<!--
	Title: In Search Of The Exotic: New Directions In Adventure Games
	Subtitle: Drawing from classical myths, detective fiction, and wild imaginations, adventure game authors are leading players into selcouth territory.
	Author: Lindsy Van Gelder
	Source: PC Magazine, v2(2)
	Date: July 1983
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

*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!

<blockquote class="pull-quote float-right center">
<strong><em>W<span style="margin-left: -0.5em;">HO THE HELL cared about finding a stupid magic rod.</span></em></strong>
</blockquote>

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.

<blockquote class="pull-quote float-left center">
<strong><em>ADVENTURE games are evolving into what can sometimes be
	an English major's delight.</em></strong>
</blockquote>

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.

<figure class="float-right-narrow">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/pcmag-in-search-of-the-exotic/suspended-packaging.jpg" alt="Suspended packaging">
	<figcaption>Suspended, <em>an interactive science fiction game from Intercom, features
		a functional game board and movable game pieces. The package is
		embellished with a face frozen in time -- a cryogenic face.</em></figcaptioN>
</figure>

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."

<blockquote class="pull-quote float-left center">
<strong><em>W<span style="margin-left: -0.5em;">E'RE IN THE business of simulating the world.</span></em></strong>
</blockquote>

## 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.

<figure class="float-right-narrow">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/pcmag-in-search-of-the-exotic/starcross-packaging.jpg" alt="Starcross packaging">
	<figcaption><em>To successfully complete Infocom's science fiction game</em>
		Starcross, <em>players will need to utilize the four-color starchart.
		The game is packaged in a flying-saucer-shaped package.</em></figcaption>
</figure>

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.

<div class="article-sidebar-box float-left-wide" style="border-top: 4px solid; border-bottom: 1px solid; columns: 2; background: var(--mdgrey);">

<h2 class="tight">Games Mentioned in This Article</h1>
<hr style="border-top: 4px solid; border-bottom: 0;">

<p class="tight" style="margin-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">
<em>Ulysses and the Golden Fleece</em><br>
Sierra On-Line Inc.<br>
36575 Mudge Ranch Rd.<br>
Coarsegold, CA 93614<br>
(209) 683-6858</p>
<p class="tight">
<strong>List Price:</strong> $32.95<br>
<strong>Requires:</strong> 48K, one disk drive, color/graphics adapter.
</p>
<hr style="border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 0;">
<p class="tight" style="margin-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">
<em>The Phantom's Revenge</em><br>
Norell Data Systems<br>
3400 Wilshire Blvd.<br>
P.O. Box 70127<br>
Los Angeles, CA 90010<br>
(213) 257-2026</p>
<p class="tight">
<strong>List Price:</strong> Available from manufacturer.<br>
<strong>Requires:</strong>64K, one disk drive.
</p>
<hr style="border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 0;">
<p class="tight" style="margin-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">
<em>Adventure</em> (Microsoft version)<br>
Distributed by IBM Personal<br>
Entertainment Series<br>
Boca Raton, FL 33432<br>
(305) 998-6007</p>
<p class="tight">
<strong>List Price:</strong> Available from manufacturer.<br>
<strong>Requires:</strong>32K, one disk drive.
</p>
<hr style="border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 0;">
<p class="tight"><em>Zork I: The Great Underground Empire</em>
<p class="tight"><em>Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz</em>
<p class="tight"><em>Zork III: The Dungeon Master</em>
<p class="tight"><em>Deadline</em>
<p class="tight"><em>Starcross</em>
<p class="tight"><em>Suspended</em>
<p class="tight" style="margin-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">
<em>Witness</em> (Microsoft version)<br>
Infocom, Inc.<br>
55 Wheeler St.<br>
Cambridge, MA 02138<br>
(617) 492-1031</p>
<p class="tight">
<strong>List Price:</strong> Deadline, Suspended, Witness, $49.95; all others, $39.95<br>
<strong>Requires:</strong> 48K, one disk drive.
</p>
</div>

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.")
