~10 minute readIn Search of the Exotic: New Directions in Adventure Games
Adventure, Microsoft's version of the original granddaddy of the adventure game genre (and the first game of any kind offered for the IBM PC when it was introduced nearly 2 years ago), put me in a state of high dudgeon. Who the hell cared about finding a stupid magic rod and waving it to make a bridge magically appear across the crystal fissure? Maybe it would have been a lot more fun to, say, lure the fierce green snake to the edge of the fissure, throw your keys in the snake's eye, bop it over the head with your lantern, wait for rigor mortis to set in, and then use its body as a causeway. (Don't snicker, this is as logical as waving wands or muttering "xyzzy.") Or perhaps it might have been interesting to shinny down into the fissure just to see what the Colossal Cave rock formations were like. Maybe even have a picnic and invite the dwarfs to slice the salami with their wretched little axes!
WHO THE HELL cared about finding a stupid magic rod.
In your basic old-style adventure game, of course, attempts to pull off anything unorthodox are usually rewarded with the computer's ultimate circuits-glazed-over snub: "I don't understand that word." This tends not to perturb those souls for whom the world in the game is mere window-dressing for the real action: the thrill of hunting down the single correct piece of the puzzle. For me -- and, I suspect, for a lot of other folks who aren't math-whiz programmer types -- the puzzle is incidental. My idea of a terrific adventure game, in fact, is one that's most like that perennial linear entertainment form, the novel. You know: plot and characterization, vibrant dialogue, vivid descriptive passages, witty asides, and, above all, a world as compellingly real as L. Frank Baum's Oz, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Baker Street, Mark Twain's Missouri, or George Eliot's Middlemarch. Microsoft's Adventure, alas, is about as literary as IBM's Guide to Operations.
More Than Adventure
I recently revisited the adventure genre, however, and while I'm not about to burn my books or rip up my membership in the International Wizard of Oz Society, I have to confess that I'm feeling a little less curmudgeonly. Adventure games are evolving from a hacker's addiction into what can sometimes be an English major's delight.
ADVENTURE games are evolving into what can sometimes be an English major's delight.
One newish trend is adventure games with color graphics; another up-and-coming trend (at least for the PC; it's old hat for Apple owners) is the multi-disk game. Still another is the trend to reach beyond the caves-and-graves imagery of the earlier games and borrow from other literary traditions, such as science fiction, mysteries, or classics.
All these features are apparent in SierradVenture's Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, the world's first double-disk, hi-res Greek myth. As the game's manual (printed on fake ancient parchment) notes, "knowing a bit of mythology and the Classics -- a familiarity with Ulysses' adventures -- also will help you survive."
If you do know a bit of mythology, but don't remember Homer's mention of Colossal Island, don't be put off; the game is fun. It is an eighties version of the classics comics that so appalled my teachers when I was a kid. (What's next? "Close Encounters with Scylla and Charybdis"?)
Other happy trends include snazzier locales and just plain better writing. Norell Data System's The Phantom's Revenge" begins in a prison cell; in the first 5 minutes of play, the average adventurer staggers into a creepy old opera house with ghouls on the staircase, a low-life waterfront dive frequented by "big burly men in black shirts, fallen women, and computer freaks of all sorts," an island that sounds like something out of The Count of Monte Cristo, and a formal garden. "While you're here," the script reads, "please admire the rhododendrons," The computer won't let you pass until you do. Then it smugly agrees; "Lovely, absolutely lovely!"
Confronting the Creator
If there's a software company that deserves the title of the thinking man's (or woman's) adventure writers, it's Infocom of Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of the best presents any PC owner got for Christmas last year was Infocom's Deadline, in which the user plays a frazzled detective assigned to solve the death of one Charles Robner. Unlike most earlier games, Deadline allows players to communicate in (gasp!) English sentences ("Mrs. Robner, tell me about your husband.") rather than in two-word troglodyte baby talk ("give cage," "go building," "Me User, You Machine"). As in real life, time passes in Deadline, and things can go on behind your back. What the characters say and do are very much a function of how you behave. The characters -- family and friends of the late Mr. Robner, all assembled in his rambling estate on the day his will is to be read -- have distinct personalities in the best Agatha Christie tradition, and the game has 25 possible endings.
Best of all, though, is Deadline's wealth of delicious tiny details, things that make it more like playing with a wonderful dollhouse or a model train set than a verbal mind-teaser. When you flush the toilets in the Robner mansion, they oblige with a "Whhoooossshhhhh!" Pick up the telephone and you'll hear a dial tone. If you look in the gilt mirror in the master bedroom, "a bedraggled and weary police inspector looks back at you. His look seems to be saying, "Look what the cat dragged in.'" Riffle through the dresser and you'll find not clues but stockings and underwear. You can even jump off the balcony if the spirit moves you, in which case you "die," but not before experiencing an exhilarating sense of free-fall, as if the ground were rushing up to meet you.
Marc Blank is InfoCom's vice president for product development. If you're used to sales people hyping software that you wouldn't feed to a goat, you'll find Blank unique; he trashes his good software. Actually, Blank seems to despise every game that is more than 20 minutes old.
At the moment, Blank is high on an about-to-be-released thirties Hollywood private eye game called Witness, which, he insists, "makes Deadline look like garbage." Blank nearly swoons as he explains that the newspaper included as a prop is a copy of a real paper, and that the radio show the characters listen to is one that was actually on the air in Los Angeles.
Blank has to be coaxed into admitting that Deadline, if "rough" compared to Witness, was still a breakthrough. He concedes, for example, that he's a little partial to the book that lies on the library table, which, if you pick it up, turns out to be a novelized version of Deadline. (No, you can't read the ending; the programmers are way ahead of you.) "We're very committed to the art form of interactive stories," he says. "More and more, we're really in the business of simulating the world."
WE'RE IN THE business of simulating the world.
Games to Come
In the future, Blank imagines games based on currently unimaginable themes. "Maybe it would be fun to play a game where you're a jerk who makes all the wrong career moves." Other plans are to have games written by famous authors (another new Infocom game, Suspended, is by Michael Berlyn, a published science fiction writer), more adaptations (Infocom is working on a game based on the character of Tom Swift), and eventually, games that integrate the microcomputer with interactive video disks. "My favorite thing," Blank says dreamily, "is when I hear people say that they used to come home at night and watch TV... who now come home and play adventure games."
The first three Infocom games -- Zork versions I, II, and III -- are all essentially plotless puzzles in the standard adventure mold. The original Zork was written in the mid seventies at the Lab for Computer Science at MIT, the same place where the original Adventure was written. Adventure was programmed in FORTRAN and Zork in the LISP-like language MDL. According to Blank, Zork was part homage to Adventure and part an attempt to do the same thing faster. Blank refers to another Infocom game, the science fictional Starcross, as "essentially Zorks in Space."
The just-released Suspended is a little more like Deadline, although it's also so weird that it's like virtually nothing else this side of "The Twilight Zone." Packaged in a chalk-white, life-sized death's-head-type mask with eye holes (a party prop guaranteed to thrill all the practical jokers in your life), the game is subtitled: "A Cryogenic Nightmare." You, the user, have been selected to be put in suspended animation for 500 years while your mind directs a squad of robots who live in an elaborate underground labyrinth and supervise the food, weather, and transport systems on the surface of the planet. All the robots have distinct talents and personalities, of course. One spouts Shakespeare, another flirts outrageously. Your job is to manage the effectively or be replaced by one of your own clones. This mélange of administrative crisis management and high-tech, backstabbing doppelgangers adds up to a sort of "What Makes Sammy Interface?" It's nerve-wracking, but never dull.
I was never able to figure out what the ultimate goal of the game was (I kept getting replaced by my clone in what has to be one of the spookiest adventure-game scenes every written), but apparently there are even more rarefied subsets within for those who are already adept at the arcana of managerial robotics.
One command, "configure," allows you to change certain elements of the game in order to challenge others. Another nice touch for players of all levels is a map of the complex, supplied with little stick-on buttons representing the robots.
Zorkaholics
Despite such high-class goodies, Marc Blank says that most of his customers are Zork nuts. (Blank, naturally, loathes the original primitive Zork, which is the best-selling game of all.) So fanatic are these people, in fact, that some 15,000 have joined the "Zork Users Group" (ZUG). They shell out hard-earned money for such items as maps, clues (written in invisible ink in incrementally broader hints, so that you needn't reveal more than necessary) -- even T-shirts and a newsletter called (what else?) The New Zork Times. Beer mugs are threatened.
Who are these people? According to ZUG chief Mike Dornbrook, they come from as far away as Australia, Italy, and Hungary, and they "are the kind of people who, when they're stuck, feel desperate." (Contrast this with Blank's description of many Deadline players who "just hang around the Robner house," snooping in the linen closet and such.) The one reader survey Dornbrook undertook provided "maybe not so much a cross section of Zork players as the kind of people who tend to buy computers: young professionals, 20 to 40, mostly men, and a lot of computer programmers." What was less predictable of Dornbrook was the amount of time people spent in the underground empire -- often 4 hours at a sitting. The average length of time to solve a game is 40 hours.
Dornbrook and Blank were actually old friends and lab partners form college. Blank was originally a medical student, and Dornbrook a "drifting" biology type. Unlike most of Blank's other friends, Dornbrook knew nothing about computer games -- to this day he's never once put a quarter in an arcade slot -- and when Blank was beta-testing the Zorks, he called on his old friend to come give him an unbiased perspective. "They originally paid me $6 an hour," Dornbrook says. "I fell in love with the games, but I didn't tell them, because I thought they wouldn't pay me anymore."
As the games began to sell, people from all over the world were starting to call the MIT Lab for Computer Science and ask anyone who answered the phone how to get past the troll. With Blank's blessing, Dornbrook, who was moving to Chicago to go to business school, started an independent hint service that eventually grew into ZUG. "People still call MIT trying to find out how to get past the troll," according to Dornbrook.
Meanwhile, the ranks of adventurers grow, be they manic puzzle-solvers or people like me, who like to look under the Robners' beds just for the hell of it. ("No doubt you intended to find the bogeyman, but you're out of luck.")
This article appeared in
PC Magazine
Jul 1983
These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.
