Atari Playfield

At Long Last, Fooblitzky

Gregg Williams

The Atari 1040 ST

The big news in January was the introduction of the Atari 1040 ST. Tramiel, for all his faults, has created a computer that breaks an important price barrier--the first computer with a megabyte of memory (1024 K) for under $1000! The Atari 1040 ST sells for $999 with a monochrome monitor and $1199 with a color monitor. It includes an internal power supply and internal double-sided 720 K disk drive, a full 1 megabyte of usable memory (the TOS operating system that ate up much of the 520 ST's memory is in ROM on the 1040 ST), an RF modulator (so you can hook it up to a color TV set), and Atari BASIC and Logo.

At the moment, the only advantages to having a 1040 ST are that you have more space for BASIC and Logo programs and that the unit boots up much faster (in about 5 seconds). The real advantage will come when someone writes some software that really takes advantage of all that memory.

Atari will continue to sell the 520 ST, but they're unbundling the $800 package to $300 for the computer, $200 for the disk drive, $200 for the monochrome monitor, and $400 for the color monitor. You can now use the 520 ST with a color TV, too, which means that you can buy a working 520 ST system for $500. All this is hard to imagine for someone whose first computer cost $700 and had cassette storage and 16 K of memory, but it's sure a lot of fun!

At Long Last, Fooblitzky

Now I finally have the room to talk about Fooblitzky, a game that I first saw a prototype of in (I think) 1983 during a visit to Infocom. This game is noteworthy in two ways. First, it's a multiplayer game with some graphics (from a company best known for its solitaire puzzle-oriented text adventures). Second, it's not out on the market yet but is (by the time you read this) at the tail end of a six-month test promotion to regular Infocom customers.

I shelled out $39.95 for the game, sight unseen, largely because I'm very involved in multiplayer games -- but also because, if the game is never (God forbid) officially released, I'll have a real collector's item.

I love multiplayer games. Solitaire games are wonderful to have around, but nothing beats a well-designed game that immerses (and brings together) several people in the cozy soup of human interaction. My favorite multiplayer games are M.U.L.E. (an Atari game from Electronic Arts -- one of the best games ever designed) and Cosmic Encounter (a multiplayer board game). Fooblitzky isn't as interactive as these two games, but it's still a fun way to spend time with a few friends. Like many of my favorite games, it has a whimsical premise, a definite element of luck, and delightfully unexpected turns of fortune.

Fooblitzky requires two to four players (no solitaire option, unfortunately) and includes four folding workslates and erasable markers. Each workslate contains a replica of the on-screen playing board and an area for keeping notes. You play using your Atari and either one joystick or the keyboard. The software (not copy-protected, by the way) is the electronic equivalent of paper maps, dice, and plastic tokens -- the Atari shows you the board, sets up the hidden portions of the game, and tells you what you're entitled to know.

As advertised, Fooblitzky is very much like a cross between Mastermind and Clue. At the beginning of the game, each player secretly chooses one item from a list of 18 (the computer chooses for any absent player positions). The object of the game is to discover what the four secret items are and get them to a checkpoint. Checkpoints are maddening because they tell you how many correct and incorrect items you have, but not which items are which (this is where the game resembles Mastermind). Deductions you make from observations about where certain items are and aren't provide the resemblance to Clue.

Playing Fooblitzky

Several things influence your actions during the game. You may get sent to the hospital if you cross a dangerous street intersection, you can buy or sell items at the pawn shop, and, if you're on the street at the end of your turn, you may get "flashed" by the Chance Man, who may do you a favor or really mess you up. If you're sufficiently sneaky, you can also "bump" an opponent and grab some of his or her items. If you run out of money (called "foobles"), you can earn some more by washing dishes in a restaurant.

Fooblitzky uses a highly stylized "doggy" motif throughout the game (for example, their one ad promises that "this is one game that's really going to bow wow you"). The game board represents the town of Fooblitzky, with its shops, sidewalk squares, and crosswalks (some of which, from move to move, become dangerous to cross). The city is divided into four quadrants, each of which has six stores (drug, grocery, hardware, pet, sport, and toy stores). Each store sells three items -- for example, the pet store sells fish, snakes, and pigs. Each item costs either 4, 8, or 16 foobles, and there is one item of each price in each store. (At the beginning, the computer tells you the prices of the four secret items. If the items cost, say, 4, 4, 16, and 16 foobles, you can automatically ignore the six items that cost 8 foobles each.) You can carry only four items, so you must sometimes discard an item to be able to pick up another one -- and woe is you if you discard the wrong item!

The Importance of Being Watchful

It gets complicated: at the beginning of the game, each store in each quadrant has one of each item -- except that one of the four copies of an item is removed if it is chosen as a secret item. (This means that, if you walk into a store that nobody's been in and the item is missing, it's one of the four secret items.) Items stolen by the Chance Man or given away to Charity Central appear randomly in pawn shops (this makes things difficult in a four-player game, when there are four players and only four copies of a given item). If you get tired of running around town, you can either take the UGH (Underground Highway) or you can call a distant store from a phone booth.

I don't have the room to explain some of the finer details (like what happens when two players choose the same item), but you get the idea. The game goes to the player who takes good notes, has some good luck, and is careful enough make absolutely no wrong inferences -- one wrong inference can severely damage your chances of winning. Fooblitzky was designed by Michael Berlyn, Brian Cody, Poh Lim, and Paula Maxwell. It was originally started by Berlyn (who's no longer with Infocom) as an exercise to see if it was possible to write games with graphics that can easily be moved to different computers (which is Infocom's trademark with its text adventures). The answer is a qualified yes. Fooblitzky currently runs on Apple, Atari, and IBM computers. The game makes occasional sounds and uses graphic images (nicely designed by Maxwell), but the moving graphic images are jerky and slow; fortunately, both sound and graphics are ornamental and can be tolerated. Mike Berlyn says that Infocom has removed some of the satirical aspects of the game as he designed it; given his sense of humor and sharp wit (as seen in his adventure Planetfall), that's our loss.

Fooblitzky is an interesting game that is a moderate but not overly taxing workout of brain cells -- it's not Pac Man, but (fortunately) it's not chess, either. It has numerous game options, and the mechanics of play are well engineered. I like it, especially when you have three or four players. I don't know the eventual status of the game, but you can order it from Infocom's mail-order service at 800-262-6868. If all goes well, perhaps Infocom will eventually design more multiplayer games.

That's all for now. Until then, remember -- he who laughs, lasts.

---

---

These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.