Why I Didn’t Write About the Best Games of 2019 in 2019

Excuse #1: There is no Excuse #1.

Excuse #2: See Excuse #1.

Of course, I don’t need excuses for not writing about last year’s games. I write a gaming blog and therefore I write about the games that I want to write about. I’m not a journalist. Ergo, there’s no reason that I have to write about any games here unless the spirit moves me. The problem is that I kinda wanted to write about my favorite games of 2019. But the spirit, that mysterious compulsion that makes me want to state my opinions about games for readers who may or may not want to hear those opinions, just wasn’t there last year. I’ve been having trouble getting it back in 2020.

Compounding my lack of motivation is the fact that I didn’t play enough 2019 games until 2019 melted its way into 2020. And there’s nothing more dispiriting than having to write about last year’s games this year. Last year’s games are literally yesterday’s news, even though I may still be playing them. The truth, though, is that my opinions about those now-bygone games have become much stronger in 2020 and damned if I’m not feeling the compulsion to write about them at this very moment. So, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to blather on about them now — on the assumption that you, like me, are still playing last year’s games.

So let’s take a plunge back into the halcyon days of 2019. You know — when Covid-19 wasn’t forcing you to stay indoors as much as possible and the U.S. election wasn’t looming over us like the sort of end-of-the-world scenario that most games take as their starting point. Here are the 2019 games that I liked, loved, or at least found interesting over the last 20 months. (Click on the headers for game trailers, some of which are inexplicably dated 2018.)

Vampyr

Vampyr: Come to London for the 1918 flu, stay for the blood supply.

This was, technically, a 2018 game, but damned if I remember being aware of it at the time. I was initially put off by the reviews that suggested it was ugly, clunky and awkward to play. My initial impression confirmed that assessment, yet I found myself drawn into it more and more deeply, once I’d gotten past the world’s most poorly animated introductory chase scene. Your character, a London-based doctor turned vampire during the 1918/19 flu pandemic (talk about accidental relevance), is a lumbering mannequin, voice-acted with stiff ponderousness by Anthony Howell (who is a great deal less stiff in Call of Cthulhu, about which more below).

The joy of Vampyr is its unique role-playing mechanics. You gain XP by drinking the blood of innocent victims, which is antithetical to the role of a doctor who seems sincere about wanting to save patients. This increases the chaos level of London neighborhoods already thrown into reckless abandon by the pandemic itself. To lower the chaos you have to help the sick and dying, but that’s difficult when you need to drain their blood in order to fight less conscientious vamps who would as soon bite your neck as help you maintain order. There are also vigilante vampire hunters who will attack you on sight, though for some reason you never get the opportunity to suck them dry, maybe because that would make it too easy to win the game.

The skills you acquire from your blood feasts are mostly bloodsucker oriented, like the ability to get more blood per bite. My favorite mechanic, which took me a while to understand, is your ability to store up blood and trade it off at strategic moments for hit points. There are plenty of fights that I would have lost if I couldn’t give myself an extra dose of life (or undeath) just as I was about to pass from my undead condition to a truly deceased one.

Even the game’s drawbacks — the stiff animations, the ugly character models, the somber musical score, the drab environments — add an appropriate sense of creepiness to a dark time in history made even darker by the vampire plague running concurrently with a very real one. Vampyr may be a matter of taste for gamers, but if it sounds like something you’d like, go for it.

Call of Cthulhu

Call of Cthulhu: Nice place to visit, wouldn’t want to live there.

I really wanted to like this game. I fell in love with H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction when I was 16 and have had an affection for his work ever since. He hasn’t been treated well by computer games, though, which miss the cosmic horror and overwhelming dread of his best, mostly later works. This was an official adaptation of the Chaosium role-playing game, though, and looked like it might actually, at long last, get Lovecraft right.

It starts out well. A dissolute detective (voice-acted once again by Anthony Howell, whose sonorous tones give the character a morose authority) is hired by a wealthy client to find out the real cause of his daughter’s death, which leads him to a creepy, Innsmouth-like whaling town. The detective, who has his own mysterious past, finds himself drawn into the town’s history, which he can plumb using a supernatural ability that allows him to reconstruct the past one event at a time. This is fun and there’s a cool underground tunnel of the sort Lovecraft loved to throw into his fiction, leading to a dark cave full of chanting cultists.

Unfortunately, the second half of the game feels rushed, as though developer Cyanide was being reminded by publisher Focus Home Interactive that they had a deadline coming up and were wasting precious time making the game, oh, good. It then devolves into a series of chase scenes, mostly non-interactive, where the detective is either chasing someone or being chased himself.

The real cosmic horror doesn’t arrive until the end. Apparently there are multiple endings, but mine involved the eponymous monster, who shows up on screen for a fraction of a second, just long enough to tell that he’s really, really big. It wasn’t worth waiting for.

The Outer Worlds

Welcome to the Outer Worlds, pardner. Would you like a spaceship or a horse?

This is the game I had most looked forward to in 2019, a brand new Obsidian RPG with a space-western vibe and a semi-open-world that looked like it was written with precisely me in mind. But as RPGs go, it’s weak tea. The central conceit of a galaxy run by corporations is certainly ripe for the game’s comedic treatment, but the send-ups of corporate branding play like something any decent Mad Magazine writer could have conceived as filler material on a slow weekend. The advertising jingles, which are played over and over by vending machines, get boring fast and the constant promotional pitches from the other characters aren’t exactly the screamingly funny parodies that the writers must have thought they were.

The RPG mechanics are okay, but sufficiently unmemorable that I don’t remember now what they were. (There’s a nice, slo-mo fight mechanic that comes in handy when you’re overwhelmed by enemies.) The environments are pretty in a cartoonish way, but are repetitive in the way that too many open game worlds seem to be. The puzzles are pretty good, but not much more. It’s worth playing, and I’ve enjoyed it well enough, but it isn’t game-of-the-year material.

As for Obsidian in general, their games often stand trembling at the threshold of greatness, but have yet to quite make it over the threshold. Their high point is still Fallout: New Vegas and that’s a decade old. (I like Pillars of Eternity. I really do. I just think they can do better.) I’m hoping that, with Microsoft infusing them with the big bucks, they’ll finally produce the great game I’m convinced they’re capable of, maybe in that open world fantasy RPG they’ve been teasing. I’ll be waiting.

Control

Control: The reality beyond reality is mostly decorated in tasteful shades of red.

This game has a wonderful premise that reminds me of Philip K. Dick by way of Arthur “The Great God Pan” Machen. There exists a reality beyond our reality and heroine Jesse Faden has stumbled into it. The game takes place inside the “Oldest House,” a New York building that only exists if you know to look for it. Ir’s the headquarters for the Federal Bureau of Control, which studies AWEs — altered world events — that seem to be created by Objects of Power (e.g., Excalibur, Mjolnir and Jesse’s shape-changing “service weapon,” all of which seem to be aspects of the same object). As you make your way deeper into the Oldest House, you find more and more hints, in the form of memos and videos, that slowly explicate the game’s cryptic but fascinating mythology.

The problem is with the gameplay. Remedy Entertainment has gone back once again to the Alan Wake well, having Jesse pursued by phantom enemies that evaporate when shot. There are some decent puzzles along the lines of plugging mysterious “keys” into equally mysterious “sockets,” but the constant assaults by bureaucrats possessed by a demonic entity known as the Hiss get tedious fast. Reportedly Alan Wake himself appears in the DLC, so at least Remedy knows that they’re treading on old ground (or, as its more likely to be called these days, a shared universe).

I bought the game in part because I had a new GeForce RTX card and wanted to try out its ray-tracing capabilities, which the game supports. I’ve waited quite literally for decades to see genuine ray-tracing in a game, but the graphics don’t look any better than those in the best conventionally rendered games. There’s a muddiness to the textures, though there are some nice reflections in the polished marble floors. I’m still waiting, though, for a game that gets ray-tracing right.

Metro Exodus

Metro Exodus: There’s a great big world outside the subway, but it’s a mess.

The Metro series was a pleasant surprise when it first appeared a few years back, survival horror set in and around the Moscow subway system after a nuclear war. The games are graphically gorgeous, imbued with wonderfully comic Russian accents, and feature real stories populated with real people. Metro Exodus opens up the world by sending a few tunnel-bound survivors out into the Russian wilds on an aging steam engine, where it turns out there are still more survivors who never had to buy a subway token to outlast the bombs.

When this game is firing on all cylinders, it’s great. The developers have made a sincere attempt to vary its environments so that it doesn’t become too repetitive, but the story went on a bit too long for my tastes. Maybe the characters began to seem just a little too silly to be worthwhile company on the journey, but after a while I was just playing to see how it ends. I still haven’t gotten there. I’m fighting some kind of mutated bear monster with way too few bullets in my gun. But that’s survival horror for you: too many monsters, too little ammo. That may work in cramped environments, but in an open world it just gets frustrating.

Still, I give this one my personal recommendation. I doubt that any fan of open-world action games would regret the purchase.

Game I Played the Most

Far Cry: New Dawn

Prosperity: Your home away from hell.

I’ve written about this game before and have the distinct impression that I liked it more than most people did, but damned if I didn’t find it to be one of the most compulsively playable games I’ve ever installed on a hard drive. It’s a bit on the short side compared to its predecessor, Far Cry 5, but it’s also cheaper than most AAA games, so take that into consideration. Despite its length, I’ve gotten more play hours out of it than almost any game except Hitman 2. It really shouldn’t be as replayable as it is, but I’ve been through it four times on my PC and twice on my XBox One X. There were months last year when I didn’t play anything else.

What makes it so replayable? Aside from the smooth-as-silk shooter mechanics and the beautiful post-holocaust recreations of the buildings from Far Cry 5, I love the characters. Both the NPCs you bring to the game’s central village and the companions who fight alongside you are people I wouldn’t mind knowing in real life. If I were younger, I’d have a wild crush on Carmina Rye, who rescues you from the wreck of a train full of town-building specialists. And I’m pretty sure I already have a crush on her more age-appropriate mother, Kim. Also, I’d like to hang with Pastor Jerome, as well as the hippy-dippy self-medicating herbalist Selene (“rhymes with felony”) and pretty much everybody else except for Ubisoft’s inexplicably popular mascot, Hurk.

What I liked most about it, though, is that it takes the base-building, expert-recruiting mechanics of Far Cry: Primal and makes them relatable in a way that Primal‘s mechanics never were. Far Cry: New Dawn isn’t just about base building. It’s about building a community and a home, complete with pets and a rotating roster of folk singers. There’s a sweet harmony to the city of Prosperity, a sense of genuine love. In this year of rampant virii and racial strife, the place you end up building in Far Cry: New Dawn is a place I’d like to move into. Right now.

My Favorite Game of 2019

Outer Wilds

Outer Wilds: So many planets, so little time.

I’m not going to call this the Game of the Year because, well, there are a lot of games I haven’t played from last year. I find it hard to believe that there were any games better than this one, though.

Outer Wilds was a surprise, a delightful one. I had no idea what to expect when I started playing it and, even if I had, I seriously doubt that I would have expected what I got. Outer Wilds manages to integrate so many different genres into its gameplay: It’s an astronomical simulation. It’s a spaceflight simulation. It’s an adventure game. It’s a puzzle game. It’s an exploration game. It’s freakin’ Groundhog’s Day, for God’s sake!

And it manages to be all of those things without breaking a sweat. It feels effortless, like it wasn’t so much designed as grown organically (and from what I’ve heard about its development, this is pretty much what happened). I want to live in the world of Outer Wilds almost as much as I want to live in New Dawn‘s Prosperity. It’s…peaceful. Right up until it isn’t.

I’ll give you the short version of its premise. You’re an astronaut flying a wooden spaceship developed by a low-tech civilization that lives in a densely forested crater on a small (very small) planet. Your job is to explore the local solar system and find evidence of earlier visitations from somewhere beyond the void. After 22 minutes of flying around, the sun goes supernova, you die, and the game ends.

Well, no, it doesn’t actually end. You wake up back at the game’s beginning, ready to go off exploring again. Pretty soon you realize that this is going to keep happening and that you have to do as much exploring as you can in 22 minutes, building on the knowledge gained during previous trips through the time loop.

One of the most ingenious aspects of Outer Wilds is how small the solar system is. Though the spaceflight physics feel realistic, you can zip around between planets and moons with sufficient speed that you can cover a lot of ground, er, space in those 22 minutes. And as small as it is, the solar system is packed with surprises, all of which start adding up to an unexpected story that you piece together one clue at a time.

Possibly my favorite thing about the game, though, is the folksy, crater-based town where it starts. It’s like a bucolic New England village from the early 20th century that just happens to be populated by friendly, banjo-playing aliens. These aren’t the sort of people who’d likely invent spaceflight, but somehow they did and gamers are the better for it. It’s a home worth coming back to…every time you die.

Adventure Games: The Graphic Years

Another reprint from my blog Adrift in the Infosphere:

In early 1984, IBM released a computer called the PCjr. It was an attempt to create a low-cost entry-level version of the company’s expensive, business-oriented PC that would be cheap enough to gain IBM a place in the home computer market, then dominated by the Apple II, the Commodore 64 and the Atari 800 computers. It was expected to be a huge hit.

The PCjr. It never grew up.

Only it wasn’t. It flopped. Big time.

Although it was in some ways software compatible with its big brother, which in two-and-a-half years had taken over the microcomputer market the way Hitler had taken over Poland in the late 1930s, the PCjr’s compatibility had been seriously crippled to prevent it from competing with IBM’s more expensive, grown-up models. Very few existing PC programs would run on it and almost none of the ones that people might actually want to use would. But it did have one feature that made it superior to IBM’s business models: state-of-the-art (by 1984 standards) 16-color graphics and impressive sound capabilities, with no add-on cards required. The PCjr was made for games, though unfortunately it wasn’t priced at game console rates.

And because it was made for games, IBM wanted games available for it when the product launched. They approached several companies about designing games that would take advantage of the PCjr’s flashy hardware and one of these companies was Sierra On-Line, the same company that had popularized if not quite invented the microcomputer adventure game with Mystery House on the Apple II. And since Mystery House had been the first game to combine graphics with adventure game mechanics, perhaps its designer Roberta Williams, along with the technical staff of Sierra On-Line, could create something far more ambitious that would take advantage of the Junior PC’s much superior video display.

The game they produced, King’s Quest, delivered on that promise. Unlike previous graphic adventures, King’s Quest didn’t use the bottom half of its screen for text and the top half  for a static image, like a page out of a children’s book. King’s Quest looked more like a proscenium stage on a computer screen, with colorful scenery and characters that could be guided through that scenery using the PC’s cursor keys. You still had to type commands using simple phrases a la The Colossal Cave Adventure, but you could actually see the results played out on the screen as though you were watching (and directing) a play.

King’s Quest. It may not look much now, but in 1984 this was the pinnacle of high-resolution adventure gaming.

The PCjr may have flopped — by the summer of 1985 IBM was stuck with a warehouse full of unsold models — but King’s Quest didn’t. Sierra went on to release eight games in the series for multiple computers, many of the later games modifying the interface so that the player no longer had to type in commands. So successful were the King’s Quest games that they spawned several similar Sierra game series, including Space Quest, Police Quest, Quest for Glory (an adventure game-RPG hybrid) and Leisure Suit Larry (a more sophisticated implementation of an early Sierra text game called Softporn Adventure).

Softporn Adventure. Although she didn’t write it, that’s Roberta Williams, wife of Sierra publisher Ken Williams and designer of King’s Quest, on the right. This subsequently became…

…this. Yes, it was sleazy and included both bawdy humor and graphic sex. Nobody complained.

As computer power increased and audiences demanded more bang for their video game buck, Sierra complied, upping the visual resolution and number of colors as a new generation of home computers arrived on the market. The sophistication of the games increased too, with some fans regarding Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight series as some of the greatest adventure games of the 90s, at least from Sierra. (Confession: I’ve only played the first half of the first Gabriel Knight game, so I have to take the word of others for its superiority.)

Gabriel Knight: Apparently not interested in a high-stakes game of chess.

I’ll admit my bias against Sierra here. Although their adventure games were impressive by the technical standards of the time, the puzzle-solving was unimaginative, characters could be killed off suddenly and arbitrarily in ways that were far more frustrating than fun, and you could often find yourself locked in dead-end situations from which the game could not be completed, even though you were never informed of this. It was possible to spend days trying to solve a problem in a Sierra adventure only to discover that it was unsolvable because you’d neglected to pick up a screwdriver four scenes earlier in a location to which you could no longer return.

And yet Sierra had the legitimate distinction of creating a style of adventure gaming that revolutionized the field and saved it from the fate of text adventures in the mid-1980s. Furthermore, their proscenium-style adventures were widely imitated by other companies. And while many of the imitations, from companies like Accolade and Activision, were roughly comparable to Sierra’s titles, there was one company that took the concept and turned what at Sierra had been run-of-the-mill if technologically advanced games into masterworks of late 20th century computer gaming.

Yes, that’s my bias. And the rest of this post will be about it.

The Age of LucasArts

In 1987 Lucasfilm Games, later LucasArts, released a graphic adventure called Maniac Mansion. It was similar to the Sierra adventures, except that it ran on the Commodore 64, which is where I first encountered it.  It was a parody of low-budget horror films and, to be honest, I can’t even remember if I bought a copy when it first came out. I found myself drawn more to Lucasfilm Game’s second adventure, the 1988 Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, which I found surprisingly engrossing, much more so than the Sierra adventures I’d encountered up until that point. Zak McKracken had a subtlety of wit and puzzle design that made Sierra adventures look as though they’d been designed by sledgehammer. I was hooked.

Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders cover at by Steve Purcell. Copyright (c) 1988 by LucasArts, now a division of Disney.

This is not to suggest that Zak McKracken was any kind of technological marvel. Perhaps to allow it to run on lower end machines than those targeted by Sierra, the graphics seemed fairly flat and crude, even by the standards of the late 1980s. (More advanced versions of this and Maniac Mansion were published a couple of years later for more powerful machines.)

Screen from Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. Note the menu-driven control system that eliminated the need for typed commands. Copyright (c) 1988 by LucasArts.

But the strength of Zak McKracken as an adventure game was its wit. The interactions between Zak and other objects/characters in the game, even the timing with which dialog appeared on the screen (there was no voice acting in the game), suggested a creative sensibility that placed less emphasis on the kind of expensive programming skills that Sierra brought to bear on its games and more on an intuitive sense of what was funny, what was challenging, and ultimately on what was compelling to the player. I found myself enthralled.

LucasArts made rapid leaps forward over the next two or three years with their games for the Atari ST, the Commodore Amiga and DOS PCs, games like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (based on the film) and Loom (an innovative adventure that incorporated music into its problem solving). For me, though, the real breakthrough, the game that showed me just how much quality LucasArts was capable of shoveling into the confines of the graphic adventure format, was The Secret of Monkey Island, a game that remains available in updated versions today. You can even buy it for your iPhone.

I knew that Monkey Island, about a young wannabe pirate named Guybrush Threepwood trying to discover the eponymous secret of the eponymous island, was going to be good when I spent a couple of hours working my way through the playable demo that LucasArts made available through online services like CompuServe. How good it was, though, wasn’t apparent until I bought the complete game and played it nonstop for two days.

The Secret of Monkey Island, when LucasArts adventure games went from being good to being great.

Monkey Island wasn’t just the funniest adventure game I’d played up until that time — I still laugh over the three-headed monkey joke — but had the most ingeniously designed puzzles (always fair and just challenging enough not to be frustrating), characters I actually enjoyed spending time with (including not only Guybrush but Governor Elaine Marley and the ghost pirate LeChuck) and a surprisingly effective romantic subplot. And the soundtrack, even on a PC SoundBlaster card, was possibly the best I’d heard up to that point in a computer game.

The Secret of Monkey Island was followed by a string of sequels (Monkey Island 2, The Curse of Monkey Island and Escape from Monkey Island), but also by a raft of LucasArts games that at least equaled if not surpassed the Monkey Island games in quality. These included Sam & Max Hit the Road, The Dig, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango and the Maniac Mansion sequel Day of the Tentacle, any one of which has a legitimate claim not only to being the greatest LucasArts adventure but the greatest adventure game ever. My vote is with Day of the Tentacle, which was such an insanely epic comedy adventure that it contained a complete, playable version of Maniac Mansion hidden inside it as an Easter egg, but other gamers will inevitably differ. Grim Fandango has a well-deserved reputation as Peak LucasArts and is currently available in a remastered edition.

The tentacles have their day.

The second half of the 1990s, though, saw the output of LucasArts adventures slow to a trickle. Escape from Monkey Island, published in 2000, was the last original adventure game from the company, despite promised sequels to Sam & Max Hit the Road and Full Throttle.

Other than a few new adventures imported from the European market, this was pretty much the death of the adventure game on the American scene, amateur interactive fiction notwithstanding. However, a few years later, graphic adventures would rise again from their graves, thanks in part to a team of designers who had formerly worked at LucasArts.

But more about that in the next installment of this post.

CONFESSION: I never got around to writing the next installment of this post. For more thoughts on LucasArts games and their design ethic as compared to Sierra’s, see the earlier post in this blog, “Methadone for Lucasarts Withdrawal: The Blackwell Saga.” I may yet get around to writing about the games teased in the penultimate paragraph, i.e., the Telltale adventures. But that means I’d have to go back and replay a bunch of the early ones, which isn’t likely to happen soon.

Adventure Games: The Text Years

Not having an entry to add to this blog at the moment, I’m reprinting a post that originally appeared in my blog Adrift in the Infosphere:

What’s your favorite type of computer game? If you’re a typical gamer of the 2010s you may have replied CRPGs (computer role-playing games) like Skyrim or The Witcher, or their massively multiplayer online counterparts like World of Warcraft or Star Wars: The Old Republic. If you like your action faster and more furious, maybe you’re partial to first-person shooters, like Halo or Call of Duty. If you prefer fast-action multiplayer battles, you may have said MOBAs (multiplayer online battle arenas) like Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds. Or if you lean more toward thoughtful, turn-based exercises in strategy, you might have replied 4X (“eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate”) games a la Sid Meier’s long-running Civilization series. And if you don’t have much time for gaming but need a quick bit of relaxation during your downtime, you might have put in a vote for casual games like Bejeweled or Candy Crush.

But if you’re a long-time gamer, one who’s been playing for 20 years, 30 years, or even more, you might just have said … adventure games.

Telltale Game’s Tales from the Borderlands: What adventure games looked like in 2015.

Adventure games have gone through many permutations over the last 40 years. They’ve fallen in and out of fashion, they’ve gone through multiple visual and gameplay styles, and there have been periods when they’ve nearly disappeared altogether. But after four decades, they’re still here. And it’s possible they’re more popular than ever.

In the early to mid 1970s, when microcomputers were still barely a blip on the computer hobbyist horizon, mainframe programmer and part-time spelunker Will Crowther logged on to a DEC PDP-10 and used his FORTRAN skills to write a computer game called, simply, Adventure. It was set in a huge cave not unlike Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, which Crowther had explored. He wrote the game in part so that his daughters could play it and in part to indulge his love for Dungeons & Dragons. By all reports Crowther’s version was fairly rudimentary compared to later versions, but it caught on and spread from computer system to computer system. In 1976, a Stanford University graduate student named Don Woods expanded Adventure with Crowther’s permission into what became known as The Colossal Cave Adventure. Although it was too large to be played on most microcomputers of the period, it was widely available on mainframe and minicomputer systems. Here’s what it looked like running on a DEC PDP-10:

Colossal Cave Adventure: What adventure games looked like in 1976.

The Colossal Cave Adventure looks deceptively simple — you type in one- or two-word commands to move around in and interact with a world described purely through text — yet it created a remarkably large, surprisingly open world and went on to become one of the most influential computer games ever written. It spawned a long line of imitations that continues to this day, though you might not recognize most of its descendants based on the text screen reproduced above. If you’ve never played the Colossal Cave Adventure and you’re curious what it was like, here’s a simulation sponsored by the AMC-TV show Halt and Catch Fire.

The original Crowther and Woods version wouldn’t have run on microcomputers in the late 1970s because early personal computers weren’t powerful enough; they didn’t have enough internal memory and they mostly lacked disk drives. However, in 1978, a young Wisconsin programmer named Scott Adams (no relation to the creator of Dilbert) set out to prove that something very much like the Colossal Cave Adventure could be written on a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I, a popular home computer of the day, and that he could do it in 16-kilobytes of memory. Yes, that’s not 16 gigabytes or even 16 megabytes — that’s 16 kilobytes of memory, where a kilobyte is 1,024 memory locations, each of which can store a single number in the range 0 to 255. To give you a sense for how much memory that is, the text in this blog post takes up about one and half kilobytes, but that picture at the beginning of this post (from Telltale’s second Walking Dead adventure) requires more memory than Scott Adams’ TRS-80 had in total.

Amazingly, Adams succeeded, writing a game called Adventureland that neatly mimicked the Colossal Cave Adventure without copying it and it ran, as planned, on a 16-kilobyte TRS-80. Adventureland was successful enough in the early gaming marketplace that Adams was able to spin off his own company, Adventure International, and market an entire line of adventure games for several different models of computer. Although no longer for sale commercially, you can still download playable versions from Scott Adams’ own website or play them directly on your browser using the links he supplies at that address.

Adventureland: Still text, but no PDP-10 required.

Like the Colossal Cave Adventure, the play mechanics of the Scott Adams adventures were simple. You typed in one or two word commands, like “look” (to get a description of what was visible from your current position in the game’s world), “west” (to go in that direction) or “get sword” (to pick up any swords that you may conveniently have stumbled upon).

Even while Scott Adams was marketing his first adventure games, a small group of programmers at MIT consisting of Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling were creating their own, far more ambitious variation on the Colossal Cave Adventure. They called it Zork.

That name may or may not ring a bell. If it does, you probably just experienced a pleasant flash of nostalgia. Zork was witty, quite huge by the standards of late 70s games and had something that neither the Colossal Cave Adventure or Adventureland had: a parser that could read English language sentences and respond to commands longer than one or two words. Admittedly, it still couldn’t understand English as it’s normally spoken between human beings, but if you knew how to construct a command properly — say, “Pick up the gold sword on the wooden desk” — Zork wouldn’t get confused. Zork was the next step in the evolution of text adventures.

The first Zork game. Be careful. You might get eaten by a grue!

The microcomputers of the late 70s weren’t ready for Zork, but by the early 80s they were and the Zork programmers, following in Scott Adams’ footsteps, created their own publishing house to publish Zork and the sophisticated series of text adventures that would follow. They called that publishing house Infocom.

Like the word Zork itself, the name Infocom sends shivers down the spines of old-time gamers. Infocom was one of the greatest game publishers of the 1980s, perhaps of all time, and they produced adventure game after adventure game, every one of them just as sophisticated as Zork had been and some of them even more so. Infocom spent most of the 80s turning out one classic text adventure after another: more Zork games, Planetfall, Starcross, Suspended, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Leather Goddesses of Phobos and others.

Yet even as text adventures were increasing in sophistication, so were the graphics capabilities of microcomputers. In 1980, a young programmer named Roberta Williams, became obsessed with the Colossal Cave Adventure when she played it at home on an Apple II computer serving as a terminal for her husband Ken Williams’ office mainframe.

Roberta Williams, creator of the graphic adventure Mystery House and a significant designer of early adventure games.

Williams combined the graphics capabilities of the Apple II computer with the mechanics of a text adventure to produce the game Mystery House, which her husband used as the flagship game for what would become one of the most successful game publishing companies of the 1980s and 90s, Sierra On-Line. The graphics for Mystery House were crude, but they were an early sign of the direction in which adventure games were headed.

Mystery House: Crudely drawn, but a harbinger nonetheless.

By the mid-1980s, purely text adventures had fallen out of fashion in the commercial marketplace. The graphic capabilities of home computers had improved to the point where nobody wanted to play a game that involved reading words rather than looking at pictures. More advanced attempts than Mystery House were made to create text adventures that showed pictures at the top of the screen while text flashed by at the bottom, but this was only a stopgap measure until somebody came up with a better way of combining high-resolution images with the puzzle-solving interactivity that made adventure games so alluring.

A text adventure with shifting graphic images at the top of the video display. Published by Telarium.

Text adventures never died, really. Nowadays they’re called interactive fiction (IF) and people still write them, primarily as a hobby, to share with other IF fans. To learn more, check out the Interactive Fiction Wiki to find out where you can download new games and collect tools that you can use to create your own. (I’ll write more about the current interactive fiction field when I get the chance.)

Even as the original Infocom games were thriving in the early 80s, though, the seeds for a radically new type of adventure game were being planted. Those seeds would take root at Sierra On-Line and the game designer who would bring them to fruition was the same person who created Mystery House: Roberta Williams.

I’ll talk about that in more detail in the next installment of this post.

Methadone for LucasArts Withdrawal: The Blackwell Saga

In 1985, LucasArt game designer Ron Gilbert did something remarkable. He created a game called Maniac Mansion and a scripting language called SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) that he used to write it in. To understand why this was remarkable, you have to know a little about the state of the adventure game art in the mid-1980s.

Two years earlier, LucasArts competitor Sierra On-Line published the first “modern” graphical adventure, King’s Quest, a technically if not conceptually clever adventure game in which you used the cursor arrows on your keyboard to guide a tiny knight on a quest across an environment that looked like it was contained within a pixelated proscenium arch. (In later games, the keyboard would be supplanted by a simpler point-and-click system.) The game, a standard search-and-retrieve story, was fairly simple in construction and more than a little simpleminded in conception, though it gains a certain sheen when viewed through the eyes of nostalgia.By the time I had a computer powerful enough to run King’s Quest, not even nostalgia could have saved it from being anything other than a banal, often frustrating exercise in monotonous and annoying puzzle solving. It was designed by Sierra’s leading game designer (and wife of the company’s owner) Roberta Williams and programmed in a scripting language that Sierra called SCI (Sierra Creative Interpreter), which Gilbert was punning off, more than a little maliciously, when he named his own scripting language SCUMM. King’s Quest was successful enough to spawn multiple sequels as well as spin-offs like Space Quest, Police Quest and the Leisure Suit Larry series. These games put Sierra in serious competition with Infocom as the leading adventure game publisher of the period.

The first King’s Quest game. Believe it or not, these graphics were fairly impressive by 1983 standards.

The Infocom adventures, being entirely text-based, lost ground rapidly to Sierra’s more visually striking graphics technology, even though the Infocom adventures were, quite frankly, a lot better designed. Williams was a haphazard designer at best, with an intuitive sense of what she was trying to accomplish in her games but no coherent design ethic to guide her in doing so. Sierra’s other designers weren’t much better and some weren’t even as good (though better designers like Jane Jensen would come along in the 90s). Sierra adventures punished the player for simple actions like examining objects on the screen or trying to negotiate mountain paths partially obscured by scenery. They left the player stranded with no way to solve a puzzle if they hadn’t picked up a necessary object at an earlier location that was no longer accessible. You frequently had to restore to earlier game saves to remedy a simple failure to examine every pixel on the screen with a keen enough eye or because you’d fallen off a cliff, leading Leisure Suit Larry designer Al Lowe to use the phrase “Save Early, Save Often” as a running slogan on his games’ load screens.

Ron Gilbert, on the other hand, developed a very clear design ethic as he was creating his early games. In 1989, while writing The Secret of Monkey Island, he articulated that ethic in a remarkable document called “Why Adventure Games Suck,” which you can read at that link in a version that he posted to his blog in 2004. In Gilbert’s games you could never die and you could never find yourself in a position that was unwinnable given your current situation, making saving the game necessary only if you needed to break for bedtime or were afraid your system might crash, taking your hard-won progress with it. With Gilbert’s help, LucasArts took what Sierra was trying to do (with, I might add, inexplicable commercial success) and reworked it in a way that made it a genuine form of popular art.

The Secret of Monkey Island, VGA version. Games looked better by 1990. Not a lot better, but better.

Gilbert and subsequent LucasArts designers like Tim Schafer used that ethic to create a series of genre classics, like the Monkey Island games, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max Hit the Road and Full Throttle. It was a great time to be alive and adventuring, but the superior LucasArts games never outsold their Sierra counterparts and both lines of games, along with those of their multiple imitators, died a quiet death around the turn of the 21st century.

Gilbert attributed the death of the genre to Sierra fatigue and I can only bow to his wisdom on that point. I remember once seeing Gilbert get into a flame war on the old Compuserve Information Service with a Sierra game producer and his anger at Sierra’s inability to grasp the simplest rules of adventure game design was an impressive thing to behold. The Sierra producer, on the other hand, could only offer weak arguments in favor of their player-punishing approach that I suspect were trickling down from upper-level management. One didn’t badmouth Roberta Williams’ game designs and remain employed at her husband’s publishing firm.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the Blackwell adventure game series.

The Blackwell Saga

We live in an age of retro gaming, when everything old is new again and the market is flooded with games just like the ones you played as a teenager (or, in my case, as a thirty-something). You don’t have to complain that they don’t make games the way they used to because crowd-funding services like Kickstarter are happy to connect game designers with formerly young game players who have grown old enough to earn the kind of money they can afford to part with to give game designers the chance to do precisely that.

For my own part, I found myself having a fit of nostalgia for LucasArts’ heyday that was inspired by playing a modest but nicely decked out retro adventure called Kathy Rain, about which I can now remember very little except that it concerned a leather-jacketed, motorcycle riding, chain smoking Nancy Drew who followed clues concerning her grandfather’s tragic death to an unexpected and not entirely satisfying supernatural climax.  While it’s not a game I’m prepared to rave about, it led me to try a series of games I’d bought on sale a couple of years ago on Steam that all have Blackwell in their titles: The Blackwell Legacy, Blackwell Unbound, The Blackwell Convergence, and The Blackwell Deception. Given that there was a relatively new entry in the saga, The Blackwell Epiphany, and I’d already shelled out the money for all but that one, I figured I ought to look at what I’d bought.

It’s a decision I don’t regret. The Blackwell saga offers no sublime confusion, just sublime familiarity, but the design comes straight from the Ron Gilbert playbook and I found myself hooked from the first, though admittedly weakest, of the games. This is a series that demands to be played in order, because designer Dave Gilbert (no relation, as far as I know, to Ron) builds serial themes into what are otherwise standalone stories, the way a lot of television shows do.

The Blackwell Legacy, trying really hard to look like it’s from 1990.

Ron Gilbert makes an interesting observation in the document linked above. “The element that brings adventure games to life for me is the stories around which they are woven.  When done right, it is a form of storytelling that can be engrossing in a way that only interaction can bring.”

I didn’t get into computer games for story. I got into them for exploration, a subject I’ll expound on at greater length sometime soon. Suffice it to say that I loved the idea of finding a world inside my computer and exploring it at length, making interesting discoveries and having interesting interactions. Adventure games offer some of that but not as much as I’d like. As Gilbert, Ron, observes, adventure games are about stories. But the Infocom adventures, when I discovered them in the early 1980s, taught me that story is almost as valid a reason for gameplay as exploration, even more so if the exploration involves story as well. And the Blackwell games have story by the bushel, including a story that weaves in and out of the entire series in a slick and lovely thread. They also have a small amount of exploration, but it’s mostly linear and unsatisfying as opposed to exploration for exploration’s sake.

The games, with one exception, are about a young female psychic named Rosangela “Rosa” Blackwell and her spirit guide/ghost companion Joey Mallone. The games lack the over-the-top hilarity of the best LucasArts games but make a fair exchange for the wit of a hardboiled detective thriller cum YA mystery, with Joey playing Philip Marlowe (or maybe Mike Hammer) to Rosa’s Nancy Drew. There’s no sublime confusion to these games, which for me were a pure nostalgia trip, but there’s a sublime familiarity that kept me playing in sessions that ran much later into the night than they really should have. Sleep deprivation is both my curse and my guilty pleasure.

Rosa Blackwell’s curse and guilty pleasure is that she comes from a family in which one female member of each generation has psychic powers and the companionship, wanted or unwanted, of the aforementioned ghost Joey. Their job is to find ghosts who have become bound to the mortal plane and send them off to the fabled white light of the afterlife. They do this by solving mysteries that convince the ghosts, who suffer from serious spiritual denial, that they really are dead and can go off to a place much happier than the one they find themselves stuck in. (Gilbert never calls this “heaven” and you don’t actually have to believe in an afterlife to accept this as a standard fantasy trope.)

The Blackwell Legacy is essential to play if you’re going to understand the games that follow. It’s about Rosa’s discovery that she’s a psychic and that her aunt and grandmother were psychics too, all with the mission of playing travel guide to lost souls and the curse or blessing of Joey’s companionship. The story is about a string of suicides among a group of young women, all friends. Play it to learn the other details.

The second game, Blackwell Unbound, is a clever departure from the first game and all the  games that follow. It flashes back to 1973 (the other games are set in the present) and introduces us to Rosa’s aunt Lauren, who would later raise Rosa after her parents died and then go insane, leaving Rosa essentially orphaned. The insanity isn’t explained until a much later game; here we just get to know what Rosa’s aunt was like and get a much handsomer version of Joey, not I assume because he was younger then — he was already dead and aging isn’t in the list of things that ghosts get to do — but because the artist presumably realized that Joey needed to be a handsome hero, not the ordinary-looking schlub of the first game. The game also introduces the countess, a clearly insane old lady who figures into a later game as a ghost and in a still later game makes a cameo in a flashback as a young woman.

The third game, The Blackwell Convergence, ties together the storylines of the first two games, hence the title. It also introduces Madeline, a spirit guide who’s been around much longer than Joey, who seems to have died in the 1940s, give or take a decade. (Much of the humor in the games comes from Joey’s wisecracking disdain for modern electronic technology.) Madeline, who may well have been around for thousands of years, figures into the remainder of the games in an increasingly major way.

The Blackwell Convergence. Rosa has a loose strand of hair to show us how disheveled she claims to be.

The fourth game, The  Blackwell Deception, introduces new mysteries and continues developing the plot arcs from the previous games, but its primary purpose is to set up the final game, The Blackwell Epiphany, where all the plot lines converge and designer Gilbert builds the story to literally earthshaking consequences. It’s supposedly the last game in the series and it wraps things up nicely, leaving the player with a sense of triumph and sweet sadness that justifies the hours you’ve put in playing all five games in a row.

Dave Gilbert is good at plotting, but for my tastes his greatest strength is in balancing the puzzles so that they aren’t so difficult that you throw up your hands and decide to finish the games much, much later, but still challenging enough that you feel a sense of triumph when you solve one. Of course, just when you think you’ve solved the puzzle that will tie up the plotline once and for all you find that you’ve just opened another can of puzzle-solving worms. These aren’t 100-hour-plus RPGs, but the length of play is remarkably good considering the low prices you have to pay for most of the episodes, especially if Steam or some other entity places them in a low-cost bundle.

The games also play nicely with technology, with Rosa going from a land line and a phonebook in her first game to a handheld “myPhone” with built-in search engine by the final game. And as the series goes on her apartment becomes a collection of game memorabilia that references all of the earlier plots, inside jokes for players who went to the effort to play the games in order. It’s a nice touch, one of many that Gilbert, Dave, throws in.

Like most adventure games, the Blackwell games are essentially linear, but you frequently find yourself faced with multiple puzzles that at least give you the illusion of an open world because there are very few clues as to what order they need to be solved in. But there usually is an order and figuring it out is a major puzzle in itself.

Dave Gilbert isn’t the master innovator that his namesake Ron (who has his own LucasArt throwback game on the way) was and probably still is. But he understands how to construct a compelling story with characters that the reader cares about, puzzles that are satisfying to solve, and a well-constructed five game arc that must have been flowcharted meticulously, probably starting sometime during the design process of the first game. Are the Blackwell games ever as great as the LucasArts titles? No, but that’s really too much to ask of an indie game series.

If adventure games aren’t your virtual drug of choice, I’ll move on to another topic in the next post, though right now I’m not entirely sure what it will be.