<!--
	Title: The Case of the Micro Mystery
	Subtitle: The Private Eye's on Home Computers
	Author: Andrew Christie
	Source: Softline, v2(1)
	Date: September 1982
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

<img class="float-right-wide" src="/public/img/articles/softline-the-case-of-the-micro-mystery/the-game-is-afoot.jpg" alt="The Game is Afoot!">

*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.*

<p style="text-align: right">-- Agatha Christie</p>

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.