The Case of the Micro Mystery

The Private Eye's on Home Computers

Andrew Christie

I had read a good many detective novels, as I found they were excellent to take one's mind off one's worries. After discussing one with my sister, she said it was almost impossible to find a good detective story, where you didn't know who committed the crime. I said I thought I could write one.

-- Agatha Christie

It's three a.m. in the city; decent folks are home in bed. The wind is still blowing in from the desert, hot and dry and steady, fraying nerves to a razor's edge; fingers twitch and eyes glance furtively at shadows or jerk toward the sound of a match being struck and catch the sight of a cigarette end glowing in a doorway.

Two stories up, there's a light in a window. A mainframe programmer is hunched over his terminal, long after hours, stealthily punching up hit points, strength, wisdom, charisma, and agility, and cackling over his readouts. It's all luck; random chance. He doesn't know it. It doesn't mean a thing. Poor sap.

Meanwhile, across town, wandering kids are checking out the Pong game at the Burger Chef, or sneaking into the college recreation center to play Asteroids.

That's how it was. It wasn't much. Origins are always crude. Between games that only a programmer could love and games that had only a slight edge over the spin cycle at Laundry King, there was little to indicate future greatness. But in prehistoric Britain, there was little to indicate Shakespeare.

The health of an art form depends upon diversity. Diversity comes with complexity. Complexity comes with culture. If you're gonna play games with a computer, sooner or later you gotta go to the culture. Otherwise, you wind up as cold meat on a slab, because nobody can play the game forever.

It's that kind of business.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night. Here's the picture. Sometime around 700 A.D., a teller of tales decided to recount the saga of a mighty hero with a fast broadsword who performed great deeds and saved a village by slaying a monster and its mother.

Not thirteen hundred years after Beowulf, someone got the idea for a new kind of open-ended, role-playing game involving dungeons and dragons. And in a much shorter span of time, someone else put it into a computer.

Thus did the adventure make its way through the cultural matrix. The current focus of our concern did not take half so long. Sometime around April 1841, Edgar Allan Poe, casting about for some leisurely occupation "to keep from going mad," something to do in between the penning of his "serious" stories, hit upon a new idea; a genre composed of "tales of ratiocination." (He had already invented the short story sometime previously, making his task that much easier.) The first, "Murders in the Rue Morgue," presented a brilliant detective, a slightly dim but willing detective's assistant, a very dim officer of the law, a lot of false clues, and a climactic revelation of the solution to the mystery, provided by the brilliant detective in a room with all the suspects present, at the end of the story.

Everything old was once young.

Poe's new invention didn't really catch on stateside, but enjoyed a modest vogue across the Atlantic at the hands of Wilkie Collins, Emile Gaboriau, and Charles Dickens.

After the momentous arrival of Sherlock Holmes in 1887, the entire genre tended to coast on the reputation of the best-known character in English literature until the early 1920s, when Dame Agatha had her fateful conversation with her sister, and, along with Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Dashiell Hammett, created what is commonly known among aficionados as the golden age of detective fiction.

At which point, somebody decided it would make a good game.

Suddenly a Shot Rang Out. Mr. Ree was an elegant ancestor of the perennial Clue (more elegant by far than the current woefully streamlined version). In modern times, Electronic Detective uses the traditional elements in the service of a logic game with odd/even number sequences. Stop Thief brought an extra dimension to board games with its marvelously subtle auditory clues — doors and windows opening; footsteps, inside and outside; subways. ...

But it was the very first games, expensively printed books with pictures and diagrams, providing a dossier, evidence, and a packet at the end containing the solution, that were the most perfect hybrid of a literary genre that seemed based on games, and games that seemed based on books.

At least it seemed that way to Marc Blank, who discovered the Dennis Whitney thirties mystery game novels through a current reprint series from Mayflower Books.

Blank and the folks at Infocom were looking for a follow-up to Zork; a way to expand on the fantasy game and its relatively unrelated sets of puzzle problems. Reading the old game books, he knew he was on to something, except that at the end, the solution packet was not able to say, "No, you're wrong; try again"; it simply gave you the answer. It was not interactive.

"We wanted to come up with something where you have action/reaction," Blank recalls, "where you're told the part that you've missed after you come up with a potential solution, and you can go back and try again."

What Infocom came up with was the phenomenally popular Deadline, first in a series of interactive mysteries for the personal computer. The first forays into computer mystery, however, were Adventure International's Curse of Crowley Manor and Sierra On-Line's Mystery House, the latter fondly remembered today for all its cheerful mayhem and thudding bodies, plus an extensive vocabulary and pioneering graphics. Though these early games are very firmly in the adventure mold, the computer mystery can be seen to have descended from them, as the literary detective hero — a thinking man of action — descended from the adventure hero.

Crowley Manor does not have much to do with real life, attempting a blend of Edwardian mystery with standard-issue fantasy demons and wraiths. Mystery House is set in the contemporary world, an attraction for those among us who simply are not comfortable with fantasy. As Blank puts it, "When you open a door, you don't have to worry about a monster jumping out."

The mystery is indeed different from the adventure. "When you confront a problem, you have to say 'What am I gonna do now,' not two hundred moves from now, when you come back to it later. In Deadline, we wanted to appeal to the nonfantasy people who would rather be part of a real story; people who always wanted to participate when they read the books.

"We designed the game to be open-ended and to have a large vocabulary, but at the same time, we didn't want it too large and too open."

A detective story on a computer is a different proposition from a detective story in a book. Blank and company had to map out their plot twists and build their characters around them. "We couldn't throw in some amazing coincidence at the end that solves everything and that you could never possibly have guessed. You can't run all over town looking for clues, and you can't talk to the suspects about any subject that comes into your head."

Somewhere a Door Slammed. If Deadline, with its twenty-five thousand words of text and machine-independent language, is the Cadillac of the fledgling genre of computer detective fiction, there are currently several attractive economy models to choose from. Inevitably, they must all be compared to Deadline, as most everything else in this new genre is likely to be for some time to come.

Alibi, from Hayden Book Company's Microcomputer Gameware division, offers several levels of play, unlike Deadline, but it's far more limited and highly structured. Alibi is essentially author Ian Trackman's variation on the stalwart old one-of-them-always-lies-and-one-always-tells-the-truth party game. The first discrepancy in testimony generally gives you your murderer/liar, knowledge you can then use to ascertain place and time. Getting all three correct promotes you to the next level — more suspects, more rooms, and a longer time span. In play, it resembles Electronic Detective, much simplified. The near-infinite different sets of circumstances produced by combinations of these variables produces a new "case" with every playing, very much in the tradition of Clue.

For the younger set, there's the nonviolent Snooper Troops, a mystery series from Spinnaker Software, the first of which, The Granite Point Ghost, does, in fact, go all over town. Ostensibly (and successfully) a piece of educational software, this one is a delightful surprise. You get to drive around in your Snoopmobile (a '57 Buick, judging by maneuverability and response, but what the hey), choosing your own suspects from a large cast of characters with separate identities and personalities. You have several different ways to obtain clues, and though your interrogatives are limited, they are never repetitive. The first installment of the Snooper Troops series proves itself an original, owing nothing to any other game. For its literary antecedents, its roots are in the classics of juvenile detective fiction, recalling Encyclopedia Brown and the Hardy Boys rather than Hercule Poirot or Sam Spade.

The Maid Screamed; a Woman Fainted. All of the foregoing will find their markets among the fans of the type of game each represents. But for hardcore mystery addicts, the only actual competition for Deadline may well be Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, released as a bookshelf game last May by Sleuth Publications of San Francisco and now programmed for the Atari computer by Voyager Software. It's a game that gives new vistas of meaning to the term open-ended.

Scheduled for a release this fall, the Atari Forth version is a scaled-down rendering of Gary Grady's awesomely complex and intricate original game, consisting essentially of scenarios similar to the Thames Murders from the game case book, and using some graphics for a map of Holmes's London, circa 1886, with numbered clue points. Grady, a scholar of the Holmes canon, took two years to write the game, and embarked on the project with the idea of creating something "more complex than the board games. A game like 221 B Baker Street doesn't give a player a choice; you have no control over the clue you're going to get and there's no relationship of the clues to the process of play. We wanted the idea of solving a mystery rather than a puzzle."

For Grady, the difference between a logic game and a mystery is that a mystery gives you unexplained events from which you must deduce a larger context; a logic puzzle tells you what happened and leaves you to infer the specific events that make up that context.

"In real life, if a policeman walks into a room and finds a dead body, that's all he knows."

Like the original, Voyager's computer translation is planned to be a multiplayer game, with players donning the roles of the Baker Street Irregulars and competing with Holmes in the streets of Victorian London to find the solution to each case with maximum dispatch. In the course of investigating the main case, players are liable to stumble onto several other unrelated mysteries; part of the mystery is finding out how many cases you have to solve.

Consulting Detective will be regularly updated with new cases, all requiring a master disk containing the essential information for play.

A Cloud Passed over the Moon. How to follow Sherlock Holmes was a problem before and may prove to be a problem again. (Infocom's next mystery game, planned for release in early 1983, will be an eyewitness murder case in which you may prevent the murder from occurring or possibly die trying.) It has long been noted that the most vital and interesting writers of fiction in America during the last fifty years have been mystery writers; detective novel hacks; graduates of the pulp thriller, once removed: the Raymond Chandlers, Dashiell Hammetts, and Ross MacDonalds.

This new breed of computer game may well bring out the best in designers and programmers, igniting a comparable renaissance of the popular imagination.

Marc Blank is convinced:

"In the movie Deathtrap, they show you the body and tell you it's dead. It turns out not to be.... In these games, you examine the body. Unlike books and movies, there's no cheating. The intent is not to maximize audience surprise, but a player's sense of accomplishment."

Or as Gary Grady recalls, "Dorothy Sayers once said that the job of the mystery writer is to gently take the reader by the hand and lead him in the wrong direction. We don't do that."

That's the essential difference between computer detection and the literary mystery, though it all started in the same cradle of popular culture. One could take that case as far back as 1794 and Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, which, in recounting the trials of a stalwart English couple who endure an extended stay in an ancient Italian castle, bearing up under threats of death, abduction, the supernatural, and a general air of menace, probably created several genres at once. Lots of secret panels and underground catacombs, too.

Thus do the old and enduring genetic materials return and return again, crossing over from one medium to another to lend several hundred years of literary tradition to your eager little micro. And everything old is new again.

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