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The Later Years of Douglas Adams

19 Jul

If God exists, he must have a sense of humor, for why else would he have strewn so many practical jokes around his creation? Among them is the uncanny phenomenon of the talented writer who absolutely hates to write.

Mind you, I don’t mean just the usual challenges which afflict all of us architects of sentences and paragraphs. Even after all these years of writing these pieces for you, I’m still daunted every Monday morning to face a cursor blinking inscrutably at the top of a blank page, knowing as I do that that space has to be filled with a readable, well-constructed article by the time I knock off work the following Friday evening. In the end, though, that’s the sort of thing that any working writer knows how to get through, generally by simply starting to write something — anything, even if you’re pretty sure it’s the wrong thing. Then the sentences start to flow, and soon you’re trucking along nicely, almost as if the article has started to write itself. Whatever it gets wrong about itself can always be sorted out in revision and editing.

No, the kind of agony which proves that God must be a trickster is far more extreme than the kind I experience every week. It’s the sort of birth pangs suffered by Thomas Harris, the conjurer of everybody’s favorite serial killer Hannibal Lecter, every time he tries to write a new novel. Stephen King — an author who most definitely does not have any difficulty putting pen to paper — has described the process of writing as a “kind of torment” for his friend Harris, one which leaves him “writhing on the floor in frustration.” Small wonder that the man has produced just six relatively slim novels over a career spanning 50 years.

Another member of this strange club of prominent writers who hate to write is the Briton Douglas Adams, the mastermind of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Throughout his career, he was one of genre fiction’s most infuriating problem children, the bane of publishers, accountants, lawyers, and anyone else who ever had a stake in his actually sitting down and writing the things he had agreed to write. Given his druthers, he would prefer to sit in a warm bath, as he put it himself, enjoying the pleasant whooshing sound the deadlines made as they flew by just outside his window.

That said, Adams did manage to give outsiders at least the impression that he was a motivated, even driven writer over the first seven years or so of Hitchhiker’s, from 1978 to 1984. During that period, he scripted the twelve half-hour radio plays that were the foundation of the whole franchise, then turned them into four novels. He also assisted with a six-episode Hitchhiker’s television series, even co-designed a hit Hitchhiker’s text adventure with Steve Meretzky of Infocom. Adams may have hated the actual act of writing, but he very much liked the fortune and fame it brought him; the former because it allowed him to expand his collection of computers, stereos, guitars, and other high-tech gadgetry, the latter because it allowed him to expand the profile and diversity of guests whom he invited to his legendary dinner parties.

Still, what with fortune and fame having become something of a done deal by 1984, his instinctive aversion to the exercising of his greatest talent was by then beginning to set in in earnest. His publisher got the fourth Hitchhiker’s novel out of him that summer only by moving into a hotel suite with him, standing over his shoulder every day, and all but physically forcing him to write it. Steve Meretzky had to employ a similar tactic to get him to buckle down and create a design document for the Hitchhiker’s game, which joined the fourth novel that year to become one of the final artifacts of the franchise’s golden age.

Adams was just 32 years old at this point, as wealthy as he was beloved within science-fiction fandom. The world seemed to be his oyster. Yet he had developed a love-hate relationship with the property that had gotten him here. Adams had been reared on classic British comedy, from Lewis Carrol to P.G. Wodehouse, The Goon Show to Monty Python. He felt pigeonholed as the purveyor of goofy two-headed aliens and all that nonsense about the number 42. In So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the aforementioned fourth Hitchhiker’s novel, he’d tried to get away from some of that by keeping the proceedings on Earth, delivering what amounted to a magical-realist romantic comedy in lieu of another zany romp through outer space. But his existing fans hadn’t been overly pleased by the change of direction; they made it clear that they’d prefer more of the goofy aliens and the stuff about 42 in the next book, if it was all the same to him. “I was getting so bloody bored with Hitchhiker’s,” Adams said later. “I just didn’t have anything more to say in that context.” Even as he was feeling this way, though, he was trying very hard to get Hollywood to bite on a full-fledged, big-budget Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy feature film. Thus we have the principal paradox of his creative life: Hitchhiker’s was both the thing he most wanted to escape and his most cherished creative comfort blanket. After all, whatever else he did or didn’t do, he knew that he would always have Hitchhiker’s.

For a while, though, Adams did make a concerted attempt to do some things that were genuinely new. He pushed Infocom into agreeing to make a game with him that was not the direct sequel to the computerized Hitchhiker’s that they would have preferred to make. Bureaucracy was rather to be a present-day social satire about, well, bureaucracy, inspired by some slight difficulties Adams had once had getting his bank to acknowledge a change-of-address form. Meanwhile he sold to his book publishers a pair of as-yet unwritten non-Hitchhiker’s novels, with advances that came to about $4 million combined. They were to revolve around Dirk Gently, a “holistic detective” who solved crimes by relying upon “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things” in lieu of more conventional clues. “They will be recognizably me but radically different, at least from my point of view,” he said. “The story is based on here and now, but the explanation turns out to be science fiction.”

Adams’s enthusiasm for both projects was no doubt authentic when he conceived them, but it dissipated quickly when the time came to follow through, setting a pattern that would persist for the rest of his life. He went completely AWOL on Infocom, leaving them stuck with a project they had never really wanted in the first place. It was finally agreed that Adams’s best mate, a fellow writer named Michael Bywater, would come in and ghost-write Bureaucracy on his behalf. And this Bywater did, making a pretty good job of it, all things considered. (As for the proper Hitchhiker’s sequel which a struggling Infocom did want to make very badly: that never happened at all, although Adams caused consternation and confusion for a while on both side of the Atlantic by proposing that he and Infocom collaborate on it with a third party with which he had become enamored, the British text-adventure house Magnetic Scrolls. Perhaps fortunately under these too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen circumstances, his follow-through here was no better than it had been on Bureaucracy, and the whole project died quietly after Infocom was shut down in 1989.)

Dirk Gently was a stickier wicket, thanks to the amount of money that Adams’s publishers had already paid for the books. They got them out of him at last using the same method that had done the trick for So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish: locking him in a room with a minder and not letting him leave until he had produced a novel. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency was published in 1987, its sequel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul the following year. The books had their moments, but fell a little flat for most readers. In order to be fully realized, their ambitious philosophical conceits demanded an attention to plotting and construction that was not really compatible with being hammered out under duress in a couple of weeks. They left Adams’s old fans nonplussed in much the same way that So Long… had done, whilst failing to break him out of the science-fiction ghetto in which he felt trapped. Having satisfied his contractual obligations in that area, he would never complete another Dirk Gently novel.

Then, the same year that the second Dirk Gently book was published, Adams stumbled into the most satisfying non-Hitchhiker’s project of his life. A few years earlier, during a jaunt to Madagascar, he had befriended a World Wildlife Federation zoologist named Mark Carwardine, who had ignited in him a passion for wildlife conservation. Now, the two hatched a scheme for a radio series and an accompanying book that would be about as different as they possibly could from the ones that had made Adams’s name: the odd couple would travel to exotic destinations in search of rare and endangered animal species and make a chronicle of what they witnessed and underwent. Carwardine would be the expert and the straight man, Adams the voice of the interested layperson and the comic relief. They would call the project Last Chance to See, because the species they would be seeking out might literally not exist anymore in just a few years. To his credit, Adams insisted that Carwardine be given an equal financial and creative stake. “We spent many evenings talking into the night,” remembers the latter. “I’d turn up with a list of possible endangered species, then we’d pore over a world map and talk about where we’d both like to go.”

They settled on the Komodo dragon of Indonesia, the Rodrigues flying fox of Mauritius, the baiji river dolphin of China, the Juan Fernández fur seal of South America’s Pacific coast, the mountain gorilla and northern white rhinoceros of East Africa, the kākāpō of New Zealand, and the Amazonian manatee of Brazil. Between July of 1988 and April of 1989, they traveled to all of these places — often as just the two of them, without any additional support staff, relying on Adams’s arsenal of gadgets to record the sights and especially the sounds. Adams came home 30 pounds lighter and thoroughly energized, eager to turn their adventures into six half-hour programs that were aired on BBC Radio later that year.

Mark Carwardine and Douglas Adams in the Juan Fernández Islands.

The book proved predictably more problematic. It was not completed on schedule, and was in a very real sense not even completed at all when it was wrenched away from its authors and published in 1990; the allegedly “finished” volume covers only five of the seven expeditions, and one of those in a notably more cursory manner than the others. Nevertheless, Adams found the project as a whole a far more enjoyable experience than the creation of his most recent novels had been. He had a partner to bounce ideas off of, making the business that much less lonely. And he wasn’t forced to invent any complicated plots from whole cloth, something for which he had arguably never been very well suited. He could just inhale his surroundings and exhale them again for the benefit of his readers, with a generous helping of the droll wit and the altogether unique perspective he could place on things. His descriptions of nature and animal life were often poignant and always delightful, as were those of the human societies he and Carwardine encountered. “Because I had an external and important subject to deal with,” mused Adams, “I didn’t feel any kind of compulsion to be funny the whole time — and oddly enough, a lot of people have said it’s the funniest book I’ve written.”

An example, on the subject of traffic in the fast-rising nation of China, which the pair visited just six months before the massacre on Tiananmen Square showed that its rise would take place on terms strictly dictated by the Communist Party:

Foreigners are not allowed to drive in China, and you can see why. The Chinese drive, or cycle, according to laws that are simply not apparent to an uninitiated observer, and I’m thinking not merely of the laws of the Highway Code; I’m thinking of the laws of physics. By the end of our stay in China, I had learnt to accept that if you are driving along a two-lane road behind another car or truck, and there are two vehicles speeding towards you, one of which is overtaking the other, the immediate response of your driver will be to also pull out and overtake. Somehow, magically, it all works out in the end.

What  I could never get used to, however, was this situation: the vehicle in front of you is overtaking the vehicle in front of him, and your driver pulls out and overtakes the overtaking vehicle, just as three other vehicles are coming towards you performing exactly the same manoeuvre. Presumably Sir Isaac Newton has long ago been discredited as a bourgeois capitalist running-dog lackey.

Adams insisted to the end of his days that Last Chance to See was the best thing he had ever written, and I’m not at all sure that I disagree with him. On the contrary, I find myself wishing that he had continued down the trail it blazed, leaving the two-headed aliens behind in favor of becoming some combination of humorist, cultural critic, and popular-science writer. “I’m full of admiration for people who make science available to the intelligent layperson,” he said. “Understanding what you didn’t before is, to me, one of the greatest thrills.” Douglas Adams could easily have become one of those people whom he so admired. It seems to me that he could have excelled in that role, and might have been a happier, more satisfied man in it to boot. But it didn’t happen, for one simple reason: as well as taking a spot in the running for the title of best book he had ever written, Last Chance to See became the single worst-selling one. Adams:

Last Chance to See was a book I really wanted to promote as much as I could because the Earth’s endangered species is a huge topic to talk about. The thing I don’t like about doing promotion usually is that you have to sit there and whinge on about yourself. But here was a big issue I really wanted to talk about, and I was expecting to do the normal round of press, TV, and radio. But nobody was interested. They just said, “It isn’t what he normally does, so we’ll pass on this, thank you very much.” As a result, the book didn’t do very well. I had spent two years and £150,000 of my own money doing it. I thought it was the most important thing I’d ever done, and I couldn’t get anyone to pay any attention.

Now, we might say at this point that there was really nothing keeping Adams from doing more projects like Last Chance to See. Financially, he was already set for life, and it wasn’t as if his publishers were on the verge of dropping him. He could have accepted that addressing matters of existential importance aren’t always the best way to generate high sales, could have kept at it anyway. In time, perhaps he could have built a whole new audience and authorial niche for himself.

Yet all of that, while true enough on the face of it, fails to address just how difficult it is for anyone who has reached the top of the entertainment mountain to accept relegation to a base camp halfway down its slope. It’s the same phenomenon that today causes Adams’s musical hero and former dinner-party guest Paul McCartney, who is now more than 80 years old, to keep trying to score one more number-one hit instead of just making the music that pleases him. Once you’ve tasted mass adulation, modest success can have the same bitter tang as abject failure. There are artists who are so comfortable in their own skin, or in their own art, or in their own something, that this truism does not apply. But Douglas Adams, a deeply social creature who seemed to need the approbation of fans and peers as much as he needed food and drink, was not one of them.

So, he retreated to his own comfort zone and wrote another Hitchhiker’s novel. At first it was to be called Starship Titanic, but then it became Mostly Harmless. The choice to name it after one of the oldest running gags in the Hitchhiker’s series was in some ways indicative; this was to be very much a case of trotting out the old hits for the old fans. The actual writing turned into the usual protracted war between Adams’s publisher and the author himself, who counted as his allies in the cause of procrastination the many shiny objects that were available to distract a wealthy, intellectually curious social butterfly such as him. This time he had to be locked into a room with not only a handler from his publisher but his good friend Michael Bywater, who had, since doing Bureaucracy for Infocom, fallen into the role of Adams’s go-to ghostwriter for many of the contracts he signed and failed to follow through on. Confronted with the circumstances of its creation, one is immediately tempted to suspect that substantial chunks of Mostly Harmless were actually Bywater’s work. By way of further circumstantial evidence, we might note that some of the human warmth that marked the first four Hitchhiker’s novels is gone, replaced by a meaner, archer style of humor that smacks more of Bywater than the Adams of earlier years.

It’s a strange novel — not a very good one, but kind of a fascinating one nonetheless. Carl Jung would have had a field day with it as a reflection of its author’s tortured relationship to the trans-media franchise he had spawned. There’s a petulant, begrudging air to the thing, right up until it ends in the mother of all apocalypses, as if Adams was trying to wreck his most famous creation so thoroughly that he would never, ever be able to heed its siren call again. “The only way we could persuade Douglas to finish Mostly Harmless,” says Michael Bywater, “was [to] offer him several convincing scenarios by which he could blow up not only this Earth but all the Earths that may possibly exist in parallel universes.” That was to be that, said Adams. No more Hitchhiker’s, ever; he had written the franchise into a black hole from which it could never emerge. Which wasn’t really true at all, of course. He would always be able to find some way to bring the multidimensional Earth back in the future, should he decide to, just as he had once brought the uni-dimensional Earth back from its destruction in the very first novel. Such is the advantage of being god of your own private multiverse. Indeed, there are signs that Adams was already having second thoughts before he even allowed Mostly Harmless to be sent to the printer. At the last minute, he sprinkled a few hints into the text that the series’s hero Arthur Dent may in fact have survived the apocalypse. It never hurts to hedge your bets.

Published in October of 1992, Mostly Harmless sold better than Last Chance to See or the Dirk Gently novels, but not as well as the golden-age Hitchhiker’s books. Even the series’s most zealous fans could smell the ennui that fairly wafted up from its pages. Nevertheless, they would have been shocked if you had told them that Douglas Adams, still only 40 years old, would never finish another book.

The next several years were the least professionally productive of Adams’s adult life to date. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; there is, after all, more to life than one’s career. He had finally married his longtime off-and-on romantic partner Jane Belson in 1991, and in 1994, when the husband’s age was a thoroughly appropriate 42, the couple had their first and only child. When not doting on his baby daughter Polly, Adams amused himself with his parties and his hobbies, which mostly involved his beloved Apple Macintosh computers and, especially, music. He amassed what he believed to be the largest collection of left-handed guitars in the world. His friend David Gilmour gave him his best birthday gift ever when he allowed him to come onstage and play one of those guitars with Pink Floyd for one song on their final tour. Adams also performed as one half of an acoustic duo at an American Booksellers’ Association Conference; the duo’s other half was the author Ken Follett. He even considered trying to make an album of his own: “It will basically be something very similar to Sgt. Pepper, I should think.” Let it never be said that Douglas Adams didn’t aim high in his flights of fancy…

Adams gives his daughter Polly some early musical instruction.

With Adams thus absent from the literary scene, his position as genre fiction’s premiere humorist was seized by Terry Pratchett, whose first Discworld novels of the mid-1980s might be not unfairly described as an attempt to ape Adams in a fantasy rather than a science-fiction setting, but who had long since come into his own. Pratchett evinced none of Adams’s fear and loathing of the actual act of writing, averaging one new Discworld novel every nine months throughout the 1990s. By way of a reward for his productivity, his wit, and his boundless willingness to take his signature series in unexpected new directions, he became the most commercially successful single British author of any sort of the entire decade.

A new generation of younger readers adored Discworld but had little if any familiarity with Hitchhiker’s. While Pratchett basked in entire conventions devoted solely to himself and his books, Adams sometimes failed to muster an audience of more than twenty when he did make a public appearance — a sad contrast to his book signings of the early 1980s, when his fans had lined up by the thousands for a quick signature and a handshake. A serialized graphic-novel adaption of Hitchhiker’s, published by DC Comics, was greeted with a collective shrug, averaging about 20,000 copies sold per issue, far below projections. Despite all this clear evidence, Adams, isolated in his bubble of rock stars and lavish parties, seemed to believe he still had the same profile he’d had back in 1983. That belief — or delusion — became the original sin of his next major creative project, which would sadly turn out to be the very last one of his life.

The genesis of Douglas Adams’s second or third computer game — depending on what you make of Bureaucracy — dates to late 1995, when he became infatuated with a nascent collective of filmmakers and technologists who called themselves The Digital Village. The artist’s colony cum corporation was the brainchild of Robbie Stamp, a former producer for Britain’s Central Television: “I was one of a then-young group of executives looking at the effects of digital technology on traditional media businesses. I felt there were some exciting possibilities opening up, in terms of people who could understand what it would mean to develop an idea or a brand across a variety of different platforms and channels.” Stamp insists that he wasn’t actively fishing for money when he described his ideas one day to Adams, who happened to be a friend of a friend of his named Richard Creasey. He was therefore flabbergasted when Adams turned to him and asked, “What would it take to buy a stake?” But he was quick on his feet; he named a figure without missing a beat. “I’m in,” said Adams. And that was that. Creasey, who had been Stamp’s boss at Central Television, agreed to come aboard as well, and the trio of co-founders was in place.

One senses that Adams was desperate to find a creative outlet that was less dilettantish than his musical endeavors but also less torturous than being locked into a room and ordered to write a book.

When I started out, I worked on radio, I worked on TV, I worked onstage. I enjoyed and experimented with different media, working with people and, wherever possible, fiddling with bits of equipment. Then I accidentally wrote a bestselling novel, and the consequence was that I had to write another and then another. After a decade or so of this, I became a little crazed at the thought of spending my entire working life in a room by myself typing. Hence The Digital Village.

The logic was sound enough when considered in the light of the kind of personality Adams was; certainly one of the reasons Last Chance to See had gone so well had been the presence of an equal partner to keep him engaged.

Still, the fact remained that it could be a little hard to figure out what The Digital Village was really supposed to be. Rejecting one of the hottest buzzwords of the age, Adams insisted that it was to be a “multiple media” company, not a “multimedia” one: “We’re producing CD-ROMs and other digital and online projects, but we’re also committed to working in traditional forms of media.” To any seasoned business analyst, that refusal to focus must have sounded like a recipe for trouble; “do one thing very, very well” is generally a better recipe for success in business than the jack-of-all-trades approach. And as it transpired, The Digital Village would not prove an exception to this rule.

Their first idea was to produce a series of science documentaries called Life, the Universe, and Evolution, a riff on the title of the third Hitchhiker’s novel; that scheme fell through when they couldn’t find a television channel that was all that interested in airing it. Their next idea was to set up The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Internet, a search engine to compete with the current king of Web searching Yahoo!; that scheme fell through when they realized that they had neither the financial resources nor the technical expertise to pull it off. And so on and so on. “We were going to be involved in documentaries, feature films, and the Internet,” says Richard Creasey regretfully. “And bit by bit they all went away. Bit by bit, we went down one avenue which was, in the nicest possible way, a disaster.”

That avenue was a multimedia adventure game, a project which would come to consume The Digital Village in more ways than one. It was embarked upon for the very simple reason that it was the only one of the founders’ ideas for which they could find adequate investment capital. At the time, the culture was living through an odd echo of the “bookware” scene of the mid-1980s, of which Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s game has gone down in history as the most iconic example. A lot of big players in traditional media were once again jumping onto the computing bandwagon with more money than sense. Instead of text and text parsers, however, Bookware 2.0 was fueled by great piles of pictures and video, sound and music, with a thin skein of interactivity to join it all together. Circa 1984, the print-publishing giant Simon & Schuster had tried very, very hard  to buy Infocom, a purchase that would have given them the Hitchhiker’s game that was then in the offing. Now, twelve years later, they finally got their consolation prize, when Douglas Adams agreed to make a game just for them. All they had to do was give him a few million dollars, an order of magnitude more than Infocom had had to put into their Hitchhiker’s.

The game was to be called Starship Titanic. Like perhaps too many Adams brainstorms of these latter days, it was a product of recycling. As we’ve already seen, the name had once been earmarked for the novel that became Mostly Harmless, but even then it hadn’t been new. No, it dated all the way back to the 1982 Hitchhiker’s novel Life, the Universe, and Everything, which had told in one of its countless digressions of a “majestic and luxurious cruise liner” equipped with a flawed prototype of an Infinite Improbability Drive, such that on its maiden voyage it had undergone “a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure.” In the game, the vessel would crash through the roof of the player’s ordinary earthly home; what could be more improbable than that? Then the player would be sucked aboard and tasked with repairing the ship’s many wildly, bizarrely malfunctioning systems and getting it warping through hyperspace on the straight and narrow once again. Whether Starship Titanic exists in the same universe — or rather multiverse — as Hitchhiker’s is something of an open question. Adams was never overly concerned with such fussy details of canon; his most devoted fans, who very much are, have dutifully inserted it into their Hitchhiker’s wikis and source books on the basis of that brief mention in Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Adams was often taken by a fit of almost manic enthusiasm when he first conceived of a new project, and this was definitely true of Starship Titanic. He envisioned another trans-media property to outdo even Hitchhiker’s in its prime. Naturally, there would need to be a Starship Titanic novel to accompany the game. Going much further, Adams pictured his new franchise fulfilling at last his fondest unrequited dream for Hitchhiker’s. “I’m not in a position to make any sort of formal announcement,” he told the press cagily, “but I very much hope that it will have a future as a movie as well.” There is no indication that any of the top-secret Hollywood negotiations he was not-so-subtly hinting at here ever took place.

In their stead, just about everything that could possibly go wrong with the whole enterprise did so. It became a veritable factory for resentments and bad feelings. Robbie Stamp and Richard Creasey, who didn’t play games at all and weren’t much interested in them, were understandably unhappy at seeing their upstart new-media collective become The Douglas Adams Computer Games Company. This created massive dysfunction in the management ranks.

Predictably enough, Adams brought in Michael Bywater to help him when his progress on the game’s script stalled out. Indeed, just as is the case with Mostly Harmless, it’s difficult to say where Douglas Adams stops and Michael Bywater begins in the finished product. In partial return for his services, Bywater believed that his friend implicitly or explicitly promised that he could write and for once put his own name onto the Starship Titanic novel. But this didn’t happen in the end. Instead Adams sourced it out to Robert Sheckley, his favorite old-school science-fiction writer, who was in hard financial straits and could use the work. When Sheckley repaid his charity with a manuscript that was so bad as to be unpublishable, Adams bypassed Bywater yet again, giving the contract to another friend, the Monty Python alum Terry Jones, who also did some voice acting in the game. Bywater was incensed by this demonstration of exactly where he ranked in Adams’s entourage; it seemed he was good enough to become the great author’s emergency ghostwriter whenever his endemic laziness got him into a jam, but not worthy of receiving credit as a full-fledged collaborator. The two parted acrimoniously; the friendship, one of the longest and closest in each man’s life, would never be fully mended.

And all over a novel which, under Jones’s stewardship, came out tortuously, exhaustingly unfunny, the very essence of trying way too hard.

“Where is Leovinus?” demanded the Gat of Blerontis, Chief Quantity Surveyor of the entire North Eastern Gas District of the planet of Blerontin. “No! I do not want another bloody fish-paste sandwich!”

He did not exactly use the word “bloody” because it did not exist in the Blerontin language. The word he used could be more literally translated as “similar in size to the left earlobe,” but the meaning was much closer to “bloody.” Nor did he actually use the phrase “fish paste,” since fish do not exist on Blerontin in the form in which we would understand them to be fish. But when one is translating from a language used by a civilisation of which we know nothing, located as far away as the centre of the galaxy, one has to approximate. Similarly, the Gat of Blerontis was not exactly a “Quantity Surveyor,” and certainly the term “North Eastern Gas District” gives no idea at all about the magnificence and grandeur of his position. Look, perhaps I’d better start again…

Oh, my. Yes, Terry, perhaps you should. Whatever else you can say about Michael Bywater, he at least knew how to ape Douglas Adams without drenching the page in flop sweat.

The novel came out in December of 1997, a few months before the game, sporting on its cover the baffling descriptor Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic by Terry Jones. In a clear sign that Bookware 2.0 was already fading into history alongside its equally short-lived predecessor, Simon & Schuster gave it virtually no promotion. Those critics who deigned to notice it at all savaged it for being exactly what it was, a slavishly belabored third-party imitation of a set of tired tropes. Adams and Jones did a short, dispiriting British book tour together, during which they were greeted with half-empty halls and bookstores; those fans who did show up were more interested in talking about the good old days of Hitchhiker’s and Monty Python than Starship Titanic. It was not a positive omen for the game.

At first glance, said game appears to be a typical product of the multimedia-computing boom, when lots and lots of people with a lot of half-baked highfalutin ideas about the necessary future of games suddenly rushed to start making them, without ever talking to any of the people who had already been making them for years or bothering to try to find out what the ingredients of a good, playable game might in fact be. Once you spend just a little bit of time with Starship Titanic, however, you begin to realize that this rush to stereotype it has done it a disservice. It is in reality uniquely awful.

From Myst and its many clones, it takes its first-person perspective and its system of navigation, in which you jump between static, pre-rendered nodes in a larger contiguous space. That approach is always a little unsatisfactory even at its best — what you really want to be doing is wandering through a seamless world, not hopping between nodes — but Starship Titanic manages to turn the usual Mysty frustrations into a Gordian Knot of agony. The amount of rotation you get when you click on the side of the screen to turn the view is wildly inconsistent from node to node and turn to turn, even as the views themselves seem deliberately chosen to be as confusing as possible. This is the sort of game where you can find yourself stuck for hours because you failed to spot… no, not some tiny little smear of pixels on the floor representing some obscure object, but an entire door that can only be seen from one fiddly angle. Navigating the spaceship is the Mount Everest of fake difficulties — i.e., difficulties that anyone who was actually in this environment would not be having.

Myst clones usually balance their intrinsic navigational challenges with puzzles that are quite rigorously logical, being most typically of the mechanical stripe: experiment with the machinery to deduce what each button and lever does, then apply the knowledge you gain to accomplish some task. But not Starship Titanic. It relies on the sort of moon logic that’s more typical of the other major strand of 1990s adventure game, those that play out from a third-person perspective and foreground plot, character interaction, and the player’s inventory of objects to a much greater degree. Beyond a certain point, only the “try everything on everything” method will get you anywhere in Starship Titanic. This is made even more laborious by an over-baked interface in which every action takes way more clicks than it ought to. Like everything else about the game, the interface too is wildly inconsistent; sometimes you can interact with things in one way, sometimes in another, with no rhyme or reason separating the two. You just have to try everything every which way, and maybe at some point something works.

Having come this far, but still not satisfied with merely having combined the very worst aspects of the two major branches of contemporary adventure games, Douglas Adams looked to the past for more depths to plumb. At his insistence, Starship Titanic includes, of all things, a text parser — a text parser just as balky and obtuse as most of the ones from companies not named Infocom back in the early 1980s. It rears its ugly head when you attempt to converse with the robots who are the ship’s only other inhabitants. The idea is that you can type what you want to say to them in natural language, thereby to have real conversations with them. Alas, the end result is more Eliza than ChatGPT. The Digital Village claimed to have recorded sixteen hours of voiced responses to your conversational sallies and inquiries. This sounds impressive — until you start to think about what it means to try to pack coherent responses to literally anything in the world the player might possibly say to a dozen or so possible interlocutors into that span of time. What you get out on the other end is lots and lots of variations on “I don’t understand that,” when you’re not being blatantly misunderstood by a parser that relies on dodgy pattern matching rather than any thoroughgoing analysis of sentence structure. Nothing illustrates more cogently how misconceived and amateurish this whole project was; these people were wasting time on this nonsense when the core game was still unplayable. Adams, who had been widely praised for stretching the parser in unusual, slightly postmodern directions in Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s game, clearly wanted to recapture that moment here. But he had no Steve Meretzky with him this time — no one at all who truly understood game design — to corral his flights of imagination and channel them into something achievable and fun. It’s a little sad to see him so mired in an unrecoverable past.

But if the parser is weird and sad, the weirdest and saddest thing of all about Starship Titanic is how thoroughly unfunny it is. Even a compromised, dashed-off Adams novel like Mostly Harmless still has moments which can make you smile, which remind you that, yes, this is Douglas Adams you’re reading. Starship Titanic, on the other hand, is comprehensively tired and tiring, boiling Adams’s previous oeuvre down to its tritest banalities — all goofy robots and aliens, without the edge of satire and the cock-eyed insights about the human condition that mark Hitchhiker’s. Was Adams losing his touch as a humorist? Or did his own voice just get lost amidst those of dozens of other people trying to learn on the fly how to make a computer game? It’s impossible to say. It is pretty clear, however, that he had one foot out the door of the project long before it was finished. “In the end, I think he felt quite distanced from it,” says Robbie Stamp of his partner. That sentiment applied equally to all three co-founders of the The Digital Village, who couldn’t fully work out just how their dreams and schemes had landed them here. In a very real way, no one involved with Starship Titanic actually wanted to make it.

I suppose it’s every critic’s duty to say something kind about even the worst of games. In that spirit, I’ll note that Starship Titanic does look very nice, with an Art Deco aesthetic that reminds me slightly of a far superior adventure game set aboard a moving vehicle, Jordan Mechner’s The Last Express. If nothing else, this demonstrates that The Digital Village knew where to find talented visual artists, and that they were sophisticated enough to choose a look for their game and stick to it. Then, too, the voice cast the creators recruited was to die for, including not only Terry Jones and Douglas Adams himself but even John Cleese, who had previously answered every inquiry about appearing in a game with some variation of “Fuck off! I don’t do games!” The music was provided by Wix Wickens, the keyboardist and musical director for Paul McCartney’s touring band. What a pity that no one from The Digital Village had a clue what to do with their pile of stellar audiovisual assets. Games were “an area about which we knew nothing,” admits Richard Creasey. That went as much for Douglas Adams as any of the rest of them; as Starship Titanic’s anachronistic parser so painfully showed, his picture of the ludic state of the art was more than a decade out of date.


Begun in May of 1996, Starship Titanic shipped in April of 1998, more than six months behind schedule. Rather bizarrely, no one involved seems ever to have considered explicitly branding it as a Hitchhiker’s game, a move that would surely have increased its commercial potential at least somewhat. (There was no legal impediment to doing so; Adams owned the Hitchhiker’s franchise outright.) Adams believed that his name on the box alone could make it a hit. Some of those around him were more dubious. “I think it was a harsh reality,” says Robbie Stamp, “that Douglas hadn’t been seen to figure big financially by anyone for a little while.” But no one was eager to have that conversation with him at the time.

So, Starship Titanic was sent out to greet an unforgiving world as its own, self-contained thing, and promptly stiffed. Even the fortuitous release the previous December of James Cameron’s blockbuster film Titanic, which had elevated another adventure game of otherwise modest commercial prospects to million-seller status, couldn’t save this one. Many of the gaming magazines and websites didn’t bother to review it at all, so 1996 did it feel in a brave new world where first-person shooters and real-time strategies were all the rage. Of those that did, GameSpot’s faint praise is typically damning: “All in all, Starship Titanic is an enjoyable tribute to an older era of adventure gaming. It feels a bit empty at times, but Douglas Adams fans and text-adventurers will undoubtedly be able to look past its shortcomings.” This is your father’s computer game, in other words. But leave it to Charles Ardai of Computer Gaming World magazine to deliver a zinger worthy of Adams himself: he called Starship Titanic a “Myst opportunity.”

One of the great ironies of this period is that, at the same time Douglas Adams was making a bad science-fiction-comedy adventure game, his erstwhile Infocom partner Steve Meretzky was making one of his own, called The Space Bar. Released the summer before Starship Titanic, it stiffed just as horribly. Perhaps if the two had found a way to reconnect and combine their efforts, they could have sparked the old magic once again.

As it was, though, Adams was badly shaken by the failure of Starship Titanic, the first creative product with his name on it to outright lose its backers a large sum of money. “Douglas’s fight had gone out of him,” says Richard Creasey. Adams found a measure of solace in blaming the audience — never an auspicious posture for any creator to adopt, but needs must. “What we decided to do in this game was go for the non-psychopath sector of the market,” he said. “And that was a little hubristic because there really isn’t a non-psychopath sector of the market.” The 1.5 million people who were buying the non-violent Myst sequel Riven at the time might have begged to differ.

Luckily, Adams had something new to be excited about: in late 1997, he had signed a development deal with Disney for a “substantial” sum of money — a deal that would, if all went well, finally lead to his long-sought Hitchhiker’s film. Wanting to be close to the action and feeling that he needed a change of scenery, he opted to pull up stakes from the Islington borough of London where he had lived since 1980 and move with his family to Los Angeles. A starry-eyed Adams was now nursing dreams of Hugh Laurie or Hugh Grant as Arthur Dent, Jim Carrey as the two-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox.

The rump of The Digital Village which he left behind morphed into h2g2, an online compendium of user-generated knowledge, an actually extant version of the fictional Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. If you’re thinking that sounds an awful lot like Wikipedia, you’re right; the latter site, which was launched two years after h2g2 made its debut in 1999, has thoroughly superseded it today. In its day, though, h2g2 was a genuinely visionary endeavor, an early taste of the more dynamic, interactive Web 2.0 that would mark the new millennium. Adams anticipated the way we live our digital lives today to an almost unnerving degree.

The real change takes place [with] mobile computing, and that is beginning to arrive now. We’re beginning to get Internet access on mobile phones and personal digital assistants. That creates a sea change because suddenly people will be able to get information that is appropriate to where they are and who they are — standing outside the cinema or a restaurant or waiting for a bus or a plane. Or sitting having a cup of coffee at a café. With h2g2, you can look up where you are at that moment to see what it says, and if the information is not there you can add it yourself. For example, a remark about the coffee you’re drinking or a comment that the waiter is very rude.

When not setting the agenda with prescient insights like these — he played little day-to-day role in the running of h2g2 — Adams wrote several drafts of a Hitchhiker’s screenplay and knocked on a lot of doors in Hollywood inquiring about the state of his movie, only to be politely put off again and again. Slowly he learned the hard lesson that many a similarly starry-eyed creator had been forced to learn before him: that open-ended deals like the one he had signed with Disney progress — or don’t progress — on their own inscrutable timeline.

In the meanwhile, he continued to host parties — more lavish ones than ever now after his Disney windfall — and continued being a wonderful father to his daughter. He found receptive audiences on the TED Talk circuit, full of people who were more interested in hearing his Big Ideas about science and technology than quizzing him on the minutiae of Hitchhiker’s. Anyone who asked him what else he was working on at any given moment was guaranteed to be peppered with at least half a dozen excited and exciting responses, from books to films, games to television, websites to radio, even as anyone who knew him well knew that none of them were likely to amount to much. Be that as it may, he seemed more or less happy when he wasn’t brooding over Disney’s lack of follow-through, which some might be tempted to interpret as karmic retribution for the travails he had put so many publishers and editors through over the years with his own lack of same. “I love the sense of space and the can-do attitude of Americans,” he said of his new home. “It’s a good place to bring up children.” Embracing the California lifestyle with enthusiasm, he lost weight, cut back on his alcohol consumption, and tried to give up cigarettes.

By early 2001, it looked like there was finally some movement on the Hitchhiker’s movie front. Director Jay Roach, hot off the success of Austin Powers and Meet the Parents, was very keen on it, enough so that Adams was motivated to revise the screenplay yet again to his specifications. On May 11 of that year, not long after submitting these revisions, Douglas Adams went to his local gym for his regular workout. After twenty minutes on the treadmill, he paused for a breather before moving on to stomach crunches. Seconds after sitting down on a bench, he collapsed to the floor, dead. Falling victim to another cosmic joke as tragically piquant as the brilliant writer who hates to write, his heart simply stopped beating, for no good reason that any coroner could divine. He was just 49 years old.


Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The books Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams by M.J. Simpson, Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams by Nick Webb, The Frood: The Authorised and Very Official History of Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Jem Roberts, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine, and Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic by Terry Jones; Computer Gaming World of September 1998.

Online sources include Gamespot’s vintage review of Starship Titanic, an AV Club interview with Adams from January of 1998, “The Making of Starship Titanic“ from Adams’s website, The Digital Village’s website (yes, it still exists), and a Guardian feature on Thomas Harris.

Starship Titanic is available for digital purchase on GOG.com.

 
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Posted by on July 19, 2024 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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This Week on The Analog Antiquarian

12 Jul

The Voyage of Magellan, Chapter 10: The Easter Mutiny

 
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Posted by on July 12, 2024 in Uncategorized

 

Starcraft (A History in Two Acts)

05 Jul

Act 1: Starcraft the Game


Great success brings with it great expectations. And sometimes it brings an identity crisis as well.

After Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft: Orcs and Humans became a hit in 1995, the company started down a very conventional path for a new publisher feeling its oats, initiating a diverse array of projects from internal and external development teams. In addition to the inevitable Warcraft sequel, there were a streamlined CRPG known as Diablo, a turn-based tactical-battle game known as Shattered Nations, a 4X grand-strategy game known as Pax Imperia II, even an adventure game taking place in the Warcraft universe — to be called, naturally enough, Warcraft Adventures. Then, too, even before Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness was finished, Blizzard had already started on a different sort of spinoff than Warcraft Adventures, one which jettisoned the fantasy universe but stayed within the same gameplay genre of real-time strategy. It was to be called Starcraft, and was to replace fantasy with science fiction. Blizzard thought that one team could crank it out fairly quickly using the existing Warcraft II engine, while another one retooled their core RTS technology for Warcraft III.

In May of 1996, with Warcraft II now six months old and a massive hit, Blizzard brought early demos of Starcraft and most of their other works in progress to E3, the games industry’s new annual showcase. One could make a strong argument that the next few days on the E3 show floor were the defining instant for the Blizzard brand as we still know it today.

The version of Starcraft that Blizzard brought to the 1996 E3 show. Journalists made fun of its florescent purple color palette among other things. Was this game being designed by Prince?

The gaming press was not particularly kind to the hodgepodge of products that Blizzard showed them at E3. They were especially cruel to Starcraft, which they roundly mocked for being exactly what it was, a thinly reskinned version of Warcraft II — or, as some journalists took to calling it, Orcs in Space. Everyone from Blizzard came home badly shaken by the treatment. So, after a period of soul searching and much fraught internal discussion, Blizzard’s co-founders Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime decided not to be quite so conventional in the way they ran their business. They took a machete to their jungle of projects which seemed to have spontaneously sprouted out of nowhere as soon as the money started to roll in. When all was said and done, they allowed only two of them to live on: Diablo, which was being developed at the newly established Blizzard North, of San Mateo, California; and Starcraft, down at Blizzard South in Irvine, California. But the latter was no longer to be just a spinoff. “We realized, this product’s just going to suck,” says Blizzard programmer Pat Wyatt of the state of the game at that time. “We need to have all our effort put into it. And everything about it was rebooted: the team that was working on it, the leadership, the design, the artwork — everything was changed.”

Blizzard’s new modus operandi would be to publish relatively few games, but to make sure that each and every one of them was awesome, no matter what it took. In pursuit of that goal, they would do almost everything in-house, and they would release no game before its time. The time of Starcraft, that erstwhile quickie Warcraft spinoff, wouldn’t come until March of 1998, while Warcraft III wouldn’t drop until 2002. In defiance of all of the industry’s conventional wisdom, the long gaps between releases wouldn’t prove ruinous; quite the opposite, in fact. Make the games awesome, Blizzard would learn, and the gamers will be there waiting with money in hand when they finally make their appearance.

Adham and Morhaime fostered as non-hierarchical a structure as possible at Blizzard, such that everyone, regardless of their ostensible role — from programmers to artists, testers to marketers — felt empowered to make design suggestions, knowing that they would be acted upon if they were judged worthy by their peers. Thus, although James Phinney and Chris Metzen were credited as “lead designers” on Starcraft, the more telling credit is the one that attributes the design as a whole simply to “Blizzard Entertainment.” The founders preferred to promote from within, retaining the entry-level employees who had grown up with the Blizzard Way rather than trying to acclimatize outsiders who were used to less freewheeling approaches. Phinney and Metzen were typical examples: the former had started at Blizzard as a humble tester, the latter as a manual writer and line artist.

For all that Blizzard’s ambitions for Starcraft increased dramatically over the course of its development, it was never intended to be a radical formal departure from what had come before. From start to finish, it was nothing more nor less than another sprite-based 2D RTS like Warcraft II.  It was just to be a better iteration on that concept — so much better that it verged on becoming a sort of Platonic ideal for this style of game. Blizzard would keep on improving it until they started to run out of ideas for making it better still. Only then would they think about shipping it.

The finished Starcraft in action, looking much more chic than it did during its Orcs in Space days.

The exceptions to this rule of iteration rather than blue-sky invention all surrounded the factions that you could either control or play against. There were three of them rather than the standard two, for one thing. But far more importantly, each of the factions was truly unique, in marked contrast to those of Warcraft and Warcraft II. In those games, the two factions’ units largely mirrored one another in a tit-for-tat fashion, merely substituting different names and sprites for the same sets of core functions. Yet Starcraft had what Blizzard liked to call an “asymmetric” design; each of the three factions played dramatically differently, with none of the neat one-to-one correspondences that had been the norm within the RTS genre prior to this point.

In fact, the factions could hardly have been more different from one another. There were the Terrans, Marines in space who talked like the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket and fought with rifles and tanks made out of good old reliable steel; the Zerg, an insectoid alien race in thrall to a central hive mind, all crunchy carapaces and savage slime; and the Protoss, aloof, enigmatic giants who could employ psionic powers as devastatingly as they could their ultra-high-tech weaponry.

The single-player campaign in which you got to take the factions for a spin was innovative in its way as well. Instead of asking you to choose a side to control at the outset, the campaign expected you to play all three of them in succession, working your way through a sprawling story of interstellar conflict, as told in no fewer than 30 individual scenarios. It cleverly began by placing you in control of the Terrans, the most immediately relatable faction, then moved on to the movie-monster-like Zerg and finally the profoundly alien Protoss once you’d gotten your sea legs.

Although it seems safe to say that the campaign was never the most exciting part of Starcraft for the hyper-competitive young men at Blizzard, they didn’t stint on the effort they put into it. They recognized that the story and cinematics of Westwood Studio’s Command & Conquer — all that stuff around the game proper — was the one area where that arch-rival RTS franchise had comprehensively outdone them to date. Determined to rectify this, they hired Harley D. Huggins II, a fellow who had done some CGI production on the recent film Starship Troopers — a movie whose overall aesthetic had more than a little in common with Starcraft — as the leader of their first dedicated cinematics team. The story can be a bit hard to follow, what with its sometimes baffling tangle of groups who are forever allying with and then betraying one another, the better to set up every possible permutation of battle. (As Blizzard wrote on their back-of-the-box copy, “The only allies are enemies!”) Still, no one can deny that the campaign is presented really, really well, from the cut scenes that come along every few scenarios to the voice acting during the mission briefings, which turn into little audio dramas in themselves. That said, a surprising amount of the story is actually conveyed during the missions, when your objectives can unexpectedly change on a dime; this was new to the RTS genre.

One of the cut scenes which pop up every few scenarios during the campaign. Blizzard’s guiding ethic was to make them striking but short, such that no one would be tempted to skip them. Their core player demographic was not known for its patience with long-winded exposition…

Nonetheless, any hardcore Starcraft player will tell you that multiplayer is where it’s really at. When Blizzard released Diablo in the dying days of 1996, they debuted alongside it Battle.net, a social space and matchmaking service for multiplayer sessions over the Internet. Its contribution to Diablo’s enormous success is incalculable. Starcraft was to be the second game supported by the service, and Blizzard had no reason to doubt that it would prove just as important if not more so to their latest RTS.

If all of Starcraft was to be awesome, multiplayer Starcraft had to be the most awesome part of all. This meant that the factions had to be balanced; it wouldn’t do to have the outcome of matches decided before they even began, based simply upon who was playing as whom. After the basic framework of the game was in place, Blizzard brought in a rare outsider, a tireless analytical mind by the name of Rob Pardo, to be a sort of balance specialist, looking endlessly for ways to break the game. He not only played it to exhaustion himself but watched match after match, including hundreds played over Battle.net by fans who were lucky enough to be allowed to join a special beta program, the forerunner of Steam Early Access and the like of today. Rather than merely erasing the affordances that led to balance problems — affordances which were often among the funnest parts of the game — Pardo preferred to tweak the numbers involved and/or to implement possible countermeasures for the other factions, then throw the game out for yet another round of testing. This process added months to the development cycle, but no one seemed to mind. “We will release it when it’s ready,” remained Blizzard’s credo, in defiance of holidays, fiscal quarters, and all of the other everyday business logic of their industry. Luckily, the ongoing strong sales of Warcraft II and Diablo gave them that luxury.

Indeed, Blizzard veterans like to joke today that Starcraft was just two months away from release for a good fourteen months. They crunched and crunched and crunched, living lifestyles that were the opposite of healthy. “Relationships were destroyed,” admits Pat Wyatt. “People got sick.” At last, on March 27, 1998, the exhausted team pronounced the game done and sent it off to be burnt onto hundreds of thousands of CDs. The first boxed copies reached store shelves four days later.

Starcraft was a superb game by any standard, the most tactically intricate, balanced, and polished RTS to date, arguably for years still to come. It was familiar enough not to intimidate, yet fresh enough to make the purchase amply justifiable. Thanks to all of these qualities, it sold more than 1.5 million copies in the first nine months, becoming the biggest new computer game of the year. By the end of 1998, Battle.net was hosting more than 100,000 concurrent users during peak hours. Blizzard was now the hottest name in computer gaming; they had left even id Software — not to mention Westwood of Command & Conquer fame — in their dust.

There was always a snowball effect when it came to online games in particular; everyone wanted the game their friends were already playing, so that they too could get in on the communal fun. Thus Starcraft continued to sell well for years and years, flirting with 10 million units worldwide before all was said and done, by which time it had become almost synonymous with the RTS in general for many gamers. Although your conclusions can vary depending on where you move the goalposts — Myst sold more units during the 1990s — Starcraft has at the very least a reasonable claim to the title of most successful single computer game of its decade. Everyone who played games during its pre- and post-millennial heyday, everyone who had a friend that did so, everyone who even had a friend of a friend that did so remembers Starcraft today. It became that inescapable. And yet the Starcraft mania in the West was nothing compared to the fanaticism it engendered in one mid-sized Asian country.

If you had told the folks at Blizzard on the day they shipped Starcraft that their game would soon be played for significant money by professional teams of young people who trained as hard or harder than traditional athletes, they would have been shocked. If you had told them that these digital gladiators would still be playing it fifteen years later, they wouldn’t have believed you. And if you had told them that all of this would be happening in, of all places, South Korea, they would have decided you were as crazy as a bug in a rug. But all of these things would come to pass.

Act 2: Starcraft and the Rise of Gaming as a Spectator Sport


Why Starcraft? And why South Korea?

We’ve gone a long way toward answering the first question already. More than any RTS that came before it and the vast majority of those that came after it, Starcraft lent itself to esport competition by being so incredibly well-balanced. Terran, Zerg, or Protoss… you could win (and lose) with any of them. The game was subtle and complex enough that viable new strategies would still be appearing a decade after its release. At the same time, though, it was immediately comprehensible in the broad strokes and fast-paced enough to be a viable spectator sport, with most matches between experienced players wrapping up within half an hour. A typical Command & Conquer or Age of Empires match lasted about twice as long, with far more downtime when little was happening in the way of onscreen excitement.

The question of why South Korea is more complicated to answer, but by no means impossible. In the three decades up to the mid-1990s, the country’s economy expanded like gangbusters. Its gross national product increased by an average of 8.2 percent annually, with average annual household income increasing from $80 to over $10,000 over that span. In 1997, however, all of that came to a crashing halt for the time being, when an overenthusiastic and under-regulated banking sector collapsed like a house of cards, resulting in the worst recession in the country’s modern history. The International Monetary Fund had to step in to prevent a full-scale societal collapse, an intervention which South Koreans universally regarded as a profound national humiliation.

This might not seem like an environment overly conducive to a new fad in pop culture, but it proved to be exactly that. The economic crash left a lot of laid-off businessmen — in South Korea during this era, they were always men — looking for ways to make ends meet. With the banking system in free fall, there was no chance of securing much in the way of financing. So, instead of thinking on a national or global scale, as they had been used to doing, they thought about what they could do close to home. Some opened fried-chicken joints or bought themselves a taxicab. Others, however, turned to Internet cafés — or “PC bangs,” as they were called in the local lingo.

Prior to the economic crisis, the South Korean government hadn’t been completely inept by any means. It had seen the Internet revolution coming, and had spent a lot of money building up the country’s telecommunications infrastructure. But in South Korea as in all places, the so-called “last mile” of Internet connectivity was the most difficult to bring to an acceptable fruition. Even in North America and Western Europe, most homes could only access the Internet at this time through slow and fragile dial-up connections. South Korean PC bangs, however, jacked directly into the Internet from city centers, justifying the expense of doing so with economies of scale: 20 to 100 computers, each with a paying customer behind the screen, were a very different proposition from a single computer in the home.

The final ingredient in the cultural stew was another byproduct of the recession. An entire generation of young South Korean men found themselves unemployed or underemployed. (Again, I write about men alone here because South Korea was a rigidly patriarchal society at that time, although this is slowly — painfully slowly — changing now.) They congregated in the PC bangs, which gave them unfettered access to the Internet for about $2 per hour. It was hard to imagine a cheaper form of entertainment. The PC bangs became social scenes unto themselves, packed at all hours of the day and night with chattering, laughing youths who were eager to forget the travails of real life outside their four walls. They drank bubble tea and slurped ramen noodles while, more and more, they played online games, both against one another and against the rest of the country. In a way, they actually had it much better than the gamers who were venturing online in the Western world: they didn’t have to deal with all of the problems of dial-up modems, could game on rock-solid connections running at speeds of which most Westerners could only dream.

A few months after it had made its American debut, Starcraft fell out of the clear blue South Korean sky to land smack dab in the middle of this fertile field. The owners of the PC bangs bought copies and installed them for their customers’ benefit, as they already had plenty of other games. But something about Starcraft scratched an itch that no PC-bang patron had known he had. The game became a way of life for millions of South Koreans, who became addicted to the adrenaline rush it provided. Soon many of the PC bangs could be better described as Starcraft bangs. Primary-school children and teenagers hung out there as well as twenty-somethings, playing and, increasingly, just watching others play, something you could do for free. The very best players became celebrities in their local community. It was an intoxicating scene, where testosterone rather than alcohol served as the social lubricant. Small wonder that the PC bangs outlived the crisis that had spawned them, remaining a staple of South Korean youth culture even after the economy got back on track and started chugging along nicely once again. In 2001, long after the crisis had passed, there were 23,548 PC bangs in the country, roughly the same number of Internet cafés as there were 7-Elevens.

Of course, the PC bangs were all competing with one another to lure customers through their doors. The most reliable way to do so was to become known as the place where the very best Starcraft players hung out. To attract such players, some enterprising owners began hosting tournaments, with prizes that ranged from a few hours of free computer time to up to $1000 in cash. This was South Korean esports in their most nascent form.

The impresario who turned Starcraft into a professional sport as big as any other in the country was named Hwang Hyung Jun. During the late 1990s, Hwang was a content producer at a television station called Tooniverse, whose usual fare was syndicated cartoons. He first started to experiment with videogame programming in the summer of 1998, when he commemorated that year’s World Cup of Football by broadcasting simulated versions of each match, played in Electronic Arts’s World Cup 98. That led to other experiments with simulated baseball. (Chan Ho Park, the first South Korean to play Major League Baseball in North America, was a superstar on two continents at that time.)

But it was only when Hwang tried organizing and broadcasting a Starcraft tournament in 1999 that he truly hit paydirt. Millions were instantly entranced. Among them was a young PC bang hanger-on and Starcraft fanatic named Baro Hyun, who would go on to write a book about esports in his home country.

Late one afternoon, I returned from school, unloaded my backpack, and turned on the television in the living room. Thanks to my parents, we had recently subscribed to a cable-TV network with dozens of channels. As a cable-TV newbie, I navigated my way through what felt like a nearly infinite number of channels. Movie channel; next. Sports channel; next. Professional Go channel; popular among fathers, but a definite next for me.

Suddenly I stopped clicking and stared open-mouthed at the television. I could not believe what I was seeing. A one-on-one game of Starcraft was on TV.

Initially, I thought I’d stumbled across some sort of localized commercial made by Blizzard. Soon, however, it became obvious that wasn’t the case. The camera angle shifted from the game screen to the players. They were oddly dressed, like budget characters in Mad Max. Each one wore a headset and sat in front of a dedicated PC. They appeared to be engaged in a serious Starcraft duel.

This was interesting enough, but when I listened carefully, I could hear commentators explaining what was happening in the game. One explained the facts and game decisions of the players, while another interpreted what those decisions might mean to the outcome of the game. After the match, the camera angle switched to the caster and the commentators, who briefed viewers on the result of the game and the overall story. The broadcast gave the unmistakable impression of a professional sports match.

Esports history is made, as two players face off in one of the first Starcraft matches ever to be broadcast on South Korean television, from a kitschy set that looks to have been constructed from the leavings of old Doctor Who episodes.

These first broadcasts corresponded with the release of Brood War, Starcraft’s first and only expansion pack. Its development had been led by the indefatigable Rob Pardo, who used it to iron out the last remaining balance issues in the base game. (“Starcraft [alone] was not a game that could have been an esport,” wrote a super-fan bluntly years later in an online “Brief History of Starcraft.” “It was [too] simple and imbalanced.”)

Now, the stage was set. Realizing he had stumbled upon something with almost unlimited potential, Hwang Hyung Jun put together a full-fledged national Starcraft league in almost no time at all. From the bottom rungs at the level of the local PC bangs, players could climb the ladder all the way to the ultimate showcase, the “Tooniverse Starleague” final, in which five matches were used to determine the best Starcraft player of them all. Surprisingly, when the final was held for the first time in 2000, that player turned out to be a Canadian, a fellow named Guillaume Patry who had arrived in South Korea just the year before.

No matter; the tournament put up ratings that dwarfed those of Tooniverse’s usual programming. Hwang promptly started his own television channel. Called OnGameNet, it was the first in the world to be dedicated solely to videogames and esports. The Starcraft players who were featured on the channel became national celebrities, as did the sportscasters and color commentators: Jung Il Hoon, who looked like a professor and spoke in the stentorian tones of a newscaster; Jeon Yong Jun, whom words sometimes failed when things got really exciting, yielding to wild water-buffalo bellowing; Jung Sorin, a rare woman on the scene, a kindly and nurturing “gamer mom.” Their various shticks may have been calculated, but they helped to make the matches come alive even for viewers who had never played Starcraft for themselves.

A watershed was reached in 2002, when 20,000 screaming fans packed into a Seoul arena to witness that year’s final. The contrast with just a few years before, when a pair of players had dueled on a cheap closed set for the sake of mid-afternoon programming on a third-tier television station, could hardly have been more pronounced. Before this match, a popular rock band known as Cherry Filter put on a concert. Then, accepting their unwonted opening-act status with good grace, the rock stars sat down to watch the showdown between Lim Yo Hwan and Park Jung Seok on the arena’s giant projection screens, just like everyone else in the place. Park, who was widely considered the underdog, wound up winning three matches to one. Even more remarkably, he did so while playing as the Protoss, the least successful of the three factions in professional competitions prior to this point.

Losing the 2002 final didn’t derail Lim Yo Hwan’s career. He went on to become arguably the most successful Starcraft player in history. He was definitely the most popular during the game’s golden age in South Korea. His 2005 memoir, advising those who wanted to follow in his footsteps to “practice relentlessly” and nodding repeatedly to his sponsors — he wrote of opening his first “Shinhan Bank account” as a home for his first winnings — became a bestseller.

Everything was in flux; new tactics and techniques were coming thick and fast, as South Korean players pushed themselves to superhuman heights, the likes of which even the best players at Blizzard could scarcely have imagined. By now, they were regularly performing 250 separate actions per minute in the game.

The scene was rapidly professionalizing in all respects. Big-name corporations rushed in to sponsor individual players and, increasingly, teams, who lived together in clubhouses, neglecting education and all of the usual pleasures of youth in favor of training together for hours on end. The very best Starcraft players were soon earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per year from prize money and their sponsorship deals.

Baseball had long been South Korea’s most popular professional sport. In 2004, 30,000 people attended the baseball final in Seoul. Simultaneously, 100,000 people were packing a stadium in Busan, the country’s second largest city, for the OnGameNet Starcraft final. Judged on metrics like this one, Starcraft had a legitimate claim to the title of most popular sport of all in South Korea. The matches themselves just kept getting more intense; some of the best players were now approaching 500 actions per minute. Maintaining a pace like that required extraordinary reflexes and mental and physical stamina — reflexes and stamina which, needless to say, are strictly the purview of the young. Indeed, the average professional Starcraft player was considered washed up even younger than the average soccer player. Women weren’t even allowed to compete, out of the assumption that they couldn’t possibly be up to the demands of the sport. (They were eventually given a league of their own, although it attracted barely a fraction of the interest of the male leagues — sadly, another thing that Starcraft has in common with most other professional sports.)

Ten years after Starcraft’s original release as just another boxed computer game, it was more popular than ever in South Korea. The PC bangs had by now fallen in numbers and importance, in reverse tandem with the rise in the number of South Korean households with computers and broadband connections of their own. Yet esports hadn’t missed a beat during this transition. Millions of boys and young men still practiced Starcraft obsessively in the hopes of going pro. They just did it from the privacy of their bedrooms instead of from an Internet café.

Starcraft fandom in South Korea grew up alongside the music movement known as K-pop, and shares many attributes with it. Just as K-pop impresarios absorbed lessons from Western boy bands, then repurposed them into something vibrantly and distinctly South Korean, the country’s Starcraft moguls made the game their own; relatively few international tournaments were held, simply because nobody had much chance of beating the top South Korean players. There was an almost manic quality to both K-pop and the professional Starcraft leagues, twin obsessions of a country to which the idea of a disposable income and the consumerism it enables were still fairly new. South Korea’s geographical and geopolitical positions were precarious, perched there on the doorstep of giant China alongside its own intransigent and bellicose mirror image, a totalitarian state hellbent on acquiring nuclear weapons. A mushroom cloud over Seoul suddenly ending the party remained — and remains — a very real prospect for everyone in the country, giving ample reason to live for today. Rather than the decadent hedonism that marked, say, Cold War Berlin, South Korea turned to a pop culture of giddy, madding innocence for relief.

A 2010 match in the Korean Air Headquarters Hangar in Gimpo.

Alas, though, it seems that all forms of sport must eventually pass through a loss of innocence. Starcraft’s equivalent of the 1919 Major League Baseball scandal started with Ma Jae-yoon, a former superstar who by 2010 was struggling to keep up with the ever more demanding standard of play. Investigating persistent rumors that Ma was taking money to throw some of his matches, the South Korean Supreme Prosecutors’ Office found that they were truer than anyone had dared to speculate. Ma stood at the head of a conspiracy with as many tendrils as a Zerg, involving the South Korean mafia and at least a dozen other players. The scandal was front-page news in the country for months. Ma ended up going to prison for a year and being banned for life from South Korean esports. (“Say it ain’t so, Ma!”) His crimes cast a long shadow over the Starcraft scene; a number of big-name sponsors pulled out completely.

The same year as the match-fixing scandal, Blizzard belatedly released Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. Yet another massive worldwide hit for its parent company, the sequel proved a mixed blessing for South Korean esports. The original Starcraft had burrowed its way deep into the existing players’ consciousnesses; every tiny quirk in the code that Blizzard had written so many years earlier had been dissected, internalized, and exploited. Many found the prospect of starting over from scratch deeply unappealing; perhaps there is space in a lifetime to learn only one game as deeply as millions of South Korean players had learned the first Starcraft. Some put on a brave face and tried to jump over to the sequel, but it was never quite the same. Others swore that they would stop playing the original only when someone pried it out of their cold, dead hands — but that wasn’t the same either. A third, disconcertingly large group decided to move on to some other game entirely, or just to move on with life. By 2015, South Korean Starcraft was a ghost of its old self.

Which isn’t to say that esports as a whole faded away in the country. Rather than Starcraft II, a game called League of Legends became the original Starcraft’s most direct successor in South Korea, capable of filling stadiums with comparable numbers of screaming fans. (As a member of a newer breed known as “multiplayer online battle arena” (MOBA) games, League of Legends is similar to Starcraft in some ways, but very different in others; each player controls only a single unit instead of amassing armies of them.) Meanwhile esports, like K-pop, were radiating out from Asia to become a fixture of global youth culture. The 2017 international finals of League of Legends attracted 58 million viewers all over the world; the Major League Baseball playoffs that year managed just 38 million, the National Basketball Association finals only 32 million. Esports are big business. And with annual growth rates in the double digits in percentage terms, they show every sign of continuing to get bigger and bigger for years to come.

How we feel about all of this is, I fear, dictated to a large extent by the generation to which we happen to belong. (Hasn’t that always been the way with youth culture?) Being a middle-aged man who grew up with digital games but not with gaming as a spectator sport, my own knee-jerk reaction vacillates between amusement and consternation. My first real exposure to esports came not that many years ago, via an under-sung little documentary film called State of Play, which chronicles the South Korean Starcraft scene, fly-on-the-wall style, just as its salad days are coming to an end. Having just re-watched the film before writing this piece, I still find much of it vaguely horrifying: the starry-eyed boys who play Starcraft ten to fourteen hours per day; the coterie of adult moguls and handlers who are clearly making a lot of money by… well, it’s hard for me not to use the words “exploiting them” here. At one point, a tousle-headed boy looks into the camera and says, “We don’t really play for fun anymore. Mostly I play for work. My work just happens to be a game.” That breaks my heart every time. Certainly this isn’t a road that I would particularly like to see any youngster I care about go down. A happy, satisfying life, I’ve long believed, is best built out of a diversity of experiences and interests. Gaming can be one of these, as rewarding as any of the rest, but there’s no reason it should fill more than a couple of hours of anyone’s typical day.

On the other hand, these same objections perchance apply equally to sports of the more conventionally athletic kind. Those sports’ saving grace may be that it’s physically impossible to train at most of them for ten to fourteen hours at a stretch. Or maybe it has something to do with their being intrinsically healthy activities when pursued in moderation, or with the spiritual frisson that can come from being out on the field with grass underfoot and sun overhead, with heart and lungs and limbs all pumping in tandem as they should. Just as likely, though, I’m merely another old man yelling at clouds. The fact is that a diversity of interests is usually not compatible with ultra-high achievement in any area of endeavor.

Anyway, setting the Wayback Machine to 1998 once again, I can at least say definitively that gaming stood on the verge of exploding in unanticipated, almost unimaginable directions at that date. Was Starcraft the instigator of some of that, or was it the happy beneficiary? Doubtless a little bit of both. Blizzard did have a way of always being where the action was…


Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The books Stay Awhile and Listen, Book II by David L. Craddock and Demystifying Esports by Baro Hyun; Computer Gaming World of May 1997, September 1997, and July 1998; Retro Gamer 170; International Journal of Communication 14; the documentary film State of Play.

Online sources include Soren Johnson’s interview of Rob Pardo for his Designer’s Notes podcast, “Behind the Scenes of Starcraft’s Earliest Days” by Kat Bailey at VG247, and “A Brief History of Starcraft“ at TL.net.

Starcraft and the Brood War expansion are now available for free at Blizzard’s website.

 
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Posted by on July 5, 2024 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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The Journeyman Project

21 Jun


I find that it’s oddly difficult for me to tell the story of Presto Studios, the maker of the Journeyman Project series of cult-classic adventure games, without drawing a lot of parallels and comparisons to Cyan, Inc., the maker of the multi-million-selling mega-hit Myst. This is not only because Presto won the lottery after making their last Journeyman Project game, when Cyan awarded them a contract to make a single-player Myst III while they themselves pursued an online multi-player adventure game that was to be called Uru. It’s also down to other similarities, the same ones that must have made that choice of Presto as a Myst custodian seem like such an obvious one to Cyan.

Both studios were born and bred on the Apple Macintosh in the first blush of excitement over hypertext, CD-ROM, and multimedia, all of which came somewhat earlier to the artsy, freewheeling Mac than they did to the more plebeian, business-oriented MS-DOS and Windows. And both studios saw themselves more as artists’ conclaves than as conventional game-development houses. Four words were to be found in the background of Presto’s logo: “Animation,” “Interactivity,” “Video,” and “Music.” Their “mentality did not include advanced game programming,” as Presto producer Michael Saladino wrote shortly after the company’s final closure. In the early days especially, both Presto and Cyan were happy to leverage off-the-shelf middleware packages in order to string their lovingly sculpted audiovisual assets together into a game. This made them the polar opposite of a house like id Software, for whom Code was the alpha and omega. It’s no surprise that gamers who preferred action to contemplation loved to mock Presto and Cyan for their slow-moving, slideshow-like games.

Said games had in common a first-person perspective on worlds which their players traversed by jumping from static node to static node in a coherent but pre-rendered three-dimensional space. As most of you doubtless know already, these were the hallmarks of the sub-genre that came to be known as “Myst clones.” As we’re about to see, though, the resemblance of The Journeyman Project to Myst had more to do with parallel evolution than rank imitation.

And there’s another, more subjective point that differentiates Presto’s flagship series from Myst and its clones in my mind: I actually like The Journeyman Project better than any of them. Right from the start, there was an ambition about Presto’s approach to their fiction and their world-building that didn’t reach Cyan until they turned their focus to Riven, the big sequel to their zeitgeist-defining hit. Presto rejected the surrealism that was Myst’s hallmark; they wanted to take you somewhere you could really believe in. Their execution of their ambitions was often imperfect, but no studio was more wedded to the idea of games as coherent fictions during the 1990s. The body of work that resulted from their commitment is among the most distinctive and memorable of the decade. Whatever else you can say about them, you can’t say that Presto Studios didn’t have a unique vision. Although they wouldn’t be commercially rewarded for that vision to anywhere near the same extent as Cyan, I for one found The Journeyman Project even more interesting to revisit than Myst all these years later.

There is an important precursor to the games of both Presto and Cyan, one which probably should have appeared in these histories of mine long before this point. In 1991, Reactor, Inc., a company previously known primarily as the purveyors of a naughty CD-ROM-based “girlfriend simulator” called Virtual Valerie, published a new Mac game called Spaceship Warlock, which advertised itself as an interactive science-fiction flick. Largely inspired by the genre-blending “interactive movies” of Cinemaware that were popular on the Commodore Amiga during the late 1980s, Spaceship Warlock hewed to its chosen metaphor so stubbornly that you didn’t save your “game” from its menu when you decided to take a break; you saved your “movie” instead. In truth, it wasn’t much of a game or a movie, being short, clichéd, relentlessly linear, and supremely unchallenging, good for a couple of evenings’ entertainment at best. It was, one might say, more of a proof of concept for the fast-approaching multimedia future than a real game to be enjoyed in the here and now. Nevertheless, it made a big impression on Mac users, who had never seen anything quite like it.

Spaceship Warlock used a lot of grid-like layouts, such as this city street. They lent themselves very well to node-based navigation, soon to be one of the hallmarks of The Journeyman Project, Myst, and countless “Myst clones.”

A young go-getter named Michel Kripalani, the proprietor of a two-year-old multimedia-services provider called Move Design in San Diego, was among those struck by Spaceship Warlock. At the age of 23, he decided to found his second company already to make a game in the same vein. He recruited four other would-be multimedia revolutionaries to join him in a ramshackle old house, where they could work on their game every evening after getting home from their day jobs. Thanks to one of their number named Dave Flanagan, an old high-school buddy of Kripalani who had a flair for writing, the game’s fiction was more fully developed than that of Spaceship Warlock. It was a time-travel story.

The Presto gang in the early days. Michel Kripalani is the fellow in the dark glasses; Dave Flanagan is second from right.

It is the year 2318. A time machine has recently been invented, only for the technology to be banned just as quickly in light of the threat it poses to humanity’s very temporal conception of itself. Unfortunately, the inventor of the machine has found a way to use it on the sly anyway, and has started mucking about with the past. You play a member of the Temporal Security Agency, a secret police force created for just such a contingency as this one. You must repair the damage that has been done to three different times, all of them well into the future from our perspective as 20th- or 21st-century gamers, and neutralize the mad scientist who is responsible for it.

Presto Studios, as the little group of friends had chosen to call themselves, took a bare-bones demo of the game they called The Journeyman Project to the big annual Macworld conference in January of 1992. It was very positively received there. Suitably inspired, Michel Kripalani and the others quit their day jobs. More people came onboard; the team expanded to nine, filling the original house plus a second one in the same neighborhood. Video shoots were arranged, for what would a 1990s multimedia adventure game be without real actors inserted over the computer-generated backgrounds? With the game’s high system requirements — a thirteen-inch color screen, eight megabytes of memory, and of course a CD-ROM drive — on the already niche platform that was the Macintosh, none of the mainstream game publishers showed much interest. So, Presto decided to publish it themselves, out of those same two suburban houses.

The Journeyman Project series would often be labeled Myst clones in the years to come –– but, if so, this first Journeyman Project well and truly put the cart before the horse. Certainly it uses an interface that we would still describe as Myst-like today: first-person, node-based navigation built from pre-rendered 3D graphics. And yet it was pronounced finished by Presto in January of 1993, nine months before Myst’s release and just in time for the next Macworld. No shrinking violet, Kripalani made sure the box was emblazoned with slogans like “The World’s First Photorealistic Adventure Game!” and “the game that will change history!” (A clever double meaning there…) It likewise trumpeted the participation of actor Graham Jarvis, “who guest-starred in the ‘Unification’ episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation!” He perhaps wasn’t a shining example of what most people would call star power, but one does what one can…

This first ever Journeyman Project game was a crude creation in comparison to what would come later. It was short, for one thing, almost as short as Spaceship Warlock. Presto tried to make up for this by making it difficult in all the wrong ways: the game was riddled with deaths that came out of nowhere, which you could learn to avoid only by suffering them once or twice or thrice. Brutal time limits were everywhere as well, while the “integrated arcade games” were exactly as good as such things normally are in adventure games. Playing it today, one gets the pervasive sense of a group of talented young idealists who haven’t quite figured out the fundamental workings of their craft as of yet, much less how to push it forward. But worst of all back in the day was the speed of the game, or rather the lack thereof. It was “programmed” using Macromedia’s Director, a piece of multimedia middleware that was no model of efficiency in its own right, even as it had to unspool its audiovisual assets from CD-ROM drives that could generally manage a transfer rate of no more than 150 kilobytes per second. Macworld magazine awarded the game the unwanted distinction of being “the slowest in a very slow medium.”

A killer robot, the bane of your existence in The Journeyman Project…

Thankfully for Presto, the novelty of productions like this one was still sufficient to overcome such objections in the minds of some hardy techno-pioneers. They sold 10,000 copies of the game in the first six months, mostly via mail order at the price of a cool $100. (One of the advantages of selling software for the Mac was that its user base tended to be well-heeled, such that they didn’t blink an eye at prices that would have been a death knell on any other platform.) Such numbers were enough to bring Presto out of their houses and into a proper office. The first order of business thereafter was to move the game to Microsoft Windows — thankfully, there was a version of Director for that platform as well — where many times the number of potential buyers awaited.

Presto signed a contract with a publisher called Sanctuary Woods, who had gone all-in on the premise that CD-ROM adventures like The Journeyman Project and the newly released Myst represented a major part of the future of digital gaming. At their publisher’s behest, Presto reworked the former game, using the latest software from Macromedia along with their own evolving technical skills to produce The Journeyman Project: Turbo! in mid-1994. It still wasn’t a great game by any means, but it did at least play considerably faster. Sanctuary Woods used the new version in a subtly ingenious way. They sold it at retail at a deep discount, whilst signing deals to get it included as an extra in the box with the turnkey multimedia computers and “multimedia upgrade kits” — a CD-ROM drive and a sound card in one convenient package — that were becoming all the rage as the multimedia revolution went mainstream. Deals such as these didn’t tend to be very profitable in their own right. They were rather meant to serve another agenda: by making the first Journeyman Project game so ubiquitous, Sanctuary Woods hoped to prime the pump for the sequel on which Presto was already hard at work.

The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time was envisioned from the start as the game that would take things to the proverbial next level. Michel Kripalani, Dave Flanagan, and Phil Saunders — the last being a new arrival who in previous lives had designed amusement-park rides and automobiles, and now held the title of Creative Director at the growing Presto Studios — spent more than five months sketching out what it should be. They wanted to make a quantum leap over the first game in terms of fiction, graphics, length, complexity… everything. Luckily, they were all fast learners.

The heretofore mostly uncharacterized player-controlled protagonist, who was referred only as “Agent 5” in the first game, got a name and a face in Buried in Time in the interest of deepening the fiction. The former is Gage Blackwood; the latter belonged to an aspiring actor named Todd McCormick. Once again, Buried in Time involves traveling into the past to right acts of vandalism against the temporal stream that have been committed by another time traveler. Now, though, the identity of the villain is not so obvious. In fact, thanks to some machinations on the villain’s part, Gage himself is Suspect Number One in the eyes of the powers that be.

The sequel opens in Gage’s apartment, where he is visited by a version of himself traveling back from the future, to warn him of the impending frame-up and tell him to get cracking on the trail of the real culprit before it’s too late. Instead of being reliant on a clumsy time machine that drags him back to the present after a certain span of time has elapsed — clock time, that is; this time-travel stuff does get confusing, doesn’t it? —  Gage now has access to a “Jumpsuit,” which lets him move back and forth as he wishes. Unfortunately, if any native of any given time should see him wandering around in this bulky monstrosity, the result will be a future-destroying “temporal anomaly.” It therefore behooves Gage to keep to himself. You have to hand it to Presto: as excuses for ensuring that Myst-like adventure games remain strictly solitary experiences go, this is undeniably one of the cleverest.

There are whole layers to the fiction beyond what I’ve just described, involving diplomacy with multiple alien races and all sorts of other political concerns. As with most stories about time travel, there are plot holes in this one big enough to drive a dump truck through if you stop to think too hard about it all, but that shouldn’t detract from the love and care that went into Presto’s future history of the world. They did not want the story and setting to be “just a weak scarecrow frame on which to hang gameplay,” as 3D artist David Sieks puts it. “There was a desire to create a deeper and richer experience than the typical adventure title.” You’re likely to spend your first hour or so in Buried in Time just poking around inside Gage’s stylish bachelor pad, fiddling with the knickknacks on his shelves and taking in the news broadcasts — complete with commercials! — that are available on his television. The only contemporaneous adventure game I can think of that evinces a similar commitment to building a coherent science-fictional universe out of whole cloth, with its own history, politics, and all the other trimmings, is Legend Entertainment’s Mission Critical.

But best of all from the standpoint of many players, myself very much included, are the whens to which you get to travel in Buried in Time after you get tired of futzing around in Gage’s apartment. Three of the four are before our own time, part of the “real” history of our planet. Kripalani, Flanagan, and Saunders debated for many hours where and when those places should be, looking for ones that would be both interesting to explore and manageable to depict using the 3D-rendering technology at their disposal. Some otherwise appealing ones, such as ancient Egypt, were rejected for failing the latter test. They finally settled on three that stem from the first half of the second millennium of the Common Era: the Mayan metropolis of Chichén Itzá in 1050, an English-held castle in France in 1204, and Leonardo da Vinci’s Milanese laboratory and workshop in 1488.

Presto threw an awful lot of balls into the air in thus attempting to combine their commitment to the future history of the world they were building with an equal commitment to making the real places of our real shared past that Gage was to visit as accurate as they could be. And, lo and behold, they dropped astoundingly few of them. As a lover of the Renaissance era, my favorite part of the game is naturally Leonardo’s workshop, which you visit on a sylvan December night, wandering among the genius’s sketches and notes, paintings and inventions, from siege engines to a working elevator built using a system of ropes and locking pulleys. Sometimes knowing too much can be dangerous in these situations, as it leads you to see all of the mistakes; this time, though, it merely helped me to appreciate the re-creation that much more. I consider that to be pretty high praise.

But perhaps the highest praise of all that I can offer Buried in Time is that it made me forgive if not always forget most of the things that tend to make Myst-style adventure games such a hard sell for me, even though those things are still very much present here. When you rotate the view, for example, your degree of rotation is inconsistent; sometimes it’s 90 degrees, sometimes less or more. This introduces a note of fake difficulty, as the simple act of moving about a space, which would be trivial if you were really in the world, suddenly becomes a complicated endeavor in itself. You can stumble around even in Gage’s little apartment for quite some time looking for the “exit” to the node that plants you in front of the television or the kitchen counter, to say nothing of the other, larger and more complicated spaces. Just to make it all even more convoluted, you can now look up or down as well as straight ahead from each node. And make no mistake, you have to check every single view carefully to ensure that you don’t miss a hidden exit to another node, or that little thingamabob that you’ll need to solve a puzzle somewhere (or, more likely, somewhen) else.

In some areas, however, Buried in Time does find ways to remedy the things that typically frustrate me about Myst-like games. In the year 2247 — the one time you visit from Gage’s past that still lies in our future — you can pick up an irreverent  “artificial intelligence” named Arthur, who’s a heck of a lot more fun than ChatGPT. He integrates himself with your Jumpsuit to become your boon companion, offering up a steady stream of banter, ideas, and, most vitally, explanations of the historical places you visit. He functions, that is to say, much like Dalboz, the magic-lantern-imprisoned Dungeon Master whom Zork: Grand Inquisitor later employed so effectively to relieve the pangs of solitude.[1]Laird Malamed, who led the Zork: Grand Inquisitor project at Activision, told me that he had played and enjoyed Buried in Time, but that he can’t remember consciously modeling Dalboz on Arthur. He says the disembodied Dungeon Master was a case of making a virtue out of a necessity: “I had fired the actor I wanted to play Dalboz onscreen.” Somewhat surprisingly to me, some players wind up loathing Arthur. For my part, though, I can hardly imagine Buried in Time without him. By no means do all of his jokes land, but he gives the game personality, keeps you from ever feeling too alone in the usual Myst way, and of course tells you what it is you’re actually looking at in 1050, 1204, and 1488.

Checking the news in Gage Blackwood’s apartment.

The twisty little passages of a Medieval castle. Yes, the view window is always that small, leaving lots of room for cyber-punkish gadgetry all around it. This game is certainly not cleanly, classically minimalist like Myst. Yet the crazily elaborate diegetic interface of your Jumpsuit does add to the mimesis. What can I say? You get used to it.

Floating outside the space station where you can find Arthur. One flaw in the design is an ironic consequence of its determined non-linearity: you can complete a goodly portion of the game before you meet Arthur, thus losing out on a lot of the historical context he lends with his banter. So, you might want to prioritize the year 2247 in the beginning…

The pyramid complex at Chichén Itzá.

The courtyard of Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop. This may not look like a maze, but just wait until you try to navigate it using these controls…


All told, then, Buried in Time really is the quantum leap over its predecessor that Presto intended it to be. It’s not an easy game, but it’s not an unfair one either. The frequency and variety of possible deaths is toned down in comparison to what came before, and they can more often be attributed to you doing something ill-advised than the game just deciding to randomly screw you over. I was able to finish Buried in Time without ever peeking at a hint, walking away proud of both myself and the game that had challenged but never undermined me. There are plenty of silly bits to it, but there’s a gravitas to the whole that comes through despite the silliness, a gravitas that most Myst clones lay claim to as if it is theirs by right but never even attempt to actually earn. Buried in Time’s, by contrast, is weirdly effortless, a byproduct of its steadfast commitment to both its future and past history and to its fiction in general.

Sanctuary Wood published Buried in Time in the summer of 1995. Even the hardcore-gaming press, which tended not to be overly friendly to games made by studios like Presto (or Cyan, for that matter), had to acknowledge that this was not your garden-variety Myst clone. The noted Myst hater Charles Ardai of Computer Gaming World magazine admitted that “I didn’t expect to like Buried in Time,” then went on to tell why he ended up doing so after all.

There is no way to move backward; there is no way to move sideways. This is a pain. When you’re trying to race out of Richard the Lionhearted’s bedchamber before his guards discover you, it’s a royal pain. And when you’re in the castle stairwell with a knight waving his blade at you, I am afraid it can turn out to be a bloody pain.

But Buried in Time is an enormously satisfying game in spite of all this. You know it as soon as the game starts, deep in your gut where such knowledge always lurks. It’s the feeling you get ten minutes into a movie when you know the next hundred minutes will be sheer joy. Buried in Time’s opening sequence sets up an intriguing premise and a highly charged level of suspense. And despite the game’s weaker points, it never lets you down from this early high.

Speaking of highs: that summer of 1995 was just about exactly the commercial peak of the multimedia adventure game writ large. Helped along by its fortuitous release date, by positive reviews like Charles Ardai’s, and by Sanctuary Woods’s savvy priming of the pump with The Journeyman Project: Turbo!, Buried in Time became a solid second-tier hit, selling 225,000 copies. Presto reveled in the praise and sales, took a deep breath, and augmented their programming staff for a third game in the series, which was finally to abandon Macromedia Director in favor of a proper, in-house-developed game engine of Presto’s own.

As that project was proceeding, however, the adventure genre’s commercial forecast was being clouded by games like DOOM, Warcraft, Command & Conquer, and eventually Quake. The year of 1996 became the first in half a decade not to produce any new million-plus-selling breakout adventure blockbuster, only a plethora of nearly or barely profitable would-be contenders for that status. Sanctuary Woods, finding themselves over-invested in games superficially similar to but usually not as good or as financially rewarding as Buried in Time, sold out to Disney Interactive in May of that year. As a Disney subsidiary, they were to refocus on children’s software, leaving Presto suddenly bereft of the publisher who had played such a big role in Buried in Time’s success.

In the face of these headwinds, Presto, like a fair number of other studios who found themselves in much the same boat, began to cast a hopeful eye outside the traditional computer-gaming space. Some big technology players still believed in the potential of a multimedia set-top box for living rooms, a games console but also more. Apple was among them; it had entered into a partnership with Bandai, a Japanese electronics manufacturer, to make just such a thing, to be called the Pippin. And then there was the Sony PlayStation, the machine that was in the process of unseating Nintendo from its throne as the king of console gaming. The PlayStation sported not only a built-in CD drive and the ability to save state from session to session but a user base that skewed older than the one Nintendo had always courted. If Presto could bring The Journeyman Project to platforms like the Pippin and the PlayStation, who knew how far they could take it?

They decided the best way to introduce this new demographic to the world of The Journeyman Project was to tell the story from the beginning. A team at Presto was set to work remaking the first game in the series, programming it, like the still-in-progress third game, in C++ rather than relying on Macromedia Director. Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime was to be an ideal introduction to adventure games for folks reared on WipEout and the like, being slick and quick to play, with all of the frustrations that had dogged its earlier incarnations smoothed away. For this bunch of creators who were so fixated on crafting coherent fictions as well as fun games, taking the time to do the remake was no real sacrifice at all. On the contrary, it allowed them to ret-con a lot of the additional fictional layers of Buried in Time back into the first story, including Gage Blackwood himself. He was once again played in Pegasus Prime by Todd McCormick, and much of the rest of the cast from Buried in Time returned as well.

And like Buried in Time, the end result succeeds marvelously in being exactly what it was intended to be. In fact, I must confess that, had Pegasus Prime never been made, I probably wouldn’t be writing this article about The Journeyman Project as a whole today. I bounced hard off of the original version of the first game several years ago, and largely wrote the series off as all too typical artifacts of their time, made by people who were better at babbling about a multimedia revolution than they were at making playable games. Only late in the day did I decide to take a flier on Pegasus Prime, just to see. I’m very glad I did so. It comes about as close as any adventure game of this stripe ever has to earning the label of “thrill ride.” Only one puzzle, coming right at the end, stumped me for more than a minute or two. And you know what? I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The killer robots are still around in the remake, but they aren’t so irritating as before.

This may look like a scene out of Dante, but rest assured that it’s only the planet Mars.

A cool mechanical puzzle on a submarine loading dock, one of the more intricate in the game.


Sadly, Presto’s grand plans for Pegasus Prime all fell through. The Pippin barely made it to market before it was discontinued, while a deal with Acclaim Entertainment to publish the game for the PlayStation was nixed at the last minute, when Acclaim abruptly decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. Bandai Digital Entertainment released Pegasus Prime for the Mac with little fanfare in the fall of 1997, strictly to satisfy their contract with Presto. The remake was barely noticed even in Apple World amidst the excitement over Steve Jobs’s return and rumors of the forthcoming iMac. In business if not artistic terms, the whole project was Presto’s first significant misstep, a lot of money spent for no return whatsoever.

But through it all they had also continued with The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time, which was ready to go for Mac and Windows by the beginning of 1998. They found a more auspicious publisher for this game: Red Orb Entertainment, the new games label of the venerable Brøderbund Software, the publisher of Myst and, most recently, its million-plus-selling sequel Riven. All of this seemed to bode very well indeed.

The fan consensus has it that Legacy of Time is a step down from Buried in Time, and with this I must largely concur. At the same time, however, it’s a fine game in its own right. Gage Blackwood is played for some reason by the actor Jerry Rector this time, but most of the rest of the old cast has returned. That list includes the voice actor Matt Weinhold in the role of Arthur, your disembodied, wise-cracking, information-spewing companion in adventure. Once again, Gage and Arthur must delve into the past to correct the time stream and prevent the end of human civilization as they know it (which does rather lead one to wonder whether someone oughtn’t to just travel back in time and prevent these troublesome time machines from being invented in the first place).

Technologically speaking, Legacy of Time is streets ahead of Buried in Time and even Pegasus Prime; not only is your view of the world sharper and more detailed than ever before, filling much more of the screen now, but within each node you can smoothly pan the view up, down, and sideways. Thanks to this innovation and many others, Legacy of Time feels less like a Myst clone than ever. Gage now has access to a “chameleon” version of his Jumpsuit, which lets him take on the appearance of a native in the times and places he visits, so that he can actually talk to the people there. It’s a brave choice on Presto’s part, emblematic of the thoroughgoing determination to try new things and push the boundaries that remained one of the trademarks of the Journeyman Project series from beginning to end. As a result of it, this Journeyman Project feels more alive than ever before. Although the onscreen actors you encounter in three more times and places from our planet’s past don’t hesitate to ham it up a little, they’re clearly professionals having fun rather than amateurs fumbling their way through their roles. Between chapters of the story, Jerry Rector and his colleagues in the future chew their way through what amounts to a little sci-fi B-movie all its own. These interstitial cut scenes, which often stretch to several minutes in length, aren’t bad at all by the cheesy standards of their breed.

And yet, just as Buried in Time somehow transcends its clunkier aspects, Legacy of Time comes off perhaps a little bit less well than a game made with such evident love and care ought to. The times and places you visit are the biggest source of disappoint for me. Instead of engaging with real history, as Buried in Time did so earnestly and successfully, Legacy of Time treads perilously close to the pseudo-history promulgated by fabulists like Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock; it sends you to Plato’s legendary lost city of Atlantis, to the Peruvian “city of gold” El Dorado, and to the mythical kingdom of Shangri La, nestled here high in the mountains of Nepal. All of these environments are rendered beautifully, even evocatively, but they still make the game feel more generic than its predecessor. I think most of us can probably agree that there ought to have been a moratorium on the use of Atlantis in adventure games a long, long time ago.

Then, too, some of the purported technical improvements in Legacy of Time wind up cutting both ways. The cleaner interface that gives a much larger window on the world you’re exploring seems like it should be an unmitigated good thing, but it turns out that the fiddly, almost cyberpunk look and feel of Buried in Time contributed more to the fiction than even Presto might have realized. The more elaborate filmed sequences likewise subtract as well as add, by making Legacy of Time feel that much less like your adventure. Beyond these obvious things, it’s hard to give a precise name to what is missing from Legacy of Time — call it gravitas; call it soul if you absolutely must — but many players in addition to myself have felt its absence.

Jerry Rector is Gage Blackwood, two-time hero of the Temporal Security Agency. Care to make it three times?

An Atlantean ferryman. Being able to talk to people changes the feel of the game dramatically.

The jungles of Peru, where El Dorado is hidden. Notice the silhouette at the bottom center of the screen. That tells us who the chameleon Jumpsuit is currently showing us to be (in this case, a little boy). We can switch to other personas whenever we like, as long as no one is watching. Doing so is key to solving many of the puzzles.

Shangri La. This winter landscape is my favorite, for whatever that’s worth.


Alas, this third game in the series was a commercial disappointment as well. For many years one of the best promoters and popularizers in their industry — witness what they had done with Myst! — Brøderbund was distracted as they were releasing Legacy of Time in February of 1998, being in the throes of an acquisition by The Learning Company that would be finalized that August. Their promotional efforts were feeble — although, to be fair, full-fledged interactive movies, which The Journeyman Project series seemed to be fast becoming, were beginning to look even more passé than Myst clones in early 1998. Brøderbund may simply have decided it wasn’t worth beating a dead horse after they saw the product that Presto delivered.

A fourth Journeyman Project game never got beyond the early prototyping stage at Presto, who now embarked on an urgent technological retooling in the hope of keeping their head above water in this changed industry, where 3D graphics were expected to be real time rather than pre-rendered and action games ruled the roost more than ever. Fortunately for them, they would soon be thrown a life preserver with the logo of Myst itself — seemingly the one Sure Thing still left in adventure gaming — emblazoned on the front.

We’ll get to that story at a later date. Today, though, let me warmly recommend The Journeyman Project to all of you. Although Buried in Time is the clear standout in the group in my opinion, both Pegasus Prime and Legacy of Time are well worth playing in their own right, suffering only by comparison with the companion piece that stands so tall between them.

In what order should I tackle them, you ask? Well, I wouldn’t be the first person to start my answer to that question by musing on the irony of the temporal confusion that dogs this series of games about time travel, almost as if a rogue inventor went back and scrambled their chronology too. Once I was done doing that, however, I’d recommend prioritizing the internal chronology of the series: start with Pegasus Prime, which has now been digitally re-released for Windows as well as the Macintosh, finally allowing it to fulfill the role Presto always envisioned for it as your introduction to the Journeyman Project universe. Then you can go on to Buried in Time, followed by Legacy of Time. This progression won’t be completely unjarring — suffice to say that you’ll definitely be able to see that Buried in Time is an older game than Pegasus Prime — but the middle game is good enough that you’ll quickly get over the shock of its smaller, blurrier window on the world. Whatever order you choose to play them in, my most important recommendation is to take your time with the games, to let them live in your consciousness the way you might a good book.

Michel Kripalani loves to boast today about how Presto consistently lived on the “bleeding edge” of technology. He’s not wrong in saying this, yet he ironically misses what really made these games special. If they were notable only for their technology, they would be remembered today, now that the state of the art has all too plainly moved on, as mere stepping stones to better interactive experiences. They’re made well worth playing as well as remembering today by their makers’ absolute commitment to their fictions, as demonstrated in their doggedly diegetic interfaces, by the countless little details in their worlds that exist only to further the cause of immersion rather than having anything to do with helping you to “solve” them, even by Presto’s compulsion to remake the first game over and over. (One suspects that, if the series had only lasted a bit longer, they would soon have been turning a jaundiced eye upon Buried in Time as well…)

In light of all this, I was momentarily tempted to complain here that it was Cyan’s Myst rather than these deeper virtual worlds that sold millions of copies and reshaped a portion of the gaming landscape in its image. But of course that’s unfair; Myst is possessed of its own brilliant qualities, of accessibility and universality. The Journeyman Project dared to ask a lot more of its players, which necessarily hindered its mass acceptance. But if you can meet it where it lives, you might be surprised how quickly the patina of age fades away, leaving you with an interactive story that can pull you in every bit as completely as any newer, sexier virtual reality. Whether told around a campfire or on a monitor screen, ripping yarns like these ones have no sell-by date.

The Legacy of Time Jumpsuit, a prop that cost $25,000 to have made, is on display today at the Science and Engineering Library of the University of California, San Diego, the alma mater of Michel Kripalani and a number of other Presto Studios principals.


Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The book The Secret History of Mac Gaming by Richard Moss; Game Developer of December 1995/January 1996 and December 2002; Computer Gaming World of July 1993, April 1994, November 1995, January 1998, and April 1998; Next Generation of March 1997; InterActivity of January 1996; Macworld of October 1991, February 1993, May 1993, July 1993, and September 1993; MacFormat of July 1994.

Online sources include an Adventure Classic Gaming retrospective of The Journeyman Project by Peter Rooham-Smith, an article by the same author about Pegasus Prime alone, a brief piece about Michel Kripalani from The UCSD Guardian, and Kripalani’s appearance on the Habits2Goals podcast.

The Journeyman Project 1: Pegasus Prime, The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time, and The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time are all available for digital purchase on GOG.com.

Footnotes

Footnotes
↑1 Laird Malamed, who led the Zork: Grand Inquisitor project at Activision, told me that he had played and enjoyed Buried in Time, but that he can’t remember consciously modeling Dalboz on Arthur. He says the disembodied Dungeon Master was a case of making a virtue out of a necessity: “I had fired the actor I wanted to play Dalboz onscreen.”
 
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Posted by on June 21, 2024 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

Tags: , ,

The Last Days of Zork

07 Jun

If you follow the latest developments in modern gaming even casually, as I do, you know that Microsoft and Activision Blizzard recently concluded the most eye-watering transaction ever to take place in the industry: the former acquired the latter for a price higher than the gross national product of more than half of the world’s countries. I find it endlessly amusing to consider that Activision may have lived long enough to set that record only thanks to Infocom, that humble little maker of 1980s text adventures, whose annual revenues — revenues, mind you, not profits — never exceeded $10 million before Activision acquired it in 1986. And just how did this David save a Goliath? It happened like this:

After Bobby Kotick arranged a hostile takeover of a bankrupt and moribund Activision in 1991, he started rummaging through its archives, looking for something that could start bringing some money in quickly, in order to keep the creditors who were howling at his door at bay for a wee bit longer. He came upon the 35 text adventures which had been made by Infocom over the course of the previous decade, games which, for all that they were obviously archaic by the standards of the encroaching multimedia age, were still fondly remembered by many gamers as the very best of their breed. He decided to take a flier on them, throwing twenty of them onto one of those shiny new CD-ROMS that everyone was talking about — or, if that didn’t work for you, onto a pile of floppy disks that rattled around in the box like ice cubes in a pitcher of lemonade. Then he photocopied the feelies and hint books that had gone with the games, bound them all together into two thick booklets, and stuck those in the box as well. He called the finished collection, one of the first notable examples of “shovelware” in gaming, The Lost Treasures of Infocom.

It sold 100,000 or more units, at $60 or $70 a pop and with a profit margin to die for. The inevitable Lost Treasures II that followed, collecting most of the remaining games,[1]The CD-ROM version included fourteen games, missing only Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which Activision attempted to market separately on the theory that sex sells itself. The floppy version included eleven games, lacking additionally three of Infocom’s late illustrated text adventures. was somewhat less successful, but still more than justified the (minimal) effort that had gone into its curation. The two products’ combined earnings were indeed enough to give pause to those creditors who had been pushing for the bankrupt company to be liquidated rather than reorganized.

With a modicum of breathing room thus secured, Kotick scraped together every penny he could find for his Hail Mary pass, which was once again to rely upon Infocom’s legacy. William Volk, his multimedia guru in residence, oversaw the production of Return to Zork, a splashy graphical adventure with all the cutting-edge bells and whistles. In design terms, it was an awful game, riddled with nonsensical puzzles and sadistic dead ends. Yet that didn’t matter at all in the marketplace. Return to Zork rammed the zeitgeist perfectly by combining lingering nostalgia for Zork, Infocom’s best-selling series of games, with all of the spectacular audiovisual flash the new decade could offer up. Upon its release in late 1993, it sold several hundred thousand copies as a boxed retail product, and even more as a drop-in with the “multimedia upgrade kits” (a CD-ROM drive and a sound card in one convenient package!) that were all the rage at the time. It left Activision, if not quite in rude health yet, at least no longer on life support. “Zork on a brick would sell 100,000 copies,” crowed Bobby Kotick.

With an endorsement like that from the man at the top, a sequel to Return to Zork seemed sure to follow. Yet it proved surprisingly long in coming. Partly this was because William Volk left Activision just after finishing Return to Zork, and much of his team likewise scattered to the four winds. But it was also a symptom of strained resources in general, and of currents inside Activision that were pulling in two contradictory directions at once. The fact was that Activision was chasing two almost diametrically opposing visions of mainstream gaming’s future in the mid-1990s, one of which would show itself in the end to have been a blind alley, the other of which would become the real way forward.

Alas, it was the former that was exemplified by Return to Zork, with its human actors incongruously inserted over computer-generated backgrounds and its overweening determination to provide a maximally “cinematic” experience. This vision of “Siliwood” postulated that the games industry would become one with the movie and television industry, that name actors would soon be competing for plum roles in games as ferociously as they did for those in movies; it wasn’t only for the cheaper rents that Kotick had chosen to relocate his resuscitated Activision from Northern to Southern California.

The other, ultimately more sustainable vision came to cohabitate at the new Activision almost accidentally. It began when Kotick, rummaging yet again through the attic full of detritus left behind by his company’s previous incarnation, came across a still-binding contract with FASA for the digital rights to BattleTech, a popular board game of dueling robot “mechs.” After a long, troubled development cycle that consumed many of the resources that might otherwise have been put toward a Return to Zork sequel, Activision published MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat in the summer of 1995.

Mechwarrior 2 was everything Return to Zork wasn’t. Rather than being pieced together out of canned video clips and pre-rendered scenes, it was powered by 3D graphics that were rendered on the fly in real time. It was exciting in a viscerally immersive, action-oriented way rather than being a passive spectacle. And, best of all in the eyes of many of its hyper-competitive players, it was multiplayer-friendly. This, suffice to say, was the real future of mainstream hardcore computer gaming. MechWarrior 2′s one similarity with Return to Zork was external to the game itself: Kotick once again pulled every string he could to get it included as a pack-in extra with hardware-upgrade kits. This time, however, the upgrades in question were the new 3D-graphics accelerators that made games like this one run so much better.

In a way, the writing was on the wall for Siliwood at Activision as soon as MechWarrior 2 soared to the stratosphere, but there were already a couple of ambitious projects in the Siliwood vein in the works at that time, which together would give the alternative vision’s ongoing viability a good, solid test. One of these was Spycraft, an interactive spy movie with unusually high production values and high thematic ambitions to go along with them: it was shot on film rather than the standard videotape, from a script written with the input of William Colby and Oleg Kalugin, American and Soviet spymasters during the Cold War. The other was Zork Nemesis.


Whatever else you can say about it, you can’t accuse Zork Nemesis of merely aping its successful predecessor. Where Return to Zork is goofy, taking its cues from the cartoon comedies of Sierra and LucasArts as well as the Zork games of Infocom, Zork Nemesis is cold and austere — almost off-puttingly so, like its obvious inspiration Myst. Then, too, in place of the abstracted room-based navigation of Return to Zork, Zork Nemesis gives you more granular nodes to jump between in an embodied, coherent three-dimensional space, again just like Myst. Return to Zork is bursting with characters, such as that “Want some rye?” guy who became an early Internet meme unto himself; Zork Nemesis is almost entirely empty, its story playing out through visions, written records, and brief snatches of contact across otherwise impenetrable barriers of time and space.

Which style of adventure game you prefer is a matter of taste. In at least one sense, though, Zork Nemesis does undeniably improve upon its predecessor. Whereas Return to Zork’s puzzles seem to have been slapped together more or less at random by a team not overly concerned with the player’s sanity or enjoyment, it’s clear that Zork Nemesis was consciously designed in all the ways that the previous Zork was not; its puzzles are often hard, but they’re never blatantly unfair. Nor do they repeat Return to Zork’s worst design sin of all: they give you no way of becoming a dead adventurer walking without knowing it.

The plot here involves a ruthless alchemical mastermind, the Nemesis of the title, and his quest for a mysterious fifth element, a Quintessence that transcends the standard Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. The game is steeped in the Hermetic occultism that strongly influenced many of the figures who mark the transition from Medieval to Modern thought in our own world’s history, from Leonardo da Vinci to Isaac Newton. This is fine in itself; in fact, it’s a rather brilliant basis for an adventure game if you ask me, easily a more interesting idea in the abstract than yet another Zork game. The only problem — a problem which has been pointed out ad nauseam over the years since Zork Nemesis’s release — is that this game does purport to be a Zork game in addition to being about all that other stuff, and yet it doesn’t feel the slightest bit like Zork. While the Zork games of Infocom were by no means all comedy all the time — Zork III in particular is notably, even jarringly austere, and Spellbreaker is not that far behind it — they never had anything to do with earthly alchemy.

I developed the working theory as I played Zork Nemesis that it must have been originally conceived as simply a Myst-like adventure game, having nothing to do with Zork, until some marketing genius or other insisted that the name be grafted on to increase its sales potential. I was a little sad to be disabused of my pet notion by Laird Malamed, the game’s technical director, with whom I was able to speak recently. He told me that Zork Nemesis really was a Zork from the start, to the point of being listed as Return to Zork II in Activision’s account books before it was given its final name. Nevertheless, I did find one of his choices of words telling. He said that Cecilia Barajas, a former Los Angeles district attorney who became Zork Nemesis‘s mastermind, was no more than “familiar” with Infocom’s Zork. So, it might not be entirely unfair after all to say that the Zork label on Zork Nemesis was more of a convenient way for Barajas to make the game she wanted to make than a wellspring of passion for her. Please don’t misunderstand me; I don’t mean for any of the preceding to come across as fannish gatekeeping, something we have more than enough of already in this world. I’m merely trying to understand, just as you presumably are, why Zork Nemesis is so very different from the Activision Zork game before it (and also the one after it, about which more later).

Of course, a game doesn’t need to be a Zork to be good. And indeed, if we forget about the Zork label, we find that Nemesis (see what I did there?) is one of the best — arguably even the best — of all the 1990s “Myst clones.” It’s one of the rare old games whose critical reputation has improved over the years, now that the hype surrounding its release and the angry cries of “But it’s not a Zork!” have died away, granting us space to see it for what it is rather than what it is not. With a budget running to $3 million or more, this was no shoestring project. In fact, the ironic truth is that both Nemesis’s budget and its resultant production values dramatically exceed those of its inspiration Myst. Its principal technical innovation, very impressive at the time, is the ability to smoothly scroll through a 360-degree panorama in most of the nodes you visit, rather than being limited to an arbitrary collection of fixed views. The art direction and the music are superb, maintaining a consistently sinister, occasionally downright macabre atmosphere. And it’s a really, really big game too, far bigger than Myst, with, despite its almost equally deserted environments, far more depth to its fiction. If we scoff just a trifle because this is yet one more adventure game that requires you to piece together a backstory from journal pages rather than living a proper foreground story of your own, we also have to acknowledge that the backstory is interesting enough that you want to find and read said pages. This is a game that, although it certainly doesn’t reinvent any wheels, implements every last one of them with care.

My own objections are the same ones that I always tend to have toward this sub-genre, and that thus probably say more about me than they do about Nemesis. The oppressive atmosphere, masterfully inculcated though it is, becomes a bit much after a while; I start wishing for some sort of tonal counterpoint to this all-pervasively dominant theme, not to mention someone to actually talk to. And then the puzzles, although not unfair, are sometimes quite difficult — more difficult than I really need them to be. Nemesis is much like Riven, Myst’s official sequel, in that it wants me to work a bit harder for my fun than I have the time or energy for at this point in my life. Needless to say, though, your mileage may vary.

Zork Nemesis’s story is told through ghostly (and non-interactive) visions…

…as well as through lots of books, journals, and letters. Myst fans will feel right at home.

The puzzles too are mostly Myst-style set-pieces rather than relying on inventory objects.

The macabre atmosphere becomes downright gruesome in places.

Venus dispenses hints if you click on her. What is the ancient Roman goddess of love, as painted by the seventeenth-century Spanish master Diego Velázquez, doing in the world of Zork? Your guess is as good as mine. Count it as just one more way in which this Zork can scarcely be bothered to try to be a Zork at all.


Released on the same day in April of 1996 as Spycraft, Activision’s other big test of the Siliwood vision’s ongoing viability, Zork Nemesis was greeted with mixed reviews. This was not surprising for a Myst clone, a sub-genre that the hardcore-gaming press never warmed to. Still, some of the naysayers waxed unusually vitriolic upon seeing such a beloved gaming icon as Zork sullied with the odor of the hated Myst. The normally reliable and always entertaining Charles Ardai of Computer Gaming World, the print journal of record for the hobby, whose reviews could still make or break a game as a marketplace proposition even in this dawning Internet age, dinged Zork Nemesis for not having much of anything to do with Infocom’s Zork, which was fair. Yet then he went on to characterize it as a creatively bankrupt, mindless multimedia cash-in, which was not: “Give ’em a gorgeous photo-realistic environment full of fantastic landscapes, some quasi-liturgical groaning on the soundtrack, and a simple puzzle every so often to keep their brains engaged, and you’re off to the bank to count your riches. Throw in some ghostly visions and a hint of the horrific and you can snag the 7th Guest crowd too.” One can only assume from this that Ardai never even bothered to try to play the game, but simply hated it on principle. I maintain that no one who has done so could possibly describe Zork Nemesis‘s puzzles as “simple,” no matter how much smarter than I am he might happen to be.

Even in the face of headwinds like these, Zork Nemesis still sold considerably better than the more positively reviewed Spycraft, seemingly demonstrating that Bobby Kotick’s faith in “Zork on a brick” might not yet be completely misplaced. Its lifetime sales probably ended up in the neighborhood of 150,000 to 200,000 copies — not a blockbuster hit by any means, and certainly a good deal less than the numbers put up by Return to Zork, but still more than the vast majority of Myst clones, enough for it to earn back the money it had cost to make plus a little extra.[2]In my last article, about Cyan’s Riven, I first wrote that Zork Nemesis sold 450,000 copies. This figure was not accurate; I was misreading one of my sources. My bad, as I think the kids are still saying these days. I’ve already made the necessary correction there. Whereas there would be no more interactive spy movies forthcoming from Activision, Zork Nemesis did just well enough that Kotick could see grounds for funding another Zork game, as long as it was made on a slightly less lavish budget, taking advantage of the engine that had been created for Nemesis. And I’m very glad he could, because the Zork game that resulted is a real gem.


With Cecilia Barajas having elected to move on to other things, Laird Malamed stepped up into her role for the next game. He was much more than just “familiar” with Zork. He had gotten a copy of the original Personal Software “barbarian Zork“ — so named because of its hilariously inappropriate cover art — soon after his parents bought him his first Apple II as a kid, and had grown up with Infocom thereafter. Years later, when he had already embarked on a career as a sound designer in Hollywood, a chance meeting with Return to Zork put Activision on his radar. He applied and was hired there, giving up one promising career for another.

He soon became known both inside and outside of Activision as the keeper of the Infocom flame, the only person in the company’s senior ranks who saw that storied legacy as more than just something to be exploited commercially. While still in the early stages of making Activision’s third graphical Zork, he put together as a replacement for the old Lost Treasures of Infocom collections a new one called Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces: 33 of the canonical 35 games on a single CD, with all of their associated documentation in digital format. (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Shogun, Infocom’s only two licensed titles, were the only games missing, in both cases because their licensing contracts had expired). He did this more because he simply felt these games ought to be available than because he expected the collection to make a lot of money for his employer. In the same spirit, he reached out to the amateur interactive fiction community that was still authoring text adventures in the Infocom mold, and arranged to include the top six finishers from the recently concluded First Interactive Fiction Competition on the same disc. He searched through Activision’s storage rooms to find a backup of the old DEC mainframe Infocom had used to create its games. This he shared with Graham Nelson and a few other amateur-IF luminaries, whilst selecting a handful of interesting, entertaining, and non-embarrassing internal emails to include on the Masterpieces disc as well.[3]This “Infocom hard drive” eventually escaped the privileged hands into which it was entrusted, going on to cause some minor scandals and considerable interpersonal angst; suffice to say that not all of its contents were non-embarrassing. I have never had it in my possession. No, really, I haven’t. It’s been rendered somewhat moot in recent years anyway by the stellar work Jason Scott has done collecting primary sources for the Infocom story at archive.org. No one at Activision had ever engaged with the company’s Infocom inheritance in such an agenda-less, genuine way before him; nor would anyone do so after him.

He brought to the new graphical Zork game a story idea that had a surprisingly high-brow inspiration: the “Grand Inquisitor” tale-within-a-tale in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov, an excerpt which stands so well on its own that it’s occasionally been published that way. I can enthusiastically recommend reading it, whether you tackle the rest of the novel or not. (Laird admitted to me when we talked that he himself hadn’t yet managed to finish the entire book when he decided to use a small part of it as the inspiration for his game.) Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is a leading figure of the Spanish Inquisition, who harangues a returned Jesus Christ for his pacifism, his humility, and his purportedly naïve rejection of necessary hierarchies of power. It is, in other words, an exercise in contrast, setting the religion of peace and love that was preached by Jesus up against what it became in the hands of the Medieval Catholic popes and other staunch insitutionalists.

For its part, Zork: Grand Inquisitor doesn’t venture into quite such politically fraught territory as this. Its titular character is an ideological rather than religious tinpot dictator, of the sort all too prevalent in the 20th and 21st centuries on our world. He has taken over the town of Port Foozle, where he has banned all magic and closed all access to the Great Underground Empire that lies just beneath the town. You play a humble traveling salesperson who comes into possession of a magic lantern — a piece of highly illegal contraband in itself — that contains the imprisoned spirit of Dalboz of Gurth, the rightful Dungeon Master of the Empire. He encourages and helps you to make your way into his forbidden realm, to become a literal underground resistance fighter against the Grand Inquisitor.

The preceding paragraphs may have led you to think that Zork: Grand Inquisitor is another portentous, serious game. If so, rest assured that it isn’t. Not at all. Its tone and feel could hardly be more different from those of Zork Nemesis. Although there are some heavy themes lurking in the background, they’re played almost entirely for laughs in the foreground. This strikes me as no bad approach. There are, after all, few more devastating antidotes to the totalitarian absurdities of those who would dictate to others what sort of lives they should lead and what they should believe in than a dose of good old full-throated laughter. As Hannah Arendt understood, the Grand Inquisitors among us are defined by the qualities they are missing rather than any that they possess: qualities like empathy, conscience, and moral intelligence. We should not hesitate to mock them for being the sad, insecure, incompletely realized creatures they are.

Just as I once suspected that Zork Nemesis didn’t start out as a Zork game at all, I was tempted to assume that this latest whipsaw shift in atmosphere for Zork at Activision came as a direct response to the vocal criticisms of the aforementioned game’s lack of Zorkiness. Alas, Laird Malamed disabused me of that clever notion as well. Grand Inquisitor was, he told me, simply the Zork that he wanted to make, initiated well before the critics’ and fans’ verdicts on the last game started to pour in in earnest. He told me that he practically “begged” Margaret Stohl, who has since gone on to become a popular fantasy novelist in addition to continuing to work in games, to come aboard as lead designer and writer and help him to put his broad ideas into a more concrete form, for he knew that she possessed exactly the comedic sensibility he was going for.

Regardless of the original reason for the shift in tone, Laird and his team didn’t hesitate to describe Grand Inquisitor later in its development cycle as a premeditated response to the backlash about Nemesis’s Zork bona fides, or rather its lack thereof. This time, they told magazines like Computer Gaming World, they were determined to “let Zork be Zorky”: “to embrace what was wonderful about the old text adventures, a fantasy world with an undercurrent of humor.”

Certainly Grand Inquisitor doesn’t lack for the concrete Zorkian tropes that were also all over Return to Zork. From the white house in the forest to Flood Control Dam #3 to Dalboz’s magic lantern itself, the gang’s all here. But all of these disparate homages are integrated into a larger Zorkian tapestry in a way Activision never managed elsewhere. Return to Zork is a compromised if not cynical piece of work, its slapstick tone the result of a group of creators who saw Zork principally as a grab bag of tropes to be thrown at the wall one after another. And Nemesis, of course, has little to do with Zork at all. But Grand Inquisitor walks like a Zork, talks like a Zork, and is smart amidst its silliness in the same way as a Zork of yore. In accordance with its heritage, it’s an unabashedly self-referential game, well aware of the clichés and limitations of its genre and happy to poke fun at them. For example, the Dungeon Master here dubs you the “AFGNCAAP”: the “Ageless, Faceless, Gender-Neutral, Culturally Ambiguous Adventure Person,” making light of a longstanding debate, ancient even at the time of Grand Inquisitor’s release, over whether it must be you the player in the game or whether it’s acceptable to ask you to take control of a separate, strongly characterized protagonist.

It’s plain from first to last that this game was helmed by someone who knew Zork intimately and loved it dearly. And yet the game is never gawky in that obsessive fannish way that can be so painful to witness; it’s never so much in thrall to its inspiration that it forgets to be its own thing. This game is comfortable in its own skin, and can be enjoyed whether you’ve been steeped in the lore of Zork for decades or are coming to it completely cold. This is the way you do fan service right, folks.

Although it uses an engine made for a Myst-like game, Grand Inquisitor plays nothing like Myst. This game is no exercise in contemplative, lonely puzzle-solving; its world is alive. As you wander about, Dungeon Master Dalboz chirps up from his lantern constantly with banter, background, and subtle hints. He becomes your friend in adventure, keeping you from ever feeling too alone. In time, other disembodied spirits join you as well, until you’re wandering around with a veritable Greek chorus burbling away behind you. The voice acting is uniformly superb.

Another prominent recurring character is Antharia Jack, a poor man’s Indiana Jones who’s played onscreen as well as over the speakers by Dirk Benedict, a fellow very familiar with being a stand-in for Harrison Ford in his most iconic roles, having also played the Han Solo-wannabee Starbuck in the delightfully cheesy old television Star Wars cash-in Battlestar Galactica. Benedict, one of those actors who’s capable of portraying exactly one character but who does it pretty darn well, went on to star in The A-Team after his tenure as an outer-space fighter jockey was over. His smirking, skirt-chasing persona was thus imprinted deeply on the memories of many of the twenty-somethings whom Activision hoped to tempt into buying Grand Inquisitor. This sort of stunt-casting of actors a bit past their pop-culture prime was commonplace in productions like these, but here at least it’s hard to fault the results. Benedict leans into Antharia Jack with all of his usual gusto. You can’t help but like the guy.

When it comes to its puzzles, Grand Inquisitor’s guiding ethic is to cut its poor, long-suffering AFGNCAAP a break. All of the puzzles here are well-clued and logical within the context of a Zorkian world, the sort of puzzles that are likely to stump you only just long enough to make you feel satisfyingly smart after you solve them. There’s a nice variety to them, with plenty of the “use object X on thing Y” variety to go along with some relatively un-taxing set-piece exercises in pushing buttons or pulling levers just right. But best of all are the puzzles that you solve by magic.

Being such a dedicated Infocom aficionado, Laird Malamed remembered something that most of his colleagues probably never knew at all: that the canon of Infocom Zork games encompassed more than just the ones that had that name on their boxes, that there was also a magic-oriented Enchanter trilogy which took place in the same universe. At the center of those games was one of the most brilliant puzzle mechanics Infocom ever invented, a system of magic that had you hunting down spell scrolls to copy into your spell book, after which they were yours to cast whenever you wished. This being Infocom, however, they were never your standard-issue Dungeons & Dragons Fireball spells, but rather ones that did weirdly specific, esoteric things, often to the point that it was hard to know what they were really good for — until, that is, you finally stumbled over that one nail for which they were the perfect hammer. Grand Inquisitor imports this mechanic wholesale. Here as well, you’re forever trying to figure out how to get your hands on that spell scroll that’s beckoning to you teasingly from the top of a tree or wherever, and then, once you’ve secured it, trying to figure out where it can actually do something useful for you. This latter is no trivial exercise when you’re stuck with spells like IGRAM (“turn purple things invisible”) and KENDALL (“simplify instructions”). Naturally, much of the fun comes from casting the spells on all kinds of random stuff, just to see what happens. Following yet again in the footsteps of Infocom, Laird’s team at Activision implemented an impressive number of such interactions, useless though they are for any purpose other than keeping the AFGNCAAP amused.

Grand Inquisitor isn’t an especially long game on any terms, and the fairly straightforward puzzles mean you’ll sail through what content there is much more quickly than you might through a game like Nemesis. All in all, it will probably give you no more than three or four evenings’ entertainment. Laird Malamed confessed to me that a significant chunk of the original design document had to be cut in the end in order to deliver the game on-time and on-budget; this was a somewhat marginal project from the get-go, not one to which Activision’s bean counters were ever going to give a lot of slack. Yet even this painful but necessary surgery was done unusually well. Knowing from the beginning that the scalpel might have to come out before all was said and done, the design team consciously used a “modular” approach, from which content could be subtracted (or added, if they should prove to be so fortunate) without undermining the structural integrity, if you will, of the game as a whole. As a result of their forethought, Grand Inquisitor doesn’t feel like a game that’s been gutted. It rather feels very complete just as it is. Back in the day, when Activision was trying to sell it for $40 or $50, its brevity was nevertheless a serious disadvantage. Today, when you can pick it up in a downloadable version for just a few bucks, it’s far less of a problem. As the old showbiz rule says, better to leave ’em wanting more than wishing you’d just get off the stage already.

 

“You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.” Unfortunately, the property has been condemned by the Grand Inquisitor. “Who is the boss of you? Me! I am the boss of you!”

The “spellchecker” is a good example of Grand Inquisitor’s silly but clever humor, which always has time for puns. The machine’s purpose is, as you might have guessed, to validate spell scrolls.

This subway map looks… complicated. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to simplify it in a burst of magic? Laird told me that this puzzle was inspired by recollections of trying to make sense of a map of the London Underground as a befuddled tourist.

Nothing sums up the differences between Zork Nemesis and Zork: Grand Inquisitor quite so perfectly as the latter’s chess puzzle. In Nemesis, you’d be futzing around with this thing forever. And in Grand Inquisitor? As Scorpia wrote in her review for Computer Gaming World, “Think of what you’ve [always] felt like doing with an adventure-game chess puzzle, and act accordingly.”

There are some set-piece puzzles that can’t be dispatched quite so easily. An instruction booklet tells you to never, ever close all four sluices of Flood Control Dam Number 3 at once. So what do you try to do?

Playing Strip Grue, Fire, Water with Antharia Jack. The cigars were no mere affectation of Dirk Benedict. His costars complained repeatedly about the cloud of odoriferous smoke in which he was constantly enveloped. A true blue Hollywood eccentric of the old-school stripe, Benedict remains convinced to this day that the key to longevity is tobacco combined with a macrobiotic diet. Ah, well… given that he’s reached 79 years of age and counting as of this writing, it seems to be working out for him so far.

Be careful throwing around them spells, kid! Deaths in Grand Inquisitor are rendered in text. Not only is this a nice nostalgic homage to the game’s roots, it helped to maximize the limited budget by avoiding the expense of portraying all those death scenes in graphics.


Laird Malamed had no sense during the making of Grand Inquisitor that this game would mark the end of Zork’s long run. On the contrary, he had plans to turn it into the first game of a new trilogy, the beginning of a whole new era for the venerable franchise. In keeping with his determination to bring Zork back to the grass roots who knew and loved it best, he came up with an inspired guerrilla-marketing scheme. He convinced the former Infocom Implementors Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn to write up a short text-adventure prelude to the story told in Grand Inquisitor proper. Then he got Kevin Wilson, the organizer of the same Interactive Fiction Competition whose games had featured on the Masterpieces CD, to program their design in Inform, a language that compiled to the Z-Machine, Infocom’s old virtual machine, for which interpreters had long been available on countless computing platforms, both current and archaic. Activision released the end result for free on the Internet in the summer of 1997, as both a teaser for the graphical game that was to come and a proof that Zork was re-embracing its roots. Zork: The Undiscovered Underground isn’t a major statement by any means, but it stands today, as it did then, as a funny, nostalgic final glance back to the days when Zork was nothing but words on a screen.

Unfortunately, all of Laird’s plans for Zork’s broader future went up in smoke when Grand Inquisitor was released in November of 1997 and put up sales numbers well short of those delivered by Nemesis, despite reviews that were almost universally glowing this time around. Those Infocom fans who played it mostly adored it for finally delivering on the promise of its name, even if it was a bit short. The problem was that that demographic was now moving into the busiest phase of life, when careers and children tend to fill all of the hours available and then some. There just weren’t enough of those people still buying games to deliver the sales that a mass-market-focused publisher like Activision demanded, even as the Zork name meant nothing whatsoever to the newer generation of gamers who had cut their teeth on DOOM and Warcraft. Perhaps Bobby Kotick should have just written “Zork” on a brick after all, for Grand Inquisitor didn’t sell even 100,000 units.

And so, twenty years after a group of MIT graduate students had gotten together to create a game that was even better than Will Crowther and Don Woods’s Adventure, Zork’s run came to an end, taking with it any remaining dregs of faith at Activision in the Siliwood vision. Apart from one misconceived and blessedly quickly abandoned effort to revive the franchise as a low-budget MMORPG during the period when those things were sprouting like weeds, no Zork game has appeared since. We can feel sad about this if we must, but the reality is that nothing lasts forever. Far better, it seems to me, for Zork to go out with Grand Inquisitor, one of the highest of all its highs, than to be recycled again and again on a scale of diminishing returns, as has happened to some other classic gaming franchises. Likewise, I’m kind of happy that no one who made Grand Inquisitor knew they were making the very last Zork adventure. Their ignorance caused them to just let Zork be Zork, meant they were never even tempted to turn their game into some over-baked Final Statement.

In games as in life, it’s always better to celebrate what we have than to lament what might have been. With that in mind, then, let me warmly recommend Zork: Grand Inquisitor to any fans of adventure games among you readers who have managed not to play it yet. It really doesn’t matter whether you know the rest of Zork or not; it stands just fine on its own. And that too is the way it ought to be.


Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: the books Zork Nemesis: The Official Strategy Guide by Peter Spear and Zork: Grand Inquisitor: The Official Strategy Guide by Margaret Stohl; Computer Gaming World of August 1996, February 1997, and March 1998; InterActivity of May 1996; Next Generation of August 1997; Los Angeles Times of November 30 1996.

Online sources include a 1996 New Media profile of Activision and “The Trance Experience of Zork Nemesis“ at Animation World.

My thanks to Laird Malamed for taking the time from his busy schedule to talk to me about his history with Zork. Note that any opinions expressed in this article that are not explicitly attributed to him are my own.

Zork Nemesis and Zork: Grand Inquisitor are both available as digital purchases at GOG.com.

Footnotes

Footnotes
↑1 The CD-ROM version included fourteen games, missing only Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which Activision attempted to market separately on the theory that sex sells itself. The floppy version included eleven games, lacking additionally three of Infocom’s late illustrated text adventures.
↑2 In my last article, about Cyan’s Riven, I first wrote that Zork Nemesis sold 450,000 copies. This figure was not accurate; I was misreading one of my sources. My bad, as I think the kids are still saying these days. I’ve already made the necessary correction there.
↑3 This “Infocom hard drive” eventually escaped the privileged hands into which it was entrusted, going on to cause some minor scandals and considerable interpersonal angst; suffice to say that not all of its contents were non-embarrassing. I have never had it in my possession. No, really, I haven’t. It’s been rendered somewhat moot in recent years anyway by the stellar work Jason Scott has done collecting primary sources for the Infocom story at archive.org.
 
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Posted by on June 7, 2024 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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