and I was fascinated. I owned a Tandy Model I and thought ‘let’s see if I can write an Adventure type game on the TRS80’. I didn’t listen to the people who said it would be impossible to get a program which existed on megabytes of storage into a 16K machine” (Kidd).

Locations were described not with one or two lines, as in Adventure, or but rather one or two words, and conveying one’s intention to its extremely primitive two-word parser was often more difficult than actually working out how to solve the puzzles the game presented. The game’s engine was written in BASIC rather than assembly code, meaning it was not even able to take full advantage of the primitive hardware on which it ran.

A typical screen from Adventureland (1978)

Primitive as his creation was, Adams was quite clever in choosing to develop Adventureland not as a single, stand-alone program but rather as a game file which is run on an interpreter on the target machine. Adams:

“I didn’t try and take the existing program and put it into 16K, but sat down and wrote an adventure language of my own for the machine - an interpreter - and proceeded from there to write an adventure in that language. As a system programmer I know how to write tools. The first tool was the adventure language, the second was the interpreter to understand the language and the third tool allowed me to develop a database for the interpreter to understand” (Kidd).

This model is still used for most IF today. The approach conferred to Adams two major advantages. First, he could develop his games more quickly, since he was not forced to constantly rewrite portions of the code that would remain the same from game to game; and second, he could easily bring one game to a wide variety of machines. By writing just one interpreter for any given machine, he immediately opened it up to his entire catalog. In the chaotic marketplace of the late seventies and early eighties, in which new machines came and went with the seasons and there might at any time be as many as two dozen viable but mutually incompatible machines available at any given time, this was huge. It was a model that worked particularly well for IF because of its reliance on plain text. The machines of the time were distinguished from one another primarily by their multimedia capabilities. Users of more capable machines tended to be very critical of products that did not make good use their machines’ power, but targeting such machines from the beginning would likely yield a product that would have to be substantially downgraded to run on less impressive hardware. Thus it was a delicate balancing act for developers hoping to reach more than a sliver of the market, but one which developers of IF could largely disregard. All machines on the market by 1978 could after all display plain text with reasonable facility.

Adventureland sold very well, and marked the beginning of Adventure International, the company founded by Adams and his wife Alexis. Soon the Adams’ were porting their game to the other popular microcomputers of the day, and within six months a second title, Pirate Adventure, had appeared. For a number of years, Adventure International thrived, eventually releasing almost twenty games. The technology behind them did improve somewhat, and in his later game Adams even began to include hand-drawn color graphics to illustrate the scenes, but only toward the end of Adventure International’s run did he devote serious attention to improving the parser. Thematically, Adams never really progressed beyond simplistic treasure hunts. Most of his titles took the gameplay of his first two games and merely transported it to a different setting. Adventure International’s early games succeeded because they were the only games in town. Nothing else would run on those primitive early machines. When technology advanced, however, and Adams’ games failed to advance with it, their days were numbered. Adventure International peaked in late 1983 at some fifty employees. Less than two years later, it went bankrupt and disappeared.

One of Adventure International’s final games, based on the Marvel Comics Spider Man character. Note that, in spite of the potential of the Marvel license, the game looks remarkably similar to Adventureland, released six years earlier.

Today, there is a certain nostalgia for Adams’ games, largely because they were the introduction to adventure gaming for that first generation of home computer users. Their merits do not extend much beyond being first, however. They are balky and frustrating, and the stories they tell are so sparse that even calling them IF strikes me as something of a stretch. Their greatest virtue in Adventure International’s early years was the fact that they were able to run on extremely primitive hardware, targeting machines with just 16K of RAM and a tape drive for storage. When more powerful machines began to appear for reasonable prices, Adams failed to expand his vision accordingly. In an article in the March, 1981, issue of Softside magazine, Adams speaks about his game design process, stating that the average game takes him about one month to complete, start to finish. In the next chapter I will discuss the time-consuming authoring and exhaustive testing process at Infocom, the company that represented the gold standard of IF. At that point, we will get a more complete picture of just how primitive Adams’ games were compared to the best IF available even then. While one might mourn the early passing of Adams’ pioneering company, it is hard to argue that it did not deserve its fate.

Sierra On-Line

A number of other companies began releasing IF games in the wake of Adventure International’s initial success, inspired equally by Adams’ games and by the mainframe Adventure. Most notable among these was On-Line Systems, whose founders Ken and Roberta Williams beat Adams to the punch in being the first to include illustrations with their games. Ken was working on IBM mainframes as a business programmer in 1979 when he showed Adventure to Roberta. After playing it and some of the early IF games available on the family’s Apple II, Roberta decided to try her hand at designing her own game. She sketched out on paper the rudiments of an Agatha Christie-style locked-door mystery and showed it her husband in the hope that he would agree to program it for her. Ken was impressed, but felt that “‘To really sell, you need more. An angle. Something different’” (Levy 297). Primitive black and white illustrations, little more than stick figures really, were that “angle,” and luckily so, for the game little else going for it even by the standards of the time.

Mystery House screen

Due to the novelty of its graphics, Mystery House did very well for the Williams, and provided the capital to get Online Systems, soon to be renamed Sierra Online, properly off the ground. The company released several more of their so-called “Hi-Res Adventures” over the next few years, along with various other non-IF games, such as clones of popular arcade hits. None of their works of IF were particularly distinguished, although two, Softporn Adventure and Time Zone, are worthy of brief mention for other reasons.

Softporn Adventure was perhaps the first adult-oriented piece of IF. In this predecessor to Sierra’s much better known Leisure Suit Larry series of graphical adventures, the player is tasked with relieving the game’s protagonist of his virginity. Ken Williams, always looking for that mythical “angle,” made the most of the game’s raciness, even plastering a picture of his wife and two company employees topless in a Jacuzzi on the game’s box.

Softporn’s cover art, featuring Roberta Williams at far right (1981)

Softporn was poorly written and poorly designed, and not even particularly titillating. (It is actually the only all-text adventure ever released by Sierra, which is ironic considering its theme.) As the first risqué piece of IF, though, it was important in its way, being as it is the first in a long line of adult games stretching right to the present day. It set a precedent in another way, too, for most of the games produced by the modern Adult Interactive Fiction (AIF) community are just as bad as Softporn.

One of the final entries in the Hi-Res Adventures line, Time Zone, was notable for its sheer size. This time-travel adventure spanned a staggering twelve Apple II disk sides and advertised 1500 rooms to explore in 39 separate time periods. However, its price of $99 was equally excessive, the exasperating two-word parser of Mystery House remained virtually unaltered, and the game’s only real advance over its predecessors was in its bulk.

Shortly after Time Zone’s release, Sierra published another of Roberta’s games, King’s Quest, in which the player could for the first time manipulate a graphical representation of her on-screen alter ego directly using the arrow keys or a joystick.

King’s Quest (1983)

While King’s Quest and its successors over the next several years would continue to bear the vestiges of IF in the form of a simple parser, they really mark the beginning of the graphical adventure, a form that, while interesting and worthwhile in its own right, has evolved into something very different from IF. It was in this area, not IF, that Sierra would make its reputation with a long string of games stretching to 1999. Judging by the less than breathtaking literary quality of the company’s early text-based work, perhaps it was just as well. It seems their hearts were never really in text adventuring, and once the opportunity arose they moved away from the form as quickly as possible. Ken Williams’ “angle” of graphics became the company’s guiding principal. Sierra still exists as a publishing house today, although it has moved even farther from its roots and no longer publishes adventure games of any sort. Ken and Roberta, and virtually everyone associated with the company’s graphical adventure glory days, left long ago.

Even as Adventure International, Sierra, and various other companies were cranking out their simplistic two-word parser adventures, another company was lapping the field with a game of stunning sophistication. To understand the origins of Infocom and that first remarkable game of theirs, Zork, we must return briefly to the world of mainframe computing.

Sources for Further Investigation

Games:

Adventure. 1976. Will Crowther and Don Woods.

An MS-DOS executable created from the original Fortran source is available at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/pc/adv350de.zip.

A more modern, user-friendly re-implementation by Graham Nelson is http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Advent.z5.

Adventureland. 1978. Scott Adams; Adventure International.

Released as shareware by Scott Adams.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/scott-adams/games/scottfree/AdamsGames.zip.

King’s Quest. 1983. Roberta Williams; Sierra On-Line.

Mystery House. 1980. Ken and Roberta Williams; On-Line Systems.

A faithful re-implementation of the original is available at http://turbulence.org/Works/mystery/games.php.

Pirate Adventure. 1978. Scott Adams; Adventure International.

Released as shareware by Scott Adams.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/scott-adams/games/scottfree/AdamsGames.zip.

Questprobe #2: Spiderman. 1984. Scott Adams; Adventure International.

Released as shareware by Scott Adams.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/scott-adams/games/scottfree/AdamsGames.zip.

Softporn Adventure. 1981. Chuck Benton; On-Line Systems.

Time Zone. 1982. Roberta Williams; On-Line Systems.

Other Works:

Adams, Scott. “Say Yoho.” Softside, March 1981. Available online at http://www.if-legends.org/~aimemorial/sayyoho198103.html.

Jerz, Dennis G. “Scott Adams Speaks.” http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/adams/scottspeaks.html.

Kidd, Graeme. “Great Scott!” Crash #15, April 1985. Available online at http://www.crashonline.org.uk/15/adams.htm.

Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Penguin: New York, 1994.

Liddil, Bob. Review of Zork. Byte, February 1981.

Nelson, Graham. The Inform Designer’s Manual. 4[th] ed. The Interactive Fiction Libray: St. Charles, Illinois. 2001.

Available online at http://ifarchive.flavorplex.com/if-archive/infocom/compilers/inform6/manuals/designers_manual_4.pdf.

Veit, Stan. “MITS Altair 8800.” http://www.pc-history.org/altair.htm.

Chapter 4: Infocom

We believe there is a great future for this type of game, both for the players and for the implementers and designers…

– David Lebling, Marc Blank, and Tim Anderson (1979)

The Mainframe Zork

Like those of virtually all universities, the MIT computer science department was swept up in the Adventure craze of early 1977. The game was solved by that May through a committed group effort, and a group of hackers promptly began looking into creating their own derivation. Unlike most, though, this group did not content themselves with merely improving Adventure. They wanted to create their own piece of IF, one that would be superior in every way to its predecessor. In this, they were motivated not only by the challenge of the task itself, but also by a certain sense of collegiate pride. As the two premier computer science schools in the country, MIT and Stanford enjoyed a fierce rivalry with one another. If Don Woods at Stanford had created the first true adventure game, the hackers at MIT could still create the best. From this thought process would spring Zork.

The group of students and computer lab hangers-on responsible for Zork were a motley crew but an accomplished one. As described by Tim Anderson, one of their number:

Marc Blank was enjoying a respite from medical school; I had just finished my master’s degree; Bruce Daniels was getting bored with his Ph.D. topic; and Dave Lebling was heartily sick of Morse code (Anderson, “First”).

They called their game Zork for lack of any better title, the word being one of several nonsense interjections that floated about the MIT computer labs. An early, primitive version of the game was already on the MIT computers by the end of June, 1977. Its four core implementers, along with a cast of others who came and went, spent much of their spare time for almost the next two years expanding, tweaking, improving, and debugging the game, while an army of students waited eagerly to explore each new area that was added and, of course, hackers being hackers, did their best to “break” the game. The final significant addition was made to the game in February of 1979, although bug-swatting would actually continue into 1981. Development was stopped not by the game being “finished” in any objective sense, but rather by its having grown so huge that there was no memory space left for it on even the relatively powerful DEC mainframes on which it ran. By this time, the game had spread all over the ARPANET under two different names. In addition to the original Zork, a FORTRAN port that had been renamed to Dungeon was also making the rounds.

By any technical measure, Zork succeeded splendidly in its goal of showing up Adventure. It was several times as large, its sprawling geography containing literally hundreds of individual rooms. It was filled with complexities of which Adventure had never dreamt, such as a little boat the player could board to sail about the game’s waterways and some remarkably sophisticated fellow dungeon inhabitants who moved about the game tending to their own business when they were not harrying the hapless player in some way. By far its most impressive and important trait, though, was its parser. With the fruits of many years of natural language research at MIT to draw upon, Zork could understand a remarkably sophisticated range of inputs and had a vocabulary of 908 words. Gone were the days of wrestling with an obstinate two-word parser. Almost any reasonable input, and a fair number of unreasonable ones, could now be understood. Virtually all of the conventions of modern IF parsers appear, all at once, with this game, and the general technical paradigm of IF development that languages like Inform still follow today is present and accounted for. In the sheer sophistication of its programming and world model, Zork represents a quantum leap from anything that existed before it.

Unfortunately, it is less successful as a game. Its plot, such as it is, is another iteration of the tried and true “explore the fantasy landscape and collect the treasures,” for no other reason than collecting treasures scores points and thus must be a good thing. The sheer size of the game, which looks so impressive on a technical specification sheet, makes it nearly unplayable in reality, especially as virtually none of its hundreds of rooms seems to line up logically with its neighbors. The whole game is effectively a giant maze, one that requires hours and hours of careful mapping from the player before she can even begin to think of solving any actual puzzles or collecting any of the aforementioned treasures. As modern IF author Robb Sherwin once asserted, “Zork hates its player.” Paul O’Brian recently returned to the Zork variation Dungeon, and described what he found there:

Dungeon set itself up unambiguously as the player’s antagonist, and it wasn’t particularly concerned with telling a story, nor even with describing a world. Plot is nonexistent, and fabulous treasures are described with perfunctory lines like “You see nothing special about the sapphire bracelet.” Instead, Dungeon puts its energies into confusing and confounding the player, and wacky map connections are but the tip of the iceberg. Along with the aforementioned mazes, there’s the light source, which always runs out at the worst possible times. There’s the Round Room, guaranteed to tangle any map. There are the “secret word” puzzles, some of which still perplex me to this day, even though I know how they operate. And of course, there’s the thief, whose annoyances are both numerous and legendary. Dungeon wants nothing more than to see you fail, and it’s not overly concerned with how much fun you might be having (O’Brian).

Zork’s ridiculous size and sadistic design actually make it a much less playable game than Adventure. Its aesthetic qualities are also vastly inferior. For all of Wood’s extrapolations and enhancements, Adventure remained at its root a simulation of the real-world geography around Mammoth Cave, and this gave it a certain logic and consistency that is totally lacking in Zork. Here, the geography sprawls wildly in ways that would be impossible in the real world. In Zork, a modern, industrialized dam sits just a few rooms away from the classical Land of the Dead, which is itself not far away from a troll who has stepped straight out of Tolkien. Thanks to the game’s method of creation, in which everyone sort of wildly piled in anything that seemed “cool” at the time, it possesses no internal coherency whatsoever. Throw in a crazy mix of writing styles and the blender effect just gets worse.

The hackers at MIT had thus created an excellent game engine, but a less than stellar game. An article published by Zork’s principle implementers shortly after the game’s completion would seem to indicate that they were already well aware of their game’s shortcomings. They are clearly thinking of the future here, and of the potential for IF beyond cliched fantasy dungeon crawls:

Another similar direction would be to change the milieu of the game. Zork, Adventure, and Haunt (the CFS games known to the authors) all flow back to D&D and the literary tradition of fantasy exemplified by J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and Fritz Leiber. There are, however, other milieus; science fiction is one that comes to mind quickly, but there are undoubtedly others (Lebling, IEEE).

In the same article, they also consider the “introduction of magic spells,” which is very prophetic in that the eventual Infocom’s most artistically successful fantasy games would revolve around just that.

The Birth Of Infocom and The Zork Trilogy

By May of 1979, shortly after the publication of the above article, most of the implementers of Zork were beginning to drift away from the MIT computer lab. Real life was catching up with them at last, and many were considering what prospects the future might hold outside the hallowed walls of academia. One thing seemed clear to everyone: in the future, computing would no longer revolve around the large institutional mainframes that housed Zork. The home computer revolution was in full swing, and all of the real business opportunity in the field lay with these tiny, primitive machines. A handful of MIT stalwarts led by Al Vezza, assistant administrator of the university’s Lab for Computer Science, decided to form a company to explore this new market. Among them were the principal creators of Zork. The name they chose, Infocom, was of a piece with the many futuristic-sounding trademarks that were popping up at the time: Microsoft, Compuware, VisiCorp, etc. Infocom was not founded with the intention of revolutionizing IF and making of it an art-form. That would happen accidentally. The group that founded Infocom rather envisioned creating something for the world of business software, possibly involving some research several had been involved in at MIT involving relational database systems. Creating such a product, or any other substantial piece of business software, would however take a great deal of time and money. Infocom needed something it could release quickly to get itself off the ground and generate some cash flow. Their minds soon turned back to that erstwhile hobby of theirs, Zork.

If Infocom could bring Zork to the microcomputer in anything like its original form, it would have a product that would easily trump the likes of the Adventure International games that currently dominated the market. By this time, a second generation of microcomputers was beginning to hit the market that was considerably more powerful than its predecessors. The Infocom team concluded that, through some ingenious hacking, they could fit about half of the original mainframe Zork into one of these machines. A key factor here was that, unlike Scott Adams and his peers, Infocom would not do their actual development on the microcomputers on which their games would eventually be deployed. They would rather rent time on a DEC mainframe for this purpose, then transfer their finished work to their games’ microcomputer hosts. Writing a complicated piece of software requires much more computing power than merely running it. Offloading the development to a mainframe thus allowed Infocom to create games of great sophistication compared to their peers, for, while writing something like Zork on a microcomputer of the day was completely out of the question, running it was not.

The key to their design was an imaginary computer chip called the “Z-machine.” This chip would be able to run Zork (or at least part of it) if the program were coded in a special, very compact language. Then the design called for each personal computer to have a program (called a Z-machine Interpreter Program or ZIP) that would interpret the special Z-machine language and make the computer act the same way that a real Z-machine would. In order to get Zork written in this special language, another language was invented, called Zork Implementation Language (ZIL), similar in many ways to MDL. Marc built a two-stage translator program that would translate a ZIL program, first into an assembly language and then further into the Z-machine language. He also built a ZIP so that a DECSystem–20 could emulate the Z-Machine (Anderson, “Final”).

The concept of an IF virtual machine had already been pioneered by Scott Adams. Infocom, however, took the idea to new heights. Their virtual machine would be a little marvel of clever design, remarkable in its power, compactness, and expandability. This Z-Machine that Infocom founders Joel Berez and Marc Blank invented during the second half of 1979 is in fact the same that is used, in an updated form, to run much of the IF that is produced today. Its remarkable longevity is truly a tribute to its designers. In creating it, Infocom cemented one of modern IF’s most cherished properties: the ability to run a single game file on a wide variety of computing devices. The Z-Machine today allows IF games, including Zork and the many Infocom classics that would follow it, to be played on devices that their designers never dreamed of, and has allowed them to live on long after the computers of their own time have passed into history.

Another key to bringing Zork home was Infocom’s pioneering use of virtual memory. The Z-Code story file for Zork I occupies 90K of storage alone. In addition to this, any computer hoping to run the game must also have memory for the actual Z-Code interpreter as well as space for a stack, in-game variables, etc. The TRS–80 microcomputer, a typical target machine for Infocom in those early days, had just 32K of memory. Infocom solved this seemingly insolvable problem by making use of the random-access capabilities of the floppy disks that were quickly replacing cassette tapes as the secondary storage system of choice in the microcomputer industry, paging into memory only those parts of the game that were needed at any particular point. On a tiny machine like the TRS–80, the results could be excruciatingly slow, as the disk drive ground for several seconds after virtually every input, but the fact that the game worked at all was something of a minor miracle. Now that responses from IF games are virtually instantaneous, players sometimes speak with nostalgia of those times. One could tell that one had solved a puzzle or otherwise accomplished something significant even before seeing the game’s response when the disk drive ground for a long time following an input, and the sense of anticipation of seeing the game’s eventual response was delicious.

Even with such magic, Infocom was forced to do considerable cutting and reorganizing to that first half of Zork to make it fit on a microcomputer. However, this actually improved the game:

In the process of being converted from MDL into ZIL, the program became “cleaner” and friendlier. The geographies of the maze and the coal mine were simplified so that the connections were less arbitrary, and in other places complexity was removed whenever it didn’t serve a justifiable purpose. For example, there was originally a barrel sitting near the top of Aragain Falls, but it was just a red herring; its only purpose was to lure unsuspecting adventurers inside and carry them over the falls to destruction. The Rainbow Room had its name changed to On the Rainbow, and that meant removing the silly joke about Rockefeller Center and the NBC Commissary. Since the Land of the (Living) Dead (the word “Living” was removed in order to fit the name on the status line) no longer led to the stairway where Zork III later began, the crystal skull (a brand-new treasure) was put there instead (Anderson, “Final”).

The resulting game was still far from a literary masterpiece, and its design was still rather disjointed, but the product as a whole was worlds better than anything else available at the time. Reviews, and subsequently sales, reflected this. Byte Magazine‘s gushing response was fairly typical: “No single advance in the science of adventure has been as bold and exciting as the introduction of Zork: The Great Underground Empire” (Liddil). A transcript of interaction with Zork I on the microcomputer will perhaps give some of its flavor, and convey just how advanced its parser and world model were compared with even the mainframe Adventure, much less the likes of Scott Adams’ games:

Zork: The Great Underground Empire part 1, release 1

(c) Copyright 1980 Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved. Zork is a trademark of Infocom, Inc.

West of House

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

A rubber mat saying ‘Welcome to Zork!’ lies by the door.

There is a small mailbox here.

>OPEN THE SMALL MAILBOX

Opening the mailbox reveals a leaflet.

>READ THE LEAFLET

(Taken)

Welcome to Zork: The Great Underground Empire

Zork: The Great Underground Empire is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it you will explore some of the most amazing territory ever seen by mortals. No computer should be without one!

The original ZORK was created by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling. It was inspired by the ADVENTURE game of Crowther and Woods. This version was created by Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, Joel Berez, and Scott Cutler.

>WALK AROUND THE HOUSE

North of House

You are facing the north side of a white house. There is no door here, and all the windows are boarded up. To the north a narrow path winds through the trees.

>AGAIN

Behind House

You are behind the white house. A path leads into the forest to the east. In one corner of the house there is a small window which is slightly ajar.

>LOOK IN THE WINDOW

You can see what appears to be a kitchen.

>GO IN

The kitchen window is closed.

>OPEN IT

With great effort, you open the window far enough to allow entry.

>GO IN

Kitchen

You are in the kitchen of the white house. A table seems to have been used recently for the preparation of food. A passage leads to the west and a dark staircase can be seen leading upward. A dark chimney leads down and to the east is a small window which is open.

On the table is an elongated brown sack, smelling of hot peppers.

A bottle is sitting on the table.

The glass bottle contains:

A quantity of water

>PICK UP

pick up what?

>ALL BUT THE SACK

kitchen table: An interesting idea…

glass bottle: Taken.

quantity of water: I can’t reach that.

>GO WEST

Living Room

You are in the living room. There is a door to the east, a wooden door with strange gothic lettering to the west, which appears to be nailed shut, and a large oriental rug in the center of the room.

There is a trophy case here. A battery-powered brass lantern is on the trophy case. Above the trophy case hangs an elvish sword of great antiquity.

Infocom’s slimmed-down microcomputer Zork was first published by Personal Software in a version for the Tandy TRS–80 in December, 1980, followed shortly by a version for the Apple II. By late 1981, Personal Software had sold almost 10,000 copies of the two versions combined, not a bad run for a game in those days.

Personal Software Zork’s rather incongruous cover art

(Violence actually hardly existed in the game)

Even though the game did fairly well, games were not really Personal Software’s priority. It had recently published the first usable microcomputer spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, which was selling at an even better clip than Zork, and for a substantially higher price. Personal Software soon changed its name VisiCorp to capitalize on VisiCalc’s success, and elected to pass on further offerings from Infocom. When Zork II, consisting of parts of the mainframe game that had been left out of Zork I along with a considerable amount of new material from David Lebling, arrived in late 1981, it appeared under only the Infocom name. Zork II is quite similar in feel to its predecessor, but is less disjointed and uneven and generally more consistent in its writing style and geography. Its highlight is a charming set-piece that pays tribute to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland with a pair of pills that when nibbled cause the player to shrink or grow.

Even more impressive is the final game of the original Zork Trilogy. Zork III consists mostly of new material from Marc Blank, with only part of the end-game and one other set-piece puzzle borrowed from the mainframe game. Its feel is dramatically different. In place of the wacky, self-referential humor of Zork I and Zork II is an ominous, brooding tone, which is established right from the opening text:

As in a dream, you see yourself tumbling down a great, dark staircase. All about you are shadowy images of struggles against fierce opponents and diabolical traps. These give way to another round of images: of imposing stone figures, a cool, clear lake, and, now, of an old, yet oddly youthful man. He turns toward you slowly, his long, silver hair dancing about him in a fresh breeze. “You have reached the final test, my friend! You are proved clever and powerful, but this is not yet enough! Seek me when you feel yourself worthy!” The dream dissolves around you as his last words echo through the void….

ZORK III: The Dungeon Master

Copyright 1982 by Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.

ZORK is a trademark of Infocom, Inc.

Release 17 / Serial number 840727

Endless Stair

You are at the bottom of a seemingly endless stair, winding its way upward beyond your vision. An eerie light, coming from all around you, casts strange shadows on the walls. To the south is a dark and winding trail.

Your old friend, the brass lantern, is at your feet.

The silly treasure hunts of the earlier games are gone, replaced by a quest to find and defeat a mythical Dungeon Master. When the player finds her way to the end - assuming she does, for this is a very tough game that is nevertheless scrupulously fair in a way its predecessors were not - she will experience events that subvert and re-contextualize not only this game but the whole trilogy. Zork III possesses a thematic unity and literary quality new to IF.

The Mature Infocom

A five-year golden age began for Infocom with the completion of the Zork Trilogy, during which the company produced some thirty works of IF of unprecedented sophistication, innovation, and consistency. Certainly, not every game is equal, but the fact that Infocom’s failures are often more interesting than their successes is a tribute to their restless prodding at the boundaries of what constitutes a text adventure. A generation of players learned to see the Infocom label as a guarantee of quality, promising that they would at the very least have a good time with a solid, bug-free adventure game, and that there was at least a chance of finding within a work of real innovation and artistic merit. For those of us in the modern IF community, the Infocom canon is the touchstone to which we return again and again. Whole genres of modern IF have sprung from single titles of Infocom. That said, it is I think important not to exaggerate Infocom’s admittedly impressive achievements. For all its creativity, the company was ultimately bound to the whims of a capricious computer game marketplace that was not necessary looking for innovative literary works, and it was also limited by the primitive hardware of its era. Freed of both these constraints, the modern IF community has created works that arguably surpass anything that came out of Infocom. Nevertheless, one cannot study IF without studying Infocom, for its work set the standard for quality and many of the ground rules that we still follow today.

An examination of the reasons behind Infocom’s remarkable artistic and, for a time, commercial success must begin with the technology employed in its games’ creation. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the implementers’ system of developing their games on a DEC mainframe and moving only the completed product to microcomputers enabled them to produce games of much greater complexity than competitors who were bound throughout the development process to the tiny micros on which their games would eventually be sold. On their mainframe, Infocom’s authors wrote in a programming language known as ZIL specifically designed for the production of IF games, having realized that the task was so specialized that a customized language was far superior a choice for the application than a more general purpose one. Marc Blank:

I think that it’s the whole of it – and it’s all made possible by the language we use. I mean, just imagine if the language that you use, instead of having FORs and NEXTs (BASIC keywords), had operations that dealt with things like people and objects. And it handled that in a very high-level sense, so you didn’t have to spend all your time chasing bits around, but could deal in high-level abstractions. And dealing in those terms is much easier, I mean, there’s so many things going on in a game like Deadline or Witness or actually any of the new games, Planetfall and Suspended, that you couldn’t keep track of them all unless you had a high-level language that was doing it all for you. It would take three to four years to write Deadline in machine language, and then you’d only have it running on one computer (Addams).

Infocom’s embrace of specialized tools for the creation of IF has been taken as received wisdom by the modern IF community. Virtually all quality games of the last ten years have been written in IF-specific languages like Inform or TADS, and an announcement of a new game that was written in a general-purpose language is always greeted with a decided skepticism that is borne of long experience. Likewise, Infocom’s use of a virtual machine - the Z-Machine - and an interpreter for the deployment of its stories remains the standard model today. In Infocom’s case, the Z-Machine actually brought with it a huge commercial advantage, for it allowed the company to easily sell its game on a wide variety of computing platforms with very little expenditure of time or energy. A single Infocom title was sometimes available in versions for more than two dozen separate machines that ranged from DEC mainframes to inexpensive Toy ‘R’ Us-style eight-bits.

From the consumer’s standpoint, unaware as they were of the technical underpinnings behind Infocom’s work, the company’s most obvious advantage over its competitors was its remarkably sophisticated parser. No one else in the industry really rivaled Infocom here, despite the claims of the occasional blustering upstart. Infocom constantly improved its parsing technology throughout the company’s lifetime, adding more shortcuts and convenience features, more vocabulary, more acceptable sentence structures, and even retro-fitting these changes back to its older games when possible. Even in its early work, “guess the verb” issues rarely cropped up for the average player. It was not until the late nineties, as Inform and TADS reached their maturity, that the IF world saw parsers equal to Infocom’s. Modern parsers have finally made strides beyond Infocom’s, but one must remember that Infocom’s games ran on laughably simplistic hardware compared to what we have available today. When one considers that fact, Infocom’s parser still seems as remarkable an achievement as ever.

Infocom’s innovative and powerful development system was evidence of its one of its greatest intangible strengths. Unlike the vast majority of their peers in the early computer games industry, the implementers at Infocom were not scruffy, self-taught bedroom coders. They were well-grounded in programming theory and more than capable of developing robust, long-term solutions to their needs. Although most were not actually engineering or computer science majors, their days spent hacking away in MIT’s computer science laboratory now served them well.

For all their wizardry, there was one area of computer technology that Infocom dismissed entirely for many years: only in their dying gasps did they begin including graphics in their game. When asked about this choice, Infocom usually invoked the somewhat clichéd truism of readers that the best images are those generated by the imagination, and in fact its marketing materials attempted to make its games’ lack of multimedia flash into a selling point:

We stick our graphics where the sun don’t shine. You’ll never see Infocom’s graphics on any computer screen. Because there’s never been a computer built by man that could handle the images we produce. We draw our graphics from the limitless imagery of your imagination - a technology so powerful, it makes any picture that’s ever come out of a screen look like graffiti by comparison. And nobody knows how to unleash your imagination like Infocom. Through our prose, your imagination makes you part of our stories…

In a way, Infocom’s disavowal of graphics was a very brave choice. By 1982, a very significant number of its competitors were following the path blazed by Sierra’s Mystery House and including images of some sort in their IF games, and a few years later Infocom stood virtually alone in the marketplace in placing its faith in pure text. Graham Nelson has estimated that roughly two-thirds of the IF games released during the commercial era were illustrated, a fact that is often forgotten today (Nelson 351). Some might argue that by sticking to its guns on this issue Infocom speeded its downfall, although there were enough other factors involved there that this is by no means an open and shut case to make. What does seem inarguable is that devoting all of the resources of the limited computer technology of the era to prose and world modeling rather than graphical displays allowed Infocom to create games of much greater complexity than would otherwise have been possible. There is something else, too, which bears directly on Infocom’s current hallowed reputation in the modern IF community. The graphics in its competitor’s contemporaneous games are so poor by modern standards that they distract the player from whatever virtues the games might otherwise possess. Infocom’s games, because they do not rely on now-dated visual flash, have a timeless quality about them that their competitors’ titles lack.

Infocom insisted fanatically on quality control. The company’s testing process became something of a legend in the industry. A single game would be passed through thirty-five or forty hands in a three-phase process before it was considered fit for release. Nor were Infocom’s games neglected following their release, as is demonstrated by this note that was included in most of them:

Here at Infocom, we take great pride in the quality of our stories. Even after they’re “out the door,” we’re constantly improving, honing, and perfecting. Your input is important. No matter how much testing we do, it seems that there are some “bugs” that never crawl into view until thousands of you begin doing all those wild and crazy things in the story. If you find a bug, or if you have a suggestion for some additional sentence syntaxes or vocabulary words, or if you found a particular puzzle too hard or too easy, or if you’d just like to tell us what you thought of the story, drop us a note!

In response to such feedback, new versions of the company’s older games were regularly released. Zork I went through a rather staggering seventy-some revisions over its lifetime as an Infocom product. This devotion to bug-swatting is another Infocom principal that has been embraced by the modern IF community. Probably the most frequently offered advice to a new or prospective IF author today is to “Beta test! Beta test! Beta test!” and there is even a website devoted to bringing authors together with testers willing to volunteer their time.

Of course, none of its technical strengths would have mattered terribly if Infocom had not employed a team of implementers, or “imps” as they called themselves, with the writing abilities and artistic vision to put the technology to good use. Surprisingly for a company formed by a group of MIT hackers whose backgrounds were in engineering and the sciences rather than the humanities, the literary quality of the average Infocom game was shockingly good. Further, Infocom was constantly experimenting with the forms of its games, trying to see just where it might take the seemingly limited genre of the all-text adventure game. The level of commercial and artistic success of these experiments varied greatly, and all too often not in tandem with one another, but this restless probing at the margins is another gift of Infocom to the modern IF community. Infocom was very much aware of the artistic potential of this new medium, and its authors felt themselves to be paving the way for others to follow. Implementer Mike Berlyn:

In one sense we are working within traditional genres – mystery, fantasy, science fiction – and in another we are still teaching ourselves, laying out the groundwork for what these things could be. For the most part, we are working without pioneers. In our own way we are like Louis L’Amour or Agatha Christie or Dashiell Hammett (Dyer).

In a 1983 Washington Post article, employee Michael Dornbrook expressed a similar sentiment: “Dornbrook believes Infocom’s games are ‘the beginning of a new art form,’ one that ‘could be a significant percentage of book reading 20 years from now’” (Suplee). Part and parcel to this attitude was a respect by the creators for their own work, something that is surprising in its rarity, then and now, in the computer games industry. Each game’s author was given prominent billing, and the company kept its complete back catalog in print throughout its lifetime, including those of its titles that were not terribly successful commercially, and, as discussed previously, even tweaked and improved its older works when necessary. These attitudes are closer to those of the book than the conventional computer game publisher, and, indeed, Infocom treated its products as occupying a somewhat hazy middle ground between the two. In keeping with company research that showed virtually all of its customers to be heavy readers of books, a good portion of its distribution was done not through conventional computer game channels but rather directly to booksellers.

Version 3 of the Z-Machine, its first mature iteration and the one for which most of Infocom’s games were authored, was limited to story files of no more than 128K. This is a tiny amount of space by modern standards, considerably smaller than the average digital camera photograph, but Infocom’s compression techniques made the most of it. Even with this ingenuity, though, there was room for no more text than a typical novella. Infocom partially surmounted this limitation by putting much of the background and atmospheric elements of its stories not in the games themselves but rather as accompanying materials in the game boxes. This tradition began almost accidentally, when Infocom was putting together the packaging for its first post-Zork adventure, the mystery Deadline. David Lebling:

Well the first packaging of Zork was just the disk and the manual, very prosaic, and the first one that had really exciting packaging was Deadline, the first murder mystery we did. We had seen some things by Dennis Wheatley, I don’t know what sort of books you’d call them, but they had clues, transcripts, all kinds of fun stuff in them, and I think it was Marc Blank seeing those things that motivated him to write Deadline and so we got the idea that it would be fun to have interesting stuff in our packaging too. It was such a success, and partly for that reason as well as being a good game, that the next time we did a game we thought, well, we can put some other keen stuff in it, and so we’ve just made a habit of it (Garret).

Later Infocom games would include a huge and bizarre collection of goodies to enhance the stories they told, including a starmap; a Stellar Patrol ID card; pocket fluff; a set of enchanter trading cards; a pen; a scratch-n-sniff card; a cardboard sundial; a set of bureaucratic forms in triplicate; a rubber centipede; and documents of all descriptions. Fans took to calling these extras “feelies.” Of course, the fact that an Infocom story could not be truly experienced and understood without its accompaniments helped to discourage piracy of the games. In fact, Infocom frequently included information in the packaging that was essential for completing a game for just this reason. Because the modern IF community is dependent on electronic distribution, this is one tradition that has been to some extent neglected, although some authors have chosen to manufacture feelies that may be optionally purchased to accompany their games. A website has even been set up for the purpose of selling them.

In the early days, Infocom’s creative packaging extended even to its boxes themselves. Most notable were the first releases of Starcross and Suspended. The former was shaped like a flying saucer; the latter had an embossed robotic mask jutting from its face. Both packages are much sought-after by collectors today, and change hands for hundreds of dollars. However, stores were not thrilled with trying to find room for such unorthodox shapes, and the cost of their manufacture was also rather prohibitive. Beginning in early 1984, Infocom settled on its classic “gray box” standardized package, a little marvel of compact, efficient, attractive design. In keeping with the company’s policy of constantly updating its back catalog, older titles were re-released in this new format.

The back of Infocom’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy box, showing the typically eclectic collection of feelies to be found within. Note that the actual program disk appears almost an afterthought.

At the same time that Infocom standardized its packaging, it began to categorize each of its stories by genre and difficulty level. Games were grouped into four genres: fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and “tales of adventure,” and five difficulty levels: junior (for children), introductory, standard, advanced, and expert. Both methods of categorization were rather problematic. Did consumers really need to be explicitly told what cookie-cutter genre a story occupied to decide whether to purchase it? Surely the description of the game on its box and the company’s other marketing efforts were sufficient for that decision to be made. Further, some of Infocom’s works were too unique and innovative to be easily pigeonholed into a single genre. Brian Mortiaty’s mournful atomic age tragedy Trinity, for instance, was arbitrarily given the label of fantasy even though it bore little relation to what the average consumer might think of when hearing that label. The idea of rating games by difficulty makes more sense in theory, but the execution was even more flawed. The ratings Infocom chose often seemed to bear little relation to the actual experience of players. For instance, one of Infocom’s most straightforward early games, Infidel, was incomprehensibly rated as an advanced level title. I remember playing that game for the first time, wondering when it would get tricky, only to find myself done with nary a head-scratch. The less charitable might even suggest that these ratings were unduly influenced by Infocom’s marketing goals. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Infocom’s collaborative adaptation of Douglas Adams’ best-selling novel, was rated as a standard level game, despite being laden with twisted puzzles built around Adams’ patented brand of illogical logic. One wonders whether Infocom’s desire to attract some of Adams’ legion of fans to IF made it choose the unintimidating standard rating. At any rate, Infocom eventually abandoned both classification systems altogether and allowed its stories to stand on their own merits.

A more successful innovation was Infocom’s “Invisiclues” line of hint books, one of which was made available for separate purchase for most games. To keep the reader from accidentally revealing the solutions to puzzles, all answers were printed in invisible ink which the player must reveal with a provided pen. This unique idea did not originate from within Infocom, but rather from a short-lived organization known as the Zork Users Group, which Mike Dornbrook founded in 1981 after a brief spell as a tester with Infocom. On the strength of Invisiclues and other innovations, the Zork Users Group turned a considerable profit for its founder, who was thereupon hired once again by Infocom itself to serve as head of marketing.

Infocom’s research revealed that the vast majority of its customers were repeat buyers. A fair number bought every game immediately upon its release. Being an Infocom player had something of the feeling of belonging to an exclusive club, a feeling partially created, deliberately or accidentally, by the company’s efforts to reach out to its customers. It sent to everyone who had purchased and registered a game in the recent past a free quarterly newsletter, initially called The New Zork Times and then renamed to The Status Line after a certain august but apparently humorless newspaper expressed its disapproval with rumblings of legal action. Within, along with the expected promotional materials and announcements of upcoming games, could be found humorous pieces, brain-teasers, contests, and sneak peaks at goings-on in Infocom’s Cambridge offices. Circulation of the newsletter peaked at a very respectable 250,000. Another unique outreach program was called “The Marathon of the Minds.” At a public location such as a college campus, Infocom would offer an about to be released title to several teams of fans, who would compete non-stop to see who could finish it first.

Infocom enjoyed several very good years in the wake of the Zork Trilogy’s initial success, and racked up some very impressive sales numbers for its time. The three Zork games sold more than one million copies together during the company’s decade in existence, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy alone surpassed 250,000 in sales. Even the average, unlicensed game could generally be relied upon to sell 50,000 copies during the company’s heyday. A glance at the Softsel list of the top-selling entertainment software for December 12, 1983 shows Infocom holding down the top position, along with two additional games in the top ten and seven more rounding out the top forty. The staff of Infocom was young and a bit brash, doing something genuinely new and exciting and doing well financially at the same time, and David Lebling displays some of their swagger in a 1984 Boston Globe article: “‘This business began as a lark,’ says staff writer Dave Lebling, ‘and it is looking less larky every day. We are taking serious money in, and we are putting serious money out. All to make games’” (Dyer).

Certainly one thing that comes through from speaking with the implementers today and from perusing issues of their newsletter is that Infocom was a very fun place to be. In a recent interview, Lebling described his co-workers thus: “They were very free-spirited. More importantly, they were doing something well and having fun doing it” (Briceno). IF scholar Graham Nelson writes that “former hands mostly look back on the heyday as a happy, one-time thing, like a summer romance” (350). Practical jokes and assorted office hijinx abounded, yet the team there was absolutely dedicated to putting out the best product it possibly could while advancing the state of what it saw as a genuinely new art-form. That combination of a sense of fun and an absolute dedication to not only technical but also literary quality comes through in virtually every one of the games I will discuss in detail in the next chapter.

Sources for Further Investigation

Games:

Zork. David Lebling, Marc Blank, Tim Anderson, Bruce Daniels, and others.

The portable C source of Zork’s Dungeon variant is available at http://ifarchive.giga.or.at/if-archive/games/source/dungn27s.zip.

An MS-DOS executable of the same is available at http://ifarchive.giga.or.at/if-archive/games/pc/dungn27a.zip.

Zork I: The Great Underground Empire. 1980. David Lebling and Marc Blank; Infocom.

Released as freeware by Activision, and available at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Download/zork1.zip.

Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz. 1981. David Lebling and Marc Blank; Infocom.

Released as freeware by Activision, and available at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Download/zork2.zip.

Zork III: The Dungeon Master. 1982. David Lebling and Marc Blank; Infocom.

Released as freeware by Activision, and available at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Download/zork3.zip.

Other Works:

Addams, Shay. “The Wizards of Infocom.” Computer Games, February 1984.

Available online at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/wizards.html.

Anderson, Tim and Stu Galley. “The History of Zork - First in a Series.” The New Zork Times, Vol. 4, Num. 1, Winter 1985.

Available online at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/articles/articles.zip.

Anderson, Tim and Stu Galley. “The History of Zork - Second in a Series.” The New Zork Times, Vol. 4, Num. 2, Spring 1985.

Available online at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/articles/articles.zip.

Anderson, Tim and Stu Galley. “The History of Zork - The Final (?) Chapter: MIT, MDL, ZIL, ZIP.” The New Zork Times, Vol. 4, Num. 3, Summer 1985.

Available online at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/articles/articles.zip.

Blank, Marc S. and S.W. Galley. “How to Fit a Large Program into a Small Machine.” Creative Computing, July 1980.

Available online at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/articles/articles.zip.

Briceno, Hector, Wesley Chao, Andrew Glenn, Stanley Hu, Ashwin Krishnamurthy, and Bruce Tsuchida. Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc.

Available online at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/info/infocom-paper.pdf.

Dyer, Richard. “Masters of the Game.” The Boston Globe Magazine, May 6 1984.

Available online at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/globe84.html.

Garret, Roger. “Infocom Special.” Your Computer, vol. 7, no. 3, May 1987.

Available online at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/yc87.html.

Infocom Advertisement. “We Stick our Graphics Where the Sun Don’t Shine.” Analog #11, April/May 1983.

Available online at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/adverts/ad1.jpeg.

Lebling, P. David. “Zork and the Future of Computerized Fantasy Simulations.” Byte, December 1980.

Available online at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/articles/articles.zip.

Lebling, P. David, Marc S. Blank, and Timothy A. Anderson. “Zork: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation Game.” IEEE Computer, vol.12, num. 4, April 1979.

Available online at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/articles/articles.zip.

Nelson, Graham. The Inform Designer’s Manual. 4[th] ed. The Interactive Fiction Libray: St. Charles, Illinois, 2001.

Available online at http://ifarchive.flavorplex.com/if-archive/infocom/compilers/inform6/manuals/designers_manual_4.pdf.

O’Brian, Paul. “Archeology.” IF-Review, June 29 2001.

http://www.ministryofpeace.com/if-review/reviews/20010629.html.

Sherwin, Robb. “nevermind.” Usenet post to rec.games.int-fiction, June 5 2001.

Suplee, Curt. “Through the Zorking Glass.” Washington Post, December 22 1983.

Available online at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/post83.html.

Chapter 5: The Infocom Canon

I create fictional worlds. I create experiences.

I am exploring a new medium for telling stories.

My readers should become immersed in the story and forget where they are. They should forget about the keyboard and the screen, forget everything but the experience. My goal is to make the computer invisible.

I want as many people as possible to share these experiences. I want a broad range of fictional worlds, and a broad range of “reading levels.” I can categorize our past works and discover where the range needs filling in. I should also seek to expand the categories to reach every popular taste.

In each of my works, I share a vision with the reader. Only I know exactly what the vision is, so only I can make the final decisions about content and style. But I must seriously consider comments and suggestions from any source, in the hope that they will make the sharing better.

I know what an artist means by saying, “I hope I can finish this work before I ruin it.” Each work-in-progress reaches a point of diminishing returns, where any change is as likely to make it worse as to make it better. My goal is to nurture each work to that point. And to make my best estimate of when it will reach that point.

I can’t create quality work by myself. I rely on other implementers to help me both with technical wizardry and with overcoming the limitations of the medium. I rely on testers to tell me both how to communicate my vision better and where the rough edges of the work need polishing. I rely on marketers and salespeople to help me share my vision with more readers. I rely on others to handle administrative details so I can concentrate on the vision.

None of my goals is easy. But all are worth hard work. Let no one doubt my dedication to my art.

– “The Implementer’s Creed” (Stu Galley, 1985)

The 35 Canonical Infocom Works

1980

Zork I: The Great Underground Empire by David Lebling and Marc Blank

1981

Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz by David Lebling and Marc Blank

1982

Zork III: The Dungeon Master by David Lebling and Marc Blank

Deadline by Marc Blank

Starcross by David Lebling

1983

Suspended by Mike Berlyn

The Witness by Stu Galley

Planetfall by Steve Meretzky

Enchanter by David Lebling and Marc Blank

Infidel by Mike Berlyn

1984

Sorcerer by Steve Meretzky

Seastalker by Stu Galley and Jim Lawrence

Cutthroats by Mike Berlyn

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky

Suspect by David Lebling

1985

Wishbringer by Brian Moriarty

A Mind Forever Voyaging by Steve Meretzky

Spellbreaker by David Lebling

1986

Ballyhoo by Jeff O’Neill

Trinity by Brian Moriarty

Leather Goddesses of Phobos by Steve Meretzky

Moonmist by Stu Galley and Jim Lawrence

1987

Hollywood Hijinx by Dave Anderson and Liz Cyr-Jones

Bureaucracy by Douglas Adams and the staff of Infocom

Stationfall by Steve Meretzky

The Lurking Horror by David Lebling

Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It by Jeff O’Neill

Plundered Hearts by Amy Briggs

Beyond Zork by Brian Moriarty

Border Zone by Marc Blank

1988

Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels by Bob Bates

Zork Zero by Steve Meretzky

1989

Shogun by James Clavell and David Lebling

Journey by Marc Blank

Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur by Bob Bates

The games listed above represent Infocom’s entire output of IF, but they are not the only pieces of software released with an Infocom label on their box. The company made one foray into non-narrative based entertainment software with the “computerized board game” Fooblitzky, and toward the end of its lifetime released at its new corporate masters at Activision’s insistence a few “Infocomics,” a line of rather underwhelming computerized comic books. After Infocom had been effectively dismantled by Activision as an independent entity it continued to exist for several years in name only as a label for graphical adventures and RPGs. Finally, there was the most significant of all Infocom’s non-IF products, the relational database Cornerstone whose market failure ultimately brought about the company’s downfall. That sorry story we will reserve for a future chapter.

I will devote this chapter to a discussion of the more intrinsically interesting or significant of the titles listed above. I should emphasize before beginning that the stories I will discuss are not necessary the “best” in the Infocom corpus. The company produced its share of solid adventure games that do not try to push the boundaries of the form but are nevertheless skillfully designed and well worth playing. David Lebling’s hard science fiction puzzlefest Starcross and Dave Anderson’s B-movie send-up Hollywood Hijinx are just two examples. In an historical narrative such as this one, though, concerned as it is with the development of IF as an art-form, a line must be drawn somewhere, and so these games as well as a considerable number of others will not be discussed in depth. Similarly, not all of the games I will describe in detail entirely “work.” To pick two examples, most would agree that Beyond Zork and Border Zone represent failed experiments for Infocom, yet the direction they were attempting to go is important and interesting enough that they are given space here. I can perhaps best express my guiding philosophy by saying that Hollywood Hijinx is a better game than Border Zone, but Border Zone is more important. If you my reader are simply looking for a well-crafted game to play, some of my choices may not be ideal; if, on the other hand, you are interested in surveying the development of IF as an art-form, I believe the games I will describe are the ones that are most worth your time. In the discussions to follow, I will occasionally “spoil” key plot and perhaps even puzzle elements of the games. If you wish to experience them untainted by such, play them first and return to this essay later. You have been warned. Finally, I have left my discussion of Infocom’s final four illustrated works for a later chapter, being as they arise more from its final gasps for life than from the burgeoning creativity of its glory days.

The Early Mysteries: Deadline, The Witness, and Suspect

Infocom’s first non-Zork title was something of a shot across the bows of the adventure game community as a whole. Written by Marc Blank, it was called Deadline, and it marked a clean break with the fantasy settings and exploration-focussed play of most IF of the time in taking its cues from the hard-boiled mystery novels of authors such as Raymond Chandler. Some might argue that this is merely replacing one somewhat cliched genre with another, but it did at least have the virtue of freshness. Infocom would largely rely on genre fiction conventions throughout its run, and for good reason. As Janet Murray noted in a commentary on interactive narrative in general:

Genre fiction is appropriate for electronic narrative because it scripts the interactor. When I begin a CD-ROM murder mystery, I know I am supposed to question all the characters I meet about what they were doing at the time of the murder and keep track of all the suspects’ alibis. I will use whatever primitives I am given (navigation through the space, conducting an interview, picking up pieces of evidence and looking at them under a microscope, etc.) for enacting these pre-scripted scenes. In a Western adventure I can be counted on to try to shoot at the bad guys, and in a horror story I will always enter the haunted house (Murray 192).

In the case of Deadline, the story revolves around a wealthy industrialist who has been found dead, apparently by suicide. The player takes the role of private detective who has been hired by the dead man’s attorney to clear up any lingering suspicions, and given a whopping twelve hours to investigate and make her report. Naturally, the case turns out to be much more complicated than it first appears. Marc Blank:

“I thought it was a great idea because most people, when they read mysteries, are constantly trying to think ahead, what happened. ‘Ooh, I would have looked here, I would have done this. I would have been more clever.’ So, it seemed to lend itself perfectly” (Greenlee).

Although a much smaller, tighter game than Zork, Deadline is in many ways vastly more ambitious. As a mystery, it revolves not around mechanical puzzles and inanimate objects, but character interaction. The story it is attempting to tell, while hardly War and Peace, would not be out of place in a pulp paperback. Even that level of storytelling represents a major step from what anyone had attempted in IF before. It was in fact the desire to pack more story into this game that caused Infocom to begin its long-standing tradition of including feelies and atmospheric documentation in its game boxes. Of particular note here is the way the game and its documentation work together to give the player a definite role to play. Granted, that role - the hard-bitten gumshoe - may be clichéd, but we nevertheless see here a major leap toward true interactive storytelling when we compare the protagonist of Deadline with the faceless, generic “adventurer” of Zork and similar games. All of Infocom’s subsequent games would follow Deadline’s lead to a greater or lesser extent is this respect.

In contrast to the sprawling caves and wilderness of Zork, Deadline all takes place within the confines of a single house and its grounds. Within can be found six individuals, all of them possessing, in classic mystery fashion, motive and possibly means and opportunity to murder the old man. In a remarkable feat of programming for such an early game, these characters move about the mansion of their own accord throughout the day, engaging in suspicious and not-so-suspicious actions and displaying quite a remarkable degree of verisimilitude. By being in the right place at the right time and by taking the right actions, the player can cause them to change their plans and perhaps even incriminate themselves. The player must not only deduce the identity of the killer - I trust my reader will not be surprised to learn that Marshall Robner’s death was not a suicide - but collect sufficient incriminating evidence to satisfy the police and hopefully force a confession, all while avoiding death at the hands of a murderer who may decide to eliminate this nosy P.I. once and for all, should she get too close to the truth. Another enemy is the clock, which clicks down at the rate of one minute per turn. Should time expire without the killer being found, justice will not be served and the player will have effectively lost the game.

Following the release of Deadline, Infocom repeated its formula twice more, with Stu Galley’s The Witness and David Lebling’s Suspect. Most critics today agree that the first game is the best, although all three are regarded more as noble failures than unqualified successes.

Most of the flaws that lead to that consensus arise from the games’ most interesting feature, their independent cast of characters. Because these characters move about the geography and act of their own accord, the player is forced to magically be at the right place at the right time over and over to have a chance of solving the mystery. The games give the player very little clue about when and where that is, meaning that she will likely have to restart many times before bringing the games to a successful conclusion. Some might not be bothered terribly by this, choosing to the see the games as a sort of IF Groundhog Day to be lived over and over until the player gets it right. Modern IF theory, however, generally emphasizes that a successful completion of a game should not depend on knowledge gained from previous, unsuccessful attempts. These three games were the worst violators of this rule in the entire Infocom canon, although hardly the worst in the IF world of the eighties, where attention to good game design was all too often sadly lacking.

The character interaction itself is another problem. Although the authors did their best, Infocom was operating under such stringent hardware restriction that it was difficult to implement more than a smattering of dialogue. Thus the player is likely to spend much of her time trying to find some way to communicate, only to receive a stream of rather nonsensical replies. No amount of clever writing for the responses that are implemented can quite make up for this.

In both of these problems, but particularly the second, Infocom was already struggling with issues that still plague creators of IF today. It is perhaps little surprise that Infocom itself seems to have eventually grown frustrated with the limitations of its possible implementations. After Suspect’s release in 1984, the company did not release any more games that were quite this dependent on character interaction. Its later mysteries Ballyhoo and Moonmist had some of the elements of their predecessors, but relied less on independently acting characters and dialogue in favor of more traditional adventure game puzzles. Even most modern IF mysteries, such as Kent Tessman’s Guilty Bastards and Irene Callaci’s Dangerous Curves, have generally trended toward the model of these later works. If Infocom’s reach had somewhat exceeded its grasp, however, the results are nevertheless fascinating as the first serious attempt at believable character interaction in IF.

Suspended: A Cryogenic Nightmare

In 1982, Infocom hired published science fiction author Mike Berlyn as a designer, quite a coup for a company with the stated goal of dragging IF toward some sort of literary respectability. Ironically, Berlyn’s first game for the company turned out to be the least “literary” that Infocom would ever release. The player takes the part of a disembodied brain in control of an underground complex that houses devices that regulate the weather of a planet. The complex has been damaged, and the player must repair it with the aid of six robotic drones, any one of which she can mentally inhabit at any time. The complication arises from the fact each of the six robots has its own specialized ability. One can see; one can manipulate objects; one can detect vibrations; one can hear; and one can interface with computers. The most unique is Poet, who, according to the game’s documentation, “makes the best of what he perceives, turning his input into occasionally bewildering output.” To save the complex, the player must direct the robots to where and when they will do the most good. This is easier said than done, however, particularly as each robot takes time to move from place to place. Careful planning, and not a small amount of that old bugaboo learning by death, is thus required to deal with the quick series of disasters that strike the complex over the course of the game. Infocom even provided in Suspended’s box a map of the complex and a set of counters representing the six robots to help the player to keep track of things.

It is probably fair to ask whether Suspended is really IF at all, as Graeme Cree discussed in his review for SPAG:

It might be best not to think of Suspended as a work of Interactive Fiction at all. It is a pseudo-simulation game, written before software technology was developed enough to develop real simulation games. It is a game for frustrated would-be air traffic controllers who enjoy coordinating multiple activities from a central location, much more than it is a work of fiction. It is a game for people who like to play WITH games, not merely play them (Cree).

Whatever its (lack of) narrative qualities, however, Suspended carries a unique fascination as a simulation of a remarkably complex system, which Cree touches upon in the excerpt above. It marks the farthest point to which the company would stretch its basic IF model, a fact that is somewhat surprising considering that it was released quite early in the company’s run. The game is well-worth playing about with today, although those who envision finishing it should be warned that it is frighteningly difficult.

Suspended’s model of an omniscient player hopping in and out of and directly manipulating machines actually pops up fairly frequently in IF. Paul O’Brian’s LASH, for instance, sees the player controlling an automated drone sifting through the rubble of a contaminated war zone. A more explicit homage, right down to its excruciating difficulty, is Dan Shiovitz’s fascinating Bad Machine.

Floyd and Planetfall

Planetfall stands out in Infocom’s catalog for several reasons. It marks the debut of prolific implementer Steve Meretzky, and it is one of most complete attempts at really telling a coherent story in the company’s early catalog. Most of all, though, Planetfall is remembered for the player’s little robotic playmate Floyd.

Meretzky had attended MIT as an architecture major at the same time as the core team that would eventually form Infocom. After spending a year or so working for a construction company, Meretzky decided that computer games were more to his taste, and secured a position with his old college mates’ new company, where he was soon allowed to design his own game. The result is, at least on the surface, a silly science fiction spoof. The plot of the game involves the player, a Stellar Patrol Ensign Seventh Class whose primary duties entail scrubbing down ships’ deck and other more noxious places, escaping from her exploding starship to land on an uncharted and seemingly uninhabited world. There she discovers an abandoned research complex, and begins piecing together a mystery.

At this stage some of the silliness subsides and a genuinely interesting plot begins to develop. Much of the gameplay is fairly typical of IF then and now: the player must repair machinery, open up access to new areas, get computer systems back online, etc. However, as she goes about these tasks she gradually discovers how the planet came to be abandoned through various items and printed materials she finds lying around, many of which exist not as an element to be used in solving the game’s puzzles but for background flavor only. The story she pieces together is compelling and tragic, involving a fatal disease that is sweeping the planet and a desperate attempt by the planet’s inhabitants to stop its progress. This method of telling a complex story by letting the player discover it after the fact, rather than participating directly, might be considered a cop-out by some, but it works surprisingly well when done properly, as it is here. It is in fact used quite frequently in IF and other forms of interactive narrative today, as it allows the designer to tell a coherent, complete story without worrying about the player mucking it up, as it were.

The complex is also littered with tools and other objects which often have no bearing at all on solving the game, but lend the game’s setting a resonance that is rare in IF of this vintage. Some players actually find these “red herrings,” which would come to be a trademark of Meretzky’s work, deeply annoying, having become used to the typical adventure game rule of every object having a purpose. I think most would agree, though, that the very lack of neat symmetry in the game lends it a messy, real-world believability. At times, Planetfall really does feel like interactive literature, rather than a game-like text adventure.

The elements I have already described would by themselves make Planetfall an important work, but the game also had a secret weapon in the form of Floyd. Floyd is a little maintenance droid - think an even more happy-go-lucky R2D2 with the ability to speak - who the player can discover and activate quite soon after arriving at the complex. He then accompanies the player through the bulk of the story as the faithful sidekick, occasionally piping up with a request to play “hider and seeker” or “hucka-bucka-beanstalk.” Floyd is consistently amusing and absolutely lovable. He even breaks down the game’s fourth wall at one point. If the player elects to SAVE her game in Floyd’s presence, he will say, “Oh, boy! Are we gonna try something dangerous now?” Meretzky’s achievement with Floyd is amazing not least because there is so little to it really. Floyd actually does very little other than trail the player about and pop off with the occasional canned phrase. Trying to hold a conversation with him his pointless, as he is almost entirely non-interactive, and in only a couple of places is he even useful for solving puzzles. Yet, virtually everyone who plays Planetfall falls in love with him and remembers him forever, which makes a scene near the end of the game, when he willingly sacrifices his “life” for the player, perhaps the most poignant in the Infocom canon. Meretzky even manages to work in a plug for Infocom’s earlier Starcross without seeming crass:

>look through window

You can see a large laboratory, dimly illuminated. A blue glow comes from a crack in the northern wall of the lab. Shadowy, ominous shapes move about within the room. On the floor, just inside the door, you can see a magnetic-striped card.

Floyd stands on his tiptoes and peers in the window. “Looks dangerous in there,” says Floyd. “I don’t think you should go inside.” He peers in again. “We’ll need card there to fix computer. Hmmm… I know! Floyd will get card. Robots are tough. Nothing can hurt robots. You open the door, then Floyd will rush in. Then you close door. When Floyd knocks, open door again. Okay? Go!” Floyd’s voice trembles slightly as he waits for you to open the door.

>open door

The door opens and Floyd, pausing only for the briefest moment, plunges into the Bio Lab. Immediately, he is set upon by hideous, mutated monsters! More are heading straight toward the open door! Floyd shrieks and yells to you to close the door.

>close door

The door closes.

From within the lab you hear ferocious growlings, the sounds of a skirmish, and then a high-pitched metallic scream!

>z

Time passes…

You hear, slightly muffled by the door, three fast knocks, followed by the distinctive sound of tearing metal.

>open door

The door opens.

Floyd stumbles out of the Bio Lab, clutching the mini-booth card. The mutations rush toward the open doorway!

>close door

The door closes.

And not a moment too soon! You hear a pounding from the door as the monsters within vent their frustration at losing their prey.

Floyd staggers to the ground, dropping the mini card. He is badly torn apart, with loose wires and broken circuits everywhere. Oil flows from his lubrication system. He obviously has only moments to live.

You drop to your knees and cradle Floyd’s head in your lap. Floyd looks up at his friend with half-open eyes. “Floyd did it … got card. Floyd a good friend, huh?” Quietly, you sing Floyd’s favorite song, the Ballad of the Starcrossed Miner:

O, they ruled the solar system

Near ten thousand years before

In their single starcrossed scout ships

Mining ast’roids, spinning lore.

Then one true courageous miner

Spied a spaceship from the stars

Boarded he that alien liner

Out beyond the orb of Mars.

Yes, that ship was filled with danger

Mighty monsters barred his way

Yet he solved the alien myst’ries

Mining quite a lode that day.

O, they ruled the solar system

Near ten thousand years before

’Til one brave advent’rous spirit

Brought that mighty ship to shore.

As you finish the last verse, Floyd smiles with contentment, and then his eyes close as his head rolls to one side. You sit in silence for a moment, in memory of a brave friend who gave his life so that you might live.

Janet Murray writes of the effect Floyd’s sacrifice has on the player:

At this point the game changes from a challenging puzzle to an evocative theatrical experience. The escape from the planet continues, but without Floyd’s company the player feels lonely and bereaved. (..) The death of Floyd is a minor milestone on the road from puzzle gaming to an expressive narrative art. It demonstrates that the potential for compelling computer stories does not depend on high-tech animation or expensively produced video footage but on the shaping of such dramatic moments (Murray 53).

Meretzky was unfortunately unable to stick to his dramatic guns. At the end of the game the player not only revives the inhabitants of the planet, who were as it turns out only in suspended animation awaiting the cure for the disease which the player has just obligingly provided, but is also greeted by a resurrected Floyd, repaired by the planet’s engineers. This scene leaves a bad taste in my mouth, turning as it does Floyd’s death scene into a sort of “gotcha!” moment and robbing it of the very real weight it carried before. Nevertheless, the fact that the game can invoke such discussion at all is remarkable. In a contemporaneous advertisement, another young computer game publisher called Electronic Arts asked, “Can a computer make you cry?” For many thousands of players, Planetfall provided a resoundingly positive answer.

Planetfall is flawed in many ways when viewed through contemporary eyes. Pointless annoyances abound. The player can only carry a very limited number of objects, which means she must constantly trek back and forth across the complex toting what she needs to where it will be of use. She must eat and sleep at regular intervals, which involves more tedious trekking to and from the complex’s mess hall and sleeping quarters. Perhaps worst of all, the player is gradually being consumed by the disease that is still present in the planet’s atmosphere, meaning that her game is likely to end prematurely with her death from disease, forcing a lot of re-playing of already completed stages. Infocom would largely abandon traditional text adventures annoyances like these over the year or so following Planetfall’s release, but here they are still all too present. Nevertheless, Planetfall is well worth playing today. Even its annoyances seem somehow less egregious for being wrapped up in such an otherwise charming package, and little Floyd remains probably the best-remembered IF character ever.

Planetfall became one of Infocom’s most popular titles, and Meretzky eventually brought Floyd back for a sequel, Stationfall. While a perfectly well-crafted game, it lacked the fresh charm of its predecessor. Activision did considerable work on a third, graphical game in the mid-nineties, to be called Planetfall: The Search for Floyd. The project was cancelled, perhaps fortunately, before its completion, and only a trailer remains as evidence that it ever existed. The science fiction comedy genre that Planetfall pioneered, on the other hand, remains alive and well in IF. See Harry Hol’s Dutch Dapper IV: The Final Voyage for an enjoyable recent example.

The Enchanter Trilogy: Enchanter, Sorcerer, and Spellbreaker

In light of Infocom’s extraordinary recent run of creativity, one might question the motivation behind David Lebling and Marc Blank’s decision to return to Zorkian fantasy in 1983 with Enchanter. Even if the huge sales of the Zork trilogy were an impetus, though, Lebling and Blank nevertheless did themselves proud with the result. Enchanter is set in the same world as Zork, but it shows off its authors’ improved design and writing skills to fine effect. For one, the game features an actual plot:

It must be the warlock Krill. The odd disappearances, the mysterious dissolution of regions sacred to the Circle, the lessening of the Powers - these could only be his handiwork. The Circle gathers and its leader, the esteemed Belboz, reveals to them an ancient document which portends evil days much like our own.

“Krill’s evil must be unmade,” he begins, “but to send a powerful Enchanter is ill-omened. It would be ruinous to reveal oversoon our full powers.” A ripple of concern spreads over the face of each Enchanter. Belboz pauses, and collects his resolve. “Have hope! This has been written by a hand far wiser than mine!”

He recites a short spell and you appear. Belboz approaches, transfixing you with his gaze, and hands you the document. The other Enchanters await his decree. “These words, written ages ago, can have only one meaning. You, a novice Enchanter with but a few simple spells in your Book, must seek out Krill, explore the Castle he has overthrown, and learn his secrets. Only then may his vast evil be lessened or, with good fortune, destroyed.”

The Circle rises and intones a richly woven spell, whose many textures imbue the small, darkened chamber with warmth and hope. There is a surge of power; you are Sent.

As the introductory text above indicates, the player must infiltrate and explore the evil warlord Krill’s castle, gathering the materials he will use to eventually destroy him. While nothing here really rises above typical genre fantasy, it is consistently well-written. In spite of some lingering “old-school” annoyances such as the need to eat and sleep and an overall time limit, the game as a whole reads and plays very well even today. The player even befriends a turtle at one point who is almost the equal of Floyd in loyalty and lovability.

The most interesting thing about Enchanter, though, which gives it a markedly different feel from Zork, is the introduction of magic spells. Rather than the sword-wielding, treasure-looting simpleton of Zork, the player here is a magician, albeit a young, inexperienced magician. As such, he starts the game with a spell book containing a few beginning spells:

My Spell Book

The blorb spell (safely protect a small object as though in a strong box).

The nitfol spell (converse with the beasts in their own tongue).

The frotz spell (cause something to give off light).

The gnusto spell (write a magic spell into a spell book).

As the game continues, the player will have the opportunity to acquire a considerable number of additional spells, ranging from the obviously useful (“The rezrov spell - open a locked or enchanted object”) to the simply bizarre (“The filfre spell - cause gratuitous fireworks to appear”). Solving many of the game’s puzzles, and ultimately bringing down Krill, is dependent on the use of this magic. Using a spell to solve a problem in an especially clever way is very satisfying. Further, one of the most charming aspects of the game comes when the player tries, accidentally or on purpose, to use magic in the “wrong” way. Lebling and Blank have anticipated and written in many amusing responses for these attempts, which makes Enchanter (and, later, its two sequels) among the most enjoyable of Infocom’s games to simply play about in in an “I wonder what would happen if…” sort of way. The addition of unpredictable magic gives the whole proceeding a lighter air than Zork, more Piers Anthony – without the creepy fixation on adolescent sexuality – than Tolkien.

Lebling and Blank even find room for a bit of self-referential humor. The player at one point encounters what seems to be the adventurer from Zork, who putters about engaging in typical adventure behavior, from trying out strange actions just for the sake of it (“The adventurer tries to eat his sword. I don’t think it would agree with him.”) to picking up every object not nailed down in his vicinity. At another point, the player briefly peeks behind the curtain at implementers Lebling and Blank themselves. All the while, the game as a whole somehow remains serious, never slipping into the realm of pure camp or parody.

The second game of the trilogy, Sorcerer, was a bit disappointing compared to its predecessor. It was cobbled together by Steve Meretzky partially from original material and partially from the last remaining unused parts of the original mainframe Zork. To this was grafted a plot involving the disappearance of the head of the player’s Circle of Enchanters, Belboz. The spellcasting remains, and continues to charm, but Meretzky’s gonzo style of humor does not always strike the right note for the setting, and the game as a whole has, as one might imagine from its origins, a rather patchwork feel. It is remembered today mostly for two of the most original and satisfying puzzles in Infocom’s oeuvre: a new take on the maze which manages to make the hoary old adventure game stalwart actually fun to solve again, and a time travel puzzle in which the player must do what needs to be done without being spotted or otherwise violating the bounds of causality, lest the resulting paradox cause him to “cease to exist.”

The final game of the trilogy, Lebling’s Spellbreaker, was much more satisfying, if also much more difficult. Spellbreaker was allegedly written for a certain cadre of Infocom fans who continually wrote the company to say that their games were not hard enough. “You want hard? I’ll give you hard!” was apparently Lebling’s response, and Spellbreaker was the result. One hopelessly under-clued puzzle aside, the game stands even today as a model of how to do hard IF without crossing the line, continually violated by so many other companies in the eighties, into unfairness. Spellbreaker is hair-pullingly difficult, but - except, regrettably, in one place -it never abuses the player’s faith, which makes it immensely satisfying to finally solve. The time-travel puzzle from Sorcerer even returns in another form. The magic spells from the earlier two games also return, and again much fun is to be had through random experimentation with their effects. However, the game’s humor, while definitely present, is much more understated than that of Sorcerer or even Enchanter. There is a chilly, atmospheric austerity here that actually reminds me most of Zork III.

By the time of Spellbreaker, the player’s character, having defeated evil and saved the realm from disaster twice before, has become an extremely powerful and respected wizard. Magic, however, is failing through the land, and the player is left to seek out the cause and presumably stop it. Things do not turn out quite that simply, however, as the game’s ending subverts the fantasy genre and with it the player’s own expectations in a deviously clever way to make a point about the primacy, at least in Lebling’s eyes, of science and reason over magic and superstition:

You find yourself back in Belwit Square, all the guildmasters and even Belboz crowding around you. “A new age begins today,” says Belboz after hearing your story. “The age of magic is ended, as it must, for as magic can confer absolute power, so it can also produce absolute evil. We may defeat this evil when it appears, but if wizardry builds it anew, we can never ultimately win. The new world will be strange, but in time it will serve us better.”

Your score is 600 of a possible 600, in 1057 moves. This puts you in the class of Scientist.

The player’s class immediately before scoring those final points and solving the game was, by contrast, Archimage.

The system of magic pioneered in these games has proven to be enduringly popular in IF, and with good reason. It is, for reasons somewhat hard to put into words, just plain fun. For all of IF’s occasional literary pretensions, sometimes that is more than reason enough. Graham Nelson’s Balances and John Schiff’s Threnody make particularly entertaining use of the Enchanter model of spellcasting, and the names of the spells from the original Infocom trilogy have been adopted by the modern IF community as names for many of its interpreters and utilities. Finally, for an even more devious variation on Sorcerer’s classic time travel puzzle, see half sick of shadow’s fascinating 2004 IF Comp entry All Things Devours.

The First Interactive Tragedy: Infidel

At first glance, Mike Beryln’s second game for Infocom, Infidel, is as traditional as Suspended is outré. The player is tasked with exploring a newly discovered buried Egyptian pyramid and collecting the treasure that lies within. To do so, he must contend with a variety of traps and other obstacles, but not a single living creature. This is in fact the only Infocom game in which the player is absolutely alone from start to finish. Its puzzles are generally well-crafted and satisfying, but not terribly original even for its time, and the game’s reputation has certainly not been improved by the endless stream of mediocre adventure games that followed it in mining ancient Egypt for source material. While its successor’s failings are not Infidel’s fault, there would still be little to prompt a discussion here were it not for the back-story detailed in the game’s documentation, which comes back to the fore at the end of the game in the most unique, and controversial, ending in Infocom’s catalog. What at first appears to be a traditional text adventure morphs in that last scene into a morality tale and a tragedy.

Infidel’s documentation describes its protagonist in more detail than all but a few of the company’s other efforts, and it is not a pretty picture. Through his diary and letters, we learn that he is the junior member of an archaeological partnership, and that he harbors a burning jealously toward his counterpart. When an old woman surfaces with a treasure map left her by her deceased husband giving the location of a previously undiscovered pyramid, he decides to grab the glory and booty for himself by organizing an exhibition and departing before his partner returns from a dig of his own. His efforts at the dig site are frustrated by his lack of planning, specifically his failure to bring a navigation box that will allow him to determine his exact latitude and longitude, and thus determine precisely where to dig. While he waits for his supplier to fly one in, he drives his workers relentlessly, forcing them to dig holes in random places in the hope that they will stumble upon the temple. The workers begin to grumble, first petulantly and then menacingly, but the protagonist ignores them. Finally, he goes too far when he forces them to dig on a holy day. They drug him that evening and depart, leaving him to wake up alone the next morning in their abandoned camp in the middle of the desert. This marks the start of the game proper.

The player soon discovers the following note from his erstwhile companions:

Fi aman Allah!

Hereafter you shall pursue your fool dream of the hidden pyramid and its riches alone. May the jackals feed well on your bones. We have left you what you need to get back, though we hope you do not. We put several things you treasure above life itself inside your trunk, locked with your precious padlock, but we could not bear to part with the key. Especially after what you said of our rites. We hope the drug we placed in your drink did you harm. If not, we are at least satisfied you slept especially soundly while we cleaned out the camp.

Luckily, or perhaps not considering how things eventually turn out, the long-awaited plane arrives at this exact moment to drop the navigation box by parachute into the camp. With it, the industrious player can finally locate the pyramid and make his way inside. At this point we are firmly in traditional adventure game territory, right down to scoring points for collecting treasures, and we remain there until the last scene of the game. That scene, though, is not what we have been conditioned to expect:

>open sarcophagus

You lift the cover with great care, and in an instant you see all your dreams come true. The interior of the sarcophagus is lined with gold, inset with jewels, glistening in your torchlight. The riches and their dazzling beauty overwhelm you. You take a deep breath, amazed that all of this is yours. You tremble with excitement, then realize the ground beneath your feet is trembling too.

As a knife cuts through butter, this realization cuts through your mind, makes your hands shake and cold sweat appear on your forehead. The Burial Chamber is collapsing, the walls closing in. You will never get out of this pyramid alive. You earned this treasure. But it cost you your life.

As you sit there, gazing into the glistening wealth of the inner sarcophagus, you can’t help but feel a little empty, a little foolish. If someone were on the other side of the quickly-collapsing wall, they could have dug you out. If only you’d treated the workers better. If only you’d cut Craige in on the find. If only you’d hired a reliable guide.

Well, someday, someone will discover your bones here. And then you will get your fame.

Your score is 400 out of a possible 400, in 442 moves.

This gives you the rank of master adventurer.

Many contemporary players were outraged by this inversion of everything they had come to expect from their adventure games. Mike Berlyn was forced to fend off these critics in a Compuserve online chat shortly after the game’s release:

(1,Scorpia) I did not like the main character I did not like the ending. I felt it was a poor choice to have a characetr like that in an Infocom game, since, after all regardless of the main character in the story I am the one who is really playing the game really solving the puzzles. The character is merely a shell, and after going thru the game, I resent getting killed. GA

(1,Rolexian) Other than that, she liked it.

(1,Michael Berlyn) GA for what? What do you want me to do? I can’t make you like something you don’t like I can’t make you appreciate something that you don’t think is there. I will tell you this, though You are being very narrow-minded about what you think an Infocom game is. It doesn’t HAVE to be the way you said and you don’t have to think that in EVERY game you play, that YOU’re the main character. But there’s more

(1,GAIL COMER) Why did you end the game like that?

(1,Michael Berlyn) I mean, I’m a writer. I write all kinds of things. I’ll get to ending when it’s time to talk about it. Lemme first tackle the other points raised. A question for you: Yes or No, Scorp Have you ever read a book, seen a TV program, seen a movie where the main character wasn’t someone you liked, someone you’d rather not be? GA

(1,Scorpia) Certainly.

(1,Michael Berlyn) Okay. Then that’s fair. If you look at these games as shells for you to occupy and nothing more, like an RPG then you’re missing the experience, or at least part of the potential experience. If you had read the journal and the letter before hand I would have hoped you would have understood just what was going on in the gamewho you were, why you were playing that kind of character. Adventures are so so STERILE!. That’s the word. And I want very much to make them an unsterile experience. It’s what I work for and it’s my goal. Otherwise, why not just read Tom Swifts and Nancy Drews and the Hardy Boys?

Critics of the game do have a point in that the tragedy of Infidel is not truly interactive in any real sense. From the moment he begins the game, the player is railroaded to his ultimate fate in the burial chamber. The note left by the workers does imply that the player has the option of attempting to strike out for civilization rather than remaining fixated on the pyramid and its treasures, but the game does not actually provide for this choice. Presumably the player could collect all of the treasures and completely explore the pyramid, but turn away from opening the sarcophagus, but this still leaves him stranded in the desert with no food and little water, and again the game never really takes this possibility into account. Still, in bringing the weight of moral judgment to the “points for treasures” model of its predecessors, and in bringing to IF the catharsis of tragedy, Infidel broke new ground.

Infocom and Douglas Adams: Hitchhiker’s and Bureaucracy

The story of Infocom’s long, sometimes singularly unproductive partnership with British science fiction humorist Douglas Adams is almost as interesting as the games that resulted from it. By early 1984, Adams was well-known in nerd circles as the creator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a series of BBC radio shows which had spawned a television series and three - soon to be four - best-selling novels. Adams had admired Infocom’s work ever since playing Suspended soon after its release, and Infocom was very interested in bringing in established authors to write games, feeling it would advance its goal of establishing IF as a genuine literary form. With Hitchhiker’s having been already translated to three very different media, the idea of adding one more, an IF computer game, seemed natural enough to all concerned. An ambitious contract was signed which planned for six games, each covering one-half of one of the three currently available Hitchhiker’s novels.

Adams spent a week in Infocom’s offices in February of 1984, planning out the first game and not incidentally being introduced there to his first Apple Macintosh, a computer he would have an extended love affair with for the remainder of his short life. For the game’s development, Adams was paired with implementer Steve Meretzky:

“I’d finished my previous game Sorcerer in early February just as the Hitchhiker’s game was ready to start,” recalls Meretzky. “So partly is was a matter of timing, and partly is was Marc’s feeling that I’d be a good match for Hitchhiker’s; among the Infocom game authors, I was known for my humor, and my first game Planetfall was considered very Hitchhiker’s-like. I’d never heard/read/seen Hitchhiker’s when I wrote Planetfall, but as folks began play-testing the game, so many of them said, ‘This reminds me of Hitchhiker’s Guide,’ that I borrowed a set of tapes of the radio from a friend and listened to them. I loved them, of course” (Simpson 211–212).

After Adams’ return to England, he and Meretzky continued to collaborate on the game through the then cutting-edge medium of email. As it turned out, Meretzky did as much of the writing as Adams, not least because of Adams’ gift for procrastination, which was already legendary in publishing circles and with which Infocom would eventually have more first-hand experience than it would like. Many of the most memorably warped aspects of the resulting game were, however, Adams’:

“Douglas’ overall take on the game was a fairly direct adaptation of the existing storyline,” remembers Meretzky. “Where he really had a flood of ideas was on some of the more incidental stuff, playing with the medium of interactivity and text adventures. Things like having an inventory object called ‘no tea,’ having the game lie to you, having an object called ‘the thing your aunt gave you which you don’t know what it is’ which keeps coming back to you even if you get rid of it, and so on” (Simpson 212).

Meretzky visited Adams in England in May to put the finishing touches on the game’s design, and the standard exhausting Infocom testing process began shortly thereafter. The game was released just in time for Christmas, 1984, and became a huge commercial success for Infocom. When all was said and done, Hitchhiker’s would stand second in total sales next only to the original Zork.

Like the novel, the game centers around a mild-mannered Englishman named Arthur Dent who discovers over the course of one very long day that not only is his house about to be knocked down to make way for a new freeway bypass, but the Earth itself is about to be destroyed by a group of particularly nasty aliens known as the Vogons for similar reasons. Arthur escapes the Earth’s destruction with the aid of his friend Ford Prefect, who it turns out is a sort of roving correspondent for a unique publication known as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A string of misadventures follow, punctuated by commentary from the Hitchhiker’s Guide, which the player can use to look up usually hilarious and occasionally even useful anecdotes about all manner of phenomena.

The game’s artistic success was not quite as unqualified as its commercial success. Certainly, though, it has many positives to recommend it. Adams was a deeply funny man, and the game is a veritable laugh riot at times, with the same brand of logical illogical that makes the books so much fun everywhere in evidence. Meretzky even seems to have caught some of Adams’ magic, for his usual sophomoric fraternity-brother style of humor here retreats in favor of Adams’ more subtlety clever approach. The ability to use the Hitchhiker’s Guide itself is perhaps the game’s greatest contribution to IF tradition. Many, many titles since have provided books that the player can use to learn more about the world he inhabits. It provides an ideal, unforced way for an author to communicate to her player information that the player will need, and the increasing prominence of books and even libraries in IF has even led to a whole new category of puzzle: the “research puzzle.” The fact that newer works of IF allow for effectively unlimited amounts of text lets contemporary authors to stretch out in this area in ways that Infocom could never dream of, of course.

However, the sort of charming absurdity that Adams worked to such great effect in his novels is more problematic when cast into a game. Too much of Hitchhiker’s Guide revolves around figuring out Adams’ uniquely skewed version of reality. Intuitive leaps are required that no author should ever require of his player, and at times the game seems to take as much or more delight in killing or just annoying its player than Zork did. While the whole is so funny that it is hard to get angry at it, it is at the same time an undeniable step back for Infocom in terms of pure game design. Yet it is saved by the brilliance of its humor. An example of a seemingly unforgivable design choice that Hitchhiker’s somehow manages to make palatable is the famous scene where the game actually lies to its player:

>listen

(to darkness)

You hear the deep and distant hum of a star drive coming from far above. There is an exit to port.

>port

You can’t go that way.

>fore

You can’t go that way.

>starboard

You can’t go that way.

>port

You can’t go that way.

>aft

(We were lying about the exit to port.) You emerge from a small doorway…

Such exasperations are everywhere in the game, along with plenty of under-clued, illogical puzzles and the occasional completely motivationless action required from the player. Still, the game is required playing even today for its sharp writing, great good humor, and general subversion of sacred IF principals. I have to recommend, though, that the non-masochist keep a walkthrough handy, and be unafraid to turn to it.

As mentioned previously, Infocom had planned Hitchhiker’s as just the first of a string of collaborations with Adams. The game in fact comes to no real resolution whatsoever, ending abruptly as the player steps out of his spaceship onto the “legendary lost planet of Magrathea,” a point about two-thirds of the way through the original novel, and telling him in no uncertain terms that he will have to wait for the sequel to find out what happens next. That sequel would never arrive. Certainly Infocom was very eager, considering the commercial success of the first game, and its eagerness only increased as the years passed and the company’s financial situation deteriorated. Several different implementers were assigned to the project at one time or another, but Adams continued to drag his feet, perhaps largely because after turning the same basic story into a radio serial, a television series, four novels, and finally a computer game, he was sick and tired of Arthur Dent and the whole Hitchhiker’s universe. Adams was branching out as a print author, and if he were to continue to collaborate with Infocom he wanted to do the same with his IF work. He came up with the idea of doing a real-world satire of the bureaucratic nightmare that is modern life, basing it partly upon personal experience. Infocom would almost certainly have rather continued with the lucrative Hitchhiker’s franchise, but acquiesced to a very enthusiastic Adams and gave the project the green light. Adams promptly disappointed everyone by losing interest in the project entirely after that initial burst of enthusiasm.

Steve Meretzky didn’t work on Bureacucray but was able to see what was happening with it. “Douglas’ procrastination seemed much worse than it was with Hitchhiker’s. That seems odd, because he did the first game only grudgingly, since he had already done Hitchhiker’s for several different media, but Bureaucracy was what he most wanted to do. Perhaps the newness and excitement of working in interactive fiction had worn off; perhaps he had more distractions in his life at that point; perhaps it was that the succession of people who my role in Bureaucracy didn’t stay with the project for more than a portion of its development cycle and therefore never became a well-integrated creative unit with Douglas; perhaps it was that, lacking the immovable Christmas deadline that Hitchhiker’s had, it was easier to let the game just keep slipping and slipping” (Simpson 224).

After literally years of delay, the staff of Infocom as a whole put the various existing bits and pieces together without Adams. The completed game finally reached store shelves in early 1987. Included within was an Easter egg that detailed its convoluted development:

Once upon a time Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky collaborated on a game called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Everyone wanted a sequel, but Douglas thought it might be fun to do something different first. He called that something Bureaucracy, and wanted Marc Blank to work on it with him. Of course, Marc was busy, and Douglas was busy, and by the time they could both work on it, they were too busy to work on it. So, Jerry Wolper got a free trip to Las Vegas to talk to Douglas about it before it was decided to let it rest for a while instead. Jerry decided to go back to school, so Marc and Douglas spent some time on Nantucket Island looking at llamas, drinking Chateau d’Yquem, and arguing about puzzles. Nothing much happened for a while, except that Marc and Douglas got distracted again. Paul DiLascia decided to give it a try, but changed his mind and kept working on Cornerstone. Marc when to work for Simon and Schuster, and Paul went to work for Interleaf. Jeff O’Neill finished Ballyhoo and, casting about for a new project, decided to take it on, about the time Jerry graduated. Jeff got a trip to London out of it. Douglas was enthusiastic, but busy with a movie. Progress was very slow, and then Douglas was very busy with something named Dirk Gently. Jeff decided it was time to work on something else, and Brian Moriarty took it over. He visited England, and marveled at Douglas’ CD collection, but progress was slow. Eventually he decided it was time to work on something else. Paul made a cameo appearance, but decided to stay at Interleaf instead. So Chris Reeve and Tim Anderson took it over, and mucked around a lot. Finally, back in Las Vegas, Michael Bywater jumped (or was pushed) in and came to Boston for some serious script-doctoring, which made what was there into what is here. In addition, there were significant contributions from Liz Cyr-Jones, Suzanne Frank, Gary Brennan, Tomas Bok, Max Buxton, Jon Palace, Dave Lebling, Stu Galley, Linde Dynneson, and others too numerous to mention. Most of these people are not dead yet, and apologize for the inconvenience.

The remarkable thing about the completed game is just how good it actually is. Hodge-podge it may be, but it filled with some of the sharpest, funniest writing in the Infocom catalog. The fact that the game is set in the real-world of everyday life gives its humor a satirical bite that is lacking in the company’s other efforts. The game does not just go for the easy, obvious targets either. Consider its sly dig at right-wing demagoguery, here personified by a rather anthropomorphic macaw:

>x macaw

The macaw stares blankly past you, wondering why there are no right-wing protest songs.

>show painting to macaw

The macaw is clearly deeply moved by the sight of the painting of Ronald W. Reagan, and starts shrieking a vigorous and relentless R&B number about the joys of political extremism. At the same time it launches into an energetic roach-stomping flamenco dance which miraculously generates enough aerodynamic lift to catapult it (somewhat asymmetrically) into the air, where it rips up Reagan’s face (which, to be honest, makes little real difference).

Exhausted but happy, it sinks back to its perch, croons repulsively the first verse of a ballad about pecking the eyes out of oppressors of the American people, and falls into a satisfied coma.

In one of its many clever little touches, the game begins by having the player fill out a form with some general information about herself, such as address, phone number, and even current boyfriend or girlfriend. It then uses this information throughout the game. For instance, the game proper opens with the player in her house on her actual street that she provided the game earlier. Later, she will receive a phone call from her significant other ending the relationship. Another unique little gimmick is the game’s use of a blood pressure meter. Any time something annoying happens to the player, even something as simple as a typo or command whose phrasing the game does not understand, her blood pressure will increase slightly, and will only decrease again gradually after a period of time free from annoyance. Should the player’s blood pressure get too high, she will burst an artery and die.

The game’s plot involves the player attempting to get from her hometown to Paris for a conference being conducted by her new company. Perhaps reflecting the game’s piecemeal origins, it is divided into three sections. The first and best is set in the player’s home town, and satirizes middles class life and all of its accouterments - unhelpful bank tellers, hopelessly muddled mailmen, etc. The second deals with the endless frustrations of airports and airlines. In the third section, the player ends up through a bizarre turn of events stranded in the African jungle, where she has her final showdown with a lonely computer nerd who has, as it turns out, been responsible for her troubles all along. The game’s relentless razzing of this character throughout its length is absolutely hilarious, especially considering that the text adventure demographic Infocom serviced probably consisted of many characters just like him:

The ghastly nerd reappears at your side, peering myopically through his filthy Coke-bottle spectacles. “There you are!” he whines. “I’ve got something I know you’ll want. A Boysenberry XiGT6HP Special! Only 76 bucks!”

The game as a whole is a wonderful example of Infocom’s mature technology and philosophy of game design. All of the old text adventure annoyances are gone by now, and what is left is pure pleasure, from its capable, flexible parser to its deep and thorough implementation of the environments it models. No one else at the time was capable of producing work of this level of sophistication. Against all odds, the game is truly one of the company’s best, and deserves more praise than it generally receives in my opinion. For a huge and disjointed but often amusing second take on Bureaucracy’s theme, try Carol Hovick’s AGT classic Klaustrophobia.

IF for Beginners: Wishbringer

It is somewhat surprising that Infocom waited as long as it did to create a work of IF designed explicitly to introduce newcomers to the genre. While Seastalker had been released in 1984, that game was what Infocom called “junior-level” IF, targeted toward children rather than rookie adults. When Brian Moriarty’s Wishbringer finally arrived in 1985, it seems to have satisfied a latent demand in the gaming public, for it became a sizable hit and outsold by a considerable margin Infocom’s two other releases of that year. Today, Wishbringer has been somewhat overshadowed by Moriarty’s second game, the towering classic Trinity, but nevertheless still stands as an ideal introduction to the form. Moriarty has created here, in Magnus Olsson’s words, a “small scale masterpiece” that manages to introduce the player to most of the common IF tropes without ever overwhelming him, and that makes it worthy of brief discussion here.

Wishbringer is best described as a work of magical realism. The player takes the role of a mailman in the little town of Festeron who sees his world suddenly change in a most sinister way after he delivers a letter to the mysterious Magick Shoppe just outside of town. The remainder of the game involves discovering the cause of the dark spell that has enveloped the town and setting things to rights. Doing so will probably not be too terribly difficult even for the inexperienced player, but the puzzles involved are consistently clever and satisfying even if not particularly taxing. The writing is superb, expertly balancing the gentle humor of small-town life with the sinister darkness that threatens it, and adding evidence to my opinion that Moriarty was the finest pure writer among all the implementers. There is a real creepiness to revisiting locations in the sleepy little town after the spell has been cast upon it, but, in keeping with the charming, understated modesty of the game as a whole, this is never overdone.

The game’s most memorable feature, and its most obvious concession to the newbies it hoped to attract to the genre, is the Wishbringer stone from which it takes it title. Once in the player’s possession, the stone allows him a limited number of wishes, which he can use in many cases in place of the “logical” solutions to the game’s problems. In theory, this is a wonderful idea, giving the player as it does the opportunity to “cheat” when necessary without leaving the confines of the game and turning to a walkthrough or hint list. Since he is still operating within the rules of the game, the player’s guilt at making use of the stone is likely to be less severe than more overt forms of cheating, which only adds to the relaxed, welcoming air of the game as a whole. Unfortunately, the game’s one significant design flaw arises here. It is possible for the player who relies too heavily on the stone’s magic to fail to acquire certain essential items for use later in the game. A player who finds himself in this position has no choice but to restart or restore back to a point before the problem occurred. While this is not really an unusual position for an adventurer to find himself in, it is decidedly out of keeping with the otherwise forgiving nature of the game. Moriarty later claimed that this flaw was in fact a feature, as it taught a moral lesson about the dangers of unrestrained wishing. Such an explanation rings rather false, however, in light of the game’s overall design philosophy.

This flaw aside, though, Wishbringer does what it sets out to do superbly well. There are not enough IF games in existence like it, a fact that makes IF harder to approach than it needs to be. The best compliment I can give Wishbringer is to say that I would have used it as my sample game in the first chapter of this work if it had been freely available to all my readers. Twenty years after its released, nothing has bettered it as an introduction to IF.

For a game that sports a similar atmosphere and contains only slightly more challenging puzzles, interested readers may wish to try Laura Knauth’s Winter Wonderland. Andrew Plotkin’s recent Dreamhold is the most recent attempt to create a game for introducing newbies to the form. When it notices that its player seems to be struggling with basic IF conventions, it provides context-sensitive help that is surprisingly apt. Unfortunately, it ultimately falls into the trap of trying to be all things to all people and presents a series of puzzles more reminiscent of Spellbreaker than Wishbringer.

Puzzleless IF: A Mind Forever Voyaging

A new version of Infocom’s Z-Machine debuted in late 1985. Known internally as the Z-Machine version 4, it allowed game files of up to 256K, twice the size of its older sister that had powered all Infocom games up to that point, while lifting several other annoying but less obvious restrictions. It also offered vastly improved text formatting and display options. Italic and boldface typefaces were now possible, for instance, while scrollable menus and even “title screens” of a sort were now available to authors. This newfound power came at a price, though. Infocom could make games running within this new system, which it marketed as Interactive Fiction Plus, available only on machines having at least 128K of memory and the capability of displaying at least eighty columns of text. While these requirements are rather laughable now, in 1985 they were met by only a small minority of home computers in existence, and Infocom was virtually the only game company in the marketplace aiming so high. The company was taking a risk here, selling to a vastly smaller potential market than that of its standard games. Small wonder then that Infocom continued to release a greater number of smaller games still using the older Z-Machine, with only the occasional more ambitious version 4 work. When it was employed, though, the Z-Machine’s newfound power was put to good use, for Infocom’s first two version 4 releases are within the modern IF community the two most-lauded titles in their catalog.

The first of these was Steve Meretzky’s A Mind Forever Voyaging. From its William Wordsworth-derived title to its almost completely puzzleless gameplay, Mind was the most aggressive attempt ever by Infocom to promote IF as a valid literary form. Even the back cover blurb raised the bar:

A major departure for Infocom, A Mind Forever Voyaging is reminiscent of such classic works of science fiction as Brave New World and 1984. You’ll spend less time solving puzzles, as you explore realistic worlds of the future.

The game casts its player in the role of one Perry Simm, a normal if rather bookish young man living in Meretzky’s vision of a near-future America, who gets a rude awakening at age twenty. He is literally jerked out of the reality he has always known by a Dr. Abraham Perelman, who proceeds to inform him that he is in fact not a real human being at all but merely an AI construct living within an elaborate computer simulation of American society. Perry has been “awakened” rather earlier than planned to undertake a very special mission. It seems that a Senator Richard Ryder has proposed a Plan for Renewed National Purpose, which he claims will solve many of the problems afflicting society:

The Plan for Renewed National Purpose, Legislative action:

* cut tax rates by fifty percent

* vigorous prosecution of tax evasion

* decentralization of federal responsibilities

* deregulation of all major industries

* reinstatement of the military draft

* emphasis on fundamentals and traditional values in education

* mandatory conscription for troublemakers and criminals

* a strict “USNA First” trade policy

* termination of aid to nations not pro-USNA

* cutbacks on all types of bureaucracy, e.g. registering cars, guns

* termination of government subsidies to outmoded industries

The Plan for Renewed National Purpose, Constitutional amendments:

* increase the powers of the Executive Branch

* increase the Presidential term of office to eight years

The reader may notice that the Plan bears a striking similarity to typical Republican party platforms, then and now. Mind’s political message is serious and overt. It is not by accident that Richard Ryder has the same initials as another prominent conservative politician from the game’s own era.

Dr. Perelman asks Perry to enter a simulation of his world ten years in the future to see what the results of Ryder’s Plan are likely to be. He is to wander about his fictional hometown of Rockvil, South Dakota, observing his surroundings and even his own economic and social position, making recordings of anything that seems relevant for Perelman and his colleagues to review. It is on the verge of this return to “simulation mode” that the player assumes control and the game proper begins. Perry first travels to Rockvil in the year 2041, a jump of ten years into the future. What he finds there seems ideal. The economy is booming, crime is down, and the atmosphere is upbeat. Perry is happily married to his college sweetheart Jill, and his career prospects are looking very good. The following excerpt shows Perry visiting his happy home. (Meretzky was a newlywed himself at the time of this game’s development, which is perhaps reflected in his glowing depiction of wedded bliss.)

>n

Living Room

This is the large living area of your apartment, with a bedroom to the north and a kitchen to the east. The front door of the apartment, next to the couch on the south wall, is open. A huge window provides a panoramic view to the west.

Jill’s easel occupies a beautiful, well-lit spot near the window. Her current painting is on the easel. In one corner is the old word processor where you do your writing.

Jill enters from the kitchen. “Hi, hon. You’re home early!” She kisses you.

>examine me

You look much as you always have: a normal, middle-aged male. Your clothes are simple but adequate.

>examine jill

Jill looks as beautiful as the day you married her seven years ago. She is curled up in the corner of the couch, reading a book.

>examine book

It’s another of those indistinguishable romance novels that Jill is always reading.

>examine painting

The painting is a bright watercolor of the cliff-top Bermuda cottage colony where you and Jill spent your honeymoon.

>ask jill about painting

“The watercolor? It’s pretty, but it doesn’t SAY anything. If only I could think of some good subject material…”

Jill looks up. “Perry, I heard a news report yesterday about interest rates and housing prices. If the economy keeps going the way it’s going, and someone buys your Africa book, we might be able to afford a house next year!”

>kiss jill

Jill kisses you back. “Ooo-la-la,” she says, afterwards.

The player is free to observe all of this at his own pace while wandering over the game’s sprawling map of Rockvil. He can visit churches, power stations, prisons, museums, courthouses, and stadiums; buy and read newspapers; spend time in his own home; eat in restaurants; even attend a movie. When he finally returns to Perelman to make his report and present his recordings, all doubts about the Plan are erased, and it is adopted with almost universal support.

As my reader has probably guessed, though, that is not the end of things. Perelman and his colleagues continue tinkering with the computer system, and begin to open up later eras for Perry to explore. As the player wanders Rockvil’s geography further and further in the future, what he finds there becomes more and more disturbing. The prosperity of 2041 turns out to be short-lived. Along with the steadily worsening economy comes increasing religious and racial intolerance; increasing pollution; increasing crime; decreasing civil rights; and a steadily coarsening society. Most heartbreaking of all is Perry’s personal decline in fortune:

>n

Living Room

This is the large living area of your apartment, with a bedroom to the north and a kitchen to the east. The front door of the apartment, next to the couch on the south wall, is open. A huge window provides a panoramic view to the west.

Jill’s current artistic endeavor, a pencil sketch, is on her easel, near the entrance to the kitchen. In one corner is the old word processor where you do your writing.

Jill is sitting on the couch, staring morosely out the window.

>examine jill

Jill has aged dramatically during the last decade, an effect heightened by the fact that Jill has become more and more withdrawn; she has lost interest in many things, including her appearance. She is sitting on the couch, staring morosely out the window.

>examine me

Your clothes are frayed, and your skin is beginning to show the wrinkles of your sixty years.

>examine sketch

The sketch is dark and brooding, depicting a demonic figure towering over a frightened group of children. It’s been months since you last saw Jill working on it.

>kiss jill

Jill kisses you briefly, without much enthusiasm.

With a roar of tromping feet, six or eight heavily armed Church police storm into the apartment. You see a look of horror come over Jill, as she covers her mouth with the back of her hand, as though stifling some silent scream. You follow her gaze, and – a shock of recognition – sauntering in behind the police…

The ten years since you last saw him have left scant change on the face of your son. “Mitchell!” you yell, and take a step toward him, but a blow from one of the cops sends your frail, old body flying against the wall.

“She is the one.” The voice is Mitchell’s, but the tone is cold, unrecognizable, sending shivers through you. He raises a fur-clad arm, pointing at his mother without a hint of emotion. “She spake against the Church; she tried to poison the mind of a child too young to know the Truth.” The thugs grab Jill, who reaches toward Mitchell, tears of terror streaming down her face. Totally unresponsive, he turns and walks calmly out of the apartment.

As Jill is dragged, screaming and crying, through the front door, you try to follow, but a cop pummels you in the stomach with his club. You fall to the floor, retching, as the apartment door slams closed, shutting you off forever from the son you cannot understand and the wife you will never see again.

By the time he gets to 2081, the last year of the simulation, he finds society broken down entirely. Rockvil is in a state of complete anarchy, home only to roving gangs and wild dogs.

Once the player has seen and recorded enough, he must return to the real world to stop the Plan. Ryder shows his true colors as a ruthless demagogue rather than a merely ambitious politician at this point. Perry must patch into various computer systems to thwart Ryder’s efforts to silence him and Dr. Perelman. The puzzles that are introduced here are in fact the only ones present in the game. If the player succeeds in stopping Ryder, Perry is rewarded by being allowed to return to live with Jill in a simulated paradise, and Meretzky takes the time to reward his player with a long and poignant epilogue describing their happiness.

A Mind Forever Voyaging has an almost sacred reputation in the IF community today. Matthew Murray’s gushing assessment is not terribly unusual: This masterpiece – though nearly twelve years old has yet to be matched – or even surpassed – in terms of writing, design, or gameplay. Touching, moving, emotional, thought-provoking and as close to perfection as I have seen any game yet come (…), everyone owes it to themselves to play A Mind Forever Voyaging. (…) AMFV is the finest game ever made, and should not be as underrated as it is…

While Murray overstates his case considerably in my opinion, the game certainly has many compelling qualities. Its design provides an ideal balance between a linear storyline and free-form exploration that is still worthy of study today. The game emphasizes its narrative (as opposed to puzzle-solving) elements to an unprecedented degree. Thought of in term of Graham Nelson’s characterization of IF as a “crossword at war with a narrative,” Mind is the first game to award the victory unconditionally to the narrative.

Mind has an ineffable quality of soulfulness about it. Throughout, one can sense that Meretzky cares deeply about his characters. He is plainly outraged and frightened by those who speak too frequently of “traditional values,” just as he is moved by the story and characters he has created. This perhaps leads him to try too hard on occasion, but many of the game’s passages are undeniably powerful. The cumulative effect of exploring the different time periods, of seeing an idyllic city gradually descend into violence and chaos, is very affecting when taken as a whole. Even the game’s politics, overtly and un-self-critically liberal as they are, force a reaction from the player. It is impossible to play the game and not feel something strongly. How many text adventures before Mind - or, for that matter, after it - can make this claim?

Meretzky began to develop some of IF’s artistic potential in Planetfall, where he included a host of not strictly necessary rooms and objects to bring the game’s background to life. With Mind, he takes that idea to its logical conclusion. The game is really all about discovering and exploring its background and story. Until its climactic stages, virtually nothing here has any other, more “gamelike” purpose. Little elements crop up continually that serve no purpose but to bring its world to life. For instance, at one point Perelman has Perry visit with a psychologist, who administers to him a series of Rorschach tests. The answers the player gives have no effect whatsoever in the game, but the experience serves to deepen the player’s connection with his alter-ego.

The game is larger in sheer number of locations than anything else Infocom produced. Rockvil has room to breathe, and as a result it feels like a real city when the player roams its streets. Unfortunately, the simulation is not as deep as it is broad. Very few objects within the city are implemented, and the result is too many exchanges like this:

Southway & River

Here at River Street, Southway ends its long trip from the western suburbs. South of here, the street bends toward the river. To the southwest are some brick houses, and a car lot occupies the northwest corner. All along the east side of the street is the featureless, cliff-like facade of Heiman World. Little, if anything, has been done to restore the top several floors, gutted by fire about five years ago.

That fire, which cost several thousand lives, revealed a severe deficiency of built-in fire control systems, but the courts threw out all suits since the building was built after the deregulation of the construction industry in ’38, and the developer never falsely represented the building’s safety systems.

>examine houses

[I don’t know the word “houses”.]

>examine heiman world

Totally ordinary looking Heiman World.

>nw

Skycar Lot

This large car lot serves Rockvil Mall, which lies to the north. There are exits from the lot to the southeast and southwest.

>sw

Southway & Kennedy

Kennedy Street, from the north, ends here in a “T” with Southway. On the northwest corner is a tall, ugly office tower. The words “First Continent Bank Building” hang in large metal letters over the entrance, and a car lot fills the northeast corner. A row of old brick triple-deckers, once renovated, lines the southern side of the street.

>examine tower

[You can’t see any tower here!]

Also disappointing is the game’s character interaction. Perry’s wife Jill, the emotional center of the story, is no more responsive to conversation than was Planetfall’s Floyd. Granted, even Infocom’s new version 4 technology carried with it significant space restrictions, and implementing everything in its many locations simply must not have been a practical possibility in light of the fact that the game already uses virtually every byte available to it in the version 4 format. Still, the end result of such exchanges is to chip away at the sense of free exploration that is so fundamental to the game, and to continually remind the player he is still interacting with a limited, sometimes balky text adventure. One wonders if a better choice might not have been to implement half as much map in twice as much detail. It is perhaps instructional to compare Mind to another Interactive Plus game, Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a smaller game in geographic terms but one in which virtually every object mentioned in the room descriptions is implemented, and it shows the potential a deep implementation has for immersing the player in a world even as it is, due to its more gamelike nature, much less obtrusively interested in doing so.

On a more thematic level, too, a close look reveals some cracks in Mind’s façade. Its core premise is really rather absurd when the player begins to think about it seriously, as Graeme Cree pointed out in his review:

Right away I had two serious problems with the game’s premise. First, computer simulations of the future have always been extremely unreliable, and here we’re asked to believe that we will develop one so accurate that it can actually determine the location of (as yet unplanned) parks and small businesses in Rockvil, South Dakota, where the game takes place. It is simply impossible to have enough information about people’s private thoughts, especially ones that they haven’t even had yet, to be able to factor this into a simulation. Secondly, even if such simulations were available, why couldn’t the data simply be retrieved from the computer, rather than have to send someone into the simulation to view it directly?

On the one hand, this premise, fail as it may to pass the believability test to anyone with any understanding at all of computers and their limitation, is absolutely necessary for any game to exist at all, and so we should perhaps give Meretzky a pass here and suspend our disbelief. On the other hand, though, Infocom makes a direct pitch on the game’s box for it to be talked of in the same context as 1984 and Brave New World. A static work of serious science fiction literature would certainly not be forgiven the logical lapses that Cree points out above, and so perhaps Mind should not either.

The game also fails to really engage with the full thematic potential of its plot. Its ending in particular, full of warmth and hope as it is, begins to bother me when I really think about it. When Perry returns to a utopic version of the Rockvil he knows to be with Jill, he is opting out of reality to retreat into a fantasy. The game never deeply considers the fact that Jill, and everything else Perry loves in Rockvil, is not real. All of this is made doubly troubling when one considers some material that is included in the game’s box pertaining to a phenomenon called “joybooth suicide.” The joybooth is one of the technologies that Meretzky has invented for his society of 2031. While the details he provides are sketchy, it appears to be basically a reality simulator similar to Star Trek’s holodecks. Apparently, it is quite common for people, young people especially, to enter into these alternate worlds and never come back. This is depicted as one of the manifestations of the general malaise that makes the Plan necessary in the view of Ryder and his associates. In escaping into his simulated Rockvil at the end of the game, Perry essentially commits joybooth suicide himself, yet the game never acknowledges any similarity at all. I would like to believe that Meretzky was in fact leaving the ultimate desirability of Perry’s fate ambiguous, or even being deliberately subversive, yet his style of writing in the epilogue is so freely joyous that I have trouble really believing either.

Still, the fact that Mind has enough thematic meat on its bones to even make such debates possible makes it a landmark in IF, and on the whole its virtues far outweigh its flaws. Its open-hearted idealism is so winning that most have little trouble forgiving it its failings, and even the mild criticism I have engaged in here will likely enrage a substantial number of the players whose unswerving loyalty it has captured.

Sadly, Mind was a very slow seller for Infocom, and the company never attempted anything quite like it again. Meretzky returned to his old forte of absurdist comedy for his remaining three games for the company. It was not until the modern era, where IF is free of the commercial considerations that limited Infocom’s choices, that games like Adam Cadre’s Photopia continued its puzzleless tradition. Today, Marnie Parker organizes an annual contest known as the IF Art Show specifically for IF “games” that are not really interested in being games at all, but rather focus on aesthetics and exploration, and at least one or two completely puzzleless works can generally be counted on as entrants in each year’s mainstream IF Competition. One excellent recent Art Show entry that, like Mind, lets the player explore and enjoy a landscape without worrying about puzzles is Jacqueline Lott’s The Fire Tower.

Infocom’s Finest Hour: Trinity

Brian Moriarty’s second game for Infocom, Trinity, is by general consensus considered, along with A Mind Forever Voyaging, one of the company’s two best. My personal opinion would place Trinity alone on the pinnacle, for while Mind is a fascinating and rewarding effort in its own right, it also possesses its share of flaws. I would be hard-pressed, though, to recommend any significant changes to Trinity. It works as a game, as literature, and even as an educational tool, and stands in my opinion as not just Infocom’s best effort but as just possibly the finest work of IF ever produced. It really is just that good.

The core idea for Trinity pre-dates Moriarty’s employment by Infocom. He put it on the shelf to develop his more-manageable first effort Wishbringer, then returned to Trinity once the version 4 Z-Machine was on-hand to make it a practical possibility. The game is centered around the development and use of atomic weaponry, and is divided into three parts. The first finds the player in London’s Kensington Gardens in the present day on “the last day of your $599 London Getaway Package,” hoping to “soak up as much of that authentic English ambiance as you can” before returning to the real world of work and responsibility. Unfortunately, reality arrives a day early in the form of a nuclear attack upon the city. At the last moment before the missiles’ impact, though, time seems to stop for the player alone, and she finds herself with just enough time to dive through a mysterious white door that opens in midair a few feet above the Long Water. She finds an enchanted land on the other side of the door, presided over by a huge sundial suspended above it and reachable only by a long stairway. This marks the beginning of the second and largest stage of the game. As the player explores the land and solves its puzzles, she gradually gains the ability to control the flow of time there, and to open more doorways, each one leading to a different time and place in the “real world” from which she came. Each of these points in time and space is marked by the explosion of some sort of nuclear weapon. Doors open into Nagasaki, Japan, on the day of its nuclear destruction; the first Soviet test of an atomic weapon; the first test of a hydrogen bomb; the first underground nuclear test; even a hypothetical test of Ronald Reagan’s beloved “Star Wars” missile defense system in low Earth orbit. She must visit each, solving puzzles and collecting items which she will use to complete a magic spell which will in turn confer upon her the powers she will need to complete the final stage of the game. That stage takes place in New Mexico, moments before the testing of the very first atomic bomb on the so-called Trinity site. Here she has the opportunity to sabotage the bomb and change the history that led inevitably to the world’s destruction in her own timeline – or so it initially seems. The true effects of her actions are actually far stranger.

Like much literature - and I do not throw that word about loosely - Trinity is drenched in the atmosphere of the time of its creation. The United States and the Soviet Union were beating their chests in a last great burst of mutual Cold War bluster in 1985 and 1986. Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” rhetoric was in full flower, defense spending had reached unprecedented levels, and the apocolyptic television movie The Day After had recently caused a public sensation and been watched by millions. Out of this mood of creeping paranoia and dread sprang Trinity. Little wonder then that Moriarty’s game displays little hope for mankind’s future, and treats nuclear destruction as an eventual inevitability. Moriarty, who conducted extensive research for the game and even visited the Trinity site and Los Alamos National Laboratory personally, described his thematic intentions this way:

“I wanted people, when playing the game, to feel their helplessness. Because that’s what I felt when I was reading and talking to these people and seeing these places. You could just feel the weight of history on you. Going to the Trinity site and being there and realising what that place means, I just wanted people to feel that weight on them when playing the game. Have it crush them in the end because that’s what I got out of my studies and research” (Rigby).

This is not say that the game is ever strident in tone, or indulges in political condemnation. Moriarty is too talented and subtle a writer for either. The overall tone is of a stately, elegiac resignation. Moriarty:

“Well, it wasn’t a pleasant experience, I can tell you that. It was not easy to sit down and write that stuff. As I said I talked to some people who were there and I read a lot of books by people who were there and the one thing they all said about it, the one common theme is that it was inevitable. That if we hadn’t of done it, someone else would. They also say that that’s not the only thing that’s inevitable. History has a lot to teach us” (Rigby).

Trinity continually juxtaposes moments of lightness, even sweetness, against the shadow of destruction. Animals appear frequently as sentient embodiments of the idyllic beauty that man’s folly continually destroys. Consider this encounter with a friendly dolphin on Bikini Atoll on the eve of the first hydrogen bomb test:

>sw

You duck under the extension and follow the curve of the shore.

West Beach

The sand curves northeast and southeast, skirting the dark outline of the equipment shed.

A tiny islet is visible a short distance offshore.

A wave washes up underfoot. It looks as if the tide is rising.

“Gnomon can tether time or tide,” sniggers a voice in your ear.

A gray fin is gliding across the lagoon.

>examine fin

The gray fin glides closer.

“Detonator check, go.”

With a sudden splash, the gray fin shoots upward! You shriek and cover your face with your hands as a mouthful of sharp teeth leaps from the lagoon…

A friendly chatter encourages you to open your eyes. It’s a bottle-nosed dolphin, standing on its tail just offshore.

>examine dolphin

The dolphin stands on its tail.

The distant islet is shrinking in the rising tide.

>wave at dolphin

The dolphin responds with a happy squeal.

“Zero minus five minutes.”

>examine islet

The islet is just a barren crescent of sand, gradually shrinking away in the rising tide.

A lone coconut tree stands near one end of the islet.

A faint plop draws your eyes to the islet. There’s now a coconut lying at the water’s edge.

>examine coconut

The coconut under the tree looks especially plump and juicy.

“Geo, sync at three, two, one, mark.”

The dolphin chatters happily.

>pet dolphin

It’s a little too far offshore.

The tide creeps towards the coconut under the distant tree.

>z

Time passes.

“Zero minus four minutes.”

>z

Time passes.

The coconut floats away from the distant islet on the rising tide.

The dolphin gives you a playful splash.

>point to coconut

The dolphin sees the floating coconut, snatches it out of the lagoon and tosses it into the sand at your feet.

“Patch to Alpha Echo Three Five.”

In less than four minutes, hopefully after the player has safely escaped the island, the dolphin will be dead, victim of man’s destructive folly.

The player is not always allowed to stand apart, to cluck and fret and condemn mankind’s destruction of so much that is precious while remaining unstained herself. In one of Trinity’s most affecting scenes, the player is herself forced into cruelty. One of the items that the player requires to complete her magic spell is a “fresh whole lizard, killed in the light of a crescent moon.” Trinity makes her do the killing of this helpless little creature herself:

Earth Orbit, in a soap bubble

You’re five hundred miles above a sea of ice, hurtling in profound silence over the Arctic atmosphere. Layers of crimson and violet describe the curve of the horizon, blending imperceptibly into a black sky crowded with stars.

The soapy film around you freezes instantly, but remains intact.

The white door drops away behind you.

You watch helplessly as the white door dwindles to a distant speck, vanishing at last between the horns of the rising moon.

>get skink

You take the skink out of your pocket.

Far ahead, a satellite drifts into view.

The skink squirms violently in your hand.

>kill skink

The tiny lizard writhes in your grasp and claws at your fingers, its pink mouth gasping for breath. You squeeze harder and harder until your fist trembles with the effort.

The skink stops squirming.

[Your score just went up by 3 points. The total is now 57 out of 100.]

Moriarty speaks of the disturbing effect this scene had on many players:

“That was deliberate. I was amazed to see how many people were actually bothered by the scene with the lizard, because it was them doing it. It’s nice to know that interactive fiction could do that, make you feel uncomfortable about killing things. In no other media could I make you feel bad about killing something. Because there is only one medium where I can make YOU do it, and make you feel empathy for a thing that doesn’t exist. It’s only with interactive fiction that you can explore these emotions” (Rigby).

For all its contemporary relevance, Trinity is really concerned with the eternal. It depicts mankind as, for all its beauty and ugliness, rather insignificant in the face of the unchanging perfection of the land at the center of the game. Time here is not a linear flow of battles, extinctions, and inventions, but rather is circular, as symbolized by the sundial at the enchanted land’s heart. The player - or Wabewalker, as the game eventually comes to refer to her - realizes this with a shock at the end of the game, after she has thwarted history, or so she believes, by disabling the Trinity bomb before its explosion. From all of her previous IF experience, she expects a conventional happy ending at this point. What she finds is very different.

>cut blue wire

[with the steak knife]

[Your score just went up by 5 points. The total is now 100 out of 100.]

You slide the blade of the steak knife under the blue wire and pull back on it as hard as you can. The thick insulation cracks under the strain, stretches, frays and splits…

Snap! A shower of sparks erupts from the enclosure. You lose your balance and fall backwards to the floor.

“X-unit just went out again,” shouts a voice.

“Which line is it, Baker?”

“Kid’s board says it’s the ground. The others look okay. We’re lettin’ it go, Able. The sequencer’s running.”

The walkie-talkie crackles for a moment.

“Congratulations.”

You turn, but see no one.

“Zero minus fifteen seconds,” crackles the walkie-talkie.

“You should be proud of yourself.” Where is that voice coming from? “This gadget would’ve blown New Mexico right off the map if you hadn’t stopped it. Imagine the embarrassment.”

A burst of static. “Minus ten seconds.”

The space around you articulates. It’s not as scary the second time.

“Of course, there’s the problem of causality,” continues the voice. “If Harry doesn’t get his A-bomb, the future that created you cannot occur. And you can’t sabotage the test if you’re never born, can you?”

The walkie-talkie is fading away. “Five seconds. Four.”

The voice chuckles amiably. “Not to worry, though. Nature doesn’t know the word ‘paradox.’ Gotta bleed off that quantum steam somehow. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a good-sized bang every time they shoot off one of these gizmos. Just enough fireworks to keep the historians happy.”

The player has not actually prevented the Trinity explosion at all, but reduced its effect from a blast that would have destroyed the entire state of New Mexico to the effects we are actually familiar with. Her meddling has altered the laws of physics, but only to set up the reality she has already experienced, for causality cannot be violated. She now finds herself back in London, exactly where she began the game, and faced with doing the whole thing all over again. At best she can hope that she has prevented the complete destruction of mankind. The beauty of the Kensington Gardens, though, and presumably everything else she knows, will be destroyed forever. Thus our modern notions of progress and past, present, and future are dashed away in a nod to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. What is left are only individual moments.

Much in Trinity goes entirely unexplained. To whom does the mysterious voice that occasionally whispers in the player’s ear at key moments belong? What and where is this magical land, exactly, and why does a new doorway spring up there with every atomic explosion in our world? Who is the little boy blowing the bubbles? Who is the bird lady who seems to know more than the player about what is to come even before the missiles begin to rain down on London? How does the roadrunner, the player’s on-again, off-again companion throughout the game, fit into everything else? How exactly has the player gotten stuck in this endless loop that becomes apparent at the end of the game? Surrealism is dangerous in any form of literature, and is far overused in IF. Yet here, in the hands of a master, it works superbly. We do not know the answers to any of these questions, and quite possibly neither does Moriarty, yet the pieces fit together in a way that just feels right on a level beyond intellect.

For all of its structural and emotional heft, Trinity remains a perfectly satisfying traditionalist text adventure. The player collects objects, solves puzzles, and scores points, just as in Adventure, and Moriarty never challenges this basic formula. Unlike many of the games I will discuss in detail, Trinity succeeds not by extending or subverting the form but by using it to perfection, and in doing so it achieves a perfect balance between Nelson’s narrative and crossword. Many of Trinity’s features have been immensely influential. While time travel games were certainly far from unknown before it, Trinity raised the bar with its detailed, meticulously accurate recreation of the past. Moriarty did an immense amount of research for the game, traveling to Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Trinity Site himself and even including a voluminous bibliography with the game’s documentation. Another IF tradition, some would claim an overused one, inaugurated by Trinity was the use of occasional box quotes to highlight its action. Trinity‘s quotations, ranging from Alexander Pope to the Bible to Talking Heads’ David Byrne, are always cogent and serve to reinforce the game’s claim to the status of serious literature by anchoring it within the larger literary tradition.

Trinity’s achievement is so immense that it is hard not to see the remaining few years of Infocom as somewhat anticlimactic, even though several more classic works were in store. The game sold only moderately, which, combined with the commercial failure of A Mind Forever Voyaging, probably helped to convince the company to refocus its attention onto slightly less high-brow works of IF.

For a newer time-travel epic that captures some of the feel and even some of the stately majesty of Trinity, see Graham Nelson’s Jigsaw.

Infocom Gets Sexy: Leather Goddesses of Phobos

At first, it is hard not to feel a bit disillusioned when turning to Steve Meretzky’s first game after A Mind Forever Voyaging. Having ventured into the waters of serious speculative fiction and found his audience rather lukewarm, he returned to his forte of science fiction comedy with Leather Goddess of Phobos. The difference, though, and the element which makes the game worthy of brief discussion here, was that Meretzky, in a first for himself as well as Infocom, brought sex into the equation. Billed as a “racy science fiction spoof,” the game is an homage of sorts to 1930s movie serials like Flash Gordon, with the implicit sexuality of those production made overt. The player begins the game in a bar in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, and in a rather clever touch chooses whether to play as a male or female by relieving herself in the appropriate bathroom. The gender of the player’s various potential conquests changes depending on the sex she chooses at the beginning. She is soon abducted by Leather Goddess for employment as their personal sex slave. Meretzky is all for lesbians, of course, so the Leather Goddesses remain the Leather Goddesses even if the player chooses to be female. The player soon escapes from the Goddesses, and sets off on a merry romp around the galaxy to foil their nefarious plans.

The story goes that Meretzky was deeply disappointed that Mind’s political content inspired nary a whiff of notice in the press. Determined to court controversy wherever he could find it, he opted to make his new game racy. He seems quite proud of himself all things considered, as is demonstrated by the game’s opening text:

Some material in this story may not be suitable for children, especially the parts involving sex, which no one should know anything about until reaching the age of eighteen (twenty-one in certain states). This story is also unsuitable for censors, members of the Moral Majority, and anyone else who thinks that sex is dirty rather than fun.

The attitudes expressed and language used in this story are representative only of the views of the author, and in no way represent the views of Infocom, Inc. or its employees, many of whom are children, censors, and members of the Moral Majority. (But very few of whom, based on last year’s Christmas Party, think that sex is dirty.)

By now, all the folks who might be offended by LEATHER GODDESSES OF PHOBOS have whipped their disk out of their drive and, evidence in hand, are indignantly huffing toward their dealer, their lawyer, or their favorite repression-oriented politico. So… Hit the RETURN/ENTER key to begin!

In truth, the game would likely be given no worse than a PG–13 rating if released as a movie, and Meretzky’s constant patting himself on the back for his edginess grows a bit wearisome. As an apparent concession to those with particularly delicate sensibilities, though, three user-selectable “naughtiness levels” were offered: Tame, Suggestive, and Lewd. I would suspect that very few players bothered with anything but the Lewd level, of course. What they found there were a number of sex scenes of the old Hollywood fade-to-black style; a fair number of dirty words that often seem forced, as if thrown in more from a sense of obligation than anything else; and an endless stream of sexual innuendo. Words like “thrusting” get a lot of play in reference to buildings and rocket ships, for instance. The end result generally does not get far above a Beavis and Butthead level of humor, but when it hits the mark the good-natured silliness can be amusing enough:

>n

Canalview Mall

Trent follows you.

[A warning for any Jerry Falwell groupies who are miraculously still playing: we’ll be using the word “tits” in five turns or so. Please consult the manual for the proper way to stop playing.]

>z

Time passes…

[Only a few turns until the “tits” reference! Use QUIT now if you might be offended!]

>z

Time passes…

[Last warning! The word “tits” will appear in the very next turn! This is your absolutely last chance to avoid seeing “tits” used!!!]

>z

Time passes…

A hyperdimensional traveller suddenly appears out of thin air. “My sister has tremendous breasts,” says the traveller and, without further explanation, vanishes, leaving only a vague trace of interdimensional ozone.

[Oh, regarding the use of “tits,” we changed our mind at the last minute. Everyone agreed it was too risque.]

Obviously, anyone expecting serious titillation from Leather is likely to be disappointed, but the game’s aggressively low-brow humor works more often than not. One of my favorite responses occurs when the hapless player tries to use the standard command to check her score:

>score

[with Trent]

A slap across the face alerts you that Trent isn’t that hot to trot. And not a goddam single cold shower in sight!

Infocom included an unlabelled scratch-n-sniff card with Leather. The game occasionally tells the player to try out a particular square when some strong odor is present. The mind might initially boggle at the potential smells that might be found there, but all of the scents are actually perfectly wholesome. Thankfully, Infocom’s edginess only went so far.

In the end, Leather is a trifle, but it is an amusing trifle, and Infocom’s usual technical excellence and sense of strong game design make it the first racy text adventure that is even remotely worth playing. While it may have disappointed Meretzky by failing to generate any more controversy than Mind, it was Infocom’s last real commercial hit, the old adage that sex sells apparently holding true. For a modern game that follows somewhat in the tradition of Leather, but with a level of explicitness that even the controversy-courting Meretzky would not have dared approach on the 1980s commercial game market, try Adam Thorton’s Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country.

Wordplay: Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It

Jeff O’Neill’s Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It is one of the most unique titles in the Infocom catalog, and one which has in its quiet way been fairly influential. Nord is actually a collection of bite-sized “short stories,” all of them taking place in the “mixed-up town of Punster.” The segments are not dependent upon one another and can in fact be played in any order, with one exception: unlocking the eighth and final chapter requires that the player complete the other seven. While this approach is unique enough in itself, it is only the beginning of the game’s innovations. Each of Nord’s segments revolves around a particular kind of wordplay. Puns, clichés, spoonerisms, and others are present and accounted for. The end result is an “adventure game” that plays like nothing else seen in the genre before, and one that could only be done as textual IF. A sample transcript from the section dealing with clichés gives a taste of typical gameplay:

The farm crisis never seemed so desperate as it has this planting season in Punster. One such family farm on the edge of town, the McCleary’s, has been especially blighted. The family, though well accustomed to hard work, suddenly lost the ability to perform even the simplist of chores necessary to scratch a living from the soil. They have since been driven from the land, and join with their fellow Punster neighbors in urging you to somehow save the family farm.

Road

The telltail smell of grain and dung drifts by. You’re on a dusty road in front of abandoned farm – a nice-sized spread of land that stretches far out to meet the horizon.

A wooden cart sits in the dusty road here.

An old dog sits in the dust at the side of the road, feeling all of the spirit of gravity, looking dog-eared and worn out by a lifetime on the farm.

>teach old dog new tricks

The old dog perks up one of its dog-eared ears, then the other. Its tail emerges from the surrounding dust and begins oscillating back and forth with such intensity that you’d think it was a case of the tail wagging the dog.

In turn the old boy goes through a series of back flips, chases its tail, walks around on his hind legs, and howls at the moon. The dog, bursting with energy through its shiny new coat, is no longer dry as the dust that surrounds it.

Suddenly by leaps and bounds, the old dog bolts away, and comes back with one stone in its slobbery mouth.

>go to field

You trudge along and get there…

Field

You are standing at the edge of a barren field that is reminiscent of the dust bowl days. A steady wind, having secreted away the topsoil, is now drifting sandy dirt across the plain. A scant sign of life here is a freshly burrowed molehill on the ground.

Marking the corner of the property is a large stack of hay, whose musty odor sticks in your nostrils.

The old dog follows behind you.

>search for needle in haystack

It’s hard, of course, because all those stalks of hay look like needles themselves. The needle is found twinkling brightly silver among the yellow stalks of hay grass. You grab it.

>go to barnyard

You trudge along and get there…

Barnyard

You’re standing here in the barnyard, a meager patch of scratched earth. You can tell right away what a dog-eat-dog world the farm can be, as you see lying on the ground a sow’s ear, and then some poor animal’s tail.

You can see a full complement of swords leaning up against the broad side of the barn, looking very out of place here on the farm.

You can see a sow’s ear and a tail here.

The old dog follows behind you.

>make silk purse out of sow’s ear

After working your fingers to the bone and using some rather amazing stitches, you finally tie up the last thread, taking pride in the silky radiance of the lavender purse.

>beat swords into plowshares

If you only had a hammer…

Nord and Bert had been intended by Infocom as the debut entry in a line of somewhat casual IF, which it hoped would win them converts outside of the typical adventure-gamer demographic. Unfortunately, the game was never given any promotion among those who might have found it interesting, and pretty well sank without a trace upon its release. It deserved a better fate, for it is among the most original works of the company’s later years, and it is just plain fun to play. Scoring all of the points available in any given section is fiendishly difficult, but, in keeping with its generally relaxed personality, a section is considered completed when some reasonable percentage of the maximum has been attained. Thus those who want to challenge themselves can struggle to find every last point, while those who simply want to have a good time and get the gist of things are free to move on. About the only serious complaint about the game that I can make is that in a couple of sections O’Neill seems to run out of inspiration for wordplay, and falls back on fairly typical text adventure tropes that seem exceptionally stale when juxtaposed against the rest of chapters. The other sections are more than good enough to make up for these failings, however. It may not have the serious pretensions of some of Infocom’s other works, and there is in fact virtually no real narrative happening here, but Nord and Bert is easily one of my five or so favorites from their catalog, and one of very few that I return to on a semi-regular basis.

The IF short story, as opposed to novel, has for better or for worse become a dominant trend in the modern community, driven by the annual Competition’s two-hour judging time limit and perhaps also the fact that virtually everyone writing IF today is a hobbyist with many other demands on her time. Epics still get made, of couse, but not in the quantity many would like to see. We will return to this debate in a later chapter. Nord and Bert’s idea of building an IF game not around a simulated world but around the actual words continues to recur occasionally in modern works. Nick Montfort’s Ad Verbum is an excellent homage to O’Neill’s original. For something more esoteric, try Carl Muckenhoupt’s The Gostak, which takes this idea of “playing with words” to an extreme by being written largely in a made-up language which the player gradually learns to decipher and then “speak” through contextual clues.

Late Experiments in Genre: The Lurking Horror and Plundered Hearts

1987 was the most prolific year by far for Infocom, with the company shipping no fewer than eight new IF titles. In this year, its last great flowering, Infocom consistently pushed at the boundaries that marked their previous IF. The just-discussed Nord and Bert is one example. Two more, David Lebling’s The Lurking Horror and Amy Brigg’s Plundered Hearts, are more conventional in form but represent forays into new genres of fiction.

The Lurking Horror is the first and only horror game that Infocom produced. In this unabashed homage to H.P. Lovecraft, the player takes the role of a student at the fictional GUE Tech University, which has been marked lately by a series of strange disappearances of its students. The game’s begins on a winter’s night in the midst of a blizzard. The campus is virtually shut down, but the player must venture forth to the computer lab to finish her literature paper. Upon logging in, she finds that her paper has disappeared off the campus computer system, the file replaced by a mysterious, garbled text that seems to be connected with GUE’s “Department of Alchemy.” She sets off to investigate with the help of a hacker who is not that far removed from the one in Bureaucracy, and the game is afoot.

Infocom was beginning to experiment with multimedia elements by this stage, and in certain versions of Lurking it included appropriately creepy sound files that were played to punctuate the action at certain points in the game. Still, as horror the game never quite hits the mark. Perhaps this is because the element of horror does not quite reconcile with the other, more endearing side of the game’s personality, a fond tribute to student life at MIT. There is no question that GUE is a stand-in for MIT. The pranks and quirky traditions; the intensely nerdy atmosphere; the network of ancient steam tunnels underneath the campus; the stylistically jumbled architecture dating from many different eras; even the legendarily cold Boston winter and the so-called “long corridor” running through the heart of the campus are all present, lovingly portrayed by Lebling with an almost palpable aura of nostalgia. Lebling:

It was a labor of love, set as it was at a thinly-disguised MIT, with lots of real places and a somewhat-accurate geography. Aside from the actual monsters, the course of the game duplicates “Institute Exploring” adventures I went on when I was a freshman (Mullen).

Lurking had initially been planned as an Interactive Fiction Plus release, only to be cut down to a standard-sized game for commercial reasons. Lebling himself has indicated that he was not entirely satisfied with the result: “A lot of lovely shivers had to be cut out of the design, and some stuff out of the almost-finished product” (Mullen). The overall design is polished, the puzzles are always fair, and the game is quite satisfying to play even in its truncated state, but it still feels like a bit of a missed opportunity.

Horror, particular Lovecraft-inflected horror, has continued to be a going concern in IF. Perhaps the best example, and a better game in virtually all ways than its progenitor, is Michael Gentry’s sprawling epic Anchorhead. College campuses have also been frequently used as IF settings. Gareth Rees’ Christminster does for Oxford and Michael Roberts’ Return to Ditch Day does for Cal-Tech what Lurking did for MIT.

The only Infocom game authored by a woman, Plundered Hearts is also the company’s only romance. Its author, Amy Briggs, describes its genesis: I wanted to write a game that women like myself would enjoy, and I enjoyed romances. Actually, even more than romance, I enjoy historical fiction, and that’s a genre that’s still largely untapped in the game industry, unless you count Castles, or the medieval side of Dungeons and Dragons games. I’m not sure why that genre has been ignored – I think we decided at Infocom that a historical romance would be a little more focused at a particular audience than historical fiction. Also, I very definitely wanted a female protagonist, and I wanted to play with the humor of being a romantic heroine – typically passive and docile, with at most “spunk” – in a situation where she has to take the reins (deMause).

Briggs, a longtime Infocom employee in various positions who in this the company’s twilight was finally given the change to write her own game, goes for the classic bodice-ripper feel right from the dream sequence that opens it:

>SHOOT THE PIRATE

Trembling, you fire the heavy arquebus. You hear its loud report over the roaring wind, yet the dark figure still approaches. The gun falls from your nerveless hands.

“You won’t kill me,” he says, stepping over the weapon. “Not when I am the only protection you have from Jean Lafond.”

Chestnut hair, tousled by the wind, frames the tanned oval of his face. Lips curving, his eyes rake over your inadequately dressed body, the damp chemise clinging to your legs and heaving bosom, your gleaming hair. You are intensely aware of the strength of his hard seaworn body, of the deep sea blue of his eyes. And then his mouth is on yours, lips parted, demanding, and you arch into his kiss…

He presses you against him, head bent. “But who, my dear,” he whispers into your hair, “will protect you from me?”

Given Infocom’s well-documented struggle with character interaction in its early mysteries, one might wonder how on Earth Briggs hoped to pull off a believable romance. In fact, though, she does just that, not through any new technical wizardry but by carefully limiting and scripting the character interaction. Essentially, Plundered Hearts is a straightforward adventure game, albeit a rousing good one, set among pirates on Spanish Main in the late 1600s. The protagonist is a young Englishwoman whose attempt to travel by sea to nurse her ailing father in the West Indies meets with disaster when her ship is attacked by pirates. High adventure ensues, as does a developing romance with a charming rogue.

The game works so well because Briggs places the interactive emphasis on things that IF is very good at, and largely pre-scripts the game’s “touchy-feely” aspects. Stacking the deck in her favor she may be, but the results are thoroughly satisfying, and the technique has been much-emulated since. Its plucky, likable heroine is so well characterized, both in the game itself and in its accompanying documentation, that the game’s admitted railroading of the player seems perfectly unforced. Plundered is in fact among the best of Infocom’s later efforts, absolutely drenched in period and genre atmosphere and, with Infocom’s years of design experience to draw upon, impeccably constructed as a game. It is one of Infocom’s most under-played and under-appreciated titles. Many seem to avoid it, perhaps because IF’s still largely male demographic is not terribly interested in romance novels, but virtually all who give it a chance are delighted. For those who are concerned about such things, its sexual content is essentially non-existent. It is a classic romance in the old style, where sexuality is implied but never shown. The pity is that Infocom’s downsizing and eventual demise prevented Briggs from writing any more IF.

Plundered Hearts sold dismally, but several modern IF authors are unabashed fans of both it and romance novels in general, and have given the genre surprising life. Kathleen Fischer’s Civil War romance Masquerade seems particularly indebted to Plundered Hearts, and is almost as satisfying. See Christopher Huang’s Muse: An Autumn Romance for a touching take on unrequited love from a male perspective. Finally, Emily Short’s Savoir Faire, while not really a romance, has much of the same period atmosphere as Plundered Hearts.

The three games previously discussed all represent significant attempts by Infocom to move IF into previously unexplored genres. All were commercial failures, however, and if anything likely only hastened the company’s decline. Perhaps the essential problem was that the people who might be interested in such works were generally not computer game players, at least at this time, while those who were - largely young men with a prediliction for science fiction and Dungeons and Dragons-style fantasy - were not terribly interested in traveling down these particular literary roads. Thus Infocom was left in a frustrating position, with a works that it felt would interest certain people but with no way to bring those works to those people’s attention. It is a problem that those in the modern IF community are all too familiar with.

Late Experiments in Form: Border Zone and Beyond Zork

Even as it branched into new genres, Infocom also experimented with various new technologies in its IF titles during that busy year of 1987. One of the more successful of these experiments, or, as some would have them, gimmicks, I have already mentioned in my discussion of The Lurking Horror and its inclusion of sound effects. While sound was a nice, but inessential, bonus feature in Lurking, two other games from that year were largely defined by their “gimmicks.” Both were made possible by another revision of the Z-Machine, to version 5. While the size of version 5 games remained capped at 256K, text formatting and presentation options improved yet again; limited graphical displays were made possible with the availability of color and a special graphical font for drawing on-screen; a mouse was supported on those machines that had one available; and (for better or for worse) the Z-Machine was given real-time capabilities. A very convenient option to UNDO the player’s last command was also added. Although Infocom used version 5 for just a bare few games, it later became the de facto standard for modern IF games. That story will have to wait for a future chapter, however.

Border Zone by Marc Blank was Infocom’s first and only foray into the arena of espionage fiction ala John Le Carré and Frederick Forsyth. It construction was also somewhat unique. In a nod to Nord and Bert, the game is really three separate, interlocking stories told from three different points of view. They can be played in any order, although Infocom recommends that the player go through them sequentially to experience the larger plot of the game as a whole in a coherent way. The game takes places in the fictional Eastern bloc country of Frobnia. In the first part, the player takes the role of an ordinary Western businessman who meets a mysterious, badly wounded man on a train and receives some papers from him. The second part takes place from the perspective of that wounded agent as he attempts to escape Frobnia, and the third introduces yet another protagonist, an American double agent who is trying to prevent the assassination that is at the heart of all these previous events. Blank dives into the spy novel genre with Infocom’s usual wholehearted gusto, and the end result would work quite well if it were not almost totally undone by the game’s associated technical gimmick.

The gimmick here is that Border Zone is a real-time game. A clock steadily advances in synch with the real world, and events continue to happen in the story even if the player enters nothing at all. The obvious hope was that this would impart a sense of urgency, and further immerse the player into the game. In practice, though, it is just annoying, forcing the player to continually restore or restart to maximize her time efficiency after he solves each puzzle. In the end, real-time IF is an answer to a question absolutely no one was asking. Just giving the player a limited number of conventional turns to accomplish what he need to works just as well in establishing urgency, and does not penalize those whose typing skills are perhaps not quite up to par. The real pity here is that the real-time gimmick ruins an otherwise well-written and well-crafted game. In an odd reversal of Infocom’s usual policy of allowing its players to customize its games and play them their way, Border Zone does not allow the real-time clocked to be disabled entirely, only slowed down or sped up. The game represents an interesting experiment, but an emphatically failed one, and one that to my knowledge has never been repeated.

Only marginally more successful was Infocom’s attempt at creating an “IF RPG,” Brian Moriarty’s Beyond Zork. In this return to the fantasy universe of the Zork and Enchanter trilogies, the player is sent on a quest for the legendary Coconut of Quendor. The difference here is that the player creates a persona for herself in the style of a role-playing game such as Ultima, Wizardry, or The Bard’s Tale, allocating points to statistics such as strength, intelligence, and dexterity. Much of Beyond Zork revolves around conventional IF puzzle-solving, but there are also monsters to be defeated in simulated, randomized combat. In the classic RPG mold, the player will steadily collect better weapons and armor and improve her ability scores as she progresses through the game, thus allowing her to take on bigger and tougher foes. Beyond Zork bears the obvious influence of online MUDS (Multi-User Dungeons), which appear superficially similar to single-player IF, but actually have a very different focus. Beyond Zork’s attempt to combine the two does not really work, and just ends up feeling rather schizophrenic. One finds oneself wishing to just be allowed to enjoy Moriarty’s clever puzzles and well-crafted prose, and not have to deal with the hack and slash elements at all.

Randomized combat in textual IF has always been oddly unsatisfying, in spite of occasional noble attempts like Beyond Zork. Perhaps the major problem is that the ability to RESTORE or (beginning with Z-Machine version 5) simply UNDO at any time removes all tension. An unfavorable “die roll” is thus easily enough corrected, and the combat ends up feeling more like tedious number crunching to just be gotten through than anything more exciting. Also, the text-based nature of the medium has meant that strategic options for the player are very limited, removing any real element of skill from the equation. I believe that an IF RPG might work if it provided a graphical display showing the player’s relation to her enemies, and thus allowing the use of real strategy in battle. As of yet, though, no one has tried anything quite like that, and every experiment in this area - including Quarterstaff: The Tomb of Setmoth, an IF RPG effort developed by an outside party and published for Macintosh only by Infocom in 1988 - has failed in a similar way to Beyond Zork.

Beyond Zork (1987)

Beyond Zork presents by far the most advanced interface yet seen from Infocom, as the above screenshot may illustrate. The player can choose from several different screen layouts displaying various sorts of information. The above shows the default. A description of the player’s current location always appears to the top left, while a map of the surrounding geography appears to the right. The player can click with a mouse on this map to move around if she so chooses. Note also the game’s use of color. Modern IF designers have almost entirely eschewed this sort of flash in favor of the cleaner, more book-like model of Infocom’s earlier games.

As I hope the above discussion has conveyed, even Infocom’s unsuccessful designs were consistently innovative and interesting. In consistent quality, quantity, and creativity, no other IF publisher of the commercial era could touch Infocom. However, that does not mean that no interesting work at all was coming from other camps. In the next chapter, we will leave Infocom for a time to look at some of their more significant rivals’ histories and games.

Sources for Further Investigation

Games:

For the Infocom games discussed, see the list of canonical works beginning on page 2.

Ad Verbum. 2000. Nick Montfort.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/adverbum.z5.

All Things Devours. 2004. “half sick of shadows.”

http://mirror.archive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/devours/devours.z5.

Anchorhead. 1998. Michael Gentry.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/anchor.z8.

Bad Machine. 1998. Dan Shiovitz.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/bmch.zip.

Balances. 1994. Graham Nelson.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/balances.z5.

Christminster. 1995. Gareth Rees.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/minster.z5.

Dangerous Curves. 2000. Irene Callaci.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/curves.z8.

The Dreamhold. 2004. Andrew Plotkin.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/dreamhold.z8.

Dutch Dapper IV: The Final Voyage. 2002. Harry Hol.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/DDIV.z5.

The Fire Tower. 2004. Jacqueline A. Lott.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/art/if-artshow/year2004/firetower.z8.

The Gostak. 2001. Carl Muckenhoupt.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2001/inform/gostak/gostak.z5.

Guilty Bastards. 1998. Kent Tessman.

http://mirror..ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/hugo/guilty.zip.

Jigsaw. 1995. Graham Nelson.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Jigsaw.z8.

Klaustrophobia. 1994. Carol Hovick.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/klaus.zip.

LASH. 2000. Paul O’Brian.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/LASH.z8.

Masquerade. 2000. Kathleen M. Fischer.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/mask/mask.z5.

Muse: An Autumn Romance. 1998. Christopher Huang.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/muse.z5.

Photopia. 1998. Adam Cadre.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/photopia.z5.

Return to Ditch Day. 2004. Michael J. Roberts.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/return-to-ditch-day.zip.

Savoir Faire. 2002. Emily Short.

http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Savoir.z8.

Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country. 2001. Adam Thornton.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2001/glulx/smtuc/smtuc.blb.

Threnody. 2005. John Schiff.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/springthing/2005/Threnody.zip.

Winter Wonderland. 1999. Laura A. Knauth.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition99/inform/winter/winter.z5.

Other Works:

Berlyn, Michael. Transcript of online chat on CompuServe’s GameSIG. July 18, 1984.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/info/berlynco_adv.txt.

Cree, Graeme. Review of A Mind Forever Voyaging, SPAG #5, April 1995.

http://sparkynet.com/spag/m.html#amfv.

Cree, Graeme. Review of Suspended, SPAG #8, February 1996.

http://sparkynet.com/spag/s.html#suspended.

deMause, Neil. “Romancing the Genre: An Interview with Plundered Hearts Author Amy Briggs.” XYZZY News #12.

http://www.xyzzynews.com/xyzzy.12d.html.

Greenlee, Steven. “Where Are They Now?” Computer Games Review, April 1996.

http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~pete/Infocom/Articles/where.html.

Mullen, Eileen. “Interview with David Lebling.” XYZZY News #8.

http://www.xyzzynews.com/xyzzy.8d.html.

Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck. MIT Press: Cambridge, 1997.

Murray, Matthew. “Top 5 Underrated Games?” Usenet post to comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure, April 9, 1997.

Nelson, Graham. “The Craft of Adventure (2[nd] ed.).”

http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/info/Craft.Of.Adventure.txt.

Olsson, Magnus. Review of Wishbringer, SPAG #6, July 1995.

http://sparkynet.com/spag/w.html#wishbringer.

Rigby, Paul. “From Here to Trinity… and Back Again.” Adventure Probe, May 1991.

http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/moriarty.html.

Simpson, M.J. Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams. Justin, Charles, and Company: Boston, 2003.

Chapter 6: The Rest of Commercial IF

English is not English. That became obviously clear at a press conference in London, which was attended by Dave Lebling (Spellbreaker, Starcross) from Infocom and Anita Sinclair (The Pawn) from Magnetic Scrolls.

While chatting we also discussed problems Infocom fans have with the parser of The Pawn. German Infocom User group pointed out that The Pawn does not understand “look into”.

Asking Anita about that, she became suspicious for a very short moment, only to counter: “Why should our parser understand this? Look into is completely wrong in English grammar”. However, Dave Lebling answered: “In American English ”Look into“ is a common term.” Anita agreed to support “Look into” in future games, even if it conflicts with grammar rules. Vice versa Dave Lebling promised to show more consideration to English people in his next adventure, because Anita immediately complained about a scene in Spellbreaker, in which the parser understands American English, but not British English.

– Boris Schneider (Happy Computing, June 1987)

Any remotely comprehensive survey of the commercial IF marketplace of the eighties as a whole would necessitate literally hundreds of pages. At IF’s peak around 1983, several dozen companies were actively creating and promoting IF games, which accounted for a significant chunk of the entertainment software market as a whole. Science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon’s famous saying that “ninety percent of everything is crud” certainly applies here, however. If anything, ninety percent is an optimistic figure. Most of the games produced at this time were frankly awful, saddled with borderline illiterate writing, excruciating two-word parsers, and incoherent storylines, while their utter lack of attention to good game design made many well-nigh insolvable for the player who was unwilling to try random actions ad nauseum or hack into the games’ data files for answers. They were all but unplayable in their own time, and today are interesting only as minor historical curiosities.

Amidst all this dross, though, there was a fair amount of quality, or at least interesting, work being done. No other publisher from the era has a catalog worthy of mention in the same breath as Infocom, but there was a handful whose work is worthy of serious discussion today. In this chapter, I will briefly describe the histories of the most significant of the non-Infocom publishers, and discuss some of their most important works.

The Phoenix Mainframe Community and Topologika

Today, Level 9 Computing, which I will discuss shortly, is often referred to as the “British Infocom.” A better candidate for that title, though, might be Topologika, for the origins of its text adventures are surprisingly similar to those of Infocom. The implementers at Topologika were also products of a prestigious university, in this case Cambridge, and their first product was also a microcomputer version of a mainframe game they had developed there. Here their respective stories diverge considerably, however. Topologika’s history and the games it produced are unique and fascinating in their own right.

The mainframe computer at Cambridge was known as Phoenix, and has become something of a legend not only in the IF world but in computer science circles in general. It entered service in 1971, and quickly became a centerpiece of computing research in Britain. It was also the machine on which Jon Thackray and David Seal created what was most likely the first adventure game written outside of America, Acheton, in 1978. As was common in the mainframe world, Acheton was expanded and refined for years after its initial creation, not finally reaching a relatively finished state until 1981. It is yet another variation on the plotless “collect the treasures” fantasy dungeon crawl, but it is distinguished by a number of features. For starters, it is almost incomprehensibly huge, having 403 separate locations to explore, and its difficult is legendary:

Acheton is one of the very earliest adventure games, preceded most significantly by ADVENT (Colossal Cave) and mainframe Zork. It is a game much influenced by those games (there’s even a hollow voice), with the main differences being that it is MUCH larger and (as expected from the Phoenix crew) quite a bit tougher and more cruel. It starts by warning you of its difficulty, and then underscores the point. A smug veteran of Colossal Cave quickly finds the familiar lamp and keys, heads down to that oh-so-familiar grate, opens it up, goes down, falls into a well and dies. This is a wakeup call - and you had better get used to such instant deaths, because there are a lot of them in Acheton (Russotto).

Most importantly, though, the creators of Acheton produced not only a game but a programming environment to allow the creation of more like it. This adventure development system was made freely available to users of Phoenix, and many more games were written with it throughout the eighties.

The home computer explosion prompted some of the Phoenix authors to port their works to microcomputers and seek a publisher for them. Several were published by Acornsoft, but that company soon decided to get out of the adventure game market, and the Cambridge team took their work to a young publisher known as Topologika. A productive, albeit unusual, relationship was soon established. The Phoenix community continued to develop and play games on their mainframe, with the best being ported to home computers and given to Topologika to market. Most were written by members of Cambridge’s Mathematics Department, and play largely as one might expect of games from such creators. They are layered with often difficult but generally fair and logical puzzles, while plot, character, and setting are given a back seat if they receive any consideration at all. While not always terribly interesting from a literary perspective, the games have their devotees even today among lovers of well-designed puzzlefests.

Perhaps Topologika’s most original and satisfying work is Jonathan Partington’s Avon, a full-on immersion into the world of William Shakespeare. The allusions and quotations fly fast and loose as the player deal with characters and situations from Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and others:

You are not going to forget today in a hurry.

You will be quite happy just to survive. It started with a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s town, and you haven’t the slightest idea where it is going to end.

To start with, everything went normally. Like all the other tourists you looked round the town, walked along the banks of the Avon, visited Ann Hathaway’s cottage, bought some postcards, had a cup of tea, obstructed the traffic and enjoyed the sunshine. Then something went seriously wrong.

Was it something to do with those three old ladies in the antique shop, the ones who wanted you to buy their old brass cauldron? Did you offend them when you refused? Was there something funny about that pine tree? It made such a strange groaning sound when you walked past it!

Now that you think back, other oddities spring to mind. Were you right in supposing that that ass’s head in the museum moved slightly when you passed by?

That strange asp in the pet shop – it wriggled towards you very purposefully, and it might have bitten you if you hadn’t stepped back smartly!

Perhaps most suspicious of all was the behaviour of the pharmacist – when you walked into his shop to buy some aspirins he hid the phial he was mixing so hastily that you feel sure it was some sort of illicit substance.

The town seemed suddenly rather strange, and definitely menacing, so you decided to take a walk along banks of the river Avon. It was then you knew something, for the streets suddenly looked totally unfamiliar.

Wherever this is, it certainly isn’t modern Stratford – those woods over there remind you of Scotland, the streets might be London, or Egypt, or Venice – there is nothing that you can get your bearings from.

You took stock of your position. Even the ground at your feet looked unnatural. It was made of boards, as though you were on some sort of stage. You sighed a premature sigh of relief – surely all was explained: you must be on a huge stage, maybe some sort of film set. Well, that would explain some things, but the whole area looked far too realistic – those were real trees and real buildings.

Some people passed in the distance, and you heard their conversation: “Marry, ’tis a strange churl, that standeth over there. Methinks it knoweth not the time of day.” It was then that hope died and desperation took over – why, instead of being a warm August day, it had suddenly become a cold winter’s afternoon, and it would be dark within a few minutes. Yes, something had gone badly wrong.

So there you are, standing in a world that, although it is definitely NOT Stratford-upon-Avon, does seem to have this strange Shakespearean flavour. To judge by those fragments of Shakespeare’s works that you can remember, it all looks very much as though you may have been transported into the world of his plays, but it will be your wits rather than your knowledge that will help you now.

Whoever it was that got you into this nightmare, it is now up to you to find your way back to the present day. Good luck! You are standing on a flat plain. From here it seems that all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances to the north, south, east and west.

:quit

All’s well that ends well. Are you sure you want to finish?

?yes

You scored 10 points out of a maximum of 450.

Once more into the breach, dear friend?

?no

Our revels now are ended.

Finished.

Students of literature and lovers of the Bard will have a wonderful time trying to spot all the references, and the game, while no cakewalk, is even much less difficult than the Topologika norm.

Topologika’s work remained almost defiantly quirky over the years, and that, combined with the Phoenix group’s unapologetically elitist, austere approach to game design, caused it to remain something of an esoteric taste even in IF’s commercial heyday. The company stuck with a two-word parser, albeit a fairly good one as such things go, for years after Infocom had raised that particular bar, and common IF shortcuts such as I for INVENTORY were never implemented. Most legendary of all is Topologika’s refusal to implement one of the most common IF verbs of all, EXAMINE. Despite, or perhaps because of, all this, its games have a certain charm all their own for many.

As the eighties drew to a close, the Phoenix community began to disperse, and Toplogika grew less interested in publishing its work in a commercial arena ever more enthralled with graphical adventures. The company still exists today, but only as a publisher of educational software. The old Phoenix mainframe was finally shut down in 1995 amidst a great outburst of tears and nostalgia amongst those for whom it had been an important part of their lives.

Present at Cambridge for many of the glory years of the Phoenix IF community and briefly a student of Jonathan Partington was a mathematics major named Graham Nelson, who would have a huge role to play in the future of IF. We will learn more of him and his work in future chapters.

Level 9 Computing

Level 9 Computing was founded in England by the three Austin brothers - Pete, Mike, and Nick - in 1981. At first the brothers concentrated on utilities and arcade games, but they found their calling, as it were, when they created yet another adaptation of the original Adventure, which they entitled Colossal Adventure to advertise the expanded end-game section that they had included. Today, the game does deserve respect for its technical prowess if not its originality. Level 9’s compression techniques were better even than those of Infocom, and allowed it to pack not only the whole original Adventure but also its expanded end-game into a BBC Micro with 32K of memory and a cassette drive for storage. The company in fact loved to advertise the size of its games compared to the competition, a trend that reached a somewhat ridiculous climax when it breathlessly declared its game Snowball to be the largest adventure ever, boasting 7000 rooms. What was not mentioned was that 6800 of those rooms were part of a huge, featureless maze.

Hyperbole aside, Level 9 produced a considerable number of solid adventures during the eighties. As was quickly becoming the norm among IF developers, the Austins designed their games to run on a virtual machine, know as the A-Code system in their case, to allow them to easily port them to many platforms. Beginning quite early in its history, Level 9 also began including simple line-drawn graphics with some versions of its adventures. Its early games could not rival Infocom in technical or literary polish, but it should be recognized that Level 9’s hardware constraints were also much greater. Because it sold primarily into the British market, where cassettes rather than floppy disks were the dominant storage medium, Level 9 did not have the luxury of using virtual memory techniques to increase the complexity of its efforts. Looked at in this light, the company’s achievements are as remarkable in their own way as those of Infocom. Common consensus in fact holds Level 9’s games to be the most advanced cassette-based adventures ever written. In Britain, Level 9 was the dominant publisher of text adventures for several years, the company that players immediately thought of when the genre was discussed. A whole generation of players cut their teeth on these games in a country where Infocom’s games were usually available only as prohibitively expensive imports, and often required hardware beyond the average Briton’s means.

In 1986, Level 9’s dominance in Britain was being seriously challenged for the first time. The increasing affordability of disk drives and a distribution deal that Infocom had signed with a British publisher meant that Infocom’s games were finally becoming accessible to the average user, and another upstart British company I will discuss shortly, Magnetic Scrolls, was making waves on both sides of the Atlantic. Level 9 responded with an all-new adventure engine named KAOS, which targeted newer, more powerful machines such as the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST and which was the equal of any of its rivals’ technology. The handful of games that Level 9 produced with this system are in fact among the most sophisticated of their era, and quite playable even today.

The most remembered and respected of this group is Pete Austin’s Knight Orc, which, in an unusual reversal, casts the player in the role of the thoroughly disgusting and disreputable character of the title, who at the beginning of the game is “volunteered” by his companions to participate in a joust with a knight. (Volunteering in this context means being tied to a horse that is then led onto the field of combat.)

Knight Orc screen

After this rather deflating experience, the player is off to explore a land full of prima donnas and losers of all ilk. From Robb Sherwin’s review:

So, then. You’re an orc trapped in human country. While attempting to pick up some rope to cross the river you will encounter the first bit of magic the game has to offer: the characters. I have never witnessed a greater collection of thugs, losers, egomaniacs and self-important motos than I have in this game. The descriptions offered by the parser as to the wandering characters are cruel –

The gripper: “he is a squinty, rat-like youth, with an orcish squint.”

Kris the ant-warrior: “she is a muscle-bound champion, armoured with plates of giant ant cuticle and wearing a strange ant-head helm. She looks a lot like an ogre-sized fried roach.”

Denzyl: “he is a right gullible and stupid-looking person.”

Fungus the boggit-man: “he is a lanky, twitchy-fingered, nicotine-addict.”

– but a riot. Efffing genius.

A personal favorite is the Prophet, whom the game uses as an embodiment of the more distasteful aspects of organized religion:

A sweaty pedophile quite happy to swarm on about the meek inheriting the earth, turning the other cheek and the love of you know who… Until you mention liberation theology, disarmament, or anyone other than human males becoming ministers.

These characters and many others wander the landscape of their own accord, and the player must interact with virtually all of them to solve the game. The result is not only one of the most smartly funny games of its era but also a technical tour de force, and features an ending so original and surprising that I cannot bear to spoil it here.

Like most of its contemporaries, Level 9 was ultimately undone by declining commercial interest in parser-based adventures. Its final IF game, released in 1989, was the very unique supernatural crime drama Scapeghost, a classic in its own right almost the equal of Knight Orc. The company struggled on for two more years, attempting to move into other areas of software development, but finally closed its doors in 1991.

Melbourne House

Australian publisher Melbourne House was founded in 1978 with the intention of providing books to the nascent home computer market. From there, the company branched out into software, and in the early eighties acquired the then still modestly priced license to develop a series of IF games based upon J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. A handful of Melbourne University students, most notably Veronika Megler and Philip Mitchell, was hired to create the first of these adventures. Released in 1982 for the ZX Spectrum and subsequently ported to a wide variety of machines, The Hobbit became probably the single most commercially successful IF game ever, selling in excess of one million copies worldwide on the strength of its license and Melbourne House’s extensive promotion. It was often packaged with a copy of Tolkien’s novel, and provided a ticket for entry to his universe for many young players, myself among them. For that perhaps more than anything else the game deserves considerable credit.

The Hobbit screen

On more capable machines of its time, The Hobbit featured a nicely done (for its time) picture of virtually every location as well as even more impressive background music, features that certainly did nothing to diminish its marketability. Today, however, the most interesting feature of the game is its attempt to provide a degree of independent agency to its characters. Thorin, Gandalf, and various others move about of their own accord, occasionally speaking a stock phrase to the player (who of course plays the role of Bilbo), or commenting on the action. The player can even command these characters to do various things, although there is seldom any real point. In truth, this vaunted “artificial intelligence” that Melbourne House loved to hype is more often annoying than useful. On the few occasions where another character is needed, he always seems to have gone wandering off somewhere else, and sometimes the characters’ actions are frustrating in the extreme, as when they pluck items right off the player’s person for no apparent reason and carry them off. Most of the fun to be had with the game actually involves abusing its world model and seeing what strange interactions can be created. The player can for instance in some versions instruct Thorin to pick Gandalf up and carry him about, and he will happily comply for dozens of turns.

Indeed, The Hobbit is more memorable for quirks like this, and of course for its multimedia elements, than for its game design. It follows the basic pattern of Tolkien’s novel, but captures neither its whimsy nor its grandeur. Whole chapters are encapsulated into single rooms that are described in just a few bland sentences. There is no sense of forward motion or plot to the game, just a series of locations representing very simplified versions of scenes from the novel. The trolls’ clearing, for instance, is just two rooms away from Bilbo’s home, to which he can return at any time. Melbourne House made a major promotional point of The Hobbit’s parser, which it dubbed Inglish, but, while it does support more than two words, it is not a patch on Infocom’s contemporaneous parsing technology. In truth, the game receives the coverage it does in this essay more for its enormous commercial success and accompanying role in introducing many to IF than any other quality.

Melbourne House produced three more adventures in the same mold as The Hobbit, covering the three books of The Lord of the Rings. The problematic idea of including active actors remained in place, and was in fact expanded. The player could now at times actually switch roles, whereupon the former protagonist would begin acting with the same artificial “intelligence” as the other actors. All of the problems of the first game - bugs, quirks, and an utter failure to capture the magic of Tolkien’s world - remained, and the games failed to duplicate the commercial success of The Hobbit. Melbourne House had always had its fingers in many pies, and soon abandoned IF development for greener pastures.

Trillium / Telarium

Telarium, which called itself Trillium for its first few games before changing its name due to possible trademark issues, was active in the IF market for only a few years. Its first games were published in 1984, and by 1987 it was defunct. The company was never an entirely independent entity, but rather a subsidiary of Spinnaker Software, a leading publisher of educational software of the time. Telarium was located very close to Infocom’s Cambridge, Massachusetts offices, and was also similar to its rival in packaging its games in fairly elaborate ways, including atmospheric documentation and sometimes even feelies. Indeed, Telarium seems to have been greatly “inspired” by Infocom’s business model, even briefly publishing a free newsletter for its customers similar to The New Zork Times. Unlike Infocom, but in tune with the prevailing trends of the market, Telarium included pictures and occasional sound effects and musical flourishes in its games. Some even contained simple arcade sequences to break the text adventuring monotony. This use of multimedia flash was somewhat ironic considering Telarium’s central conceit: all of its games were either adaptations of literary works or, in a couple of cases, direct collaborations with contemporary print authors on new stories.

The adaptation of a work of linear fiction to an interactive format is always a dicey proposition. Presumably, a good chunk of the game’s audience will be there because they are fans of the book, but many will also have picked up the game on its own merits. If the game’s developers simply recreate the story of the book, those who have read it will know exactly what to do at every turn, thus leaving them with no real challenge, while those who have not will likely have no idea how to proceed. It is also difficult to avoid giving the player the feeling that she is being railroaded, being forced to jump through an improbable and illogical series of hoops to get to each plot event, simply because that is how things happened in the book. (Granted, every game railroads the player to some extent. The trick for the author is giving the player the illusion of total freedom.) Finally, there is the unavoidable fact that most print literature revolves around characters and their interactions, while most IF written even today is object-oriented in the most literal sense, believable character interaction being such a problematic area for the genre.

Telarium dealt with these issues in various ways. One was to choose carefully its source material. One of the books it chose to adapt, Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, places almost no emphasis on personalities. While a team of astronauts is present and given some superficial characteristics, the novel’s focus is the giant, long abandoned alien spaceship which they explore. This is of course a perfect setup for an adventure game, which perhaps explains why Infocom essentially stole the idea for its own Starcross before Telarium’s official adaptation. Telarium was able to do a fairly “straight” conversion of the novel, inserting text adventures puzzles here and there to challenge the player, and have the whole thing work as a solid, albeit unexceptional, adventure game. In other cases, Telarium placed its games in the same settings as their source novels, but told somewhat different stories, as in its adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which takes up the story of Fireman Guy Montag just at the conclusion of the events of the novel. The result is a decently designed science fiction adventure that just happened to have Bradbury’s name on its box. Telarium’s work is most interesting, though, when it confronts issues of character interaction head-on, which it does twice: in its adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s fantasy novel Nine Princes in Amber, and in its interactive Perry Mason mystery, The Case of the Mandarin Murder.

Zelazny’s novel, the first of a series of ten of generally declining quality, is told from the perspective of Corwin, one of nine princes of the magical land of Amber, the one true world of which all other realities, including our own, are but shadows. The brothers’ father has disappeared, and his sons are left feuding amongst themselves over who will assume the Kingship, or for that matter if anyone should at all until the King is confirmed dead. A bewildering, Machiavellian series of plots and counter-plots ensues. The novel is a classic, with its own street-smart flavor that is miles away from the typical Tolkien knock-off that all too often defines the fantasy genre. With its emphasis on personalities, it is also one of the last works one would immediately imagine being adaptable to IF. Telarium deserves credit for sheer chutzpah if nothing else. Indeed, the game’s team of twenty or so authors studiously avoids easy solutions like those employed by the Fahrenheit 451 team, choosing instead to chronicle the events of the novel in a fairly straightforward fashion. To facilitate character interaction, a bewildering list of communication verbs is provided in the documentation. The player can, just for starters, “snarl,” “flatter,” “calm,” “spit,” “bribe,” “wink,” or “plead.” Upon reading this, the prospective player might think he is in for a revolutionary IF experience. Unfortunately, actually playing the game leads to inevitable disappointment. While these verbs are indeed understood by the game, there is never any sense that the player is engaging in meaningful discourse with the other characters. Rather, he must determine exactly what will lead to the plot advancing and, of course, Corwin surviving. The conversation system is actually more of an elaborate guess-the-verb puzzle than a simulation of real communication, and the solutions are all too often arbitrary, reachable only through extensive trial and error or - more efficiently - through having read Zelazny’s book. Things do get a bit more flexible toward the end of the game, where the player can summon any of several different endings depending on how he plays the last few conversations, but it is nevertheless a bit hard not to feel let down by all the game promises and then fails to deliver. One suspects that the development team truly hoped to create the flexible system described in the documentation, but were ultimately undone by hardware constraints and all the limitations of IF character interaction that authors still struggle with today. What they ended up with is not a bad game - in fact, it is one of Telarium’s best, and working out the conversational “puzzles” can actually be oddly satisfying at times - but they seemed to be aiming so much higher.

Telarium’s Perry Mason game works better, albeit only marginally so. Although Erle Stanley Gardner’s name was prominently featured on the box, the game is not directly based on any of his novels, and in fact its protagonist is the gentleman Perry Mason of the television series rather than the edgier version found in Gardner’s print work. The game even follows the structure of a typical television episode, although the “script” is original to Telarium. The player is briefly introduced to a new client, a beautiful (naturally) young lady named Laura Kapp, who fears that her husband Victor, a prominent local restaurateur, is about to divorce her due to malicious rumors. The next day, Victor turns up dead, and Laura is of course the prime suspect. The game is on, as Perry must prove her innocence against all odds. After he has searched the crime scene for evidence, the heart of the game really begins with the trial. Perry’s loyal assistants Paul Drake and Della Street are both present, and the player must ask them to investigate various leads while he performs in the courtroom, questioning the various witnesses and occasionally objecting to the prosecution’s lines of inquiry. To facilitate this, the game supports a similarly wide range of conversational verbs to those of the Amber game. Also included in the manual is a list of phrases that the player can combine together to build quite complex questions to ask the witnesses. Once again, however, all of this looks more impressive in theory than it actually plays out in practice. The game rarely manages to convince that the player that he is having a real, organic exchange. Once again we are left with just a series of elaborate conversational puzzles that the player must work out through logic, intuition, and good old trial and error. For all that, though, Perry Mason is a surprisingly satisfying game to play. Mapping out the correct path to a conviction is challenging and rewarding. To succeed, the player must not only deal with his witnesses in the right way in court, but also use Paul and Della’s talents in the right way and at the right time. The game even provides multiple endings of a sort. Raising enough doubt to acquit Laura is not hugely difficult, but acquiting Laura and also bringing the real murderer to break down and confess in court is another proposition altogether. Even some of the more useless conversational commands can be entertaining. It is good fun to WHIRL on a jumpy witness in the courtroom and otherwise grandstand for the jury, even if there is no strict point to it from the standpoint of the game’s internal logic. The whole thing adds up to a game experience that is completely unique in IF, and indeed one of the most interesting potential pathways for further exploration in the genre.

A comparison of the Commodore 64 and IBM PC versions of Nine Princes in Amber

While Telarium’s reach often exceeded its grasp, most of its games nevertheless stand up fairly well today, although I do heartily recommend that the interested reader seek out the Commodore 64 versions to play on an emulator. While versions were created for MS-DOS, the graphics and sound therein are so aggressively ugly that they all but ruin the games. The Commodore 64 versions on the other hand, while hardly state of the art, do retain a certain colorful, retro charm. Also of potential interest is Spinnaker’s Windham Classics children’s software label, which created two IF games in the Telarium mode: adaptations of the children’s classics Treasure Island and The Swiss Family Robinson.

Synapse’s Electronic Novels

Synapse Software was already well established as a maker of arcade-style games when it chose to enter the IF market in 1983. The company went all out to emphasis the literary qualities of its work, subtitling the games “Electronic Novels,” packaging them to appear like a hardcover book, and including within each a substantial novella setting up its premise. It sought out established print authors to write the text for its games, which were then programmed by the Synapse technical team. Technologically, Synapse took dead aim at market leaders Infocom. It was something of an open secret in the industry that its parsing system, known as BTZ, stood for “Better than Zork.” In a contemporaneous interview, Synapse developer Richard Sanford trumpets the company’s parser:

“No parser can handle the language and resolve all ambiguities, so we came up with something else, a keyword concept based on certain built-in filters. We do as much of that [conventional parsing] as possible, but we may only have to parse part of a command and leave the rest to the filters. They look to see how a phrase involving a keyword object might tend to have meaning in this fictional world (the context of the game).”In Mindwheel and Essex, the first games in the series, this keyword approach enables the reader/player to converse with other characters in ways no other adventure has ever permitted. You can elicit reasonable responses to questions like: “Thug, what lies east of here?” for example, or “Singer, how can you help me?” “There are aspects of the Eliza approach that we’ve used as part of an eclectic combination of tools,” Sanford continues, “and we couldn’t do it without BTZ, which is responsible for codifying and assembling - pairing nouns with verbs, checking for prepositions and conditional modifiers such as adjectives and adverbs.” Sanford says “the parser is still being refined, and will continue to be refined. Right now, there are certain ambiguities with combinations in compound sentences. We’re cleaning up things like this and trying to make it even smoother” (Addams, “if”).

All in all, there is a bit too much hyperbole not only in statements like this but in almost everything Synapse produced. Its parser was not bad for the era, but was most certainly not the equal of Infocom’s, and its games are a bit of a frustrating lot overall. For all their well-developed premises and aggressively literary approach to a genre still generally referred to as humble text adventures, their design as playable games often left something to be desired. As much as some may desire to see IF accepted as a viable literary form, they must also recognize that all the wonderful prose in the world is ultimately wasted if the reader / player cannot easily interact with the creation within which that prose resides. One unfortunately often get the impression when playing its games that Synapse did not see this basic truism, and its products often suffer for it. The end result is excruciatingly frustrating for one who desires to see IF go in exactly the literary direction Synapse was pursuing, and sees it coming so close to a certain IF Holy Grail, only to be undone by poor design decisions.

Just as annoying as the fundamental game design flaws is the real-time interface employed by all of Synapse’s works. If the player does not type something in an allotted amount of time, a turn passes in the world of the game. The idea does not work any better for Synapse than it did for Infocom in its own later real-time experiment, Border Zone. Real-time interaction is fundamentally at odds with the book-like nature of IF, and it is surprising that so many designers have chosen to go down this particular rabbit hole over the years.

The best work to come out of Synapse was Robert Pinsky’s Mindwheel. Pinsky is one of the most “high-brow” literary figures to have associated himself with IF. At the time of the game’s development, he was already a very respected young poet. Since then, he has won considerable fame not only as a poet in his own right but also as a translator of Dante’s work into English and as the poetry editor for the online magazine Slate. Pinsky, although hardly a technophile himself, has remained consistently optimistic about the possibilities for computer-mediated literature. It was thus rather appropriate that he served as poet laureate of the United States during the biggest years of the Internet boom, 1997 to 2000.

Appropriately enough for a game authored by a translator of Dante’s Inferno, Mindwheel is a very metaphysical work. The player is tasked with retrieving a mysterious artifact known as the Wheel of Wisdom. To do so, she must travel into the minds of four different people:

"BOBBY CLEMON, assassinated rock star, once called ‘half John Lennon and half Janis Joplin’. This charismatic, scandalous musician made the anthems of freedom and pleasure for a generation. Shot by an unknown attacker during an immense protest rally.

"THE GENERALISSIMO, dictator and war criminal. He was executed for crimes so horrible that it seemed for a time that such hatred and violence had vanished from the world. But incredibly, this monstrous genius now has a considerable posthumous following.

"DOCTOR EVA FEIN, ‘the female Einstein’ of the Late Technological Age. Honored for earthshaking work on the nature of matter and energy. A schoolmate of THE GENERALISSIMO, she fled his regime, then developed the horrible weapons that defeated him – weapons that now threaten the obliteration of all life. Her deathbed message to the world supplied BOBBY CLEMON with the words of a peace song.

“THE POET, passionate, many-minded genius of the Learning and Art Era, he wrote the great War Trilogy of poetic dramas, which centuries after his death remain the glory of your planet’s literature. He wrote the plays in hopes of making enough money to marry the young princess he was hired to tutor. Her father, discovering the romance, had THE POET put to death in the Royal Dungeons.”

Not surprisingly, much of Mindwheel revolves around words and poetry. Finishing it requires that the player answer various riddles and complete a number of sonnets using words inside found about the varied consciousnesses she explores. The worlds it presents are surreal, often beautiful, and usually fascinating. Pinsky’s prose is a consistent joy to read, and he makes a compelling scenario out of a premise that would have likely resulted in a pretentious mess in the hands of a lesser writer. (Indeed, several recent IF efforts have attempted something similar to Mindwheel, and ended up with just that.) Unfortunately, far too many unmotivated, random actions are required of the player, and the game continually stymies her sense of wonder with mundane text adventure puzzles. One senses that Synapse, not only in this work but in all its games, wanted to create something akin to Infocom’s A Mind Forever Voyaging, but lacked the courage to fully embrace the narrative at the expense of the crossword. Gamelike elements are certainly not the death knell to a work’s potential literary value, as lasting classics like Trinity prove, but in this case the puzzles seem grafted onto the narrative out of some misguided sense of obligation. The result is a tantalizing, fascinating work, but one that is far too frustrating to really play without outside guidance. Still, Mindwheel is so unique and well-written, and so compelling when it works, that I have to recommend that anyone seriously interested in the literary possibilities of IF make time for it. I would also emphasize, of course, that there is no shame in consulting a walkthrough.

Given time, Synapse might very well have sorted out its teething problems with design. Unfortunately, though, its electronic novel series ended up being a short-lived effort. Although Mindwheel did fairly well on the strength of some good mainstream press, sales of the other three titles were rather abysmal. It would appear that the computer game market did not know quite what to do with such a forthrightly literary approach to text adventures. It certainly could not have helped the electronic novels’ fate that they were all text at a time when virtually everyone working in IF, with the exceptions of Infocom and niche publisher Topologika, was now including multimedia elements of one kind or another in their games. Being the market leader with an established fan base, Infocom would be able to get away with selling text-only games for a few more years, but Synapse’s attempt to break into the IF market with such unflashy products was perhaps doomed to failure from the beginning. Reports are that three more electronic novels were virtually complete when Broderbund Software, which had acquired Synapse in late 1984, shut the whole project down in 1986.

Electronic Arts’ Amnesia

Electronic Arts, one of the biggest producers of entertainment software of the eighties, as indeed it still is today, published only one work of IF. That work, Amnesia, was however quite high profile in its day, having been written by respected science fiction author and poet Thomas M. Disch. True to its title, the game has the player wake up naked and alone in a hotel room in present-day Manhattan, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. The amnesia gambit has become something of a tiresome cliché in contemporary IF, but here Disch plays it to the hilt and makes it work. The opening sequence brings the player’s memory loss home in a clever way, by subverting a sequence that on first play seems to be allowing the player to customize his character:

You wake up feeling wonderful.

But also, in some indefinable way, strange.

Slowly, as you lie there on the cool bedspread, it dawns on you that you have absolutely no idea where you are. A hotel room, by the look of it. But with the curtains drawn. You don’t know in what city, or even what country.

Then the blank of WHERE AM I? balloons into the bigger, the total blank of WHO AM I? It’s a question without an answer. Your memory is an open book - with every page blank. You have no name, no known address, no memories of friends or relatives, or schools or jobs. You have …

Thomas M. Disch’s

AMNESIA

Hotel Room

What’s a person to do in such a situation?

What YOU do is….

>stand

You get out of bed, and as you do, you realize, from a glance at your naked body, that you are white, male, and reasonably well-put-together. But what about your face? That’s part of anyone’s identity that should be proof against amnesia. The mirror over the dresser is angled so you can’t see yourself from where you stand. So you decide to take a simple test, closing your eyes and taking an inventory of how you think you OUGHT to look.

Your hair – is it light or dark?

>light

Is it long or short?

>short

Do you have a beard? Or a moustache? Or neither? Or both?

>neither

What is the color of your eyes?

>brown

You could hardly be more completely mistaken! For when you look into the mirror, the stranger you see there has long blonde hair. He has a full beard. And his eyes are emphatically blue.

In a sense, of course, this sequence does allow the player to customize his character. It is just that the end result will be the opposite of the choices that he makes.

Amnesia’s strengths and weaknesses are remarkably similar to those of the Synapse games. The mystery at the heart of the game is compelling, as, after solving the game’s first few puzzles to acquire clothing and escape from the hotel, the player finds mysterious people attempting to kill him as he wanders Manhattan searching for clues to his identity. Disch handles this plot with all the skill of a seasoned professional, and the player is left feeling deeply driven to figure out just what is going on here.

Unfortunately, the game’s many annoyances make appreciating its more compelling aspects somewhat difficult at times. At its heart is a sophisticated simulation of Manhattan - all of it, encompassing some 4000 separate locations. Luckily, a map is included in the game’s documentation. Even the subway system is simulated realistically, the trains moving about from station to station. Riding the subway costs money of course, as does eating and renting a room to sleep in at night, both of which the player is required to do occasionally if he is not to drop dead in the street. The player can acquire money in various ways: by panhandling, by doing odd jobs such as window washing, or course of by outright theft. Regardless of the approach he chooses, however, one thing holds true: none of this is any fun. It is but dull busywork that the player must slog through in the hopes of occasionally getting the opportunity to advance the compelling central plot that he actually cares about. Player Phil Goetz explains further:

I have devoted several days to trying to play Amnesia. I say “trying to play”, because what I did could not well be described as playing. It was more like trying to write something in a language for which you only have a few cryptic system man pages. I spent all my time finding food and a place to sleep, and so never got to go anywhere or solve anything. Furthermore, the map was so damned big, with no indication of where to go, that I calculated that at my present rate of exploration it would take months of full-time play to visit the whole map.

Playing was never so much work. I honestly think Amnesia is for those reasons the worst game I ever paid money for. This despite the fact that it may be technically the most sophisticated text adventure released professionally.

The end result may be a depressingly accurate simulation of real life, but it works as neither game nor literature. Amnesia is a remarkably sophisticated simulation, and its creators have the right to be proud of it just on its technical merits, but its misguided simulational aspects have the distinct whiff of something that was more fun to program that it is to actually play. It also stands as a warning to authors today of what can happen if they allow the simulation aspects of their games to run rampant and overwhelm the narrative qualities.

Released in 1986, Amnesia was one of the last commercial all-text titles to emerge outside of Infocom, and was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not a hit with either reviewers or the general public. Disch had positively gushed about the possibilities of interactive literature before Amnesia’s release, but in the end was left thoroughly disappointed and embittered by the whole experience. Certainly some of this was due to technical limitations of the time, which made the end result only a shadow of his initial vision. Even though it stands as one of the most ambitious titles of the commercial era, the final game reportedly contains only about half the text that Disch had hoped to include. As for the game’s commercial and critical failure, Disch blamed the audience for being incapable of appreciating his genius: “trying to impose over this structure a dramatic conception other than puzzle was apparently too much for the audience” (McCaffrey). While the authors at Infocom and many other companies might have undoubtedly shared some of Disch’s frustrations with trying to sell works of interactive literature into a computer game marketplace, Disch overlooks his own failures of vision in statements like this one. Disch himself failed to honor his “dramatic conception” in Amnesia, imposing over his compelling plot a layer of annoying, simulationist puzzles, and this is the work’s ultimate downfall. The sad fact is that Amnesia received at the hands of the marketplace the fate it deserved.

Our experiences with Synapse’s work and with Amnesia have shown that involving professional authors of static fiction by no means guarantees a compelling work of IF. A prospective IF writer must master not only the standard prose techniques for plotting, characterization, and description, but also must exercise good game design judgment. Seeing this battlefield strewn with the wreckage of their more high-profile competitors, as it were, makes the literary achievements of Infocom’s humble hackers in works like A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity seem all the more remarkable.

Magnetic Scrolls

London developer Magnetic Scrolls arrived with a bang in 1986 when its first game, The Pawn, hit the market on several computer systems at once. There was nothing terribly original about the The Pawn’s plot or gameplay. The player wakes up following a blow to the head in the fantasy land of Kerovnia, where she must perform various tasks for various characters - from whence arises the game’s name – in order to find her way home. The occasional self-referential and distinctly British nugget aside, such as a dwarf campaigning for mayor with the promise to “rid dungeons of mazes of any sort,” none of this is terribly inspiring. Few reviewers paid much attention to The Pawn’s rather threadbare plot, however, or to its gameplay, a curious and frustrating mixture of obvious and hopelessly obscure puzzles. The Pawn rather caused the sensation it did because it married its stock text adventure premise to a series of quite nicely done high-resolution pictures and, on the newer generation of 16-bit machines, a slick interface that allowed the player to arrange the screen in various ways and perform some functions using the mouse. The game also featured some very nice music on suitably capable machines. Even on smaller machines, none of this flash seemed to take away from the game’s core parsing technology, which, if not quite up to par with Infocom, was better than just about anything else out there. Magnetic Scrolls in fact advertised the game’s parser almost as heavily as its graphics, emphasizing its ability to understand such tortured constructions as, “Get all except the cases but not the violin case then kill the man-eating shrew with the contents of the violin case.”

The Pawn screen

Magnetic Scrolls and The Pawn might have seemed to have sprung out of nowhere, but the company had actually already been in business for two years in 1986, having been founded by Anita Sinclair and several partners with the intention of making an adventure game for the brand new Sinclair QL computer. (Anita was friendly with but unrelated to Clive Sinclair, the eccentric British inventor behind the Sinclair line of home computers.) The Pawn was released as a text-only game for the QL in 1985, but the computer and Magnetic Scrolls’ game were both utter flops in the marketplace. Only at this point did Magnetic Scrolls decide to add graphics to its game and port it to other, more successful machines. While its graphics were unique, in many other respects Magnetic Scrolls copied the Infocom model, developing The Pawn on a VAX mainframe and then porting it to microcomputers via a virtual machine similar to Infocom’s Z-Machine. Plainly, Magnetic Scrolls was following Infocom’s lead in investing in the tools and infrastructure right from the start that would allow it to produce a regular stream of text adventures. While the computer game press continually tried to concoct a bloody rivalry between the two companies, in truth they were quite friendly with one another. The occasional cultural exchange visit occurred, and there were even discussions of the two houses working together on collaborative efforts, although they ultimately went nowhere.

Magnetic Scrolls was quite the phenomenon in the press during this early period. A series of in-house exposes were published in the major gaming magazines of the day, as one scruffy geek reporter after another fell in love with the company’s secret weapon, the young, charming, and very comely Anita Sinclair.

The Pawn became a major commercial hit, and its follow-up, Guild of Thieves, did almost as well. Guild is the most successful of Magnetic Scrolls’ works as a playable game. Set in the same fantasy land as The Pawn, it casts the player as an apprentice member of its titular organization, who, in order to achieve full membership, must prove her worth by robbing a castle and its surrounding landscape blind. The plot never develops beyond that. The game is a thematically unambitious collect the treasures romp in the mode of Adventure and Zork, but it succeeds by charming the player with its skewed British sense of humor and by offering a perfectly balanced progression of puzzles. The early stages are almost trivially easy, but the difficulty ramps up steadily, so that finishing is a real accomplishment. There are a few slightly dodgy puzzles, but on the whole the game is fair if, especially in its ending stages, unforgiving, and offers one of the best implementations one can hope to find of this old-school type of text adventuring. It is also very large, offering the player plenty of value for her money.

Magnetic Scrolls produced three more games using the same engine as The Pawn and Guild of Thieves. The company confined itself consistently to text adventures as opposed to interactive literature, being largely content to offer the player a collection of puzzles wrapped around some tasteful graphics and a solid dose of the humor it quickly became known for. Its only attempt to break away from light-hearted fantasy, and its most interesting (although deeply flawed) effort, was Rob Steggles’ Corruption. Steggles had already done most of the writing for The Pawn and Guild of Thieves when he decided, to paraphrase Monty Python, to do something completely different. Corruption takes place in (then) present-day London. The player is a young up-and-comer in The City, who has just been promoted to partner of his law firm when he finds that his employers do not, to say the least, have his best interests at heart. They are actually planning to frame him for insider trading transactions they themselves committed. That is not all, though. They are also running a cocaine-smuggling ring, and one of them is having an affair with the player’s wife. The game takes place over a single day, with each turn counting for one minute, and its object is of course to clear the player’s name and bring the real guilty parties to justice. With its plot involving insider trading and financial misdeeds, Corruption is as perfectly of its time as Trinity. It was released in 1988, as the American savings and loan scandal was in full flight and just after the movie Wall Street appeared to engrave forever into the popular lexicon Gordon Gecko’s catch-phrase, “Greed is good.”

The game is quite complex, having some of the flavor of the early Infocom mysteries but on a more ambitious scale. While its geography is fairly confined, a surprising number of characters move about it with independent agency. The player must take just the right steps, firstly just to avoid the various snares that are set for him and later to bring the game as a whole to a satisfactory conclusion. Doing so requires constant learning by death and failure, but at least at first this is not so egregious if approached in the right frame of mind:

Corruption is a giant riddle, and to decipher its meaning, you must play, and replay, each of its parts. Once the player has mapped out the movements of the non-player characters, he will recognize a web of deceit and betrayal, and be able guide his character to paths that lead to a satisfying ending (Sandsquish).

Thus the player engages in a sort of meta-narrative, learning more about the mystery and the characters involved and generally probing the boundaries of the simulation by sacrificing his pawn - the player’s alter ego - over and over in return for information he will eventually use to map out a successful path through the story. Although modern IF theory generally condemns this emphasis on learning by death, in certain cases it can work. Corruption ultimately frustrates not through this sin, if indeed sin it be, but by failing to adhere to reasonable rules that might give the player a fighting chance of actually solving it by this method. There are far too many tiny details that show up in one location for a bare handful of turns, and too many arbitrarily exact choices the player must make. Corruption is one of the cruelest games one will ever play. At one point it actually awards the player points for going down a dead-end path. Since the player will assume, based on all his previous IF experience, that that point reward means that he is onto something important, he will likely spend many frustrating hours beating his head against this proverbial brick wall. Such bizarre design “features” as this may represent fragments of alternate paths that could not ultimately be implemented. In the end, though, they inevitably cause the player to lose faith in the game. Magnetic Scrolls was kind enough to include a hint booklet with this and all its games, rather than force the player to purchase it separately as did Infocom and many others, but this is small substitute for the satisfaction of solving a game on one’s own. Like too many games of its era, Corruption comes close to genius only to fall down not in its abstracts but in the nitty-gritty of its execution.

The three games that followed The Pawn and Guild of Thieves, Corruption among them, were nowhere near as successful as their predecessors. The glow that had accompanied Magnetic Scrolls’ initial entry into the market had faded, and the larger industry trend away from parsers and toward point and click interfaces could not be fought for long. Magnetic Scrolls decided that what was needed was an even more elaborate graphical interface overlaid on the basic IF model, and spent a great deal of time and money developing a new system, which it called Magnetic Windows. In games running under this system, the player can arrange a variety of windows on the screen to suit her purposes, and can avoid typing altogether if she so desires. For instance, she can pull up a verbs menu listing all of the actions the game understands, and use this in conjunction with other menus listing all objects in the player’s current inventory and all objects visible in the room she currently inhabits to construct sentences. She can even pull up descriptions of items in an individual window which she can keep on-screen for easy reference. Pictures of the scenery, always Magnetic Scrolls’ trademark, also continued to appear of course, albeit now in their own windows that the player can manipulate as she chooses. The whole is one of the most ambitious IF interfaces ever designed, and while its baroque complexity is undoubtedly not to all tastes, even those people have little to really complain about. By simply shutting all of these bells and whistles off, a Magnetic Windows game can be made to play just like a title in the traditional Infocom mold.

Unfortunately, this impressive new technology saw only limited use. Just one new game was released for Magnetic Windows, an entertaining if rather workmanlike adaptation of Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland novels. Three of Magnetic Scrolls’ older efforts were also re-released in one package as Magnetic Windows games, but sales were not what the company had hoped for. Having spent far too much developing Magnetic Windows and Wonderland and with not enough revenue coming in, Magnetic Scrolls closed up shop in 1991.

In the end, Magnetic Scrolls released only half a dozen games, but its work is much remembered and appreciated today, perhaps more so than any other company’s with the exception of Infocom. This commentator must say that in his opinion its games are often somewhat overrated, although there is certainly considerable entertainment to be found therein. The virtual machine used by the company has been reverse-engineered in a similar fashion to Infocom’s Z-Machine, and interpreters are now available for many different computers to play them. Perhaps this easy accessibility has contributed to them remaining so much in the IF public’s consciousness.

As the eighties drew to a close, virtually all of the publishers of IF were either out of business, teetering on the edge of same, or had left IF for other areas of game development. The marketplace was changing, and even Infocom was not immune. We will take up the sad story of that giant’s downfall, as well as the story of the last active publisher of commercial IF, Legend Entertainment, in the next chapter.

Sources for Further Investigation

Games:

Acheton. 1981. Jon Thackray, David Seal, and Jonathan Partington; Topologika. Released as freeware and available at

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/phoenix/games/pc/Acheton.zip.

Amnesia. 1986. Thomas M. Disch; Electronic Arts.

Avon. 1985. Jonathan Partington, borrowing characters and situations from William Shakespeare; Topologika.

Released as freeware and available at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/phoenix/games/pc/Avon.zip.

Colossal Adventure. 1983. Mike Austin, Nick Austin, and Pete Austin, based on Adventure by Will Crowther and Don Woods; Level 9.

Corruption. 1988. Rob Steggles; Magnetic Scrolls.

Fahrenheit 451. 1984. Len Neufeld and Byron Preiss, based on Ray Bradbury’s novel; Telarium.

Guild of Thieves. 1987. Rob Steggles; Magnetic Scrolls.

The Hobbit. Veronika Megler and Philip Mitchell, based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel; Melbourne House.

Released as freeware; versions for many computers are available at http://www.lysator.liu.se/tolkien-games/entry/hobbit.html.

Knight Orc. 1987. Pete Austin; Level 9.

Mindwheel. 1984. Robert Pinsky; Synapse.

Nine Princes in Amber. 1985. Staff of Telarium, based on Roger Zelazny’s novel; Telarium.

The Pawn. 1986. Rob Steggles; Magnetic Scrolls.

Perry Mason: The Case of the Mandarin Murder. 1985. Paisano Productions, based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s character; Telarium.

Rendezvous with Rama. 1984. Ronald Martinez, based on Arthur C. Clarke’s novel; Telarium.

Scapeghost. 1989. Pete Austin, Sandra Sharkey, and Pete Gerrard; Level 9.

Snowball. 1983. Mike Austin, Nick Austin, and Pete Austin; Level 9.

The Swiss Family Robinson. 1984. Staff of Windhim Classics, based on Johann David Wyss’ novel; Windham Classics.

Treasure Island. 1985. Ann Weil and Lee Jackson, based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel; Windham Classics.

Wonderland. 1990. David Bishop, based on Lewis Carrol’s novels; Magnetic Scrolls.

Other Works:

Addams, Shay. “if yr cmptr cn rd ths…” Computer Entertainment, August 1985.

http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/parser-war.html.

Addams, Shay. “The Pawn: England’s Finest Hour.” Commodore Magazine, July 1987.

http://www.if-legends.org/~msmemorial/articles.htm/cm787.htm.

Farmer, J.J. Review of Scapeghost. SPAG #6, July 26, 1995.

http://sparkynet.com/spag/s.html#scapeghost.

Forman, Christopher E. Review of Amnesia. SPAG #9, June 11 1996.

http://sparkynet.com/spag/a.html#amnesia.

Goetz, Phil. “Re: Vocabulary Size in Infoocom Games (OOPS! Made a Mistake!)”. Usenet post to rec.arts.int-fiction. March 23, 1992.

Granade, Stephen. “History of Interactive Fiction: Level 9.”

http://www.brasslantern.org/community/history/level9.html.

Granade, Stephen. “History of Interactive Fiction: Topologika.”

http://web.archive.org/web/20010221022044/interactfiction.about.com/games/interactfiction/library/weekly/aa071299.htm.

Hewison, Richard. “Level 9: Past Masters of the Adventure Game.”

http://www.sinclairlair.co.uk/level9.htm.

Jones, David. Review of The Hobbit. SPAG #38, September 28, 2004.

http://sparkynet.com/spag/h.html#hobbitmh.

Karsmakers, Richard and Stefan Posthuma. “An Interview with Magnetic Scrolls’ Anita Sinclair.” ST News, August 1989.

http://www.if-legends.org/~msmemorial/articles.htm/stnews4v4.htm.

McCaffrey, Larry. Interview with Thomas M. Disch. Across the Wounded Galaxy: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Authors. University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1990.

Mirapaul, Matthew. “An Approach to Poetry That Rhymes with HTML.” New York Times, April 3, 1997.

http://partners.nytimes.com/library/cyber/mirapaul/040397mirapaul.html.

Montfort, Nick. Twisty Little Passages. MIT Press: Cambridge, 2003.

Nelson, Graham. “Announcing: Fyleet, Crobe, Sangraal.” Usenet post to rec.arts.int-fiction, August 24, 1999.

Russotto, Matthew T. “Acheton.” Usenet post to rec.games.int-fiction, September 10, 2000.

Sandsquish, Walter. Review of Corruption. SPAG #21, June 15, 2000.

http://sparkynet.com/spag/c.html#corruption.

Schmidal, Gunther. “Gunther Upon Avon.” IF Review, November 24, 2001.

http://www.ministryofpeace.com/if-review/reviews/20011214.html.

Sherwin, Robb. Review of Knight Orc. SPAG #15, October 11, 1998.

http://sparkynet.com/spag/k.html#knight.

Schneider, Boris and Heinrich Lenardt. “Small Talk with Anita.” Happy Computer, January 1987.

http://www.if-legends.org/~msmemorial/articles.htm/hc187.htm.

Steggles, Rob. “Magnetic Scrolls Memories.”

http://www.if-legends.org/~msmemorial/articles.htm/robmemory.htm.

Chapter 7: The End of an Era

Infocom Inc., which pioneered the personal computer software text-adventure genre with such fantasy games as Zork, Wishbringer and Leather Goddesses of Phobos, is closing its doors in Cambridge and moving to Menlo Park, Calif., next month.

That’s headquarters for Mediagenic, formerly Activision Inc., which purchased Infocom three years ago for close to $9 million. The relocation is a cost-saving measure, since Infocom has been losing an average of $200,000 per fiscal quarter for the past two years, according to Laura L. Stagnitto, Mediagenic’s director of corporate communications.

[…]

Another factor for Infocom’s declining fortunes is the aging of Infocom’s traditional audience, composed of early computer users who spent evenings and weekends hunched over a terminal drawing maps in text-only games that took 20 to 50 hours to solve.

“Computers are a mass-merchandising market and we found it difficult to interest consumers in products that did not capture their attention immediately through superficial characteristics, such as fancy graphics,” said Joel Berez, Infocom’s founder and former president. Berez resigned last summer to return to his family’s 70-year-old housewares business in Pittsburgh.

Mediagenic said it will continue to publish some of Infocom’s titles, notably the Zork series, which has sold more than 1 million copies, along with newer software that uses computer graphics.

“It’s been sad for me,” acknowledged Berez.

– Ronald Rosenberg (Boston Globe, May 22, 1989)

Over the last few years of the eighties, IF gradually disappeared altogether from the marketplace, as the companies that had published it either shut their doors or found more lucrative areas in which to focus their attentions. By 1990, adventure gaming meant mouse driven, graphical games such as those published by Sierra and Lucasarts, and textual IF was seen, as it still too often is today, as an anachronistic throwback to the early days of the home computer revolution, good for little other than nostalgia.

While it is temping for a self-avowed IF evangelist like myself to rely on arguments such as those of Joel Berez in the Boston Globe article above, stating in effect that gamers were too simple-minded and fixated on superficial flash to appreciate the charms of IF, they represent only a partial truth at best. IF developers did themselves few favors with would-be converts in the eighties. The average specimen from the early part of that era is virtually unplayable in its awfulness, and even efforts from the latter half of the decade, when the inertia of the market had weeded out everyone not seriously dedicated to the genre, pay far too little attention to tenets of game design now taken as accepted wisdom by the modern IF community. While there were diamonds to be found even among games not bearing the Infocom label, they were the exception rather than the rule. Expecting consumers to pay thirty dollars or more for the privilege of being stymied at every turn by willfully unfriendly designs filled with well-nigh insolvable puzzles is not a viable strategy for long-term success. Early on, consumers put up with this sort of thing because there was nothing less frustrating out there. When that changed, though, only the die-hards were left, and when these also fled, so did the commercial era of IF, even though developers had barely scratched the surface of the genre’s potential.

If one is so inclined, one can take a certain solace in the fact that, having killed off commercial IF, graphical adventure gaming would suffer its own decline in commercial fortune over the following decade, and that many of its wounds would be similarly self-inflicted. Today it is thought of by most mainstream gamers in the light that IF was in 1990. That, however, is a story for another essay.

The Decline and Fall of Infocom

While Infocom was largely innocent of the game design sins of its competitors, it ultimately shared their fate. The reasons for Infocom’s failure are complex, and only partially bound up with the market failure of the IF genre as a whole. As it did in so many more positive areas, Infocom blazed its own trail here, sowing the seeds of its destruction even during its glory years when it could seemingly do no wrong.

Studious readers may recall that Infocom was not founded with the intention of being solely a producer of computer games. Many members of the company’s board and most of its principal investors saw games only as a way of bringing in some quick income which could be funneled toward what they saw as the company’s ultimate goal, the production of professional business software. Their attitudes did not change appreciably even after Zork and its immediate successors made of Infocom minor media sensations and one of the most successful computer game publishers in the world. The most vocal proponent of an entry into business software was Board of Directors member Al Vezza. Vezza was older than most of the Infocom staff, having been a professor rather than a student at MIT at the time of the company’s founding. His professional experience and knowledge of the ways of business, not to mention the effect his vote of confidence in this group of scruffy kids had on potential investors and creditors, had been instrumental in getting Infocom off the ground, and everyone tended to defer to him. At Vezza’s prodding, Infocom founded a Business Products Division in the 1982, even in the midst of its first rush of entertainment software success, to develop a new relational database system to be called Cornerstone.

Vezza and Infocom believed that some of the technologies that had come into the company from MIT could be adapted to the world of business, as well as entertainment, software. Most important of these was its Z-Machine virtual machine. In a personal computing world still fragmented into many competing and incompatible operating systems, the Z-Machine could allow Infocom to simultaneously market Cornerstone on many machines, which could then freely exchange data among one another.

During 1983 and 1984, Infocom’s IF business grew at a prodigious rate, but virtually all of the profits thereby, plus considerable funding from outside venture capitalists, were sunk directly into the Business Products Division. By now, Infocom effectively consisted of two different companies with completely different cultures. The Games Division was populated by the irreverent dreamers that were chronicled by many a fascinated reporter of the day; while the the marketeers of the Business Products Division were straight-laced and businesslike. Employees of the Games Division often showed up at noon in sneakers and tee-shirts to work late into the night; while those in the Business Products Division arrived promptly at nine o’clock in pin-striped suits, and left equally promptly at five. Employees of the Games Division dreamed of the potential of IF as a whole new literary form; while those of the Business Products Division dreamed of market penetration and consulting fees. Not surprisingly, there was little love lost between the two halves of the company. The hacker culture of the Games Division frustrated Vezza as he attempted to round up serious business investors:

Vezza also believed that the relaxed, fun-loving engineering culture also worked against the company. He believed that East Coast venture capitalists wanted to invest in serious, professional-looking companies. Investors would initially be impressed with Infocom’s bottom line and potential for growth, but they would be displeased by a lack of a serious atmosphere after they visited Infocom. One firm reportedly told Vezza, “You have a bunch of talented, undisciplined people, and you’re not going to be able to control them” (Briceno 33).

For their part, employees of the Games Division were understandably frustrated at seeing the fruits of all their labors sunk directly into the black hole that was a Business Products Division which had no appreciation whatsoever for what Games was creating. Much of their resentment was directed toward Vezza himself, who was apparently not the most personable of men. Even in 1999, implementer Mike Berlyn was still referring to Vezza as a “weasel-alien” (Berlyn). Vezza was unfazed, however, and continued to consolidate his position as the company’s leading strategist, replacing Games Division loyalist Joel Berez as CEO in January of 1984, although Berez continued to serve as the company’s President. By this time, Business Products employed several times the number of people of the Games Division that was the company’s sole source of revenue, and was spending that revenue with reckless abandon on their marketing schemes. Steve Meretzky recalls that a “Don’t Panic!” button included with Cornerstone cost fifty cents to manufacture, while a virtually identical one included with the Hitchhiker’s game was procured by the Games Division for about ten cents.

Amidst these conflicts, development of Cornerstone ground on, and it was finally released with high expectations and considerable fanfare in January of 1985. These were quickly dashed, as Cornerstone, in spite of possessing a number of clever features and innovations, turned into a complete flop for several very good reasons. For one, while the home computer market would remain rather wild and chaotic for a few more years, the business market had largely settled as its standard computing platform on IBM PC-compatible machines running MS-DOS. This meant that Infocom’s virtual machine technology conveyed no real advantage anymore, and in fact caused Cornerstone to run sluggishly compared to other databases written as native PC applications. As Vezza had always feared, Infocom’s reputation as a games developer also worked against it here. There is an old adage in corporate America that “no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft,” and, indeed, serious businesses were much more comfortable investing in software from equally serious business software developers such as Microsoft than in Infocom’s product. Cornerstone’s $495 price tag, meanwhile, kept it out of the reach of the individuals and small business owners who might otherwise have been willing to give this unproven company a chance. Once Cornerstone’s complete market failure was obvious, Infocom laid off the entire Business Products Division and instituted a series of stringent cost-cutting measures, even reducing Cornerstone’s price to $99 in a desperate attempt to wring some sort of revenue from the white elephant. Al Vezza stepped down as CEO, to be replaced by the man he had replaced two years before, Joel Berez. It was too little too late, though, as the financial damage to the company was done, even as its games continued to do fairly well. (The December 1985 Softsel chart, for instance, shows a very respectable three Infocom titles amongst the top twenty.)

Saddled with debt from the Cornerstone fiasco, Infocom was left with a stark choice: sell itself to an outside buyer, or go under entirely. Said buyer came along in the nick of time in the form of major computer and console games publisher Activision. The sale was officially agreed to in February of 1986, and completed that June. For Infocom’s remaining employees, it felt like nothing short of a new lease on life. Activision was being run at the time by Jim Levy, a rare computer game executive who actually cared deeply about the artistic potential of interactive narrative, as was evidenced by products like the innovative “computer novel” Portal that he had shepherded to fruition. Naturally, Levy admired Infocom greatly, and jumped at the chance to acquire the company for reasons that seemed to have at least as much to do with his artistic heart as his business head. Levy quickly charmed the initially guarded implementers:

Infocom held a surprise “InfoWedding” with Levy and Berez to commemorate the merger. Levy happily played along as “Rabbi” Galley pronounced Activision and Infocom, “Corporate and Subsidiary.” “The way Levy handled [the wedding] was better than any speech he could have given,” said Meretzky (Briceno 41).

Levy fit right in with Infocom’s irreverent culture. The Summer 1986 addition of The Status Line includes a profile of him in which he lists “collecting companies” as his hobby, names Cornerstone as his favorite Infocom “game,” and gives a one word answer when asked exactly why he chooses to do what he does: alimony. His operating instructions to Infocom were essentially to keep doing what it had been doing, only more so. He encouraged the company to double its rate of game production, from three to five new titles per year to eight to ten. With a slate of new and innovative IF games being given the green light by a supportive parent company and Cornerstone and business products in general a distant memory, Infocom’s future seemed brighter than ever for many of its employees.

Alas, it was to be a false dawn. Perhaps due partly to the financially questionable Infocom acquisition, Levy was replaced as Activision CEO by Bruce Davis at the end of 1986. Davis had been against the Infocom deal from the start. The games that had been approved during Levy’s brief reign would be completed and released throughout 1987, but they would represent not a new beginning but rather Infocom’s last great creative flowering, as Davis pushed the company hard to abandon what he saw as its anachronistic all-text work and move into more lucrative areas. Notes taken by David Lebling at a company meeting conducted on April 29, 1987, have surfaced, and illustrate the confusion and uncertainty that was once again swirling around the company at this time:

There was a great deal of discussion about defining what it is we do. For example, do we just do I.F.? Do we do anything that has an English parser in it? Do we have to have puzzles? Do we have to have stories? If you do a point-and-click interface (like Deja Vu) is it still “what we do”?

Frustration is also expressed at a gaming press that continually dismisses Infocom’s products as outdated:

Some people in the market seem to believe that I.F. technology, particularly ours, hasn’t advanced in years. They don’t notice the small improvements in the parser and substrate, probably because to a casual observer, our newest games look a lot like our first ones.

[Apparently, Personal Computing is doing a piece on new stuff, and said they weren’t including anything of ours (when asked) because it’s “old hat.”]

Ultimately, the powers that were at Activision would allow Infocom only one way forward. Once the pipeline was cleared of all-text works currently in production, Infocom’s future games would have to include graphics. The implementers set about responding to this technical challenge the way they always had, by creating a new version of the venerable Z-Machine. Version 6 doubled the maximum allowable story size yet again, to 512K, although no released game would come anywhere close to using all that capacity. More noticeably, version 6 allowed the display of illustrations, along with elaborate borders and attractive colors.

Screens from Infocom’s late illustrated games Zork Zero and Shogun

There is certainly nothing inherently wrong with the concept of illustrated IF, but the four games produced in this format, which together represent Infocom’s swan song, are a rather uninspiring lot when compared with what had come before. The first to appear was Steve Meretzky’s Zork Zero, yet another trip to the well of the Zork universe that Activision must have thought of as the closest thing Infocom had to a sure bet at this point. There are some clever puzzles, and the game is suffused with Meretzky’s trademark gonzo humor, but the whole feels rather workmanlike and tired, especially when compared to the bold experimentation of the previous year’s all-text work.

Zork Zero was, however, a masterpiece in comparison with Shogun, Infocom’s adaptation of James Clavell’s best-selling novel and equally successful television mini-series. The project was apparently foisted upon Infocom by Activision executives who saw the property as a sure thing. (Adaptations from other media were in fact a major cornerstone of Activision’s business plans in all gaming genres at the time.) The original plan had called for Clavell to actively collaborate with David Lebling on the game in a similar manner to Douglas Adams’ involvement with the Hitchhiker game, but that never materialized. Clavell in 1988 was aging and in poor health, and struggling to complete what would turn out to be his final novel. He had little time, energy, or interest to give Infocom’s project. Lebling:

What I ended up writing is a sort of “Scenes From…” game. It has some good parts, I think (a couple of timing puzzles that are very intricate), and Donald Langosy did a superb job on the graphic add-ins. However, as a whole I have to consider it a failure. The technology wasn’t (and still isn’t) ready for a plot-and-character-heavy adventure game (Granade).

Most of the game’s text is lifted verbatim from the novel, and many parts are barely interactive at all. Most of its “puzzles” consist of simply doing exactly what John Blackthorne did in the book, however arbitrary or random those actions may seem in the context of the game. Those who attempt the game without having read the book obviously have a problem on this front. Lebling considers Shogun to be by far is most disappointing work for Infocom, and few would argue with him on this point. Its only redeeming qualities are its lovely Japanese-style illustrations and the endlessly amusing fact that it is the only Infocom game in which the player is required to “make love to” another character to advance the plot. The reason is of course that this is what Blackthorne did in the book.

Of the remaining two graphical efforts, Journey is a rather generic, albeit well-written, fantasy adventure from Marc Blank that abandons the parser entirely in favor of a menu-driven interface, thus turning it into a sort of elaborate computerized Choose Your Own Adventure book. Infocom’s final released game, Arthur: The Quest for Excaliber, was not produced in-house at all, but was rather written by a Virginia-based outside contractor named Bob Bates using the company’s tools. While hardly innovative in either its Arthurian subject matter or its standard text adventure construction, it is well-crafted and entertaining. Certainly companies have gone out on worse notes.

Even as these titles were in production, the writing was on the wall, and Infocom’s number of employees steadily dwindled. Brian Moriarty jumped ship to Lucasarts, where he would design the acclaimed graphical adventure Loom, and Joel Berez, President of a company that was literally eroding away below him, resigned to join his family’s business in Pittsburgh. None of the first three illustrated adventures sold particularly well, and the axe finally fell before Arthur had even hit the shelves. A series of substandard games had left Activision suffering serious financial woes of its own which prompted it to briefly rename itself to Mediagenic in the hope of a fresh start of sorts. Its situation being what it was, Mediagenic had little patience with a money-losing subsidiary involved in the niche genre of IF, and shut the doors of Infocom’s Cambridge offices in May of 1989. Eleven of Infocom’s twenty-six remaining employees were offered the opportunity to move to California and continue on with Mediagenic, but only five accepted. Infocom was no more, having died with a whimper rather than a bang.

It is tempting to speculate at this point on what Infocom might have achieved had it not made the fateful decision to mortgage its future on Cornerstone. Certainly the company might have lasted longer, or perhaps even still be with us today, if it had concentrated on its core strength of developing games. Still, whether Infocom could have continued to release IF games for an appreciably longer time is by no means certain. By 1990, there were exactly two commercial IF publishers left in the world, and four years after that there were none. It is highly doubtful that Infocom could have found a way around the market pressures that led to this. I suspect that Infocom would have been forced out of IF development even if it had survived. Whatever took IF’s place with the company would quite possibly have been interesting and worthwhile in its own right, for the implementers were a prodigiously talented and creative lot, but I seriously doubt that even a well-managed alternate Infocom would still be releasing IF today. Al Vezza has much to answer for with regard to his misguided plans, but we cannot lay the death of commercial IF at his feet.

Mediagenic would soon reclaim its heritage by changing its name back to Activision, and the Infocom name, if not the company, also would live on for a while. Indeed, Activision had begun the practice of branding games that did not originate from the company’s Cambridge offices with the Infocom label as early as 1987. Most notable of these was the almost comically awful InfoComics line of “interactive comic books,” based on characters and settings from Infocom’s previous IF works but developed by Tom Snyder Productions. Infocom loathed these titles, but dutifully bits its lip and promoted them in The Status Line. After 1989, Activision continued to occasionally slap the Infocom name on its graphical adventures, and made use of some of the company’s intellectual property as well. Three graphical CD-ROM Zork adventures were produced - Return to Zork, Zork: Nemesis, and Zork: Grand Inquisitor - which are, respectively, thoroughly underwhelming, decent if a bit dull, and surprisingly good. A graphical sequel to Leather Goddesses of Phobos also appeared which has attained a sort of retrograde notoriety as a game that is so bad it is almost good, and a third Planetfall game spent considerable time in production, only to be cancelled. Activision also made a habit for years of periodically re-packaging and re-releasing the old Infocom IF games in various compilations and value-packs, most of which did surprisingly well. It has been almost a decade, however, since Activision has made any use of the Infocom name or intellectual property.

After Infocom’s final dismantling, many of the implementers decided they had had enough of the fickle computer game industry. David Lebling and Stu Galley entered the world of business data processing, where the work may not be as exciting but the hours are shorter and the pay is better. Amy Briggs returned to university to become a cognitive psychologist. Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn remained in the industry, but to work on non-IF games. Two of the implementers, however, were not quite willing to give up on IF. Out of their stubbornness was born Legend Entertainment, the last commercial IF producer of the era.

Legend Entertainment

Implementer Bob Bates had an odd relationship with Infocom. He was never a true employee of the company, but rather the head of his own Virginia firm, Challenge Entertainment, who contracted with Infocom in 1986 to develop games with its technology. The resulting titles, Sherlock: Riddle of the Crown Jewels and Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur, were then released by Infocom just as all of its other in-house written games. Both titles were solidly put together under the late Infocom philosophy of proper game design, but neither was particularly notable for its innovation. Indeed, if Bates had done no other work in IF, his biggest claim to fame would be a melancholy one, for he authored both the last all-text Infocom game (Sherlock) and its final game period (Arthur).

Bates was apparently of an entrepreneurial bent, for upon Infocom’s demise he decided to reorganize Challenge into a full-fledged publisher to continue Infocom’s legacy, as it were. On the face of it, this was dicey proposition indeed. By 1990, the only IF publisher of the eighties that still remained in that business was Magnetic Scrolls, and commercial IF increasingly seemed a thing of the past. Bates believed, however, that there was still life in the genre, as long as the player was offered more than just text. Bates and his company, Legend Entertainment, would effectively take the path Infocom had begun to explore with its late multimedia experiments to its natural conclusion, wrapping not only colorful graphics but also full music scores, sound effects, and even the occasional animated “cut scene” around the basic IF model of typing and reading. Legend would follow the trail blazed by Magnetic Scrolls in Wonderland in making even the typing optional by providing the user with context sensitive menus of verbs, prepositions, and nouns from which she could, if she chose, build sentences without doing any typing at all. Also included were other convenient features, such as an auto-map, designed to take much of the manual labor out of playing IF. All of these bells and whistles would come at a cost, however. The technical hurdles that had to be cleared to implement of this would force Legend to abandon the Infocom tradition of supporting many computers and operating systems. It would instead target its work strictly toward the IBM PC compatibles that were by now coming to slowly strangle their competitors and dominate the home computer market. Bates did however carry over to Legend one much more tangible legacy of his time with Infocom: he was able to convince Steve Meretzky, creator of some of Infocom’s most popular titles, to write IF for the new company. Apparently Bates’ ambitious new interface design and Meretzky’s involvement were enough to convince prospective investors that commercial IF still had life. With their help, Legend Entertainment was officially formed bare weeks after Infocom’s final closing, and Bates and Meretzky each began to work immediately on a first game for the new company.

Screens from Legend’s Timequest

Meretzky’s creation was a comedy called Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls. The player takes the role of Ernie Eaglebeak, a nerdy freshman just entering Sorcerer U., a sort of university of magic and, of course, a reference to Meretzky’s Infocom game of the same name. In Spellcasting, Ernie must pass his exams and, more importantly, seduce several of the more attractive females on campus. The game allows Meretzky to indulge in the same sort of risqué humor we previously saw in Leather Goddesses of Phobos, while also poking plenty of broad fun at college life. Fraternities at Sorcerer U., for instance, are named Tappa Kegga Bru and I Phelta Thi. The game as a whole is well-designed, and the humor hits often enough to give it a certain charm, but it does feel a bit disappointing to see Meretzky merely treading water with the same fraternity brother humor he had perfected years before. That disappointment only increases when looking at the two sequels the game spawned. Together, these three games make up Meretzky’s entire IF output for Legend. Even as one can appreciate them for the amusing trifles they are, one cannot help but wish that Meretzky had seen fit to challenge himself and his audience a bit more.

Bob Bates’ first Legend game, a time travel adventure appropriately entitled Timequest, was both much more ambitious and much more satisfying. Its plot - not its strongest suit – involves one Zeke Vettenmyer, who (in addition to being an anagram for Steve Meretzky) is a rogue member of the Temporal Corps, a sort of cross-time police force to which the player also belongs. Vettenmyer has subtly altered ten pivotal historical events in a plan to bring about the destruction of the world. The player, naturally, much chase this madman through time undoing the damage he causes and restoring the timestream to its proper order. By far the best aspect of the game is its historically accurate depictions of many locations and time periods, which range from 1361 BC to 1940 AD. To undo Vettenmyer’s ten changes, the player will need to visit some thirty-five separate timeplaces, exploring, solving puzzles, and collecting items that will often be needed in other timeplaces. The game is non-linear and bewilderingly complex, yet there is real fascination in putting all of the pieces together. It is undeniably difficult, yet the game leaves the player wanting to solve its mysteries unaided. One of the central tenets behind Timequest, and Bates’ other IF work, is the concept of “player empathy.” Bates:

To determine what is “fair and reasonable” you need to be able to put yourself in the player’s shoes. You need to develop what I call “player empathy.” This is the ability to look at the game from the player’s point of view, even though the game is still nothing more than a swirling design in your head. You must, as the potential player, be able to say, “This is the situation I’m in, and here is what I’ve been told. I know my long term goal, and I know my short term goal within this scene, but right now I’m being blocked by these two problems. Now… how am I going to solve them?”

Once you can look at the game from the player’s point of view, you can anticipate the kinds of things he is going to want to try. And once you have learned to anticipate his moves, you can give him a better game experience by writing non-default reactions to them (Bates).

Bates has spoken and written quite extensively on the nebulous concept of “fairness” in adventure gaming:

In a fair game, the answer to every puzzle is contained within the game. In addition, a player should theoretically be able to solve it the first time he encounters it simply by thinking hard enough (assuming he has been presented with all the information). Like a good mystery novel, it isn’t fair to wait until the last page, only to have the author reveal previously-withheld information that identifies the murderer (Bates).

The fact that Timequest consistently plays fair makes its complexities fascinating rather than frustrating. The player can put her faith in the game, without worrying whether the puzzle that currently has her stumped has some arbitrary solution she will never stumble over except through blind trial and error. This feeling is unfortunately all too rare in IF of the commercial era.

Some of the pivotal historical events are the sorts of things one might expect. Others initially seem like trivialities, yet show a real awareness of how the tides of history can turn on such seemingly inconsequential events. Legend’s multimedia enhancements work wonders here. The pictures and especially the temporally and culturally correct music for each event combine to set the mood wonderfully. In addition to its fun quotient, Timequest has real educational value. On the whole, it is not only Legend’s largest and most ambitious IF title, but also its most satisfying, and indeed one of the best all-around games of the commercial IF era. It stands today with Graham Nelson’s later Jigsaw as the ultimate examples of an IF sub-genre that began a decade before with Sierra’s ambitious but ultimately hopeless Time Zone. It is also the final work of the commercial IF era that I would call an absolute must-play for students of the genre.

Legend had peaked early, but there was still some good work to come. In addition to Meretzky’s Spellcasting series, the company released two games set in the science fictional milieu of Frederick Pohl’s Gateway novels, and one more original work by Bates, a comic fantasy entitled Eric the Unready. Even if it does not again reach the inspired heights of Timequest, Legend’s entire IF catalog is satisfying, well-written, and eminently worth playing today.

As time passed, though, a trend began to assert itself. Legend began to make more and more use of graphics for output and the mouse for input. Legend’s final two IF titles, Eric the Unready and Gateway 2: Homeworld, took advantage of the then-new CD-ROM technology to break up their gameplay with long movie sequences, and abandoned their parsers altogether for the occasional mouse-driven mini-game. My reader can probably see where this trend would ultimately lead. A few months after Gateway 2‘s 1993 release, the next Legend adventure hit the shelves. It was based on another literary property, this time Piers Antony’s Xanth series of light-hearted fantasy novels, and the prospective player might not have initially suspected any departures from the established Legend model at all from reading over the box. One she loaded the game up, though, she would find that the text parser had been abandoned at last in favor of the point-and-click model the rest of the industry had gone to years ago. Without a peep of fanfare from Legend or anyone else, Gateway 2 had marked the end of the commercial IF era, the final entry in a line that began with Scott Adams’ Adventureland in 1978 and included several thousand titles in-between.

Legend continued to release point-and-click adventures for another half-decade after giving up on the parser interface. As the nineties wound down, though, it was becoming apparent that graphical adventures were going the way that IF had a decade before, and Legend was acquired by publisher GT Interactive and transitioned into a developer of first-person action-adventure titles. After a few high-profile releases in this genre, the studio was shut down in early 2004. Bob Bates remained at the helm from its birth until its death. As for Steve Meretzky, he designed just one more graphical adventure game for Legend before moving on to other studios and other projects in that genre and others.

Mass-market commercial IF was dead, and (at least as a computer gaming form) may possibly remain so forever, but the genre as a whole would not suffer such a sad fate. The same year that Legend released its two final IF works, an Oxford mathematician named Graham Nelson released a free IF game called Curses that wowed fans of Infocom’s work by being able to stand without shame next to the best of that company’s storied output. Curses, along with Inform, the new programming language Nelson used to create it, would usher in a freeware IF renaissance. The multimedia flashiness of Legend’s work would largely disappear to be replaced by the austere all-text interface of Infocom’s classic period, but what the genre would lose in visual splendor it would gain in literary quality. Freed of the commercial considerations that bound virtually all serious IF authors before them, this new band of hobbyist artists would continue Infocom’s tradition of restless experimentation, and in the process create works that can in some cases stand proudly not just as games but as modern literature. Their story begins in Chapter 8.

Sources for Further Investigation

Games:

Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur. 1989. Bob Bates; Infocom.

Eric the Unready. 1993. Bob Bates; Legend.

Gateway. 1992. Michael Verdu, Glen Dahlgren, and others, based on Frederick Pohl’s novels; Legend.

Gateway 2: Homeworld. 1993. Michael Verdu, Glen Dahlgren, and others, based on Frederick Pohl’s novels; Legend.

Journey. 1989. Marc Blank; Infocom.

Shogun. 1989. David Lebling, based on James Clavell’s novel; Infocom.

Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls. 1990. Steve Meretzky; Legend.

Spellcasting 201: The Sorcerer’s Appliance. 1991. Steve Meretzky; Legend.

Spellcasting 301: Spring Break. 1992. Steve Meretzky; Legend.

Timequest. 1991. Bob Bates; Legend.

Zork Zero. 1988. Steve Meretzky; Infocom.

Other Works:

Bates, Bob. “Designing the Puzzle.”

http://www.scottkim.com/thinkinggames/GDC00/bates.html.

Berlyn, Mike. “Dumont & Once and Future.” Usenet post to rec.games.int-fiction, June 11 1999.

Briceno, Hector, Wesley Chao, Andrew Glenn, Stanley Hu, Ashwin Krishnamurthy, and Bruce Tsuchida. Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc.

Available online at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/info/infocom-paper.pdf.

Granade, Stephen and Phillip Jong. “David Lebling Interview.”

http://brasslantern.org/community/interviews/lebling.html.

Jong, Phillip. “Bob Bates.”

http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/168.

Lebling, David. “Offsite Meeting, Wednesday, April 29, 1987.” The Masterpieces of Infocom CD-ROM. Activision: 1996.

Levy, James H. “Gruer’s Profile: James H. Levy.” The Status Line, Summer 1986.

Nelson, Graham. The Inform Designer’s Manual. 4[th] ed. The Interactive Fiction Libray: St. Charles, Illinois, 2001.

Available online at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/compilers/inform6/manuals/designers_manual_4.pdf.

Rosenberg, Ronald. “Computer Games Firm Moving to California.” Boston Globe, May 22, 1989.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/articles/globe.890522.

Chapter 8: The Growth of Hobbyist IF

Firstly, I never intended to write Inform! I had played a few Infocom games in the late 1980s (running under CP/M on a ghastly Amstrad), and admired them: I was curious about the run-time format and in early 1993 found some fragmentary documents on the Internet. I wrote to Mark Howell asking if there was a compiler, and he said “Many people have had many dreams”. So I tried to fake a toy game file, to print “Hello World” and stop. Each time, nothing happened, and I thought, ah, I shouldn’t have missed out the property default table, and coded a bit more. Eventually I found it had been working all along – but didn’t show anything on screen until it had the first full page of text. I inserted 30 new lines, and suddenly my toy said “hEllO woRlD”. (An hour later I understood alphabet shifting rather better!) My first real program factorized the numbers 2 to 100 into prime factors, for which I improvised an assembler: Mark’s excellent disassembler helped me to perfect it. By then “zass”, as it was called, was a horrid tangle of exceptions so I sat down with plenty of paper and worked out the underlying rules. I wrote these into a much simpler assembler, added “if” statements, code blocks, loops and an expression evaluator, and the result was Inform 1.

–Graham Nelson (1996)

Not surprisingly, a whole host of 1980s computer hobbyists were inspired by Adventure, Zork, or the Scott Adams games to attempt to create their own works of IF in popular general-purpose programming languages of the time such as BASIC. Equally unsurprisingly, the results were almost uniformly dire. Developing a reasonable IF parser and world model is a hard problem even for the professional programmer, but one which must be tackled by even the most rank amateur before she can even begin to think about the text, objects, characters, and puzzles that will make up her game. Most “written from scratch” amateur games are undermined by the weakness of their underlying infrastructure, as it were. The logical solution to the problem, a customized programming language with an accompanying library encapsulating parsing and basic world modeling, was not a practical possibility on the primitive hardware of the time. Thus would-be authors were left to struggle with BASIC and try to implement something that would be, if not of professional quality, “good enough.” Something of a cottage industry of how-to magazine articles and books sprung up to aid them.

Luckily, while creating an IF infrastructure is a hard problem, once that infrastructure is created it is eminently possible to apply it to many different individual games. Virtually all of the major IF developers of the commercial era quickly realized and acted upon this, and it did not take much longer for others to try their hand at creating similar tools for the prospective amateur IF author.

The Quill

The first usable hobbyist IF development system was a commercial product known as The Quill, developed by Welshman Graeme Yeandle and published by Gilsoft. In 1982, Yeandle had begun to write an adventure game to cash in on what was then the hottest form of computer entertainment on the market. He soon realized, as many had before him, that by taking the time to develop specialized IF tools he could make his first game much better, as well as open up the possibility for creating many more games after it fairly quickly. From here, it was a short leap to come to the idea of setting himself up not as an author of IF himself but rather as a provider of said tools to the general public, thus allowing them to create their own works of IF. Yaendle polished up his system and successfully pitched it to nearby publisher Gilsoft, who published The Quill in 1983 for what was then the most popular home computer in Britain, the Sinclair Spectrum. Priced at just £14.95, it was an immediate success, and a version for the other popular British 8-bit of the era, the Commodore 64, soon followed.

The Quill screen

Unlike the more powerful IF development systems of today, The Quill was not a true programming language. It was rather a menu-driven program into which the user could enter the various components of her game - its vocabulary, locations, messages, objects, etc - and then link everything together by providing some simple logical rules. When her adventure was complete, the user could export it from The Quill as a stand-alone program runnable on any Spectrum or, if she had that version, Commodore. Creating a simple text adventure using this system was surprisingly fast and easy. The system was sharply limited in is capabilities even by the standards of its day, but many authors dived into The Quill headfirst and came up with ingenious ways to get around some of those limitations and do things its creator had likely never envisioned. A surprisingly thoughtful article in a contemporaneous issue of Your Spectrum details some of the hoops designers had to jump through to create more sophisticated behaviors:

But, despite my admiration for the system as it stands, it tends to encourage rather ‘noddy’ results - mainly because the Interpreter fails to allow actions that would surely have been quite easy to include. It would have been nice, for instance, to perform an action if A is true OR if B is true; move an object from one location to another; set a flag; print the value of a flag (for example, ‘YOU HAVE ONLY x TURNS LEFT BEFORE THE EXPLOSION’); change the description of a room after an event; and be able to GET any object present, without further specification (this would allow me to construct a version using single key pushes only, for younger children who can read but not yet type - if Atic Atac can do it, so can The Quill).

Although a number of these requirements cannot be met at all, some, like the OR, can quite easily be but with a clumsy and inscrutable result. Others, such as moving an object, or changing the description of a room, demand a degree of ingenuity; making an animal follow you seemed at first impossible until the mysteries were explained to me. (Hint: you have to make it both a message and an object.) Ingenuity is fun, but slow to create and sometimes tricky to debug.

These features would allow more sophisticated worlds and more interesting relationships. As it stands, The Quill makes it easier to hide a torch in one arbitrary place and a battery in another than to create a world with a lunatic logic; easier just to make the player die and be forced to start again than to create bizarre but comprehensible events. Two Quill-written adventures came with the test package - Magic Castle and Diamond Trail - and both fell into that ‘Snakes and Ladders’ trap (Green).

We are already seeing a demonstration of a modern IF development truism: a system that makes it easy to create simple games by pointing and click or selecting from menus rather than programming is actually more difficult to develop more unique and complex works in than one that does not so coddle its user. Of course, The Quill cannot really be faulted too egregiously here. It was after all the first real attempt at creating an IF development platform for the everyday user, and so had none of the modern community’s accepted wisdom to fall back upon. And regardless of its creator’s desires, running a full-fledged high-level programming environment on a 48K Spectrum or 64K Commodore 64 just was not a practical possibility.

In spite of its limitations, a thriving community soon sprung up around The Quill. Key here was the system’s generous licensing policy. Authors were required to place somewhere in their creations a credit to the The Quill, but otherwise retained absolute rights to distribute or, if they chose, even sell their games as they pleased. A surprising number did just that, and so-called Quilled adventures soon became a staple of the commercial IF scene in Europe. These games were primitive in the extreme when set beside the works of more professional companies like Infocom, for some limitations of The Quill, most notably its simplistic two-word parser and its lack of support for independently acting characters besides the player, could not be overcome by any amount of authorial ingenuity. Tim Gilberts, founder of Gilsoft, amusingly and unconvincingly attempted to spin this primitiveness into a feature:

Tim is not particularly keen on highly complex interpreters in adventure anyway. “In some ways that kind of thing can actually limit communication. You’ll often have to spend time working out the right phrase to use before a character will respond or you get the action you want. Even then you will find that some dwarf will only end up singing about gold or you just get another free lunch. The ‘Inglish’ used in games like The Hobbit can be quite quixotic and difficult to fathom. I really do prefer to play games with the usual verb/noun entry” (Price).

In countries where Infocom games were available only as expensive imports, Quilled games did have one undeniable thing going for them: their price. Most were sold by their creators for the equivalent of five US dollars or less, and at such prices the few hours of entertainment they provided were apparently acceptable. Gilsoft eventually began gathering up what it judged to be the best Quilled games for release under the company’s own imprint as the Gold Collection, priced at £1.99 each.

The Quill, and Quilled adventures, never caught on to any appreciable degree in America. For one thing, Quill’s first and most successful computing platform, the Sinclair Spectrum, was sold only briefly and unsuccessfully in the United States as the Timex Sinclair. The Quill was marketed as Adventure Writer in the United States for the very successful Commodore 64, but never saw the wide distribution and heavy advertisement of its European sibling. Most Quilled adventures, sold as they were by their amateur European developers to local distributors or through mail order only, never even made it to America.

Gilsoft and Yeandle worked to improve upon The Quill following its initial release. An add-on called The Illustrator was released in 1984 that allowed the user to add full-color graphics to her game, and in 1986 a second-generation version of The Quill appeared called the Professional Adventure Writer, or PAW. Although it remained a limited, menu-driven construction set rather than a true programming environment, PAW did remedy many of the shortcomings of its predecessor. Most notably, a reasonably proficient full-sentence parser was now provided for (presumably over Gilberts’ heartfelt objections). Games could now be much larger, and could include non-player characters. In spite of these much-needed improvements, though, PAW never caught on with the public in the way that The Quill had, and never even saw release in America. By 1986, simple text adventures of the sort it was designed to create were falling out of fashion, and new distribution deals were finally making the works of Infocom and other American professionals available to the European public for reasonable prices. Thus The Quill, PAW, and the games created with them faded quietly into history.

AGT

Surprisingly, no equivalent to The Quill community existed at the time in America. In spite of a few noble attempts such as Hayden Software’s Computer Novel Construction Kit, no product managed to combine The Quill’s reasonable price, large user-base, and (relatively speaking) power. By choice or necessity, amateur IF designers in America largely “rolled their own” adventures from scratch during these years, aided if at all only by books and magazine articles on the subject. As my reader can perhaps imagine, the average product of their labors made Quilled games seem positively sophisticated.

The first widely used IF development system in America would not emerge until 1987. It would be called the Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT), and would itself evolve from an earlier, less successful system with the rather uninspiring title of Generic Adventure Game System (GAGS) in a way reminiscent of the development of the original Adventure. AGT’s creator, David Malmberg, describes its genesis from Mark Welch’s GAGS:

I saw an article about GAGS in a local weekly computer newspaper (Computer Currents), in which Mark offered to sell the Turbo Pascal source code to GAGS for $50. I sent him a check and also bought Turbo Pascal 2.0 (only available via mail order in those days) for $50.

I was working in downtown San Francisco and riding BART two hours a day, so I had plenty of time to teach myself Turbo Pascal (which I didn’t know – I was a COBAL and FORTRAN programmer in those days) and to teach myself how GAGS worked by studying Mark’s GAGS code.

After studying GAGS in detail, it became obvious that it was limited to very simple games with only a few verbs. I wanted to create Infocom-like games. GAGS in its current state would never make it. However, Mark had defined the essential data structures very well, e.g., ROOMs, NOUNs, and CREATUREs, but GAGS lacked flexibility in manipulating those objects. So I set about extending GAGS by adding what I called “meta-commands,” which really increased the power and flexibility of GAGS. These meta-commands allowed for an almost unlimited number of nouns, verbs, and objects (and synonyms for any of them) and the ability to manipulate them. It came close to my goal of creating games that were truly Infocom-like (Granade).

In the hands of a master, AGT may indeed have come close at times to the Infocom ideal, but it would never quite reach it. There were simply too many frustrations and limitations inherent in the system. Still, AGT was remarkable for its time. Malmberg attempted to cater to both those looking for an easy-to-use IF construction set ala The Quill and to those willing to dive in and truly program. For the former, he provided “Standard Level” AGT, a method of building a simple game entirely from menus; for the latter, he provided “Advanced Level” AGT, a true, full-featured programming language that was the first of its kind for hobbyist IF development. Of course, virtually everyone serious about creating worthwhile games with AGT quickly grew frustrated with its restrictive “Standard Level” and learned to program. The following is part of Al Golden’s AGT implementation of Roger Firth’s Cloak of Darkness, a demonstration game specifically created to illustrate how the same thing is accomplished in various IF languages:

ROOM [Opera Foyer]

Opera Foyer

SOUTH [Foyer Bar]

WEST [Cloakroom]

END_ROOM

ROOM_DESCR [Opera Foyer]

You are standing in a spacious hall, splendidly decorated in red and gold, with glittering chandeliers overhead. The entrance from the street is to the north, and there are doorways south and west.

END_ROOM_DESCR

ROOM [Cloakroom]

Cloakroom

EAST [Opera Foyer]

END_ROOM

ROOM_DESCR [Cloakroom]

The walls of this small room were clearly once lined with hooks, though now only one remains. The exit is a door to the east.

END_ROOM_DESCR

ROOM [Foyer Bar]

Foyer Bar

NORTH [Opera Foyer]

Light [dumb gizmo]

END_ROOM

ROOM_DESCR [Foyer Bar]

The bar, much rougher than you’d have guessed after the opulence of the foyer to the north, is completely empty. There seems to be some sort of message scrawled in the sawdust on the floor.

END_ROOM_DESCR

NOUN [Velvet Cloak]

Cloak

Velvet

There is a velvet cloak here.

LOCATION [worn]

WEARABLE

END_NOUN

NOUN_DESCR [Velvet Cloak]

A handsome cloak, of velvet trimmed with satin, and slightly spattered with raindrops. Its blackness is so deep that it almost seems to suck light from the room.

END_NOUN_DESCR

AGT offered an unprecedented level of power for its time, although in terms of modern IF its shortcomings are legion. The system was designed to create treasure hunts like Adventure and Zork, and while more interesting types of gameplay could and often were implemented in it by the sufficiently ingenious, one often had the feeling one was fighting the system rather than working with it. Unlike more modern development systems, much of AGT’s workings were closed to its programmer rather than left in open and modifiable libraries. AGT developers developed countless ingenious ways of forcing the system to do what they wished, up to and including modifying the Turbo Pascal source code to and re-compiling the AGT compiler itself to change its behavior. The AGT parser was reasonably good, although limited to about 500 words, and its geography was likewise limited to about 100 rooms.

Such modern-day quibbling is really a bit unfair, however. For amateur developers of 1987, AGT, sold via mail order and word of mouth by Malmberg and his now largely silent partner Welch via the shareware model, was a dream come true, and a community quickly sprung up around the system just as conventionally marketed commercial IF was going into steep decline. For these diehards, AGT would bring a steady supply of new adventures to play even as the commercial providers of IF expired one by one. A number of reasonably priced online services, such as GEnie and CompuServe, were appearing at this time. These, the predecessors to modern Internet communities, provided a global meeting space for the AGT community to congregate, communicate, and organize itself. For his part, Malmberg worked assiduously to cultivate that community. AGT’s documentation improved by leaps and bounds, and was soon made available as a professionally printed manual for an additional fee. Malmberg also released the source code to several complete games implemented in AGT for learning purposes, including the old stand-by, Adventure. He improved AGT steadily as well. Although many of the fundamental design flaws in the system could never be fully remedied, new versions allowed more vocabulary and more objects and rooms, and the system was eventually ported from the IBM PC-compatibles on which it had been born to the Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, and Atari ST. The support Malmberg offered his users during these years remains something of a legend among those who were there. He passed out his home phone number to all and sundry, and spent many an evening doing nothing but dealing with technical support issues. One of Malmberg’s best ideas, and one that has resonance right into our modern era, was to institute an annual competition, open to anyone who wished to enter, for games written in AGT. This contest would become an annual “festival” of sorts around which the AGT community could organize itself, as well as guaranteeing an annual bumper crop of interesting new games from contest hopefuls.

A very sizable number of games were written in AGT. Very few of them are played or commented on today, which is a bit of a shame really. This unique era between the glory days of Infocom and the beginning of our modern community passes hardly mentioned by most, yet in sheer numbers probably as many people were participating in that community as in our own. Their correspondences have largely been lost now, having disappeared when the commercial online services that housed them shut down in the face of the Internet explosion of the mid-nineties. Their games, however, have for the most part been preserved on the IF Archive. Unlike modern IF games, which are virtually all completely free, many AGT authors chose to sell their work through the shareware model, distributing perhaps the first quarter of their games for free. The idea was that the prospective purchaser would start playing and become hooked, then mail in her check to gain access to the rest of the game. The AGT games of this era are, as my reader can probably imagine, something of a mixed bag, but plenty of satisfying adventures were created, and at least a couple that are more than worthy of discussion here.

Judith Pintar’s Cosmoserve: An Adventure for the BBS-Enslaved is an affectionate tribute to online life during the era of the game’s creation. The player is cast in the role of a somewhat faceless freelance programmer with the suitably asexual name of R.J. Wright. In order to complete an important assignment, she must download a patch file from the online service of the game’s title, which is itself a play on the name of the then-popular service CompuServe. Naturally, this simple task soon spirals completely out of control:

Along the way you will encounter computer viruses, virtual reality games, lost passwords, online conferences, FBI raids, online stalkers, and Rick’s Cafe Americain (Cree).

Although it begins in RJ.’s living room and occasionally gives the player reason to return to its simulation of the “real world,” most of CosmoServe is played via a simulation of R.J.’s computer. Upon firing up this (simulated) computer, the player is presented with a very cleverly done in-game MS-DOS prompt. From here, she must navigate around the hard drive, running various programs, performing various tasks, and, of course, logging on to CosmoServe. The heart of the game is here, in a marvelous re-creation and send-up of online culture circa 1991. CosmoServe contains, like its real-world counterparts, discussion forums for every triviality; file repositories; technical support that is not terribly supportive; and the inevitable cyber-sex chat lines, all presented with enough verisimilitude to feel familiar to any who were there in reality, and with enough satirical edge to entertain. Most of the fun of playing CosmoServe comes in exploring this environment and experimenting rather than actually trying to solve R.J.’s problem, for the game is very unforgiving, particularly in expecting its player to complete a series of complex tasks within very harsh time limits. The serious player will likely have to restart many times to optimize her time, and, as Pintar candidly noted years after the game’s release, “the jokes get less funny the fifth time around” (Forman). CosmoServe’s failure to free itself from these old-school text adventures annoyances is disappointing, but the game has nevertheless attained a resonance today that its creator perhaps never would have imagined for it. The text-based online world that it chronicles was a fleeting one that would be swept away in a few years by the advent of cheap Internet access and the graphical web browser. For anyone who was there, it offers a brace of “the way we were” moments that the player may herself have forgotten; and for anyone who was not, it provides a precious, educational window into another time. CosmoServe was designed to be a text adventure, with few if any literary pretensions, but because it is so thoroughly of its time and place and so sharply observant of online culture even as it pokes fun at it, it has gained a literary value beyond most of its contemporaries. It is also, not incidentally, something of a technical tour-de-force, bending AGT from its imagined purpose of creating Zorkian dungeon romps into a surprisingly accurate simulation of a typical MS-DOS computer circa 1991.

Pintar was also heavily involved with what has come to be regarded as the best AGT game ever written, Shades of Grey. The game is one of the few from the AGT era to seek to be more than an entertaining text adventure. Shades of Grey has at least two lessons to impart: one a specific lesson about the long, sad history of Haiti, and the other a more abstract lesson about the complexity of the real world and the danger in allowing oneself to believe too wholeheartedly in moral absolutism. From the latter comes the game’s title, contrasting shades of grey to moral black and white.

The game initially seems somewhat clichéd. The player finds herself cast into a strange, deserted city with no memory of who she is or how she got there. She soon meets up with a wizened old fortune teller, who uses her Tarot cards to cast the player into a series of vignettes that at first seem utterly unconnected. The player has brief, poignant adventures as a young child, as a soldier, and as both Robin of Sherwood and his arch-enemy the Sheriff of Nottingham. All can stand alone, but as the player completes these sequences she gradually assembles the pieces of a jigsaw that imparts the game’s overarching theme that evil is often in the eye of the beholder, and that we replace real-world complexity with rigid values of black and white at our peril. The game climaxes in an historical vignette from 1957, in which the player is placed in the role of a CIA operative with the opportunity, but not the instructions, to assassinate François Duvalier just as he is beginning his long, brutal dictatorship of Haiti. The moral quandary she is presented with is a thorny one, and could not perhaps be conveyed in such immediate terms in any other form of literature. On the one hand, killing “Papa Doc” here could save hundreds of thousands of Haitians from decades of suffering; on the other, doing so would be a blow in the face of the rule of law by which civilized nations supposedly conduct their affairs, as well as, no matter what spin is placed upon the deed, cold-blooded murder. In the end, the games does have an opinion of its own on the moral choice it presents, and coveys to the reader in its closing sequence whether she has made the “right” or “wrong” choice. Some have criticized it for that, feeling it at least partially subverts the message implicit in its very title. Nonetheless, this climactic scene is one of the most affecting to be found anywhere in IF, and in its sheer thematic ambitions the game pushes the limits in a way that had not been seen in IF since Trinity, a title to which Shades bears a striking similarity at times, both in its segmented, surrealistic approach and in its broodingly tragic, thoughtful tone.

Shades of Grey’s gestation was almost as unusual as its subject matter. It was created by seven separate authors organized over the CompuServe online service by Judith Pintar. Each wrote a part of the game, whereupon Pintar wove their contributions together into the finished whole. This method of development should not have worked, but it did. While each of the vignettes that make up the game has its own feel and writing style, this actually works for the game by giving each vignette its own distinct feel.

CosmoServe was the deserved winner of the 1991 AGT Contest, and Shades of Grey of the 1992 event. While these games are standouts, they are by no means the only quality work to come from the AGT community. Other worthwhile efforts include the Christmas game Sanity Clause by Mike McCauley, which sends its player around the world delivering presents on Christmas night, and indeed is a perfect game to play at that time of year; and Klaustrophobia by Carol Hovick, a Bureaucracy homage so large that it had to be split into three separate game files, to be played one after another, to get around AGT’s size restrictions. As the 1990s wore on, though, the AGT community began to wind down. The online services that had been the community’s home were fading away to be replaced by the World Wide Web, and a new IF community was springing up there which preferred to write with new languages that offered much more power and flexibility than AGT. Also, David Malmberg found himself simply worn out by more than seven years of development, documentation, and technical support for a system that never earned him or his partner much more than the proverbial beer money. In the end, Malmberg said, “I simply grew tired of it. I wanted to do something else with my free time” (Granade). The final AGT Contest was held in 1993, and in 1994 Malmberg officially bowed out of the IF business, releasing AGT along with all of its source code and documentation to all and sundry to do with as they chose. The demise of the AGT community coincided almost perfectly with the rise of our modern community.

Very little further development was done to the system itself after Malmberg ceased to provide support, but AGT is not entirely dead even today. A trickle of new games continued to appear for a while, and an AGT game was entered into the modern IF community’s annual competition as recently as 2003. The system has also remained quite popular with those in the adult interactive fiction community for the creation of interactive erotica.

The historical legacy of AGT, meanwhile, has been carefully preserved by the modern IF community. All AGT games that can be located have been placed on the IF Archive, official clearing-house of all things IF related. A portable interpreter known as AGiliTy has also been developed that allows these old games to be played on a variety of modern computing platforms.

TADS

The second most commonly used IF programming language today, the Text Adventure Development System (TADS) has a checkered history going back almost two decades. One thing that has remained constant, however, is its faithful stewardship by its creator, Californian Michael J. Roberts.

The first version of TADS was released in 1988, just one year after AGT, and like AGT was marketed as shareware. A crippled demonstration version was distributed to computer bulletin boards and other online services of the day by Roberts and his business partner, Steve McAdam, in the hope of interesting potential developers enough to make them purchase the complete tool. TADS had much to recommend it over AGT, beginning with its C-like syntax and Roberts’ decision to make TADS a full-featured object-oriented programming language that just happened to be especially suited for the creation of IF, rather than the more limited and specialized tool that was AGT. Much of TAD’s inner workings were contained in its user-modifiable library files, rather than hard-coded into the language itself, and this made it possible to introduce all sorts of sophisticated custom behaviors elegantly and quickly. The external library also made it possible for users to adapt TADS wholesale to the creation of works in languages other than English, and made it extremely easy for users to share bits of code with one another to work into their individual games. TADS games compiled not into native machine code but into story files that were runnable on a sophisticated virtual machine similar to Infocom’s Z-Machine, thus making the games easily portable to many different computers. Combine these features with a vastly more sophisticated parser and world model than that of AGT, and TADS becomes the first of the modern IF languages, and the first that the prospective author might realistically hope to use to create games of Infocom’s sophistication. Part of Dan Shiovitz’s TADS implementation of Roger Firth’s Cloak of Darkness demonstration follows:

cloakroom: room

sdesc = "Cloakroom"

ldesc = "The walls of this small room were clearly once lined with

hooks, though now only one remains. The exit is a door to the

east."

east = startroom

;

hook: fixeditem, surface, item

sdesc = "small brass hook"

ldesc =

{

"It's just a small brass hook, ";

if (cloak.isIn(self))

"with a cloak hanging on it. ";

else

"screwed to the wall. ";

}

noun = 'hook' 'peg'

adjective = 'small' 'brass'

location = cloakroom

;

bar: darkroom

lightsOn =

{

if (not cloak.isIn(self)) return true;

else                      return nil;

}

sdesc = "Foyer bar"

ldesc = "The bar, much rougher than you'd have guessed after the

opulence of the foyer to the north, is completely empty. There seems to be some sort of message scrawled in the sawdust on the floor."

north = startroom

roomCheck(verb) =

{

if (not self.islit)

{

if (isclass(verb, travelVerb))

{

if (verb <> nVerb)

{

"Blundering around in the dark isn't a good idea!";

message.number += 2;

return nil;

}

}

else if (not isclass(verb, sysverb))

{

"In the dark? You could easily disturb something!";

message.number += 1;

return nil;

}

}

return true;

}

;

For all of its strengths, TADS did not immediately take the IF world by storm, rather languishing for years as a sort of also-ran to AGT. Possible reasons for this are several. While much more powerful than AGT, TADS was nowhere near as forgiving or accessible to those who were not already programmers, as a comparison of the AGT and TADS sample code I have provided will perhaps illustrate. While AGT eased users in with its two-tiered approach, TADS did little to coddle its user. The implicit message seemed to be that TADS was a serious tool, and would require a serious commitment to use well. (The seemingly inevitable tradeoff we see illustrated here between power and ease of use is of course still with us in IF development today.) Roberts’ marketing and distribution were perhaps not as good as Malmberg’s, and the slightly higher price he charged for his system probably also led some to turn to its competitor. Finally, AGT had the huge advantage of simply having been first, and having had virtually all of the remaining text adventure diehards form their community around it for that reason. It was very difficult for a newcomer like TADS to make inroads into such an established party.

Although TADS games were few and far between in these early years, Roberts continued to doggedly support and improve the system. He officially released version 2 of TADS in late 1992. Its improvements were many, but most notable was the removal of virtually all game size restrictions, another first in IF development. The sufficiently ambitious author with sufficiently advanced hardware was now free to create games of many times the size of Infocom’s greatest epics.

TAD’s popularity began to increase dramatically at about this time, thanks largely to two authors, David Leary and David Baggett, and a series of shareware IF games they published under the company name of Adventions. There is a truism among IF developers which states that what a new system really needs to succeed is a game created with it that is sufficiently advanced to excite the interest of the public. During its early years, TADS notably lacked such a demonstration of its capabilities, but with the arrival of Adventions that situation was finally remedied. Leary and Baggett devoted the bulk of their efforts to the creation of four fantasy romps in the Zork tradition: in chronological order, Unnkulian Underworld: The Unknown Unventure, Unnkulian Unventure II: The Secret of Acme, Unnkulia One-Half: The Salesman Triumphant, and Unnkulia Zero: The Search for Amanda. Actually, saying that these games were “inspired” by Zork hardly begins to describe Advention’s debt to Infocom’s original games set in the Zork universe, particularly those of Steve Meretzky. That is not to say that the Unnkulia games are without value, though. They display an attention to fair design seldom seen since the demise of Infocom; they are competently written; and if they often feel like they are trying a bit too hard to be funny, Meretzky can sometimes be accused of the same thing. Whether the IF public really needed four games set in this same milieu is a somewhat more debatable question, however. Regardless, the games did wonders for TADS’ acceptance, as it was immediately obvious from spending a few minutes with them that they were markedly more polished works that even the best AGT creations of the time. At almost five years old, TADS finally had its coming-out party. As for Leary and Baggett, they proved themselves capable of creating some thematically interesting work on those too-few occasions when they stepped out of Unnkulia.

Leary’s Horror of Rylvania is a tale of Gothic horror of the vampire variety. Its opening text describes its premise better than I could ever hope to, and also conveys some of the atmosphere to be found throughout the game:

The hiking trip across Europe has been a wonderful experience for two recent college graduates like yourself and your friend Carolyn. From the mansions of England to the beaches of Greece, you’ve walked in the footsteps of the Crusaders and seen sights that few Americans have ever seen.

Carolyn had wanted to skip the Central European nation of Rylvania. “Why bother?” she’d said. “There’s nothing but farmers there, and creepy old castles - nothing we haven’t seen already. The Rylvanians are still living in the last century.”

That, you’d insisted, was exactly why Rylvania was a must-see. The country was an intact piece of living history, a real treasure in this modern age.

If only you hadn’t insisted! As night fell, as you approached a small farming village in search of a quaint inn to spend the night, the howling began. A scant hundred yards from the village, and it happened…the wolves appeared from the black forest around you and attacked. Big, black wolves that leaped for Carolyn’s throat before you could shout a warning, led by a great gray-black animal that easily stood four feet at the shoulder. Carolyn fell to the rocky path, blood gushing from her neck as the wolves faded back into the trees, unwilling, for some unknown reason, to press their attack.

If she dies, it will be your fault. You curse the darkening sky as you cradle Carolyn’s head, knowing that you have little time to find help. Perhaps in the village up the road to the north -

The game’s big plot twist comes when the player is transformed into a vampire by the previously stricken Carolyn:

>ne

You walk out of town, heading out into the moors. Your mind wanders to Carolyn, and the recent strange turn of events. Where could she have gone? Is she dead? Can you still save her? Where did Doctor Trolovitch go?

The moors are dark and cold. A light rain is falling and the rumblings of far-distant thunder reach your ears. A flash of lightning, and suddenly, she is there. Carolyn - dressed in a white robe, standing before you on the fog-covered fen! Stunned, you run toward her, calling her name. She smiles, arms outstretched, reaching for you. And then you are there, hugging her, crying - and noticing how cold she is, how pale - how very dead. Her mouth opens in a jagged smile. Cold, bone-white pointed teeth reach for your neck. You cry out as her canines puncture your throat - and go limp as your lifeblood pumps into her mouth. The world turns black -

You dream.

The dreams are endless and horrifying. You are alive, then dead, then floating in a formless void, then somehow alive again - but not alive. You have changed - you can tell. You are no longer human. You struggle out of blackness and find yourself enclosed in wood -

Rylvania does not spare the player, here or anywhere else, in the way most of its predecessors likely would have, but gives to its story and atmosphere total fidelity. Adam Thorton:

Atmosphere? Does anyone else remember how radical Rylvania was in that it stuck to its gothic-horror guns and did not yield to the then near-total temptation to throw cutesy and anachronistic stuff into the game?

For all its atmosphere and all the bravery of its approach, Rylvania does not succeed as totally as it might if it were, say, written today. Leary ultimately fails to deliver a totally plot and character driven game, falling back frequently on traditional fiddly adventure game tropes. Reviewer Valentine Kopteltsev describes his frustration as a modern player:

Then, just as things really got rolling, I was resolutely grabbed by the collar, pulled back, and told, “Not so fast, my friend. From now on, you’ve got to do it the usual way - explore, pick up things, and enjoy yourself”. This sudden change alone was baffling enough; to make things worse, it turned out that one had to be pretty careful, if not pedantic, in collecting items – the game is split in two parts, with many rooms in the first part no longer accessible when you reach the second stage; however, puzzles at stage 2 often require objects from stage 1 to be solved, so that you’re very likely to lock yourself out of victory, and find out something is wrong only several hundred turns later (sometimes without a hint what item is needed, exactly). Also, be prepared for a couple or more restarts; many decisions in the beginning phase of Rylvania depend on knowledge you only acquire later in the game. Combined with the fact that the game sometimes requires actions that seem completely inappropriate in the given situation, it makes a thorough strategic pre-planning practically inevitable.

This degenerating into Adventure is all the more a pity as the puzzles don’t seem to be the main focus of the game, and as the storytelling aspect of the game has got so much potential. I’m not saying that the puzzles are bad – they are very solidly done for the most part, but they’re… well, unexceptional. I like creative, challenging puzzles (though I’m not very good at solving them); here, however, I’d rather prefer puzzles that’d be easier, but would fit the plot better: as it is, the plot and the puzzles seem to literally fight against each other.

In Leary’s defense, it is important to recognize that Rylvania was conceived as essentially a commercial product, and that its author was thus laboring under the same constraints that limited Infocom’s and others literary aspirations. Those who pay for a work of IF expect a certain amount of value for their money, meaning a certain number of hours of playtime. If a designer gives total credence to the narrative at the expense of the crossword, his player is likely to complete his game quite quickly, assuming he is not in a position - as Leary and other private developers like him certainly were not - to create a work of absolutely vast scope. Puzzles thus serve as speed-bumps of sorts in this situation, slowing the player down by occasionally stumping her. I certainly do not imply that this is the only or even most common purpose of puzzles. Certainly, a well-designed puzzle game is an art-form in its own right. In the case of a work like Rylvania, though, which seems to so clearly to want to tell a story with rather than play a game with its reader, arbitrary puzzles just serve as pointless distractions from what the player would like to focus on. One great blessing of the current IF scene with its almost universally free games is that, the value for money proposition no longer being a factor, authors, for the first time in the history of the genre, do not have to make such compromises but can instead insert exactly as many or as few puzzles as seem to suit their vision.

If Rylvania wavers somewhat at times from its course, it recovers admirably in time for its end-game. The player has by this time put together an antidote to the vampirism of himself and Carolyn, but has only been able to manufacture enough for one person. With the standard horror-movie mob of angry villagers at the gates of the castle he and Carolyn inhabit, he is faced with a stark choice: take the antidote himself and kill Carolyn, or give the antidote to Carolyn and sacrifice himself to the mob outside. Rylvania does not explicitly judge the morality of the player’s final act in the way that Shades of Grey did, but a bit of reading between the lines of the game’s two possible ending messages does give a pretty clear picture of where its author’s sympathies lie. There is in fact a subtle Christian theme woven into these final moments of the game, one which would become more prominent in Adventions’ swan song, The Legend Lives! We will discuss Legend and its unusual (for IF) Christian subtext in a later chapter.

Curses and Inform

As some were designing systems for the creation of new IF, others were working to preserve the Infocom classics by reverse engineering the Z-Machine. Various efforts in this direction were made on various computers beginning not long after the release of Zork itself, but the first really serious, concentrated project was begun in 1986 by a loosely organized group of hackers who called themselves the InfoTaskForce. Together this group was able to produce within six months or so a Z-Code interpreter for the version 3 games that made up the bulk of Infocom’s catalog. Their interpreter was written in C, which made it very easy to port to many computers. The InfoTaskForce continued to sporadically improve their interpreter into the early 1990s, by which time support had been added for all versions of the Z-Machine, with the exception of the graphical version 6, in a single interpreter. The group faded from the scene around 1994, but left behind enough code and technical specifications to allow others to continue their tradition. Today, a wide variety of interpreters exist for a huge range of computers and computing devices, many even supporting the elusive version 6 standard.

The InfoTaskForce saw itself as preserving Infocom’s legacy by keeping its games easily accessible to the public, but it never occurred to the group to consider the possibility of making new games to run on Infocom’s old virtual machine. That would be left a junior Oxford mathematician named Graham Nelson, who began tinkering with the InfoTaskForce’s work about 1992. At this time, it was widely known that Infocom had written its games in an in-house, specialized language called ZIL, but absolutely nothing was known about the look or structure of that language. Nelson therefore started from scratch in designing what would become Inform, basing its syntax and capabilities partly on the unique architecture of the Z-Machine itself and partly on what seemed to him to be the most logical way to put together a language for IF. Many would date the beginning of the modern IF community to May 9, 1993, when Nelson posted to the Usenet group rec.games.int-fiction an announcement of both Inform and the first game written with it, Curses:

Your family have owned the house for generations, not that they ever amounted to anything. Well, now it’s yours, but you haven’t any great ambitions; all you want is to get away from the holiday packing, which is driving you mad, and hunt around in the ramshackle old attic of Meldrew House for that student map of Paris you know you left up there somewhere.

You certainly have no idea why Aunt Jemima’s keen interest in horticulture, your grandfather’s early photography, how robot mice work, what Arthurian legends have to do with the motorway at the bottom of the garden, Tarot cards, the politics of George III, holiday snaps and Greek myths are all about to become suddenly important to you… could you possibly be suffering from a Curse?

Curses is a new version–3 format story file which can be played, hopefully, on any Infocom interpreter capable of running general version 3 games. (Most games were version 3: but be warned that some interpreters are hacked only to work with one specific game.) The InfoTaskForce interpreter will run it, and since that’s been ported to most machines now this means it should be easy to get going.

Curses is a fully worked-out and tested game which pushes the format to its limits; it is about 115K long, larger than average, and has a comprehensive parser (capable of working out implicit commands, and of asking clarifying questions) with a vocabulary of about 700 words.

The story file contains full instructions and needs no other accompanying material. It is public domain, though I retain the copyright.

Curses was written under an Infocom-format compiler called Inform, details of which are given in a similar announcement on rec.arts.int-fiction. It may be found in the if-archive at ftp.gmd.de: if-archive/infocom/compilers/inform contains all the Inform files, including a copy of Curses See the Index file there. There is also a copy in if-archive/games/infocom. Remember that it must be FTP’d in binary, not ASCII, mode. There are interpreters for Infocom-format adventures in if-archive/infocom/interpreters.

As Nelson has always freely acknowledged, he was influenced by IF languages that had come before, particularly TADS, although the look and feel of Inform would end up quite different from that language. From TADS Nelson took the idea of making his language as open and customizable as possible by putting as much functionality as he could into user-modifiable libraries. Nelson in fact did TADS one better here by writing the nuts and bolts of Inform’s parsing algorithms themselves in the Inform language, thus making it easy to modify or improve the parser as the needs of individual games dictate. It is also possible to drop down to the “bare metal” of Z-Machine assembly language at any point in an Inform program, allowing experts to introduce all sorts of unusual effects and custom behaviors.

Inform’s biggest objective drawback compared to TADS was bound up with the limitations of the Z-Machine architecture itself. Early versions of the language could be compiled only into version 3 story files, and were therefore limited to 128K in size. Inform’s compression techniques were very good - much better than those of Infocom’s in-house tools, in fact - and allowed a surprising amount of game to be implemented in that small space, but the limitation was very real. Newer versions of Inform would quickly appear that compiled to version 5, thus allowing 256K of story, and within a couple of years the community would define and retro-fit into its interpreters two new standard Z-Machine versions for very large games: the seldom used version 7 (384K maximum) and the much more common version 8 (512K maximum). While some have tested the limits of even version 8, doing so takes a truly epic work.

Inform has been criticized for its syntax, which is somewhat eccentric and can seem a bit fiddly to the new user. Those who are experienced in C or C-like languages are often a bit put off by Inform’s determination to blaze its own syntactical trail, especially compared to TADS’ more traditional structure. Still, the language becomes quite readable once one has spent sufficient familiarizing oneself with it. An excerpt from the Inform version of Cloak of Darkness follows:

Object  foyer "Foyer of the Opera House"

with  description

"You are standing in a spacious hall, splendidly decorated

in red and gold, with glittering chandeliers overhead.

The entrance from the street is to the north, and there

are doorways south and west.",

s_to  bar,

w_to  cloakroom,

n_to

"You've only just arrived, and besides, the weather outside

seems to be getting worse.",

has   light;

Object  cloakroom "Cloakroom"

with  description

"The walls of this small room were clearly once lined with

hooks, though now only one remains. The exit is a door to

the east.",

e_to  foyer,

has   light;

Object  hook "small brass hook" cloakroom

with  name 'small' 'brass' 'hook' 'peg',

description [;

print "It's just a small brass hook, ";

if (self == parent(cloak)) "with a cloak hanging on it.";

"screwed to the wall.";

],

has   scenery supporter;

Object  bar "Foyer bar"

with  description

"The bar, much rougher than you'd have guessed after the

Opulence of the foyer to the north, is completely empty.

There seems to be some sort of message scrawled in the

sawdust on the floor.",

n_to  foyer,

before [;

Go:

if (self hasnt light && noun ~= n_obj) {

message.number = message.number + 2;

"Blundering around in the dark isn't a good idea!";

}

default:

if (self hasnt light) {

message.number = message.number + 1;

"In the dark? You could easily disturb something!";

}

],

has   ~light;

Curses and Inform caused a veritable sensation among the group of Infocom nostalgics, AGT refugees, and curious hackers that had recently begun to congregate on two Usenet newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction (focusing on technical issues and the authoring of IF), and rec.games.int-fiction (focusing on the playing, reviewing, and swapping of hints on the games themselves). The reasons for their fascination are not hard to discover. Curses is a sprawling, complicated epic that is as good, in both its technical and its literary qualities, as the best of Infocom, yet that manifests a style all its own through its quiet, good-natured humor; its distinctly English sensibility; and its unabashed intellectualism. Curses carries a distinct Infocom influence, yet in this commentator’s opinion there is just as much of Topologika to be found in its depths. And there was something else: not only was Curses a fantastically involving adventure game, and Inform a very interesting tool even in this first version, but both were absolutely free at a time when the only things close to them in quality - the Adventions games and TADS - were available only for a fee.

Curses is unabashedly a text adventure, as opposed to interactive literature. It comes down squarely on the crossword side of the equation, being filled with knotty puzzles. Careful mapping, note-taking, and planning are required to succeed, as is considerable learning by death. Most of its puzzles are tough but fair, but some cross that line in ways that Nelson himself would repudiate a few years later in his classic essay “The Craft of Adventure.” Curses was a traditionalist work even at the time of its release, and is definitely not what most literary critics are looking for in IF today, but that does nothing to diminish its artistry in its chosen form. Reviewer Nick Patavalis returned to Curses in 2000, and offered this perspective:

Curses is a classic, and it must be treated as such. Nelson has studied the great Interactive Fiction tradition from as far back as Advent and collected the elements that define the medium. He then blended and used them in a skillful way to create a masterpiece. Curses is not experimental. Curses is conclusional. It does not try to explore the vague borders of the medium; it stays well behind the trenches, ploughs the rich soil and collects the harvest that feeds the experimentalists’ armies. Experimentation without games like Curses is sterile. If works like Shrapnel and So Far expand Interactive Fiction (and they do), then games like Curses prove it.

In the best tradition of Adventure and the original mainframe Zork, Nelson continued to improve both Curses and the language it was written in following their release. Curses was not pronounced completely finished until 1995, by which time it had grown to more than twice size of the game that Nelson announced in 1993. Nelson learned a lesson from his predecessors in choosing to keep the source of Curses to himself and thus remaining the game’s sole father. Most modern IF authors have followed his lead in this. Inform’s source, on the other hand, was made available, and its evolution was even more spectacular: by 1995, it was already in its fifth major revision. Several significant Inform games had by then already arrived from authors other than Nelson, including Brendon Wyber’s horror classic Theatre and Gareth Rees’ compelling collegiate mystery Christminster. Another half-dozen games would appear that fall with the First Annual IF Competition, a pivotal community event to be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.

Inform by 1995 had already surpassed TADS to become the most popular IF development language. This was not due to any great technical edge it held over its counterpart, for both languages are similar enough in their capabilities that choosing between them is more down to personal preference than any objective arbiters of quality. Inform had the great advantage, however, of being free at a time when TADS still cost $40.00 to register. This would soon change. In 1996, Mike Roberts followed a trend that had been building in the community since the release of Inform and Curses, officially making TADS free for the taking. The damage, if one chooses to think of it in those terms, had, however, been done. TADS never caught up with Inform’s popularity, although it remains today widely used and well-entrenched in its position as the number two language - in popularity, not quality - for serious IF development. In addition to Inform’s gaining an early edge due to its being free, the fact that its games ran on Infocom’s venerable Z-Machine was likely enough to cause many to choose it, both then and now. Nostalgia is, after all, a powerful force.

Thanks to Roberts, Nelson, and countless others, all of the building blocks of a new IF community were in place by 1995. In that year, the Internet exploded in popularity among the general public, bringing to the party thousands of newcomers and giving this nascent community the critical mass it would need to sustain itself and grow. Freed of commercial considerations and expectations of what the genre is “supposed” to be, it would soon take IF in surprising new experimental and literary directions, all while also creating plenty of old-school text adventures just for the fun of it. We will look at a decade’s evolution of this uniquely intelligent and vibrant community in the next chapter.

Works for Further Investigation

Games:

Christminster. 1995. Gareth Rees.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/minster.z5.

CosmoServe: An Adventure for the BBS-Enslaved. 1991, 1997. Judith Pintar.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/agt/cosmos97.zip.

Curses. 1993, 1995. Graham Nelson.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/curses.z5.

The Horror of Rylvania. 1994. David Leary; Adventions.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/adventions/adventions.zip.

Klaustrophobia. 1993. Carol Hovick.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/klaus.zip.

Sanity Clause. 1992. Mike McCauley.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/agt/clause.zip.

Shades of Grey. 1992, 1997. Judith Pintar and six others.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/agt/soggy97.zip.

Theatre. 1994. Brendon Wyber.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/theatre.z5.

Unnkulia Zero: The Search for Amanda. 1993. David Leary; Adventions.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/adventions/adventions.zip.

Unnkulia One-Half: The Salesman Triumphant. 1993. David Leary; Adventions.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/adventions/adventions.zip.

Unnkulian Underworld: The Unknown Unventure. 1992. David Leary; Adventions.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/adventions/adventions.zip.

Unkullian Unventure 2: The Secret of Acme. 1992. David Baggett; Adventions.

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/adventions/adventions.zip.

Other Works:

Cree, Graeme. CosmoServe review. SPAG #5, April 1995.

http://sparkynet.com/spag/c.html#cosmo.

Firth, Roger. “Cloak of Darkness.”

http://www.firthworks.com/roger/cloak/index.html.

Forman, C.E. “A Conversation with CosmoServe’s Judith Pintar.” XYZZY News #11.

http://www.xyzzynews.com/xyzzy.11d.html.

Forman, C.E. Shades of Grey review. SPAG #8, February 1996.

http://sparkynet.com/spag/s.html#shades.

Frey, Franco. “The Illustrator.” Crash, March 1985.

http://www.crashonline.org.uk/14/illust.htm.

Granade, Stephen. “David Malmberg Interview.” The Brass Lantern.

http://brasslantern.org/community/interviews/malmberg.html.

Green, Thomas. “Thrills from The Quill.” Your Spectrum, July 1984.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~jg27paw4/yr05/yr05_58.htm.

Guy, Neil K. “A Brief History of Amateur IF.”

http://www.teladesign.com/tads/authoring/articles/if-history.html.

Kopteltsev, Valentine. The Horror of Rylvania review. SPAG #30, September 2002.

http://sparkynet.com/spag/h.html#rylvania.

Mullin, Eileen. “Interview: Graham Nelson.” XYZZY News #1.

http://www.xyzzynews.com/xyzzy.1c.html.

Nelson, Graham. “Announcement: Curses Announcing Curses, A New Infocom-Format Game.” Post to Usenet group rec.games.int-fiction, May 9, 1993.

Nelson, Graham. “The Craft of Adventure (2[nd] ed.).”

http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/info/Craft.Of.Adventure.txt.

Nelson, Graham. The Inform Designer’s Manual. 4[th] ed. The Interactive Fiction Libray: St. Charles, Illinois. 2001.

Available online at http://ifarchive.flavorplex.com/if-archive/infocom/compilers/inform6/manuals/designers_manual_4.pdf.

Patavalis, Nick. Review of Curses. SPAG #22, September 2000.

http://sparkynet.com/spag/c.html#curses.

Price, Richard. “Fantastic Landscapes.” Sinclair User, April 1985.

http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/037/advent.htm.

Thornton, Adam. Once and Future review. SPAG #16, November 1998.

http://sparkynet.com/spag/o.html#once.

Yeandle, Graeme. “History of The Quill and PAW.”

http://www.yeandle.plus.com/advent/.

Chapter 9: The Evolution of a Community

The perspective of today’s active community of IF authors and interactors is that interactive fiction didn’t really get going until after the commercial era. Stephen Granade’s timeline of interactive fiction’s history, for instance, in an odd reversal of Aarseth’s idea of interactive fiction, places about two-thirds of its events after 1991.

– Nick Monfort, Twisty Little Passages (2003)

Chronicling the last decade of IF’s development presents a unique problem for an historical narrative such as this one. Most of the big events that have been our focus until now - company foundings and closings, sales successes and failures, etc. - no longer occur. Instead, we have a loosely organized group of individuals who share tools, techniques, and games among themselves. A handful have been pillars of the community since the beginning; while others come, go, and sometimes unexpectedly return. Change occurs, but at a slower pace. Yet if the events of the modern IF era are not so dramatically compelling as those of the halcyon days of the eighties, the actual work has suffered not a bit. On the contrary, in fact, IF has grown in directions Infocom and its contemporaries never anticipated. Ten years ago, the goal was to create games equal in quality to the Infocom classics; today, Infocom’s work is routinely equaled and not infrequently surpassed. Much of the IF groundbreaking that has occurred in recent years is likely because of, rather than in spite of, modern IF’s non-commercial status. Freed of commercial considerations, authors are now free to wildly experiment with the form, with the awareness that failure will cost them only time, and, indeed, that an interesting failure will garner respect and discussion to itself and may pave the way for future successes.

Before launching into a critical analysis of the some of the modern community’s important work, it seems prudent to look at the origins and current status of the institutions around which it is built. I will also offer practical advice to my reader on how to avail oneself of these resources and, should one have sufficient interest to do so, become an active participant in the community. The community’s institutions reflect the time of their founding, and in some cases may seem a trifle archaic to the contemporary surfer. What they lack in high-tech flash, though, they make up for in stolid reliability. I will also devote space to the current IF systems’ multimedia capabilities, and to several attempts to return IF to the commercial marketplace.

The Newsgroups

Usenet is one of the oldest components of the Internet, predating the World Wide Web by a decade. It is organized as a hierarchy of groups devoted to the discussion of many topics, ranging from literature to technical matters to sports. There is no central server that houses Usenet, it rather being an affiliation of nodes that together pass messages among themselves. Accessing Usenet has traditionally required an appropriate user id, but most groups are totally un-moderated and open to anyone with general Usenet access. The ids and the access necessary to use them were generally available from universities, government entities, and the occasional high-technology business in the era before the World Wide Web, but home accounts were somewhat expensive and therefore rather rare. When the invention of the World Wide Web led to the home Internet explosion in 1993 through 1995, most service providers began offering Usenet access along with email and the World Wide Web to their customers, and this tradition has for the most part continued to the present day. Usenet probably peaked in usage somewhere around this time, and my subjective impression is that it has shrunk considerably since then. Many Internet users are not even aware of its existence today, yet it continues to soldier on as one of the few areas of the Internet that still holds true to the non-commercial ideals behind the Internet’s founding. Today, Usenet remains home to a diverse band of techies, old-timers, and hardcore Internet users. Two of its discussion groups, rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction, are also ground central for news and discussion within the IF community.

The group rec.arts.int-fiction was founded by Adam Engst, a student at Cornell University, in 1987, with the intention of discussing the then-hot topic of hypertext fiction created with products such as Apple’s recently released Hypercard. Usenet being the un-moderated environment that it is, though, many took the new group’s definition of IF to match Infocom’s rather than Apple’s, and began initiating discussions of text adventures. Engst:

I fought the battles to keep the newsgroup talking about writing for some time, but at the time, there simply weren’t enough people to back me up and slowly I lost interest in posting the same rebukes over and over again as new users appeared and wanted to know how to do X in Zork. I imagine this corresponded with the time that I become more busy with school and work and whatnot. In fact, given when I started the newsgroup and when I graduated, it probably didn’t have very long discussing what I wanted discussed. And people were always more into the game aspects of things.

Thus rec.arts.int-fiction became a central gathering point for text adventure aficionados despite its founder’s best “serious” intentions.

By 1992, the decision had been made to form a second newsgroup, rec.games.int-fiction, in order to separate the discussion of playing games from writing them. This separation still holds today, as rec.arts.int-fiction focuses on coding questions and discussions of theoretical or technical interest to IF authors; while rec.games.int-fiction focuses on providing hints and game reviews to the community, as well a sort of community bulletin board for new game and contest announcements and the like.

There has been occasional discussion about moving IF discussion to some sort of more modern forum, but it has never gotten very far. While Usenet can be somewhat more daunting for the newbie to access than a simple web-based forum, its advantages are still considerable. Perhaps first among them is its decentralized nature, which leaves the community dependent on no single server for its communication. Google now provides an easy web-based interface to Usenet at http://groups.google.com for those who do not wish to configure their mail programs or download specialized newsreaders, and also maintains an archive of posts, thus providing the community with an ongoing history of its events and discussions that has certainly been invaluable for this author’s project as well as many others. Usenet’s un-moderated nature, on the other hand, can occasionally leave a bad taste. Both IF groups have their share of “trolls” who seemingly post just to stir up controversy, and flame wars, while not exactly common, are not unheard of either. Still, both groups are on the whole uniquely intelligent and civilized by Usenet standards, with a generally decent signal to noise ratio. On balance, the groups serve their purpose well, and things are unlikely to change.

The IF MUD

While Usenet provides a forum for fairly formal discussion, the IF community also has a relaxed place to “hang out” and engage in real-time discussion of IF and many other topics as well: the IF MUD. A conventional MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) is a form of multi-player role-playing game that dates back to the early eighties. Users assume roles in the MUD’s virtual world, which is described to them through a textual interface that is superficially similar to IF. The goals of the two forms are very different, however. While IF focuses on providing a satisfying single-player narrative experience, MUDs revolve around social interaction, and, in most cases, the gaining of wealth and experience through the slaying of monsters and possibly even other player characters. They are in fact the direct ancestors of today’s hugely popular massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as Everquest.

The IF MUD, however, is not a traditional MUD. Game-like elements are non-existent. The environment rather serves as a social space for swapping hints, discussing works in progress, and of course just chatting about general topics with no bearing on IF. The IF MUD’s founder, Liza Daly, describes some of the thoughts that went into its 1997 creation, and its evolution since:

The MUD has definitely exceeded my expectations. I had sensed the potential for a community after lurking on r.*.i-f [the Usenet groups rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction. Ed.] for years. I also wondered what kind of people were so fond of a technology that’s essentially been obsolete since the late 1980’s.

So I created the MUD after a few attempts to get people on IRC. I expected an initial strong turn-out that would eventually decay as the novelty wore off. To some extent, the novelty of the MUD environment did wear off – in the first few months, people built extensive landscapes, and many features were added to the MUD code to increase its usefulness as a programming environment. These days, few new areas or complex new objects are created.

What people didn’t tire of was each other. There are over 180 accounts on the system – I’d estimate that anywhere from 30–50 of those people log on regularly. The dialogue is international and therefore non-stop: there’s a day shift and a night shift and lots of little shifts in-between. More new people are added every week. There’s a web page of photos for those curious to breach the fourth wall. There’s a culture and an etiquette. There is no good documentation (Granade, “MUD”).

The IF MUD contains a variety of rooms in which to gather, such as the Coder’s Tavern; the Adventurer’s Lounge; and the Auditorium, where the XYZZY Awards, the community’s equivalent of the Oscars, are presented in a ceremony each year. As noted above, inhabitants who are so inclined can modify the MUD environment itself. They can, for instance, build homes for their avatars. One can even play various IF games through the MUD just by speaking with the friendly robot Floyd. Virtually no role-playing takes place on the MUD, however. Its inhabitants more often than not go by their given names, and are content to simply be themselves in a friendly environment.

While by no means all, or even the majority of, the community participates, the IF MUD provides a wonderful way for members who are so inclined to bond and get to know one another. It is also a valuable networking resource for those in search of beta-testers, hands-on technical help, or co-authors. Information on accessing the MUD can be found at http://ifmud.port4000.com:4001.

The IF Archive

As IF made the transition from a commercial form to one driven by hobbyists, a need was seen for a central file repository, or central IF library of sorts, to house their work. Volker Blasius, an employee of the German National Research Center for Information Technology (abbreviated to GMD based on its German form), stepped in to fill this gap in November of 1992. Blasius:

Very soon I noticed that many good things were available on the Net but they were almost hopelessly distributed all over the world. I didn’t like Unix very much at the time, so I thought I might get better acquainted with it if I had a reason for really using it. I thought building an archive with IF stuff might be such a reason. I asked our ftp administrator whether I could have some disk space and a directory of my own on the ftp server, and I asked Dave Baggett (whom I knew from playing the Unnkulian Unventures and a few discussions about them) for his opinion. He thought that a central interactive fiction archive would be a great idea and offered his help. We copied the files we had to GMD’s ftp server (ftp.gmd.de) and announced the archive in November 1992, inviting everyone to upload whatever they would like to see there (Mullin, “Blasius”).

Other volunteers soon stepped in to ease the load on GMD’s server, establishing a network of mirror sites.

The Archive suffered its only real crisis to date in 2001, when Basius, after almost a decade of sterling service as its maintainer, included the following message with his regular list of recent updates to the Archive:

[T]his is probably my last post with this subject line. GMD is no more. The German federal government sold GMD to the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (FhG). The former GMD will be split up into separate FhG institutes; the central IT department that hosted the archive will probably disappear.

As usual, though, the community came through with a solution quickly enough. The Archive’s central server was moved to the more straightforward address of http://ifarchive.org, and business continued as usual under new maintainers David Kinder and Stephen Granade. Virtually every IF game, development platform, or article that legally can be has been uploaded to the Archive at this point, and the collection continually expands as new authors, programmers, and transcribers upload their work.

While the IF Archive is invaluable to the community, its sheer comprehensiveness can be daunting, and its no-frills all-text appearance and somewhat arcane organization do not encourage browsing by newbies. To ease this situation, Carl Muckenhoupt created a front-end site for the Archive, known as Baf’s Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive (http://www.wurb.com/if), in 1995. The Guide provides an easy way to search the games contained therein by title, subject matter, author, or other criteria, and includes capsule reviews of many as well.

IF Journals and Reviews

Any literary community needs to have forums for serious discussion and review of the work of its members of a more lasting, considered nature than exchanges on newsgroups. Reviews are particularly important to modern IF authors. Since the vast majority seek no financial reward for their work, feedback, and the accompanying knowledge that others are playing and thinking about the work they create, is precious. It is literally the only reward they will receive, and constructive criticism offers the only hope they have of improving their craft. To their credit, members of the community realized this quite early in its lifetime, and put appropriate organs of communication and criticism in place.

The first of these was the e-zine SPAG, which was at first an abbreviation for Society for the Preservation of Adventure Games, and later changed - when the conclusion was reached that adventure games were no longer particularly endangered - to Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games. Founded by one of the pillars of the early modern IF community, G. Kevin Wilson, in 1994, its format has remained basically the same ever since. Space is given to an editorial by the current editor, news of goings-on in the community, and occasional letters to the editor, feature articles, and interviews, but the magazine’s primary focus is on providing reviews, solicited from the community at large, of IF works. In addition to publishing reviews of contemporary games, SPAG has diligently mined the past, establishing a substantial archive of reviews of not only the works of the modern community but also those of Infocom and its competitors from the commercial era. The quality of the average SPAG review is surprisingly good, and the magazine has contributed immensely to the establishment of a real critical dialogue about IF. A new issue of SPAG currently appears each quarter. Each is “published” by being sent directly to the email accounts of all subscribers, as well as being made available on SPAG’s web site (http://www.sparkynet.com/spag), where an archive of all back issues can also be found, along with a comprehensive index of all reviews that the magazine has published over its now considerable lifetime. SPAG has gone through several editors since Wilson’s tenure, but is still going strong as of this writing.

Eileen Mullin founded XYZZY News, another online IF journal, in early 1995. (XYZZY is a famous “secret word” that is needed to solve a puzzle in the original Adventure. It has since become something of an IF in-joke. Many games, for instance, offer an amusing response when it is entered.) While Mullin did publish reviews, her magazine had a somewhat wider focus than SPAG, with a greater percentage of its space devoted to theoretical articles, articles of historical interest, and interviews with significant IF figures past and present. After twenty excellent issues, Mullin decided to stop publishing XYZZY as a regular magazine in 2001 due to other commitments. She has maintained its website (http://www.xyzzynews.com), though, which contains a complete archive of the magazine’s back issues and is occasionally updated with news and notes Mullin finds to be of interest. Mullin also continues to administrate her most lasting contribution of all to the IF community, the annual XYZZY Awards, held early each year for games released during the previous year. Voting for the XYZZYs take places in two stages. In the first round, the community is invited to write in their choices for nominees in each of the categories. In the second round, the community chooses the winners from the top five vote-getters in each category. The categories themselves consist of: Best Game, Best Writing, Best Story, Best Setting, Best Puzzles, Best Non-Player Characters, Best Individual Puzzle, Best Individual Non-Player Character, Best Individual Player Character, and Best Use of Medium.

Mark Musante founded his IF Review site in 2001 with the intention of providing long, serious reviews of works of IF that were deserving of same but were not entered into any of the community’s competitions, and so perhaps did not receive the coverage they deserved. Musante actually offers to pay his reviewers $20.00 for each quality article they submit to him. His site does not publish new reviews on any particular schedule, and covers only the barest fraction of games that see release, but when new reviews do appear on his site they are unfailingly thoughtful and detailed.

A relative newcomer to the IF review game is the Interactive Fiction Ratings Site (http://www.carouselchain.com/if), opened in 2003 by Chrysoula Tzavelas. While the other resources so far discussed concentrate on longer, in-depth reviews and articles, IF Ratings is an interactive website where users can quickly rate games on a scale of one to ten, and (if they choose) leave a brief comment. Players can also input the amount of time the game took to play, and the genre or genres within which it best fits. All of this compiled information can then be utilized by others. Statistics are also available showing the best ten and the worst ten games available on the Archive, according to the site’s users anyway. Such information is interesting, but should obviously be taken with a grain of salt, and not used as some final arbiter of quality. Still, the IF Ratings site serves a valuable function as a place for throwing out some quick thoughts on a piece of recently played IF, as well as a quick way to just find something interesting to play. It has proven to be quite a popular addition to the community’s resources.

The websites and journals described above are only the beginning of a veritable mountain of history, theory, and reviews that the community has generated over the past decade or so. Many prominent authors and reviewers maintain personal websites devoted to their hobby, and there are many other worthwhile shared resources as well.

The Competitions

After founding SPAG, G. Kevin “Whizzard” Wilson made his second lasting contribution to the IF community. Perhaps inspired by David Malmberg’s AGT Competitions, he decided in 1995 to organize a competition for new short works of IF, preferably playable in two hours or less. The concept was as simple as it was idealistic:

This competition is to inspire IF authors to write something, however small, and make it available for people to play. IF as a hobby cannot survive unless there are people out there writing and playing it. Hopefully, some of the people who enter the competition will enjoy it, and decide to write more on their own.

That first year the Competition was divided into two divisions, one for games written in Inform and one for games written in TADS. Anyone who chose to could participate in the judging process by playing all games in one or both divisions, and voting for their three favorites. After a one-month judging period, the game with the highest average ranking in each division would be declared the winner.

That first Competition, which concluded on October 1, 1995, was a rousing success. At least half of the authors who entered went on to do more important and interesting work in IF, including the winners of both the Inform and TADS divisions, Andrew Plotkin and Magnus Olsson respectively, who are today among the most respected of IF authors and elder statesman of sorts within the community. Perhaps feeling freed by having been given permission to not produce an epic, many Competition entrants submitted games that were frankly experimental, some of them trying things that had never before been seen in IF. As usual with such things, not all of the experiments worked, but the sense of freedom and artistic rebirth engendered by the Competition was palpable. Naturally, it was quickly decided to make the Competition an annual event.

The following year considerable changes were made to the Competition, as it adopted the format in which it still exists today. The divisions were eliminated. Any work of IF, written in any language, was now eligible, and would be judged and ranked alongside its peers regardless of origin. Judges were no longer required to play every single game, but were simply asked to play as many as possible, and to score each they were able to get to on a scale of one to ten. The entrants would then be ranked on the basis of their average score.

Twenty-six games were entered that year, followed by thirty-four the next. The Competition would eventually exceed fifty entrants in 2000 and 2001, before settling down to the thirty-five or so that usually enter today. (Most members of the community are not terribly concerned by this slippage. The general consensus is that fewer frivolous, half-implemented games are being entered today.) By this time, the Competition had become the central event in the community’s year. Wilson eventually stepped down as Competition organizer, passing the reins briefly to David Dyte, who in turn passed them to Stephen Granade, in whose able hands the Competition has rested for a goodly number of years now. In addition to providing a pivotal, exciting event for the community each fall, the Competition serves a number of other valuable purposes. It has introduced a very considerable number of new authors to the community, and provided a venue for many authors to release frankly experimental works with the assurance of getting solid feedback about what did and did not work, as many community members do not just score the Competition games, but also take the time to write up at least a brief review of each and every one they play. And by providing the lure of competition and a hard and fast submission deadline, the Competition has probably caused many works to be finished that would otherwise have languished away under their authors’ procrastination.

With the Competition being such a success, others naturally tried to duplicate its formula. For a time, the community was inundated with one-time “mini-competitions” that generally came with many different judging systems and often fairly esoteric entry requirements. For instance, there was the SmoochieComp, for games focusing on love and romance; the ArcadeComp, for games based on classic coin-op arcade games; and the C32Comp, for games that would be capable of running on an (imaginary) Commodore 32 computer with just 32K of memory. As the number of competitions increased, though, the number of entrants to each tended to decrease. Several competitions were started with the highest of hopes only to receive just one or two entrants, or none at all. Due to this, the community’s mania for competitions for the sake of competitions has to some extent abated. A few have survived the shakeout, however, and have become important annual events in themselves.

Perhaps the most significant of these is Marnie Parker’s annual IF Art Show, a competition for brief “games” that are not only puzzleless but also essentially plotless. The attention of the player is thus drawn completely to the environment and objects being simulated. Judges of the Art Show are a hand-picked panel of community veterans, and entrants are divided into four categories: Still Life, focusing on a single object; Landscape, focusing on the work’s environment as a whole; Portrait, focusing on a single non-player character; and Event, focusing on some sort of activity. The Art Show has generated a fair amount of interest each year it has been held, and has produced some fascinating, boundary-stretching works that leave traditional text adventures far behind. It was held regularly from 1999 to 2004, but never arrived in 2005. If it passes away into history, as it appears it may, the community will be worse off for its loss.

For all of their popularity, the IF Competition and its smaller siblings are not regarded as universally positive by the community as a whole. Fans of large, traditional epics have been particularly vocal in bemoaning the shift away from such works to smaller, “snack-sized” pieces. While there are doubtless other factors at work as well, it is hard to deny that the Competition’s emphasis on games completeable in two hours or less has been a major impetus behind the last decade’s shift from novel-length works to short stories. When long works are created, the rules of most of the competitions preclude their entry; and games released outside of competitions often fail to garner the attention and feedback they deserve. This probably tends to convince many authors who might be inclined to write IF novels to scale down their plans. The situation has become so disturbing, even among those who are generally fans of the Competition, that some have made efforts to counteract the trend. They have done so, naturally enough, by starting more competitions.

Authoring a large game requires a great deal of courage and self-confidence. One must spend months working in a vacuum, never sure if what is being created is worth the time and effort being poured into it. If one devotes a month to a small work that fails, that is one thing; to devote a year or more of one’s life to the IF equivalent of the great American novel, only to find that one’s game is trash, is quite another. Neil de Mause created the IntroComp in 2002 to address some of these anxieties. Authors are encouraged to submit the early portions of a larger game for judgment and review by the community as a whole, to get some valuable feedback on whether finishing the game is worthwhile. To further encourage authors who submit introductions with potential to finish what they have started, the first place finisher is awarded $100.00; the second $60.00; the third $40.00; and the fourth $20.00, subject to one very important stipulation. To claim the prize, each author must finish her game within one year of the end of the competition. Jacqueline Lott took over the administration of the IntroComp from de Mause in 2003, and it has been held every year since, with rather mixed results. The competition generally receives a fair number of entries, among which are always to be found some works of real promise, but none of its winners have ever been completed. The IntroComp is a brilliant idea, but has not really succeeded in producing more works of longer length. Lott continues to try, however. She will be running another iteration of the competition this summer. Perhaps the flood gates will eventually open.

Another recent competition with some similar goals to the IntroComp, albeit a very different approach, is the Spring Thing, founded by Adam Cadre in 2002. He designed the Spring Thing explicitly to address many of the complaints community members had voiced about the main IF Competition and the effect it had had on the community in proceeding years. Cadre:

The 2001 comp featured 52 games, many of them half-baked at best; discussion was limited, with a brief flurry of reviews and then not much conversation about the games, possibly because most judges only had time to play a small fraction of them. Furthermore, relatively few IF works of substance were released at other times of the year, which was not an aberration but a trend dating almost to the beginning of the comp. What to do? I figured the Spring Thing might help some.

The Spring Thing was thus designed to provide some balance to the IF calendar year, by setting up a second major general interest competition in opposition to the existing fall Competition. It was also designed to address a concern which had been increasingly raised about the main Competition, namely that one-third or more of the entrants were half-baked, half-finished works that served to do little more than waste time that the judges could otherwise devote to more serious works. To encourage only those with serious intentions to participate, entering the Spring Thing would require an entry fee – albeit a modest one of just $5.00 – from each entrant, all of which would be given back to the winner as prize money. Cadre also stipulated that each entry must be previewed by him first to assure that it was basically complete and playable before it was released to the community as a whole to judge. And finally, in an effort to promote longer works of IF, the two-hour time limit of the main Competition would be removed entirely, and entrants encouraged to submit games of any length they chose.

Cadre administrated his Spring Thing in 2002 and 2003, but then ceased due to lack of time. After a year’s hiatus, the banner was taken up by Greg Boettcher in 2005, and the competition has now seeped into the community’s consciousness as one of its regular annual events. Despite this, response has never been overwhelming, and certainly nothing to compare with the fall Competition. This year’s event, for instance, has just begun as of this writing, and its field consists of just four entrants. Still, several excellent games have resulted from past events, and the Spring Thing is generally regarded as an endeavor well worth continuing.

The Return of Multimedia IF

As discussed in earlier chapters, a large percentage of the IF produced during the commercial era used multimedia of some sort to enhance the text, a trend that climaxed with the late creations of Magnetic Scrolls and Legend. This was not true of early hobbyist IF, whether we speak of the early days of our modern community or the AGT era that proceeded it. The reasons for this are not hard to discover. While some people were (and still are) opposed to any sort of enhancements beyond straight text as a sort of corruption of the form, for most it was simply a matter of practicality. A work of hobbyist IF work was generally produced by one person who must already combine the talents of writer and programmer. Adding artist into that mix seems to raise the bar high indeed. Also, none of the early programming languages offered any support for graphics or sound. The community in those days was working simply to keep IF alive in some form, preferably with a general quality level that would not compare too unfavorably to Infocom’s. Since that company, their model, had not used multimedia in its most significant work, it seemed a distant concern to most in the community.

Once the modern community was established and IF no longer seemed in immediate danger of extinction, however, some began looking into multimedia again. The first language to offer support for graphics was not one of the big two, but rather a well-respected but less commonly used entry known as Hugo. Hugo had been developed by Kent Tessman and released in 1995. Much of its syntax was based on that of Inform, but the language did not target the Z-Machine, and corrected many of the flaws and shortcomings Tessman thought to be present in Nelson’s work. Whatever its merits (and they were considerable), Hugo remained an obscurity next to Inform and TADS until 1997, when version 2.4 arrived with graphics support added to the language. Soon afterward, Tessman released a very impressive murder mystery game entitled Guilty Bastards which demonstrated many of Hugo’s new multimedia capabilities, including not only graphics but music and interface features such as a clickable compass rose for navigation that had not been seen since the commercial era.

Guilty Bastards (1998)

Perhaps inspired by Hugo’s advances, efforts were soon made to add multimedia capabilities to both TADS and Inform. First to arrive was HTML TADS, developed, like virtually everything TADS-related, by Mike Roberts and released in 1998. As its name implies, HTML TADS offers a unique approach to multimedia IF in allowing its author to essentially format her games as she would web pages, using the standard HTML tags to control the page layout, colors, and fonts, and of course to imbed graphics. Mouse support is also included. Authors can include buttons in separate frames, and can even add clickable hot-links within the main text to ease the strain of typing.

The situation with Inform was somewhat more complicated, for here Graham Nelson’s decision to target Infocom’s aged (albeit robust) Z-Machine was problematic. The only Z-Machine version to support graphics is version 6, introduced during Infocom’s twilight. While acceptable enough in its time, version 6 left much to be desired a decade later, supporting as it did only low-resolution pictures with very limited color palettes, and having an extremely unintuitive method of formatting its screens. The sound situation was even worse. While limited support was available, only very low fidelity samples saved in a non-standard format could be used. Deciding that the venerable Z-Machine had finally reached its practical limits, Andrew Plotkin stepped in to design a new virtual machine, which he called Glulx, to offer proper, modern graphics and sound to Inform programmers who wished them, and also to erase the Z-Machine’s restrictions on maximum story file size which a very few epics had recently butted up against. The Inform compiler itself was patched to allow it to target either the traditional Z-Machine or Glulx at the programmer’s discretion. Glulx and the patched compiler were released in 1999, and suddenly programmers using any of the major development systems had the option of adding multimedia elements to their works.

This is not to imply, however, that most exercise that option. Although the technology to do multimedia is now readily available, the artistic talent necessary cannot be manufactured so easily. Producing a work of quality IF is difficult enough for a single person without also adding the complications of designing graphics, sound, and/or music. Thus the vast majority of IF released today continues to be in the traditional text-only format, and many of the multimedia games that do appear are the work of small teams rather than individuals. The Z-Machine in fact remains much more widely used by Inform authors than Glulx. It requires far fewer resources than its younger sibling, and for this reason can be emulated on a much greater range of computing devices. For the benefit of those who prefer to play IF on their PDAs or on older, more obscure desktop systems, Inform programmers are encouraged to continue to target the Z-Machine by default, making use of Glulx only if they have need of its capabilities.

Modern Commercial Efforts

For all of the freeing artistic effects that have come from IF’s non-commercial status in recent years, there are drawbacks to be considered as well. The fact that IF is now created as a hobby rather than a full-time vocation brings with it its own set of limitations. The size and scope of most works are necessarily limited; graphical and sound enhancements are out of the question for many; and literally years elapse between games from even many well-known authors, due to sheer lack of time to devote to the work. Many have fondly imagined just what a company of the size and talent of Infocom might be able to accomplish today with modern hardware and our modern suite of development tools. For many, also, just the idea of bringing home a shiny, shrink-wrapped box containing not only a game disc but handsomely packaged background information and feelies holds an intrinsic, if perhaps slightly irrational, appeal. For all of these reasons, the dream of a commercial comeback for IF has never died. Discussions periodically flare up on the newsgroups about how this might be accomplished. While few see IF ever making inroads into the conventional computer game marketplace again, some see potential in selling IF at inexpensive price points in book shops, marketed as interactive stories rather than computer games; some feel such schemes are nice fodder for dreams but utterly unrealistic; and some claim that the benefits of IF’s freeware status outweigh the drawbacks, and that everyone should stop pining for the past. Amidst all this discussion, some have actually made attempts to realize some of the community’s collective dreams, at least on a modest scale. Results have been somewhat mixed.

The earliest serious attempt at a commercial revival, and ultimately the most heartbreaking, was that of Mike Berlyn and Cascade Mountain Publishing. Readers may recall Berlyn’s name from much earlier in this essay, for he spent considerable time as an implementer for Infocom, where he authored Suspended, Infidel, and Cutthroats, before going on to create Tass Times in Tonetown with Interplay Productions. Berlyn dropped back into the IF community in the spring of 1998 with grand plans to start a company to sell IF games again. The name would be Cascade Mountain Publishing, and, while it would also offer conventional books and e-books for sale, its “flagship product” would be IF. The community normally tends to be a fairly skeptical lot when it comes to newcomers with bold new plans, but it is also, of course, filled to the gills with worshippers at the altar of Infocom. Berlyn was greeted warmly and enthusiastically as a returning hero, and Cascade quickly became something of a joint community project, with members pitching in to help with its website design and so on. What Berlyn really wanted, though, was new games from the community’s best authors. He scored an early coup on that front when Kevin Wilson signed on to market his epic Avalon through Cascade. Avalon was an absolutely massive game, and had become something of a running joke in the community, having been (in Wilson’s words) just weeks away from release for something like five years now. Wilson simply could not leave well enough alone, and continued to add and add to the game, until many wondered if it would ever see release. Berlyn’s marketing plans, meanwhile, were as ambitious as Wilson’s game:

Our plans for selling IF are briefly outlined for your edification:

1. Work out the kinks in website ordering and the 800 order line. In addition, insure the packages are being built properly and shipped properly.

2. Expand possible customer base by posting the game’s availability outside of raif and rgif.

3. Advertise in major magazines, e.g.: Games and Ultimate PC to start. First ads should appear on-street in December in Games (Feb. issue).

4. List CMP site with major search engines. This would also include PR releases to all major game sites.

5. Get reviews in major publications to heighten awareness of the product’s availability.

6. Product listings with Amazon.com, etc.

7. Find a European partner for European manufacturing and distribution.

8. Distribute into the retail channel by cutting a reasonable deal with a distributor, with primary focus on bookstores.

Avalon, retitled at the last minute Once and Future for legal reasons, duly appeared for ordering on Cascade’s website in late 1998 amidst great excitement. An entire issue of SPAG was devoted to reviews of just this game, something that has never been done before or since. Yet, while Once and Future was undoubtedly huge and undoubtedly ambitious, it was not quite the marvel everyone wanted to find. It quite simply reads and plays like exactly what it is, a game put together in patchwork fashion over a period of years while its author learned his craft. Parts are quite impressive; others much less so; and all its sprawling bulk, which leaps from the Vietnam War to Arthurian fantasy to a fair number of points in between, does not always hold together cohesively, or even at times coherently. If it had been released for free, everyone would have appreciated it for what it is and enjoyed it; at $29.95 and with the future of commercial IF resting on its shoulders, things were more problematic. Next to Infocom’s work, not to mention the best work of the modern community, much of Once and Future is simply amateurish. There is an odd overtone to that special issue of SPAG, with most of the commentators aware at some level of its flaws and yet, having pinned their hopes to its success, trying their best to overlook or excuse them. Adam Thorton, however, after much prevarication, finally began to tell it like it is:

After all of these games, parts of OaF seem strangely dated. There are puzzles that are simply too much tedious monkey-manipulation: the Crown of Earth and the flaming braziers come to mind. There, thankfully, are no mazes (there is one place that looks like a maze, but isn’t). However, some of the puzzles seem to exist for the sake of having puzzles: fundamentally, the whole underground scene with Snookums exists to get the necklace; now, there’s nothing wrong with that, exactly, but Snookums is a wonderful character, and I wish there had been some way to meet her such that it didn’t feel like she was a tool of the problem-solving process; I think removing the gratuitous plank puzzle would have helped a lot here. Mordred, too, feels less like a character than like an obstacle; a door with a multi-part key, as it were.

In short, OaF suffers from having been conceived at a time when it was assumed that the puzzles were the point of the game.

Cascade followed up Once and Future a few months later with Dr. Dumont’s Wild P.A.R.T.I., a reworking and expansion (with the help of community member Mark Musante) of a game that Berlyn had originally written back in 1988. Plans were announced for a third game, to be entitled Chameleon and written by Berlyn and his wife, but it would never materialize. Cascade did indeed advertise in the publications Berlyn mentions in his action plan above, but the spots were tiny and amateurish. Beyond this, Berlyn’s primary marketing tactic seemed to be to spam random sections of Usenet every few days. Many loyal community members bought copies of both games, but the sales to the wider world that Berlyn had counted on never materialized. He disappeared abruptly in August of 1999, never to be heard from again within the community that had done so much to help him. The Cascade Mountain site, meanwhile, stayed up until of April of 2000, when it also quietly disappeared. It was later discovered that Berlyn was spending a great deal of time in another area of Usenet, one devoted to casino gambling. And so another hero was proven to have feet of clay.

Probably the greatest victim of this whole fiasco was the relentlessly upbeat and likable Kevin Wilson, who saw his five-year masterwork condemned to a sort of Purgatory from which it was not finally freed until April of 2001, when its was uploaded to the Archive as freeware. By that time, Wilson had retired from community participation and IF authorship. It is tempting, but perhaps overdramatic, to speculate that the Cascade Mountain adventure was an impetus behind that decision. Regardless, though, his presence is missed by old-timers to this day, even as his legacy is carried on by the IF Competition and by SPAG.

The most recent attempt at reviving commercial IF has left an equally bad taste in the community’s mouth. In early 2003, Howard Sherman, an occasional IF community participant with two less than well-received Competition entries to his credit, announced that he had formed a company called Malinche Entertainment to market IF commercially. Its first game would be (yet another) Zorkian fantasy adventure entitled Pentari: First Light. Even more so than Cascade Mountain, Sherman based his market upon the Infocom model, in some case lifting whole sentences virtually unchanged from the older company’s marketing materials. Even as some were perhaps wondering where tributes end and plagiarism begins, Sherman started a brouhaha with community member Jessica Knoch over an unflattering review she gave to a demo of Pentari. From here, the bad blood just got worse. Sherman embroiled himself in several protracted flame wars on the newsgroups, and threatened to sue SPAG for libel when he got wind that it intended to publish an unfavorable review of the full version of Pentari. In addition to their irritation with Sherman’s rather abrasive personality and, shall we say, sensitivity to criticism, many community members were angered that Sherman made no mention of the free IF community on his website or in any of his marketing materials, even as he wrote his games in Inform and distributed to his customers a wide variety of community-written Z-Code interpreters to play them with. Things eventually settled into an uneasy standoff, Sherman having declared the community a group of petty souls beneath contempt and taken his leave of them in no uncertain terms, while the community as a whole largely did its level best to ignore Malinche’s existence.

Malinche has continued to soldier on on its own, and as of this writing four games are available from its website (http://www.malinche.net), with two more listed as in production. This represents the most sustained effort at publishing IF commercially since the days of Legend Entertainment, and one wishes one could feel better about the whole enterprise. Unfortunately, it is difficult to do so for reasons beyond Sherman’s rather unlikable persona. Firstly, its games are by most accounts of decidedly substandard quality, hardly ideal standard bearers for modern IF; secondly, Sherman not only fails to credit the people whose tools he takes advantage of, but he often seems to be deliberately trying to hide the free community’s existence, and even denigrates its work as just amateur efforts when innocents on the adventure gaming forums he frequents mention it; and thirdly, there is a distinct whiff of dishonesty about his whole enterprise. Malinche’s home page, for instance, sports a quote from Time magazine, declaring IF “part of the latest craze in home computing.” The quote is accurate. Unfortunately, it is also from 1983, and from an article about Infocom rather than Malinche. As far as Malinche’s sales figures, no one really knows but Sherman.

Commercial IF in the modern era has not, however, been a complete disappointment. Two more modest but focused efforts have actually met with relative success.

In October of 2002, Peter Nepstad began selling his massive HTML TADS game 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery for $19.95. 1893 is an astonishingly detailed reconstruction of the Chicago World’s Fair of that year, described not only through text but through over 500 period photographs, painstakingly located by Nepstad and scanned in one by one. The whole represents an astounding piece of research, and is also almost certainly the largest single IF game ever created. To give the player some sort of direction and motivation to explore this massive environment, Nepstad grafted on a plot involving the theft of some precious jewels. To solve the mystery and locate the jewels, the player must painstakingly explore the Fair. It is hard not to be in awe of the game as a whole. The amount of sheer effort it represents on its lone author’s part is staggering, and its overall look is thoroughly polished and professional. Actually playing this monster is somewhat daunting, however. Its environment is so huge as to be overwhelming, and the mystery plot feels tacked-on and superficial when set against all of this lovingly recreated historical detail. If anyone was still asking whether it was possible to make an IF game too big, 1893 provided the answer. It was received with awe in the community, but very few finished it. 1893 is a must play due to its sheer ambition, but it is perhaps best to ignore the central plot and just enjoy it as a virtual landscape, an IF Art Show entry blown up to staggering proportions.

Nepstad is himself a resident of Chicago, and was able to work out an arrangement to sell 1893 in the museum gift shop located on the remnants of the Fair’s grounds. 1893 has been a modest success, selling several thousand copies online and through the shop. It remains for sale today at http://www.illuminatedlantern.com/1893/.

In late 2004, Kent Tessman (creator of the Hugo IF language) released the colorful super-hero spoof Future Boy! for online sale through his film production company, General Coffee Productions. Future Boy! is the most multimedia-intensive piece of IF yet released in the modern era. It pushes the capabilities of Hugo to the limit, featuring not only pictures, sounds, and music, but even “cut scenes” illustrating important events. It is sold through an animated Flash website, and a nicely designed trailer is available. The actual game to be found underneath all this flash is warm-hearted, amusing, and well-designed, not a visionary work but perfectly respectable. Tessman has not published sales figures for Future Boy!, but the game has received considerable coverage outside the IF community in sites devoted to graphical adventures and even in the general-interest computer gaming media. It remains available today at http://www.generalcoffee.com/futureboy.

Perhaps the best lesson that can be derived from all this is that IF can have a certain commercial viability as a niche genre if it consists of more than plain text, and if its sellers keep their expectations modest. The days of purely textual IF fetching buyers seem to belong to the past, however, much as many would love to see this bit of wisdom proved wrong. To some extent, the IF community works against itself here. With a wide array of freeware games of often remarkable quality already available, what is to motivate the prospective buyer to pay for a new work? Multimedia elements, on the other hand, are much less common in free IF, and seem to provide that necessary something extra to entice buyers to pay.

The Other IF Communities

I have so far discussed in this chapter only the mainstream English language IF community. However, my reader should be aware that its output does not represent all of the IF still being produced. There are at least two other communities creating IF in English.

One is known as the adult interactive fiction (AIF) community, and its focus is on the production of interactive erotica, a style of IF with a history dating back to Sierra’s SoftPorn. Its work is regarded with a certain disdain within the mainstream community, not so much out of prudishness as in response to the generally poor quality of its games. Most are of frankly horrid quality in both their prose and their technical merits, often still being written in the hopelessly outdated AGT. Their plots generally revolve around copulating with as many females as possible, the AIF community being overwhelmingly male, and disturbing elements like incest and sexual violence all too often creep into the narratives. Most women are implemented not as human beings but as collections of body parts to be manipulated. In this, AIF games perhaps represent a decent simulation of the average porno film, but this seems a low goal to reach for. The AIF community is evidently happy with its status quo, though, for it has so far shown little motivation to improve its work. The best that can be said for it is that its work is sometimes entertaining in an accidental way. One game with the charming title of Stiffy Makane, for instance, features a protagonist who can, due to a programming oversight, drop and pick up his penis like any other object. For those who wish to explore AIF further, a central portal to all things AIF resides at http://aif.emsai.net.

Somewhat more wholesome is the work of the ADRIFT community. ADRIFT is a shareware development system designed to allow an author to create works of IF with little or no programming through the use of a point-and-click interface. Although good work can and has been done with the system, the very ease of use that makes creating a simple game so quick and easy actually makes it harder to create more complex interactions. ADRIFT’s parser and world model are also no rival for the likes of Inform, TADS, and Hugo. For this reason, ADRIFT is generally looked upon with decided skepticism by the mainstream community. The fact that ADRIFT’s creator, Campbell Wild, alone among his contemporaries charges a fee for his system has also probably contributed to ADRIFT’s fairly cool reception. Perhaps in response to this situation, a largely separate community has sprung up around ADRIFT, centered around the ADRIFT homepage at http://www.adrift.org.uk and with a newsletter of its own similar to SPAG located at http://insideadrift.org.uk. There is, however, a fair amount of overlap between the mainstream community and the ADRIFT community, certainly much more so than between the mainstream community and the AIF community. At least a few ADRIFT games generally get entered into each year’s IF Competition, and some individuals maintain a presence in both communities. The consensus of the mainstream community, however, continues to be that, while some interesting work has come out of the ADRIFT community, it is ultimately limited by the tool which it has chosen to embrace. Serious IF development, at least at the moment, continues to require real programming.

One of the nicest benefits of the IF renaissance has been the internationalization of the genre. Bilingual members of the English community have worked long and hard to ports its tools to other languages, and new communities have sprung up in response. Today, annual competitions are held for IF written in Italian, French, and German; while at least a few works each have been written in Swedish, Dutch, and Russian. Most active of all is the Spanish IF Community, which sports a thriving competition of its own and a sister newsletter to the English SPAG, known as SPAC. I encourage my readers who have familiarity with one or more of the above languages to investigate further. With its emphasis on engagement and interaction, IF is actually an excellent tool for improving one’s fluency in a language not one’s own.

In the next chapter, we will take a look at the most interesting and important free English works of the IF renaissance.

Sources for Further Investigation

Games:

1893: A World’s Fair Mystery. 2002. Peter Nepstad; Illuminated Lantern.

http://www.illuminatedlantern.com/1893.

Future Boy!. 2004. Kent Tessman; General Coffee.

http://www.generalcoffee.com/futureboy.

Guilty Bastards. 1998. Kent Tessman.

ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/hugo/guilty.zip.

Pentari: First Light. 2003. Howard Sherman; Malinche.

http://www.malinche.net.

Other Works:

Berlyn, Mike. “Once and Future ships.” Usenet post to rec.games.int-fiction, October 23, 1998.

Blasius, Volker. “recent additions to the Interactive Fiction Archive.” Usenet post to rec.games.int-fiction, July 18, 2001.

Cadre, Adam. “A Timeline of Cascade Mountain Publishing.”

http://web.archive.org/web/20010715122943/adamcadre.ac/calendar/09582.html.

Cadre, Adam. “Spring Thing Background.”

http://www.springthing.net/2006/history.htm.

Engst, Adam C. “Adam C. Engst on rec.arts.int-fiction.” Usenet post to rec.arts.int-fiction, April 5, 1998.

Granade, Stephen. “IF and a MUD.”

http://brasslantern.org/community/discussion/ifmud.html.

Granade, Stephen. “A Timeline of Interactive Fiction.”

http://www.brasslantern.org/community/history/timeline.html.

Guy, Neil K. “A Brief History of Amateur IF.”

http://tela.bc.ca/tads/authoring/articles/if-history.html.

Montfort, Nick. Twisty Little Passages. MIT Press: Cambridge, 2003.

Mullin, Eileen. “Interview with Volker Blasius.” XYZZY News #3.

http://www.xyzzynews.com/xyzzy.3g.html.

Thorton, Adam. Review of Once and Future. Spag #16, October 3, 1998.

http://sparkynet.com/spag/o.html#once.

Wilson, Gerry Kevin. “The IF Gates are Closed. Let the Voting Begin!!!” Usenet post to rec.games.int-fiction, September 1, 1995.

Chapter 10: Suggested Works of Modern IF

We are slowly moving towards intelligent criticism (rather than, as used to be the case, discussion consisting only of praising old Infocom games to the skies, as though they were all equally good)…At this moment, for instance, people are debating ‘isn’t Jigsaw a rather patchy game?’ and I’m pleased to see this: people are singling out what they like and dislike, in a way which didn’t happen a few years ago with Curses, for example.

– Graham Nelson (1996)

There is a bit of a paradox associated with modern IF. Even though vastly fewer people are now engaging in the genre compared to its commercial peek, the number of quality games released in any given year has actually increased considerably. Modern IF creators and players take the genre more seriously than ever, and the community as a whole has shockingly high standards. Much thought and writing has gone into working out a theory of IF, and determining just what constitutes a well-designed game. Graham Nelson’s widely quoted Bill of Player’s Rights demonstrates some of the tenets of good game design that are now embraced by the community as a whole, to the benefit of the genre and in marked contrast to the frequently unfair design philosophy of even many interesting and important commercial titles:

1. Not to be killed without warning.

2. Not to be given horribly unclear hints.

3. To be able to win without experience of past lives.

4. To be able to win without knowledge of future events.

5. Not to have the game closed off without warning.

6. Not to need to do unlikely things.

7. Not to need to do boring things for the sake of it.

8. Not to have to type exactly the right verb.

9. To be allowed reasonable synonyms.

10. To have a decent parser.

11. To have reasonable freedom of action.

12. Not to depend much on luck.

13. To be able to understand a problem once it is solved.

14. Not to be given too many red herrings.

15. To have a good reason why something is impossible.

16. Not to need to be American.

17. To know how the game is getting on.

Games that violate these rules can expect to have their infractions pointed out in detail and by number, unless of course they have a very good reason for doing what they do. (As always in art, a good creator knows the rules so as to know when it is appropriate to break them.) This has led some to call the community unfriendly or unwelcoming, and even pretentious, but it has paid off in a collective body of work that is of a much higher standard than that of any other group of hobbyist game developers. The best of modern IF is intelligent, literary, and innovative, and makes a fine claim to be taken seriously as not just an interesting and vital form of computer entertainment but as genuine literature.

The wealth of riches that has appeared over the last decade presents a problem for an essay such as this one, however, for there is simply too much of quality and interest for one reviewer to cover in any reasonable space. For this reason, I am not going to attempt anything like a comprehensive critical survey of modern IF, for that is a subject worthy of a complete book in itself. I will rather offer a summarized, chronological listing of modern IF works that are notable, whether for innovation, importance, literary quality, or that simple but ever-elusive fun factor. The results will necessarily by incomplete and quite possibly unfair to the many others who could make a justifiable case for inclusion here, but I hope will serve the reader as a beginning sampler of the fruits of the modern IF community that stand available for further exploration. Included herein are a wondrous variety of works, from old-school text adventures to avant-garde experiments, and every work included in this chapter is completely free. The reader is thus free to dive in anywhere, with whatever seems interesting. I hope that one thing will soon become abundantly clear: the golden age of IF is now.

1993

Curses (Graham Nelson)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/curses.z5

The difficult, fascinating, often infuriating epic that marked the beginning of the modern IF era. Even though it willfully violates many of Nelson’s own Bill of Player’s Rights, its sly English humor and some wonderfully satisfying puzzles make it worth playing for more than just historical interest even today.

1994

The Legend Lives! (David Baggett)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/adventions/adventions.zip

The final effort from Adventions, released as freeware rather than shareware, set new standards of implementation depth. Virtually every object in its world is examinable and manipulatible by the player. It is also the first self-consciously literary work of modern IF, emphasizing story and setting over puzzles. Its story does not at first seem unusual for IF, taking place in a far-future, vaguely cyberpunkish milieu, but there is more going on than first appears. Legend is in fact religious allegory. It is no coincidence that a principal character has the initials J.C. The game is one of the few serious examinations of spirituality to be found in IF, where the subject is normally treated with either mocking scorn or uncritical evangelism.

1995

Theatre (Brendon Wyber)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/theatre.z5

One of the first quality Inform games to appear not written by Graham Nelson was this evocative, atmospheric ghost story set in a beautiful, if now unused and rather down at the heels, theatre.

A Change in the Weather (Andrew Plotkin)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/weather.z5

The winner of the Inform division of the first annual IF Competition was also the first game from one of the most prominent modern IF authors, Andrew Plotkin. Plotkin’s signature style is all over this short but cruel little effort, in which the picnicing player finds herself cut off from her companions by a sudden thunderstorm.

Mystery Science Theatre 3000 Presents “Detective” (C.E. Forman, Matt Derringer)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/mst3k1_2.z5

One of the first experiments with the formal possibilities of IF, this is an interactive take on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, a television show in which three commentators have fun at the expense of really bad movies as they are playing. For his effort, Forman chose a really bad IF game, Matt Derringer’s Detective, to re-implement in Inform. As the player struggles his way through this well-nigh incomprehensible game, the characters from the television show offer meta-textual commentary on the situation. The result is undeniably funny, but also rather mean-spirited. As Stefan Jokisch wrote, “We should not forget that Matt wrote this game with good intentions and he offered it for free, so who are we to mock at his efforts?”

Jigsaw (Graham Nelson)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Jigsaw.z8

Nelson’s second epic puzzlefest improved on its predecessor in every way. It seems that someone known only as Black has decided to improve the ugly, tragic history of the twentieth century by revisiting and altering the outcome of certain pivotal events with the aid of a time machine. The player, naturally, must stop him or her, and the chase is on through sixteen meticulously researched historical events. Apart from the pleasures of its settings and difficult but generally fair puzzles, Jigsaw also brings to the table an elegiac, mournful quality reminiscent of Trinity, a game that clearly served as an inspiration. Also of note is Nelson’s masterful, subtle handling of the relationship between the player and Black. Even as she opposes Black and attempts to undo the damage he or she causes to the timestream, the player is attracted to and fascinated by him or her. The game never reveals Black’s gender, thus allowing the player to build up whatever image she chooses in her mind.

Christminster (Gareth Rees)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/minster.z5

The player travels to Biblioll College, Christminster, a fictional stand-in for Christ’s College, Cambridge, to visit her brother. She finds he has disappeared, however, under mysterious circumstances, and sets about unraveling the mystery. Christminster’s very English sense of place makes it notable even today, and the work as a whole is one of the most well-written and thoroughly realized of the early games of the modern era.

1996

Lists and Lists (Andrew Plotkin)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/lists/lists.z5.

This is not really a game at all, and arguably not even IF. It is in fact an interactive tutorial on an obscure artificial intelligence-oriented programming language known as Scheme. While definitely not what one normally thinks of IF, it does provide food for thought on the potential the community’s tools might have for creating interactive works that are not narrative-based at all.

The Meteor, the Stone, and a Long Glass of Sherbet (Graham Nelson)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/sherbet/sherbet.z5

A marvelous, affectionate tribute to Infocom’s Enchanter series of games, using the same magic system as was found there.

Ralph (Miron Schmidt)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Ralph.z5

A little charmer that casts the player in the role of an ordinary suburban dog on a quest for a lost bone.

Tapestry (Daniel Ravipinto)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/tapestry/tapestry.z5

An early attempt at puzzleless IF, this works casts the player as a recently deceased man who is given the opportunity by a being known as Morningstar to relive and alter three pivotal moments in his life, if he so chooses. The work is rich in allegory and symbolism, and offers multiple endings depending on the player’s choices. Heavily influenced by Neil Gaiman’s writings.

So Far (Andrew Plotkin)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/SoFar.z8

A symbolic, dreamlike work that defies description. The player has apparently just broken up with his girlfriend, and finds himself roaming a bizarre fantasy landscape. Large, difficult, and open both to interpretation and to charges of pretension and profundity through obscurity, but also oddly compelling, with some marvelously evocative passages.

Lost New York (Neil de Mause)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/lostny14.gam

Another time travel epic, this one centering on the history of New York City. Thoroughly researched by a native of the Big Apple, the game carries with it a sense of loss for the New Yorks that once were and that never will be. Special attention is given to the sad, pointless destruction of Grand Central Station in the early sixties.

1997

The Space Under the Window (Andrew Plotkin)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/sutwin.z5

An experimental work in which the player interacts not in the manner of conventional IF, but by entering words from the work’s output text at the command line. The results are interesting, albeit unpredictable and frustrating for the more goal-oriented among us. Play it long enough, however, and a story does emerge.

Babel (Ian Finley)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/Babel31.gam

An unrelentingly grim work, but a fascinating one which uses the hoary old cliché of player-character amnesia to good effect. The player finds herself the only remaining inhabitant of an abandoned Artic research station, and spends the game trying to determine just what sort of tragedy has occurred there. Very evocative atmosphere and writing, a trademark of all Finley’s work. Shades of John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”

A Bear’s Night Out (David Dyte)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/bear.z5

An “interactive children’s story” in which the player takes the role of a teddy bear who comes to life as soon as everyone in the house is asleep. Too cute for words.

The Edifice (Lucian P. Smith)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/edifice.z5

A little game about a big subject: the evolution of man. The player must lead the way through three crucial steps on the road to becoming human.

She’s Got a Thing for a Spring (Brent van Fossen)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/spring/spring.z5

The player must meet her husband at a hot spring tucked away in the Rocky Mountains. Naturally, obstacles intervene. More notable than the gamelike elements, though, is the work’s lovingly detailed depiction of the beauty of the landscape in which it takes place. Also notable for its one non-player character, a relaxed and relaxing fellow named Bob who is implemented in remarkable detail.

Sins Against Mimesis (Adam Thornton)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/mimesis.z5

A hopelessly in-jokey work, but a very entertaining one for those in the know. The player must overcome seven deadly game design sins of the sort that are discussed and complained about to death within the community.

Sunset Over Savannah (Ivan Cockrum)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/savannah.gam

A haunting, beautiful work. It is the last day of the player’s waterfront vacation in Savannah, Georgia, and he is attempting to find an answer to the malaise afflicting his life. One could argue that its conventional puzzles clash with the ethereal beauty of the setting, but writing this fine cannot be ignored.

The Tempest (Graham Nelson, William Shakespeare)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/tempest/tempest.z5

A brave attempt, albeit a failed one, to convert Shakespeare’s play to IF. Perhaps most interesting for its conversion of all interactions into Elizabethan English.

Zero Sum Game (Cody Sandifer)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/zero.gam

The player has reached the end of a rather generic fantasy game, but his mother has found out, and ordered him to set everything back the way he found it. The player must thus restore the situation that existed at the beginning of the game, in the process losing the 75 points he has already acquired. Works as both a meta-textual send-up of IF conventions, and as a satire of the sort of uninteresting fantasy quests the community had by this point come to despise.

Zork: The Undiscovered Underground (Mike Berlyn, Marc Blank, G. Kevin Wilson)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/missing-files/ztuu.zip

Infocom implementers Berlyn and Blank were commissioned by Activision to create a short new text adventure set in the Zork universe as a promotion for Activision’s Zork: Grand Inquisitor graphical adventure. Wilson agreed to program the game in Inform, since all of Infocom’s old development tools were by this time long-gone. Thus the IF community came full circle, bestowing its modern tools upon their Infocom heroes of old. The game itself was an entertaining if hardly earth-shattering text adventure.

I–0: Jailbait on the Interstate (Adam Cadre)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/I-0.z5

Noted author Cadre’s first game was guaranteed to garner attention. The player takes the role Tracy Valencia, a rather spoiled young college student, whose car has just broken down on a trip home. The player can deal with her situation in a multitude of ways, including some that involve Tracy disrobing and relying on her, shall we say, core attributes. (To those who were offended, Cadre consistently replied that Tracy did not have to behave like a slut to complete the game, and that their choices were thus a reflection on their own personalities rather than his game.) Titillating content aside, the work is interesting for the sheer number of paths available to the player for its completion, and for Cadre’s soon to be trademark dark wit.

1998

Zork: A Troll’s Eye View (Dylan O’Donnell)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/troll.z5

A one room joke, but an amusing, well-implemented one. This work puts the player into the role of the troll from Zork I, guarding the entrance to the Great Underground Empire against those pesky adventurers. Obviously, only those who have played Infocom’s original will get the joke.

Losing Your Grip (Stephan Granade)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/grip.gam

An epic work, heavy on the psychological symbolism. The player explores the consciousness of a man who is metaphorically coming apart at the seams. Perhaps a bit too heavy on the pop psychology for its own good, but fascinating nevertheless. Much discussion has taken place on “what it all means.” Also notable for its use of branching paths through the story. Shades of Mindwheel.

Spider and Web (Andrew Plotkin)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Tangle.z5

In my opinion, both Andrew Plotkin’s best game and one of the most interesting works to come out of the modern IF community. The work is superficially a Cold War spy story, with the player tasked to infiltrate an Eastern European complex. As the game goes on, though, an interesting new dimension comes to life: the person whose role the player is inhabiting knows more about what happened than the player does, and is in fact relaying past experiences. This split between the player’s identity and the person being played is of theoretical interest, but the game also succeeds artistically. There is a wonderful sense of discovery as the player finally works out what is really going on, and the climactic puzzle has frequently been called the best ever created. A modern masterpiece.

Firebird (Bonnie Montgomery)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/firebird.gam

A simple, gentle-hearted little game built from a pastiche of Russian fairy tales. A wonderful choice for beginners.

Once and Future (G. Kevin Wilson)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/oaf.zip

Wilson’s magnum opus, five years in the making and initially released commercially by the short-lived Cascade Mountain Publishing. Its history is covered in detail in Chapter 9 of this essay.

Arrival, or Attack of the B-Movie Cliches (Stephan Granade)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/arrival.zip

The first publicly released HTML TADS games was this silly, affectionate homage to 1950s science fiction B-movies. Granade uses amateurish, decidedly low-fidelity artwork and sound effects, but they suit the game perfectly, adding to the general Ed Wood feel.

Downtown Tokyo, Present Day (John Kean)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Tokyo2.z5

A fun spoof of Japanese monster movies that is notable for splitting the player character’s point of view between the “on-screen” hero of the piece and members of the “movie’s” audience. Also features perhaps the first animated ASCII graphics ever to grace a work of IF.

Four in One (J. Robinson Wheeler)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/fourin1.gam

Wheeler has made his reputation from playing with and often subverting IF conventions, and this work is no exception. The player takes the role of a director working on a Marx Brothers movie, a task somewhat akin to herding cats. The gameplay is problematic, but the character interaction is ambitious and the writing consistently sparkles.

Informatory (William J. Shlaer)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Informat.z5

Obviously inspired by Andrew Plotkin’s Lists and Lists, this work attempts to teach its player the rudiments of Graham Nelson’s Inform IF language. Interesting for all the same reasons as its predecessor, but perhaps a more practical tool for players of IF, most of whom seem to harbor a secret desire to create works of their own.

Little Blue Men (Michael Gentry)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/bluemen/bluemen.z5

A bizarre, darkly humorous game about life at the typical office. Things begin with everyday frustrations such as a malfunctioning vending machine, but eventually escalate to bloody murder. Funny but also chilling.

Mother Loose (Irene Callaci)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/loose.z5

A children’s adventure set in a land of nursery rhymes. Another wonderful introduction to IF.

Muse: An Autumn Romance (Christopher Huang)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/muse.z5

An ambitious attempt to tell a poignant love story in IF. The player takes the role of a middle-aged Victorian clergyman who is smitten with a young girl who notices from a distance. His love is of course never consummated, but the tale is no less touching for that. The work has its share of flaws, chief among them being the very limited character interaction and an over-abundance of fiddly puzzles that take away from the story at its heart. Nevertheless, a brave, even important work.

Photopia (Adam Cadre)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/photopia.z5

One of the most important works of the modern era, Photopia was in some senses the culmination of the previous few years’ steady drift toward the narrative at the expense of the crossword. Photopia eschewed puzzles and gamelike elements altogether to tell the touching story of Ally, a young girl who is killed by a drunk driver before she finishes high school. Cadre constructs his story cleverly, placing the player in various roles of those who knew and loved Ally to better tell her story. Some have complained that the work is barely interactive at all, and is in fact little more than a short story transcribed into IF. Others have complained about its emotional manipulativeness. These complaints have a certain truth, but it is also true that many hardened IFers were left in tears by the story. Simply put, a pivotal work in the evolution of IF toward a true form of literature.

Anchorhead (Michael Gentry)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/anchor.z8

A towering work in size, quality, and importance. The player has just moved with her husband to the little New England fishing village of the title, a place in which decidedly bad things are afoot. The story is an ambitious Lovecraft homage; the geography is sprawling and wonderfully described; and the game as a whole is a textbook illustration of how to integrate story and puzzles into a seamless whole. One of the most satisfying works of the modern era.

Guilty Bastards (Kent Tessman)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/pc/guilty.exe

The first multimedia IF work of the modern era, and proof positive that Tessman’s Hugo language could stand shoulder to shoulder with Inform and TADS. See Chapter 9 for more details on its development.

Bad Machine (Dan Shiovitz)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/bmch.zip

A work of IF that is not quite like anything else out there, with the possible exception of Infocom’s Suspended. The player is a “bad machine,” a robot in an automated factory who has due to some glitch developed free will. She must escape the mechanical wardens of the factory, who desire to reprogram her for obedience. Much of the initial challenge of the game comes in just working out the robot’s strange way of communicating via a sort of pseudo machine language. Much attention has been to this work by theorists such as Nick Montfort, some of whom have gone so far as to claim it to be a metaphor for life in a totalitarian society. Such assertions are of course debatable, but Bad Machine has an undeniable intellectual fascination and even beauty all its own.

1999

Aisle (Sam Barlow)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Aisle.z5

There had been some experimentation in previous years with minimalist IF that is set in a single room. Aisle takes things one step further. The player is in a grocery store aisle in which a number of interesting things are going on, and has the opportunity to enter just one command. His choice here can lead to a multitude of different endings.

Varicella (Adam Cadre)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/vgame.z8

The player takes the role of a corrupt minister close to the throne of an equally corrupt Italian kingdom. A darkly twisted story with one of the most interesting, and unsavory, protagonists yet seen in IF. A nasty game, but a compelling one.

Chicks Dig Jerks (Robb Sherwin)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/chix.z5

The inimitable Robb Sherwin’s first game casts the player as a player of another sort, attempting to pick up girls at a bar. The game design is a bit of a mess, but it introduces one of the most original voices in IF in a game which positively revels in its political incorrectness. Play it for the writing alone.

A Day for Soft Food (Tod Levi)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition99/inform/softfood/softfood.z5

A cat lover’s answer to Ralph, Soft Food gives the player the persona of a housecat on a quest for the soft food of the title.

Exhibition (Ian Finley)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/exhibit21.gam

A fascinating and important work of puzzleless IF. The player is visiting an exhibition of work by an artist who has recently killed himself. She can view the exhibit from four different viewpoints: that of the artist’s mother, a critic, a young boy, and an art student. Only by piecing these perspectives together can some sense of objective truth, such as it is, be worked out.

For a Change (Dan Schmidt)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition99/inform/change/change.z5

The first in a line of interesting IF linguistic experiments. The player explores a surreal landscape make even more confusing by the warped yet oddly beautiful diction with which it is described. Problematic as a game, yet a compelling experience nevertheless.

Hunter, in Darkness (Andrew Plotkin)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/huntdark.z5

Plotkin’s homage to IF progenitor Hunt the Wumpus manages to succeed as a compelling game in its own right. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the caves is conveyed perfectly, and the sense of fear and dread is palpable, to the extent that final victory brings more a sense of relief than triumph.

Winter Wonderland (Laura K. Knauth)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/winter.z5

A charming children’s story. The player is a little girl heading into town to buy a candle for her family’s solstice tree while also worrying over her sick little brother. Magical adventures ensue.

Common Ground (Stephen Granade)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/Ground.gam

The player takes three different roles over the course of this short work, in the process viewing a rather dysfunctional family from the standpoint of each of its members. Not entirely satisfying as fiction, but its heavy and generally competently done emphasis on character interaction makes it a notable work.

9:05 (Adam Cadre)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/905.z5

A tiny, banal-seeming little slice of everyday life, until the player probes a bit deeper. Really more of a “gotcha!” joke on the player than anything, but one that is cleverly done, and that would not work in any other medium.

Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina (Jim Aikin)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/ballerina102.z8

It is Christmas Eve, and the player has arrived at a deserted shopping mall on the edge of nowhere in search of that Sugar Toes Ballerina doll her daughter just has to have. Acquiring this elusive toy will require solving a staggering number and variety of puzzles. An epic treat for the puzzle lover, with a healthy dose of seasonal charm to boot.

Worlds Apart (Suzanne Britton)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/worlds.zip

A hugely ambitious and largely successful work of fantasy. This succeeds by abandoning the tropes of conventional fantasy for a fully fleshed-out, richly imagined world of its own. Stunning depth of implementation, and some of the finest writing to be found in IF.

Winchester’s Nightmare (Nick Montfort)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/winchest.z8

The player is Sarah Winchester, wife of a gun manufacturer. She is struggling with the legacy her family has left to the world. The two halves of Sarah’s psyche are personified as two very different landscapes. Most interesting, though, is the game’s format innovations. It is written entirely in the third person, and alters many traditional IF commands and abbreviations, presumably in the name of verisimilitude. Problematic in the extreme, but worth a look for the experimentalists among us.

The Mulldoon Legacy (Jon Ingold)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Mulldoon.z8

A huge puzzlefest, which stands alongside Jigsaw as perhaps the finest examples of their kind. The player begins by exploring a mysterious museum, but, predictably enough, her adventure will soon carry her to many other places in time and space. The game’s puzzles are as ingenious as they are difficult, but it always, always plays fair. Simply superb.

2000

Shrapnel (Adam Cadre)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/shrapnel.z5

A small game that is also one of the strangest ever created. It initially seems to be a parody of Zork, but soon takes off willfully in about a dozen other directions. Even the parser in this one cannot be trusted. Violent, confusing, more than slightly crazed, and just possibly brilliant.

LASH (Paul O’Brian)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/LASH.z8

The Second American Civil War has recently ended, and the player is in control of a robot sifting through the rubble. While it does not quite resonate in the way its author seems to have intended, the work is interesting for its point of view and the novel way it tells an intricate story.

Augmented Fourth (Brian Uri)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Aug4.z8

A fine medium-sized work of light fantasy. The player is a musician who can cast spells by playing certain notes on his magical trumpet. The game does nothing particularly new, but does everything so well, and with such charm, that it is impossible not to like.

Galatea (Emily Short)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Galatea.z8

Emily Short’s first work of IF is also perhaps the most frequently mentioned and discussed of the community’s works in the wider field of “new media” criticism. Whether it deserves the hallowed place it has been given is perhaps debatable, but the work is certainly interesting and important on its own merits. Galatea is structured as a single extended conversation between the player and a suddenly animated statue of the titular character, a nymph from Greek mythology. The player is free to guide the conversation in many directions, which can lead to literally dozens of possible endings. The implementation is not perfect, and indeed seemingly nonsensical responses and even endings sometimes occur, but the whole still stands as the most concentrated attempt in IF to date at creating a truly believable character. What is remarkable is not Galatea’s failings, but the extent to which it often succeeds. An enormously important work.

Rematch (Andrew D. Pontious)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/Rematch.gam

Another one-move game obviously inspired by Aisle. Rematch has a decidedly different focus than that earlier experiment, however. It is in fact an adventure game, with a single puzzle that must (obviously) be solved in the one move the player is allowed. Of course, many re-playings will likely be required to get it right.

Ad Verbum (Nick Montfort)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/adverbum.z5

A game of wordplay obviously inspired by Infocom’s Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It. While it does not quite offer the freshness or delight of that work, Ad Verbum is enjoyable in its own right, and refreshingly different.

Being Andrew Plotkin (J. Robinson Wheeler)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/bap/bap.z5

Another colossal community in-joke, but a fun one for those in the know, this work is an homage to the eccentricities of Andrew Plotkin, done as an extended riff on the movie Being John Malkovich. On the one hand, this insular sort of work is vaguely disturbing, and definitely not the way to get IF noticed by the larger literary establishment; on the other, though, at least in small doses it sure is funny.

Guess the Verb! (Leonard Richardson)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/guess.z5

Several satirical vignettes that poke fun at various IF sins and clichés. It is a bit in-jokey, but cleverly done. Shades of Sins Against Mimesis.

Kaged (Ian Finley)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2000/tads/kaged

A despairing, atmospheric work set in an Orwellian dystopia. Owes perhaps a bit too much to 1984 - certainly the ending will come as no surprise - but well-written and well-designed. Makes excellent use of music and the occasional graphic.

Masquerade (Kathleen M. Fischer)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Mask.z5

A Civil War-era historical romance with a clear debt to the Infocom classic Plundered Hearts. Wonderful period detail, a well-characterized and memorable protagonist, and a multitude of possible endings make for a satisfying whole.

Metamorphoses (Emily Short)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/metamorp.z5

The player is a slave girl in a fantasy world, sent on a mission by her master. Beyond that, it is hard to say for sure just what is going on in this imagistic work.

My Angel (Jon Ingold)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/My_Angel.z5

The most noticeable thing about this work initially is its odd approach to screen formatting, which Ingold calls “novel mode.” The player’s input as well as trivial messages appear on the status line, separately from the main text of the story being told. The idea is that the text in this main window will, if saved at the end of the work, read like a novel. The work is written in first person to further accommodate this. As the reader may guess from its formatting, My Angel is story-oriented work of largely puzzleless IF. More surprisingly, the haunting story it tells of a relationship between two telepaths is ultimately more memorable than its technical gimmicks.

Rameses (Stephen Bond)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/rameses.z5

The player takes the role of the titular character, an unhappy teenager trapped in boarding school. There are no puzzles to solve, and in fact very little to be done at all. Virtually everything the player attempts is in vain, squashed by the malaise that surrounds Rameses. The odd thing is that this utter lack of interactivity works perfectly to convey Rameses’ hopeless state of mind. The work is in fact among the most moving works of IF I have played.

Shade (Andrew Plotkin)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/shade.z5

A deeply disturbing work. The player is alone in his apartment, and then…

Yes, Another Game with a Dragon! (John Kean)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/yagwad.z5

A parody of the sort of generic fantasy effort that the community has come to despise that actually turns into quite a fun little old-school romp in its own right.

Dangerous Curves (Irene Callaci)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/curves.z8

A huge Raymond Chandler-esque mystery that absolutely bleeds noirish atmosphere.

Failsafe (Jon Ingold)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/FailSafe.z5

A bizarre experiment that plays with the joint identities of the player and the game’s protagonist in a fascinating way. The whole game is literally played through a haze of static for reasons that become only somewhat clear. Inscrutable, confusing, and very, very compelling.

A Crimson Spring (Robb Sherwin)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/hugo/scourge.zip

A superhero story done Sherwin style, which means plenty of sex and violence and a great heaping dose of fractured, brilliant prose. Includes some very nicely done multimedia elements.

Heroine’s Mantle (Andy Phillips)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Heroine.z8

Andy Phillips released several huge puzzlefests during the late nineties, which were greeted with a combination of awe at their ambition and despair at their often well-nigh insolvable puzzles and sometimes purple prose. With this game, though, he finally got it right. Mantle is a superhero epic of enormous proportions. It is difficult, but rarely unfair, as for the first time Philips’ grasp is equal to his reach.

2001

Textfire Golf (Adam Cadre)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/golf.z5

A clever little gem that not only tells an amusing story but wraps it around a surprisingly well-done textual simulation of golf. One of those incredible Z-Machine hacks that has to be seen to be believed.

Bugged (Anssi Raisanen)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/alan/bugged.zip

The player’s cousin has just written a terrible, amateurish text adventure, and asked her to give it a try. Completing the game will require thinking outside the box and exploiting the game’s many bugs in situations where the designed solutions do not work. A game guaranteed to bring a smile to the face of beta-testers everywhere.

The Weapon (Sean Barrett)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/weapon.zip

The player must attempt to puzzle out a recently recovered alien weapon system of awesome power while also dealing with a raft of treacherous colleagues. Short, but tough as nails, in more ways than one.

All Roads (Jon Ingold)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/AllRoads.z5

A largely puzzleless, story-driven work set in what seems to be an alternate version of medieval Venice, one in which magic exists. The game is somewhat railroaded, but more interactive than many similar efforts, and the story it tells is undeniably interesting and exciting.

Best of Three (Emily Short)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2001/glulx/Bestof3/Bestof3.blb

Another fascinating conversational experiment from Short. The player meets an old flame, and through her dialogue with him can guide the story in many different directions. Does not work quite as well as Galatea, and has in fact been largely disowned by Short as an abject failure, but it is better than its author gives it credit for.

Carma (Marnie Parker)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2001/glulx/carma/carma.blb

A work after the heart of English teachers everywhere, Carma is basically an extended ode to the importance of good grammar, particularly good punctuation. While hardly a narrative at all, the work’s format experiments are interesting, and it boosts some of the finest multimedia effects yet seen in modern IF.

Earth and Sky (Paul O’Brian)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2001/inform/eas/eas.z5

The first of O’Brian’s very popular trilogy focusing on the adventures of superhero siblings Austin and Emily in their search for their lost parents. Such a fine example of well-implemented yet fairly traditional IF that I chose it as my example game to introduce IF to my reader in Chapter 1.

The Gostak (Carl Muckenhoupt)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/gostak.z5

Another in the increasingly long line of IF experiments with language, and perhaps the most ingenious example of same yet seen. The Gostok is written in a made-up language, which the player may slowly deduce over the course of her interactions with the work. The process is not easy, but when the pieces fall into place and understanding dawns the feeling is magical. Linguists, amateur and otherwise, will have a field day.

Heroes (Sean Barrett)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/heroes.zip

Five intertwining stories are told here, each with a different hero representing a different Dungeons and Dragons type. In spite of its somewhat bland fantasy setting, the game’s writing is solid and its construction unique. The player can play through the five chapters in any order, and can even switch freely between them in midstream. Only after completing all of the individual stories does the game’s larger narrative arc become clear.

Moments Out of Time (L. Ross Raszewski)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2001/inform/moments

The only released modern IF game to use Infocom’s short-lived graphical version 6 Z-Machine, Moments casts the player as a time traveler conducting historical research. It is structured to allow for multiple re-playings. Indeed, this will be required to see any reasonable percentage of what the game has to offer.

Fallacy of Dawn (Robb Sherwin)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/hugo/dawn.zip

A dystopian game that casts the player in the role of a violent loser with an obsession for eighties arcade games. As usual with Sherwin’s work, the implementation is sometimes problematic, but the setting explodes with (evil) imagination, and the writing positively crackles. Also as usual with Sherwin’s work, worth playing for those reasons alone.

Fine Tuned (Dennis Jerz)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/FineTune.z8

A wonderfully charming period piece set at the dawn of the automobile. A true pleasure to play.

Pytho’s Mask (Emily Short)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/glulx/pytho.blb

A fantastical tale of courtly intrigue with a dash of romance. As usual, Short’s character interactions are second to none.

Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country (Adam Thornton)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2001/glulx/smtuc

This elaborate spoof of the work of the adult interactive fiction community is something of a monument to bad taste. Most famous for one particular picture of the player copulating with a moose. Generally provokes either huge gales of outrage or huge gales of laughter.

2002

Lock and Key (Adam Cadre)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/glulx/lock-key.blb

A work that owes as much to Peter Molyneux’s classic Dungeon Keeper simulation games as it does to IF. In an interesting inversion of roles, the player is in charge of a dungeon, and must keep the brave and resourceful adventurer from escaping. Heavily dependent on its graphical elements, and oozing Cadre’s trademark black humor from every pore.

The Mulldoon Murders (Jon Ingold)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Mullmurd.z5

Ingold’s sequel to The Mulldoon Legacy follows the puzzle-oriented gameplay model of its predecessor, but is both much smaller and somewhat less satisfying on the whole. It is, however, a fine work in its own right, well worth a play by fans of the first game.

Savoir Faire (Emily Short)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Savoir.z8

Short billed this game as a straightforward tribute to the Infocom puzzlers of her youth, and this is indeed probably the most traditional of her works. It is also among the most satisfying. The player is a rather down at the heels man about town living in an alternate version of rococo France in which magic exists. He has returned to the house where he was raised in search of, in his own words, “loot.” An ingenious puzzlefest follows, with yet another clever and original IF magic system on offer.

Another Earth, Another Sky (Paul O’Brian)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/glulx/EAS2.zip

The second of O’Brian’s superhero trilogy uses the multimedia capabilities of the new Glulx virtual machine to offer sound effects and appropriately lurid comic book-style visual flourishes.

The Granite Book (James Mitchelhill)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/tads2/granite/granite.gam

A strange, surrealistic work in which it is never quite certain just what is really going on. The parser interacts in the first-person plural for inscrutable reasons of its own. Interesting as an exercise in imagery, and for snatches of writing that approach poetry.

Jane (Joseph Grzesiak)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/zcode/jane/jane.z5

An earnest look at the problem of domestic abuse whose heart is in the right place, but that is rather heavy-handed in its approach and unimaginative in its design. Still worth looking at as an attempt to bring IF to bear on a real social problem.

The Moonlit Tower (Yoon Ha Lee)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/zcode/moonlit/Moonlit.z5

A beautiful piece of work that reads and plays like poetry. Its setting and plot, such as it is, are based upon Asian mythology, a corner of culture almost never explored in IF. Sparkling and evocative, and a must play.

Photograph (Steve Evans)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/zcode/photo/photo.z5

A linear, puzzleless narrative obviously influenced by Photopia, but one which tells an affecting story in its own right.

The PK Girl (Robert Goodwin)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/adrift/the_pk_girl.zip

Perhaps the most ambitious Adrift game ever created, The PK Girl is also a thoroughly unique piece of IF in its own right. It is basically a textual version of the interactive dating simulators that are very popular in Japan. There are multiple endings galore, as the player is free to woo whichever of half-a-dozen girls strike his fancy. Hopelessly sexist, of course, but in being so it is at least being true to the games from which it takes its inspiration. Features nicely done graphics, and (thankfully) no actual sex.

Till Death Makes a Monk-Fish Out of Me! (Jon Ingold, Mike Sousa)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/tildeath.gam

A great old-school puzzle-oriented game. The player has the ability to jump into the bodies of others for brief periods of time. Ingold and Sousa seem to have spent considerable time with Magnetic Scrolls’ Fish!

TOOKiE’S SONG (Jessica Knoch)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/zcode/tookie/tookie.z5

A game that by all rights should not succeed, but does. It seems to be intended as a good-natured parody of games of the “my first adventure” style, but ends up charming so much with its air of playful innocence that it works even if the player lacks knowledge of the material it parodies. The player must pursue her beloved dog, who it appears has been abducted by aliens, or something.

Unraveling God (Todd Watson)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/adrift/UnravelingGod11.zip

A puzzleless work that grapples seriously with questions of faith and spirituality. Many in the community initially took it to be a work of outright evangelism, and criticized it appropriately. In doing so, though, they did not do the work justice, for its message is much more subtle and open-ended than it first appears.

When Help Collides (J.D. Berry)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Help.z8

A confusing but sometimes compelling work that parodies IF conventions and restrictions, the self-help culture, and many other things. Enough ideas for half-a-dozen games, which is perhaps its greatest weakness, but interesting nevertheless.

Words of Power (Stark Springs)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/glulx/words.zip

A light-hearted fantasy game based around spell-casting, somewhat reminiscent of Infocom’s Enchanter trilogy. Most notable for its host of graphical embellishments and interface enhancements, which almost rival Legend’s games in their baroque complexity.

Dutch Dapper IV: The Final Voyage (Harry Hol)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/DDIV.z5

An homage to Douglas Adams’ work, particularly Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s game. While it is perhaps too dependent on Adams at times, to the point of lacking a real identity of its own, the whole is so big-hearted that even when the jokes do not work it is hard to be too critical. There was no Dutch Dapper I, II, or III, incidentally. This fact perhaps gives some idea of the type of humor the player can expect.

2003

ASCII and the Argonauts (J. Robinson Wheeler)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/mini-comps/speedif/SpeedIF_Argonaut.zip

A perfectly implemented, perfectly charming homage to the Scott Adams games of old, two-word parser and minimalist descriptions included.

Rat in Control (Michael J. Roberts)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/spatial.t3

The primary purpose of this work is not to entertain. It is rather an interactive experiment of sorts, although Roberts invests it with enough of a story and setting to sustain a certain interest. The player is (literally) a rat in a maze, which she has the option of navigating using traditional IF compass directions or relative directions such as forward, left, etc. Roberts hoped to use this work to gain insight into possible alternative direction-finding systems. As such, it is probably of most interest to IF authors, theorists, and researchers, although others will find an at least moderately interesting little game here.

The Erudition Chamber (Daniel Freas)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2003/tads2/erudite/erudite.gam

Something of an IF psychology experiment. The player is presented with a series of puzzles, each with multiple solutions. This is not so unusual. After the game is over, though, the player is presented with a brief psychological profile of herself, based on the methods she used to solve the puzzles.

Gourmet (Aaron A. Reed)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/gourmet.z5

In this little charmer, the player is the owner and manager of new restaurant, and an important reviewer has just arrived for dinner. As problem piles upon problem, slapstick hilarity ensues. Truly a pleasure.

Risorgimento Represso (Michael J. Coyne)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/glulx/risorg.ulx

A large game built around a premise that has been seen many times before. The player has been pulled out of our world and cast, alone and helpless, into a fantasy landscape. Represso uses its premise better than one might expect, however, and will likely win over even the most cynical with its clever puzzles and polished implementation.

Scavenger (Quentin Stone)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/scavenger.zip

A post-apocalyptic adventure inspired by the classic computer role-playing game Wasteland. The setting may not be terribly original, but Scavenger plays it to the hilt while also offering a multitude of solutions to its puzzles and many pathways through the story.

Slouching Towards Bedlam (Daniel Ravipinto, Star Foster)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2003/zcode/slouch/slouch.z5

The story involves a mysterious sort of mind-virus that has been unleashed into an alternate, “steampunk” version of London. Most interesting, though, is the game’s design. Multiple endings exist, all carefully worked out and logical, and virtually any solution the player deduces to deal, or (if she chooses) not deal, with the virus is accommodated. A brave attempt at truly interactive storytelling that largely succeeds, and that has deservedly become one of the most discussed games of the last few years. Not a happy story, however, and not for the faint of heart.

Insight (Jon Ingold)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/insight.z5

A twisted tale told through character interaction. The player is interrogating a murder suspect, but as the conversation continues a much more complicated tale begins to emerge.

Shadowgate (David Griffith, based on the original by ICOM Simulations)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/sgate.z5

A slavishly accurate port of the early graphical adventure Shadowgate to an IF context. Interesting as one of the few adaptations of its type, but its gameplay is very dated. Probably of most interest to nostalgic fans of the original.

To Hell in a Hamper (J.J. Guest)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/hamper.gam

The player is in a hot air balloon that is drifting dangerously close to an erupting volcano. Can he shed enough weight to pass safely overhead? Short, sweet, and clever.

City of Secrets (Emily Short)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/glulx/CoS.zip

One of the more ambitious works from a generally ambitious author, City of Secrets sets the player loose in a richly detailed near-future metropolis. The plot is almost secondary to the setting and the many characters that can be spoken with.

Max Blaster and Doris de Lightning Against the Parrot Creatures of Venus (Emily Short, Dan Shiovitz, J. Robinson Wheeler)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/springthing/2003/parrots

Golden age space opera, with just enough modern irony layered over the top. The plot is somewhat linear and the range of possible actions constrained, but with writing this good and some period-perfect illustrations from Wheeler to boot, it is hard to really complain.

Narcolepsy (Adam Cadre)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/glulx/narco.zip

A largely puzzleless work which places the player in the role of a wandering narcoleptic. Does not always succeed. In fact, it is not always clear just what it is attempting to do, but interesting nevertheless.

2004

The Act of Misdirection (Callico Harrison)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Misdirection.z5

The player takes the role of a rather down-at-the-heels magician. The first part of the work, in which the player must improvise his act for the audience, is probably the best, but the work as a whole, and the complex, sinister plot at its heart, are worthy.

Necrotic Drift (Robb Sherwin)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/hugo/ndrift.zip

Another glorious, gonzo mess from the inimitable Sherwin. This time, there is a randomized, RPG-style combat system to complement the writing and multimedia. Waves of zombies are attacking the mall, and the player is the only gaming store employee with a chance of stopping them.

All Things Devours (“half sick of shadows”)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/devours/devours.z5

A game built around a single puzzle, but an amazing puzzle it is, involving high technology and time travel. Virtually any way the player works out to solve the central problem works. An incredibly rich implementation, and an immensely rewarding experience for the player.

Blue Chairs (Chris Klimas)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/bluechairs.z5

An excellent demonstration of the power of modern IF. Klimas seems to have internalized the previous decade’s prodigious output of theory and experimentation, and out of it all synthesized an amazing work. Blue Chairs does nothing really new, but does everything very well, then adds a dash of soul to produce an affecting contemporary exploration of love and growing up that succeeds as both narrative and crossword. Works like this may be a sign that IF is just now maturing as an art-form, and that the real golden age of the genre is just beginning.

Goose, Egg, Badger (Brian Rapp)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/geb/GEB.z5

A seemingly simple work about life on a farm that is in fact a journey through multiple layers of reality. There is much, much more going on here than is initially apparent. Only careful, thoughtful players will peel back all of the layers, and one of the main lynchpins of the game is so subtle that even many of them will miss it entirely.

Luminous Horizon (Paul O’Brian)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/glulx/eas3/eas3.blb

The final game in O’Brian’s superhero trilogy finally reunites Austin and Emily with their parents while upholding the previous releases’ tradition of quality.

Mingsheng (Deane Saunders)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/mingsheng

A contemplative exploration of an Eastern landscape, complete with Zenlike puzzles.

Square Circle (Eric Eve)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/SquareCircle.zip

A thematically ambitious exploration of free will and the roots of faith. Its dystopian setting is perhaps a bit clichéd, but it is used here to good effect. Notable also for being one of the first works to really harness the power of the TADS 3 conversation system.

Sting of the Wasp (Jason Devlin)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/wasp/wasp.z5

A wicked little piece of black comedy. The player is a country club wife who has been photographed in a, shall we say, compromising position with one of the hired help. She must use all of her cynical wiles to make sure her husband, not to mention the neighbors, do not find out.

Isle of the Cult (Rube Berg)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/islecult.gam

A puzzle game in the classic style, albeit without the annoyances. Notable not for its originality or for any particular aspect, but rather for internalizing all of the community’s accumulated wisdom about game design and getting just about everything right.

The Dreamhold (Andrew Plotkin)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/dreamhold.z8

Plotkin’s first work of IF in several years is notable for its tutorial mode, designed to help the new player along by offering gentle guidance when she appears to be stuck. The game itself is a fairly large work of fantasy, reminiscent of So Far in both its settings and its inscrutability. Like So Far, some regard The Dreamhold as a work of genius, while some find it overly obscure and tedious.

The Fire Tower (Jacqueline A. Lott)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/art/if-artshow/year2004/firetower.z8

An interactive hike through the Appalachians. A completely puzzleless and almost completely plotless work that rewards those willing to take the time to explore its richly detailed world. The author’s love of the game’s setting shines through in every line, and can easily infect the player.

Wumpus 2000 (Muffy St. Bernard)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/wump2ka.z5

Another tribute to Hunt the Wumpus, albeit very different from Plotkin’s effort. Wumpus 2000 is basically an IF implementation of a randomized computer RPG ala Rogue. Features a detailed combat model and simulationist interactions which arise from the environment, rather than set-piece puzzles. Probably not the sort of game most members of the community are interested in playing, but the ideas found herein may be applicable to more story-focused works.

Return to Ditch Day (Michael J. Roberts)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/return-to-ditch-day.zip

A fine demonstration of TADS 3 in the guise of a compelling adventure that mixes a strong narrative and considerable character interaction with plenty of clever but solvable puzzles. The story focuses on the “ditch day” tradition at California Tech, thus in turn continuing the long tradition of collegiate IF.

2005

Bolivia by Night (Aidan Doyle)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/springthing/2005/bbn.gam

A mystery notable for its strong sense of place. A rather incongruous supernatural element crops up toward the end, but until that point the game manages to be educational about Bolivia’s culture and history while also offering an interesting story to explore. The pictures that begin each chapter contribute to the atmosphere.

Conan Kill Everything (Ian Haberkorn)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/ConanKillEverything.z5

A one-joke work, but the joke is a funny one with an extra satirical bite for those who see it in a certain way. The player is Conan as realized by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he must, as the title says, kill everything.

Distress (Mike Snyder)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2005/hugo/distress

A minimalist gem notable both for the clever series of puzzles it throws at the player and for the taut atmosphere in which it does so.

Tough Beans (Sara Dee)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2005/zcode/toughbeans

A wonderful slide-of-life enlivened by one of the most charming protagonists in recent history.

Beyond (Roberto Grassi, Paolo Lucchesi, Alessandro Peretti)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/glulx/Beyond.zip

A well-done tale of magical realism, written in English by members of the Italian IF community. An ambitious work that succeeds for the most part. Features very well done graphics.

Vespers (Jason Devlin)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/vespers.z8

A despairing work set in a medieval monastery during a time of plague. Another perfect balancing of the narrative and the crossword that succeeds as literature as well as game.

Book and Volume (Nick Montfort)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/bookvol.z5

Noted IF theorist Monfort’s latest casts the player as a system administrator with a problem. Breaks many of the community’s sacred rules of design for reasons that are not always clear, but has rewards of its own to offer in return.

Building (Mike Tulloch)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/building.z5

An ambitious work of psychological horror that brings with it a strong whiff of Poe and plenty of purple prose. It will particularly resonate with cubical workers and victims of bureaucracy everywhere.

Whom the Telling Changed (Aaron A. Reed)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/telling.z5

The player is given the opportunity to devise a tale of his own based upon the epic of Gilgamesh. Eschews not only puzzles but also most other conventional IF elements to give the player control of the form and substance of a story being told around a campfire. Nothing else in IF is quite like it.

All Hope Abandon (Eric Eve)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/AllHope.zip

An exploration of the meaning of spirituality and, more specifically, the nature of Hell. Eve seems to subscribe to the view of Hell as not a tortured land of fire and brimstone, but rather anyplace removed from God. Not a difficult work to play, but one which offers plenty of food for thought.

Finding Martin (Gayla Wennstrom)

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/fm.gam

The sort of huge puzzlefest that rarely seems to appear anymore in our increasingly literary age of IF. Wennstrom’s epic begins in a vanished friends house in the present day, but soon flies off in a dozen directions at once. It is confusing, rambling, and more than a little overwhelming, but its ambition and charm make it a delight for the old-school nostalgic. As a throwback to Curses, it also brings things full circle, and is the perfect game with which to close this chapter.

Chapter 11: The State of IF Today

Text IF succeeded commercially in the 1980s to the extent it did because it had commercial distribution and promotion, because other types of computer games were not significantly more impressive at first glance, and because the demographics of the computer-using public were tilted in favor of the literate. Today we have no distribution or promotion other than what we stick on the web for free; computer graphics are no longer so crude as to lose a side-by-side wow-contest with a paragraph; and the demographics of the computer-using public are tilted in favor of those who think the second-person pronoun in English is “u”.

But we have better games.

– Adam Cadre (2002)

As the Adam Cadre quotation above perhaps begins to illustrate, the state of IF today is a classic example of the glass being half empty or half full. On the one hand, the genre has fallen from all commercial grace, and its overall popularity is a miniscule fraction of what it once was. Barely twenty years ago, at least one IF game sold one-million copies at price points of thirty dollars or more; today, the active community of IF players is reduced to a bare handful of thousands, despite the fact that its games’ creators now give their work away for free. On the other hand, though, those remnants of IF’s once prodigious fanbase who remain have largely shed the lure of retro-gaming nostalgia that has afflicted similar revivalist efforts in other genres and produced work of often amazing originality and quality. While there is plenty of detritus about, the top ten-percent or so of hobbyist IF of the past decade easily dwarfs that of the commercial era in terms of design, sophistication, and literary quality. That a relatively small group of amateurs has been capable of surpassing the work of well-funded companies not just once or twice but on a regular basis is remarkable. That they have taken IF in directions those companies never dreamed of is inspiring.

However one chooses to view this particular glass, though, plenty of questions of both a practical and an artistic nature swirl around IF today. Having spent so much time chronicling where IF has been, I would like to close this essay by looking briefly at where it currently is and where it might potentially go.

The NPC Problem

While the technical foundations laid down by the community over the last fifteen years are impressive, problem areas remain. In particular, character interaction has long been one of the thorniest problems in IF, one that no one has come close to satisfactorily solving. Simulating a world of objects with predictable behaviors presents little challenge for our modern tools. Simulating sentient beings, or even simply animals, with all of their unpredictability and independent agency, remains essentially impossible. The best we can hope to do is to fake it in a relatively believable way. This “non-player character (NPC) problem” accounts for the commonness, even in today’s forthrightly literary age of IF, of games which send the player out to explore an essentially deserted geography. Doing so plays to IF’s strengths, and avoids its greatest weakness. Still, characters and relationships are the essence of storytelling, and if IF is to make a claim to the throne of literature, it would seem that the problem must be dealt with rather than avoided. Artificial intelligence research is nowhere near sufficiently advanced to give us characters capable of making decisions and acting on their own, and even if it were contemporary IF development system are not currently oriented in this direction. Thus authors who wish to simulate another being in their games are largely left to code as many rules as possible for their characters’ behavior under different circumstances, and hope that as few as possible of the inner gears of their creations, as it were, show through. Some of the results have been remarkable, but, although Galatea perhaps came close at times, no IF character has yet been capable of fooling the player for very long.

If the NPC problem is the most difficult in IF development, the thorniest subset of same is the question of conversation. The idea of simulating a natural language conversation in a game whose parser cannot itself understand more than the tiniest subset of English is of course absurd, and yet a story where the player cannot talk to others is hardly a story at all. A number of compromises have thus been introduced.

The most traditional method, the one used by Infocom in virtually all of its games as well as the one found by default in Inform and TADS 2 games, is known as the ASK/TELL system. The player is expected to use the two mentioned verbs to discuss various subjects with characters she encounters. While this system imparts a feeling of freedom that could only be delivered by a parser-driven game, it has some problematic aspects. Namely, no matter how much effort its author puts into coding up appropriate subjects for discussion, the player is likely to try many topics that the author never anticipated, and the generic responses she receives in return to these queries play havoc with a game’s mimesis. Also, too many games using this system require their players to discuss a particular topic with a character to advance the story. The result can be a frustrating round of “guess the conversation topic” that is no more satisfying than playing “guess the verb.”

In an attempt to address these problems, authors have implemented other systems that are more restrictive but also (hopefully) less frustrating. The most common is the menu-based system, in which the player is presented with a simple menu of possible topics to choose from when she begins a conversation. While this removes most of the frustrations of the ASK/TELL system, and is certainly much easier on the author to code, it seems to some a sort of betrayal of the limitless possibility of the parser to suddenly dump the player into such a restrictive, unimaginative system. Also, all mystery, and all sense on the part of the player that she is engaging in real interaction, are removed. Virtually all players, when presented with a list of possible questions or statements, will methodically choose them one by one in an attempt to ring as much information as possible out of the person she is communicating with. The result may be less frustrating, but all of the sense of freedom and the thrill of discovery that make IF so special are removed. Other characters become little more than information vending machines.

Less commonly used, and even more restrictive, is the TALK TO system, in which the player is given no choice at all as to what she says to others. The player is restricted to using the verb construct talk to, whereupon the game will automatically have her say whatever the author deems appropriate to the current situation. This method is the easiest of all to implement, and does have the virtue of keeping the story moving, but is hardly satisfying to player who thought she was playing a game of interactive fiction.

New Technology: TADS 3 and Inform 7

As I write this, a complete revamping of TADS, known as TADS 3, is in the final stages of beta-testing, as always under the careful supervision of Michael Roberts. While TADS 3 has not yet reached its final, polished incarnation, it is quite usable and largely feature complete. All that remains to be done are the final rounds of bug-squashing and the writing up of a polished final manual. Beta versions of the system have been available for several years, and a handful of games, among them Roberts’ own Return to Ditch Day mentioned in the previous chapter, have already been written by brave souls willing to dive in and learn the ins and outs of the new system for themselves. TADS 3 is an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary project, concentrating as it does on cleaning up the language, making the library more accessible and more modifiable, and introducing the benefits of a more modern, object oriented programming paradigm. From the player’s perspective, perhaps the most obvious improvement in TADS 3 is its new system for interacting with other characters in the game, which is a sort of synthesis of the ASK/TELL and menu-driven systems.

When a conversation begins in TADS 3, the player is presented with a list of possible topics. However, she is not dropped into a menu, but can freely ASK and TELL about those topics from the conventional parser. This might seem like a minor variation at first, but the system actually offers a number of interesting features. First of all, there is no guarantee given to the player that the possible topics of conversation that the game lists are all that are available. Thus an author can provide the necessary topics to her player while still allowing those who wish to dig further to make discoveries for themselves. Also, and more significantly, the TADS 3 conversation system is much more complex in its inner workings than anything seen in a standard IF library before. TADS 3 conversations can be constructed as complicated threads in which mention of one topic will open up new avenues of discourse. A single topic can also be mentioned repeatedly by the player, with different responses as the conversation moves deeper and deeper into the topic’s depths. The end result is that TADS 3 conversations in the hands of a good author can be some of the most natural and lifelike yet seen in IF. The character interaction problem in IF may never be completely solved, but steps like the TADS 3 conversation model show that it is possible to improve on what currently exists.

Another exciting technological development is on the horizon as of this writing. Graham Nelson is about to release the latest iteration of his IF development language, Inform 7, and it does represent a revolutionary change, a new way of creating IF compared to everything that has come before. Inform 7 is not a conventional programming language, but neither is it an easy but limited point and click system ala Adrift. It rather uses natural language processing to allow its author to construct games using simple English sentences. Some typical Inform 7 “code” might look like this:

East of the Garden is the Gazebo. Above is the Treehouse. A billiards table is in the Gazebo. On in it a trophy cup. A starting pistol is in the cup.

A weight is a kind of value. 10kg specifies a weight. Everything has a weight. A thing usually has weight 1kg.

A container has a weight called breaking strain. The breaking strain of a container is usually 50kg. Definition: A container is bursting if the total weight in it is greater than its breaking strain.

A lead pig, a feather, a silver pig, and a paper bag are in a room called the Metallurgy Workshop. The bag is a container with breaking strain 2kg. The lead pig has weight 4kg. The feather has weight 0kg.

Inform 7 is worth getting excited over because has the potential to bring the rewards of IF authorship to hosts of non-technicians who have felt daunted by the programming-oriented systems that preceded it. In addition, those who have worked with it already claim that it makes things that were excruciatingly difficult under older systems into trivialities. Whether Inform 7 will live up to the potential it seems to possess at this writing is still very much an open question, but if it does it could represent the beginning of a whole new era of IF.

Spreading the Word

Just as Nelson has targeted those with no experience in programming with Inform 7, there has also been a fair amount of discussion on the newsgroups recently about possibilities for bringing the joys of playing IF to a wider audience. Some want to see IF returned to commercial viability, and certainly the relative recent successes of 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery and Future Boy! give such people hope. Others are more ambivalent about IF’s commercial prospects, at least for right now, but feel that there are many potential players out there who could and should be brought into the fold. For what it is worth, I count myself tentatively among the latter group. Proposals to accomplish this broadening of IF’s acceptance range widely in scope and feasibility. Before adding my two cents to the debate, I want to talk briefly about what might be motivating the community to have these discussions in the first place.

It seems to me that there is a slight feeling of stagnation within the community. The excitement of the early nineties IF renaissance, which stemmed first from the idea of having new quality “text adventures” to play at all and was then largely fuelled by a sense of experimentation, of seeing just what this medium might be capable of once freed of the need to conform to traditional adventure game tropes, has somewhat run its course now. The community is not unhealthy by any means, but it no longer really seems to be growing. I think some of these subjective impressions of mine are borne out when taking a look at one of the community’s most cherished institutions, the annual IF Competition.

The Competition peaked in 2000 and 2001 in terms of number of game entered. Each of these years sported more than fifty games. It has since shrunk to a relatively stable thirty-five or so entries each year. Now, this is hardly disastrous under any circumstances, and judging the overall health of the IF community by the number of entries in one competition is of course extreme folly. Further, a smaller Competition is in some ways a good thing, allowing judges as it does to have a reasonable expectation of playing all or most of the games during the Competition period. There is also something of a consensus that, while the number of entries are fewer, the general quality has increased somewhat in recent years, at least in the sense of there being fewer – although, of course, still too many – examples of bug-ridden dreck entered.

Still, perhaps my reader will allow me the assertion – formed from IF Competition data, my admittedly subjective personal impressions, and data such as the size of the average SPAG magazine issue from year to year – that in terms of numbers the IF community peaked around 2000 or 2001, and then shrunk slightly to its present level. Now, the present situation is not a bad one. Games, and often very good games, are still getting written, exciting new developments like TADS3 and Inform 7 are still appearing on occasion, and the community remains a more or less active and vibrant place to be. Indeed, I am repeatedly amazed at the generally elevated level of the discourse that goes on among its members. If IF is a small club, it is also a fascinating, vibrant, intelligent one. And yet I wonder at times what an infusion of fresh blood might accomplish for IF.

IF is by its very nature a niche pursuit. It is never going to rival, to pick a few random examples, NFL football, Eminen, or Grand Theft Auto for popularity. It does not necessarily follow, though, that the present community of perhaps a few thousand at best active players is the best it can hope for. Consider for a moment another quiet, cerebral hobby: crossword puzzles. At any airport on any busy travel day, one can find, tucked away here and here in various dark corners, individuals working crosswords. Yes, in this day of Gameboys and handheld DVD players, a certain tiny segment of the world prefers to entertain themselves with a pursuit that is if anything even more austere – and certainly much more low-tech – than IF. I would love to find a way to introduce some of those people – as well as some proportion of the much more sizable population of book lovers, and maybe even some more pencil-and-paper RPG nerds – to this hobby. These are of course niche pursuits in themselves, and yet the number of people engaged in each dwarfs IF by several orders of magnitude.

At this point, I want to note that my agenda here is not to bring hordes of crossword lovers on the IF scene. While I will gladly welcome anyone who is or might become interested in the medium’s possibility, I would love to see a mixture of people, including a fair number with a background in literature and the humanities. In other words, storytellers. The crossword-playing “community,” assuming it can be defined as such at all, I choose only as a handy example.

My reader may be expecting me to propose a grand outreach program to these other intellectual (not to say nerdy) communities at this point. Some who are aware of recent events in the community may even be ready to protest that this has been tried on various occasions before. For instance, IF was given quite a nice write-up in Games Magazine, a journal for crossword-loving types, in 2004. That article did bring a few new faces into the newsgroups, but it hardly ignited a revolution. Why? I do not think it is due to our medium being inherently too difficult for readers of that magazine. Certainly I am a great lover of IF, and even (more due to dogged experience than any intellectual brilliance on my part) fairly good at solving the games, yet many of the logical conundrums to be found in the typical issue of Games leave me frankly baffled and thoroughly out of my depth. I think the failure of this article, and many others like it, to generate significant new community members has something to do with the community’s own failure to put its best foot forward. Put bluntly, we make it too hard to get into IF.

Consider what a prospective IFer who has read about the hobby in Games Magazine, The New York Times, or anywhere else is initially faced with. First of all, there are two major systems for writing games, TADS and Inform, each requiring their own interpreter download, plus several more less commonly used but no less viable alternatives. Once the newbie has figured out that she needs an interpreter, there is a good chance that she will end up attempting to navigate the IF Archive in search of said interpreter and possibly of games to play onit. The Archive’s organization is arcane at best, the sort of thing that might make sense to a techie but that can seem a hopeless mess to someone just curious about trying out a new type of game. And the master Archive site is painfully slow.

There are of course solutions to these problems. Baf’s Guide is a wonderful resource that eases the migraines that the unfiltered Archive is likely to induce in even experienced IFers. Yet Baf’s Guide is not much help in getting started with an interpreter. There are a fair number of generously donated Archive mirrors that are generally much faster than their parent site. Yet the newbie probably does not know about these, and won’t find out unless she takes the time to read the fine print on Baf’s very carefully.

But surely anyone with the patience and intelligence to appreciate IF can overcome these comparatively minor hurdles? Of course they can, but I think this response to some extent misses a crucial point. A person who wanders into the realm of IF due to a mention in an article somewhere, or who stumbles across it during casual web surfing, is probably idly curious at best. If she is greeted with an experience that, as in the current model, manages to be simultaneously archaic in appearance and technologically daunting in practice, she will most likely just shrug her shoulders and move on to something else. She does not know how amazing and fascinating some of the community’s work really is, because she has no experience with it. It is up to the community to make it relatively easy for her to get that experience and hopefully come to that realization. For all its other successes, this is a task into which the community has put insufficient effort.

That may, however, finally be changing. Efforts are afoot to not only make IF more accessible, but to make it more modern and attractive in appearance. Along with all of the other innovations of Inform 7, for instance, a facility has now been added by which the author can easily include a “book cover” of sorts for her work, which is automatically displayed when the player begins the game. Thumbnail versions of this art could also be displayed in another application that has aroused considerable discussion in the community, even if it is a project still far from fruition: the creation of a sort of IF “I-Tunes” application that would allow the player to browse the Archive’s immense database of games, and to open any one of them on her computer with just a couple of clicks. A meta-data standard for IF is under discussion which could make this dream a reality by providing a standard format for storing basic information - copyright date, author name, brief description, etc. - about every game to facilitate easy searching and browsing. These projects have a long way to go, but the community seems increasingly committed to shedding the retro-gaming label once and for all and embracing the future. I believe a larger audience for IF is out there, and I believe an improved presentation for the genre as a whole is the best way to reach it.

Some see IF as suffering something of a directional crisis in the last few years. The wild experimentation with form that marked the late nineties has now largely subsided. One could argue that we have a pretty good sense of what the genre is capable of now, at least unless and until we see some quantum leap in artificial intelligence technology, or until something else occurs that shifts the paradigm of IF development. This is does not mean that the exciting phase of IF’s history is over, however. It may in fact be just beginning. Authors are now free to use the techniques that the experimentalists pioneered not as formal exercises but in the service of the stories they are attempting to tell. Some recent games, such as Jason Devlin’s Vespers and Chris Klimas’ Blue Chairs, have displayed just this ascendancy of substance over form that is the mark of a mature artform. There are many, many stories still to tell, and I believe that a substantial upswing in IF’s popularity could be just around the corner if the community stays the course with current efforts, even as increasing academic interest brings the genre a respectability it could never have dreamed of in the days of Infocom. Interactive narrative will be the literary form of the twenty-first century, and IF has every chance of continuing to be an important part of that movement for years to come.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1: What is Interactive Fiction

Chapter 2: The Birth of a Genre

Chapter 3: Bringing IF Home

Chapter 4: Infocom

Chapter 5: The Infocom Canon

Chapter 6: The Rest of Commercial IF

Chapter 7: The End of an Era

Chapter 8: The Growth of Hobbyist IF

Chapter 9: The Evolution of a Community

Chapter 10: Suggested Works of Modern IF

Chapter 11: The State of IF Today