<!--
	Title: Mike Berlyn: Programming His Way to a Pulitzer
	Author: Lan Barnes
	Source: Softalk v
	Date: June 1982
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

*Sitting down to his new adventure game, the player finds himself on his way
back to Earth with an antiplague serum among his other cargo. But his ship
is overtaken by an alien race, forced dowm onto their planet, stripped down to
the hull, the pieces are scattered over the alien planet, and he's imprisoned.
Can he find the keys to reversing that process?*

<img class="float-right" src="/public/img/articles/mike-berlyn-programming-his-way-to-a-pulitzer/michael-berlyn-1.jpg" alt="Michael Berlyn">

If that sounds more like the plot of a science fiction novel than an adventure
game, that's probably because it's a description of *Oo-Topos*, an adventure
game written by Michael Berlyn, a programmer who was a science fiction
novelist before discovering micros.

Berlyn's story reverses many of the trends shown by other writers who use
small computers for word processors. Always an independent spirit, the
thirty-two-year-old novelist, whose credits include *Crystal Phoenix* and *The
Integrated Man* with Bantam Books, and *Blight* under the name "Mark Bonders"
with Ace Books, actually became a writer because, as he puts it, "I hate
working. I don't work well for other people. I need to be doing something
creative. I paint, and I'm a musician -— I played electric violin and guitar
for a rock group called Taylor Mills Road in New York for a while."

But more was involved than creative laziness. Always an avid science fiction
reader, Berlyn took a course in science fiction as literature while an
undergraduate at Florida Atlantic University. "My professor said that for our
final exam we could write a short story," Berlyn recalls. "So I figured, 'Okay,
what's so hard about that?' Little did I know."

But when the professor told Berlyn that his story was worth publishing, it
gave the young rebel something to ponder. "I thought, if it's possible for me,
I'd much rather make my living doing something by myself for myself in which
I'm my own boss than work for someone else."

An Apple II proved the catalyst that transformed Berlyn the writer into Berlyn
the programmer. "I was going full blast as a science fiction writer when I
decided to purchase an Apple to use as a word processor. I figured that it
would save me a lot of time and work in not having to retype anything.

"My first word processor was *Dr. Memory*, which was really all that was
around then," he recalls. "I struggled along with it as best I could —- or as
best as it could -— and while I was doing that, I was playing games for my own
amusement. I found myself enjoying the games more and more and trying to
figure out whether or not I could write them myself."

Soon Berlyn found himself splitting his time "about fifty-fifty" between
writing on his Apple and writing for it.

"That's how I got started in it in the summer of 1978. I was getting more and
more involved in the Apple. Writing a program is very similar to writing a
book in that there are problems that must be overcome, and you can see when
it's working and when it's not working, and there are levels and layers of
complexity," Berlyn says.

"The amount of satisfaction that I can achieve from writing a good program
is —- I will not say the equal of writing a good book, but it is similar. The
more I got involved with programming, the more I wanted to learn about
assembly and Forth and the different languages that were out there."

A "laser learner," Berlyn set his sights on what he wanted to know, and went
straight for it. He started absorbing computerese at an incredible rate and,
within six months, was an adequate programmer. "Having an Apple at home full
time and having nothing else to do was a help," he admits.

But as he eased into programming, Berlyn stayed close to familiar ground —- he
wrote a science fiction adventure game. "*Oo-Topos* was my first program, and
I think I bit off more than I could chew at the time," he says. "I liked the
original *Adventure* so much that I wanted to do something like it, a lot
larger, a lot more intelligent, a lot larger vocabulary, but basically in the
same format.

<img class="float-left" src="/public/img/articles/mike-berlyn-programming-his-way-to-a-pulitzer/michael-berlyn-2.jpg" alt="Michael Berlyn typing on his computer">

"I started on it just about the time I got *Dr. Memory*, and worked on it for
a year and a half, until I got it into the shape that it is now. It turned out
to be 150 rooms and about four hundred-some-odd vocabulary words —- it really
grew into something huge."

*Oo-Topos* is still doing very well, Berlyn says. "People seem to like it. It
was the first real science fiction adventure with any kind of a plot, any kind
of tone, with any kind of science fiction consistency in it."

In 1980 Berlyn and his new wife, Muffy, left West Palm Beach, Florida, and
relocated to Aspen, Colorado. "I sold my Apple," he says. "I had no real plans
to stay with computers, but when we got here, I just happened to walk into a
computer store in town and ask if they needed any programs written."

The store's owners almost leapt upon him, he says. "They really needed a
programmer in the area. It's a pretty isolated little town, although very
sophisticated, and there wasn't a programmer here, especially for Apples. It
was a tailor-made situation."

He began working at the store and within a short time decided to found a
software company with some other people in the area. "When we started, we set
our sights on outdoing Visi-Corp, which was then Personal Software. We're
dedicated to high-quality programs and national distribution—that whole trip.
We've been working really hard at doing that."

For Berlyn, the key to high-quality programming is interactivity. "Actually,
the name of our company is Sentient, and sentient means 'aware,' " he says.
"In a science fiction sense, when you call an alien creature sentient, you
mean that it's an intelligent, feeling, aware creature, almost as if it had
human qualities. And that is what our goal is for all of our programs. To make
the user feel as if he's interacting with a partner rather than a machine."

Berlyn is in charge of games development at Sentient and still writes games
himself. Other games projects are presently jobbed out to freelance
programmers, and Sentient boasts a business line coming out with a general
ledger, accounts receivable, and accounts payable. "We've also spent a long
time developing a job-cost and accounting package for hard disk," Berlyn says.

Today he programs almost entirely in assembly, he says. "*Oo-Topos* is an
all-Applesoft program. "*Cyborg*, my second adventure game, is about 75
percent Applesoft and 25 percent assembly, and two graphics games I just
finished, *Congo* and *Gold Rush*, are all assembly. The differences between
the languages is really incredible in getting results, and I find assembly
easier to work in now than Basic. Besides, I enjoy it a lot more. I'm starting
to look at Forth as a real viable language, especially for the kind of
interactive adventures I want to write."

Interactive? Yes, Berlyn says, with both his artist's and his businessman's
natures showing. "Pure adventure games as extended puzzles have probably had
their day—they just can't compete with graphics games," he says. "But the
adventure games are evolving into interactive novels, the first all-computer
aesthetic development.

"*Oo-Topos* is the start of an interactive novel, but *Cyborg* is an
interactive novel. *Cyborg* isn't even an adventure, although we bill it as
one, and it's being reviewed and played as an adventure. The program itself is
about the same size as *Oo-Topos* is, but there's an excuse, a reason for the
computer being there.

"It really creates another persona, a character in the computer, and that is
your cyborgan half. As a player, you are only half the player. You have a
partner that is the computer, and you can ask opinions of it on locations, on
objects, on situations; you can have it scan objects for you using its cyborg
powers."

What makes a program an interactive novel? The same thing that makes a book
interactive, Berlyn says: total absorption into the characters, the situation,
and the plot.

<img class="float-right" src="/public/img/articles/mike-berlyn-programming-his-way-to-a-pulitzer/michael-berlyn-3.jpg" alt="Michael Berlyn showing off his computer">

"What takes people away from being absorbed in games is the lack of
sophistication of the user interface," he says. "So a program becomes an
interactive novel when playing. It's no longer simply a question of walking
through situations and solving puzzles. Instead, there's something that
unfolds, that illuminates the player.

"So instead of identifying with a hero you read about, you become the hero as
you play. And the role that the hero plays is different in an interactive
novel than in an adventure game. Both the player and the plot evolve as the
game is played."

In that respect, Berlyn has managed to achieve a unique synthesis of the
programmer and writer into a new breed of artist. "I'm involved in two
projects that are cutting new ground," he says. "I really can't discuss one of
them, but the other is going to bring the adventure another step closer to the
interactive novel."

So Michael Berlyn is back over the keyboard of one of the two Apple IIs or the
Apple III at Sentient, but whether he's a programmer doing writing or a writer
doing programming is hard to tell. Yet despite his achievements, he doesn't
consider himself particularly unique.

"The science fiction market was easier to break into than any other," he says,
"in that it is one of the only short story markets that is still actively
searching out material, and they had absolutely no objections to buying a
story from an unpublished writer. Well, that kind of free and easy attitude
exists In programming, too. It's getting less and less like that, but It sure
was like that last year, and it was even more like that the year before.

"The level of sophistication in the programs that are coming out precludes the
home hobbyist from knocking something out over his weekends, and then
expecting it to make it in the big time. But opportunity is still wide open.
Good programmers can still find a place even if they're self-taught."

At Sentient, he says, they're actively seeking out people who write programs.
"There are people out there in college or in high school who don't do anything
when they go home but write programs. Every software company is looking for
those people, and there's a lot of money there to be made by freelancers, too.
It's still wide open in that respect," Berlyn says.

Software companies need new programmers because of the high level of
competition, he says. "I just know If you're doing a space graphics game, you
really have to compete with people like On-Line and Sirius, because their work
is out there and available. Someone would have to be crazy to buy your game if
it weren't as good as theirs. The level of sophistication Is going up as far
as the quality of progprams that are available now."

Nor does he find the dominance of arcade games unhealthy —- with some
exceptions. "They're fine as long as what they're offering Is not destructive.
*Pac-Man* Is what I consider a nonviolent arcade game. Something like
*Defender*, where you're shooting down things and the object of the game Is to
destroy as many things as possible creates a whole different feeling while
you're playing it. Implied violence is a negative aspect of arcade games that
really isn't being dealt with. I'd like to see it addressed somehow.

"My least favorite game is *Missile Command*. It's really a sick game. And my
second least favorite is *Shark Attack*. In that one, the player is the shark,
and the goal is to rip up and destroy divers who are shooting spears at you,
with pools of red blood in color graphics. It doesn't make It for me at all.

"Games like *Pac-Man* I don't see anything wrong with at all, or the amount of
quarters being pumped into them. It's a phase, but we lived through the hula
hoop. It's going to level out, I'm sure —- especially since I'm in the
business now."

And for Michael Berlyn's future? "I still love science fiction. I still like
working for myself. So underneath It all, I'm still a writer," he says.

"I'm using *SuperText II* now. It's my own personal preference after my
experience with all the capitalizing functions In *Dr. Memory*. I find *WordStar*
a bit of overkill for what I need, so I never bothered with it. And I've used
Paymar's upper/lower case adapter since it came out —- of course, his was the
only one then, so I don't have anything to compare it to.

"But I can hardly wait for the day I can buy a word processor all my own and
sit at home doing nothing but writing. I'm being a programmer now, and I'm
doing it with a passion, but I'm still a writer. I'm 100 percent committed to
programming, and, when that phase of my life Is over, I'll commit myself to
whatever's next.

"I was a musician for seven years, and I was totally committed to that. And
when that phase of my life was over, I was completely committed to writing.
And now it's programming. "So I don't know what lies ahead, but I sure hope
I'll go back to writing. I look forward to it, but I don't begrudge the time
I'm spending programming now at all. It's very exciting."
