Category Archives: Apple II

Minimalism And Magic

Kirk Hamilton and I have been writing all those FFVII Letters at Paste, banging on about how special and imaginative the game is. Yet as Kirk pointed out in our last letter, it contains a Meteor called “Meteor,” a Weapon called WEAPON, and stuff called Black Materia and Huge Materia (to differentiate itself from regular old Materia, of course). Creative.

But in today’s new edition in the series, I talk about how the simplistic names are abstraction at its happy work yet again — when we don’t have to think much about what things are called, it gives us more mental resources to think about what they are. Simple names make important concepts intuitive, second-nature. And then when something is named rather prettily, like the sunken Gelnika or Turks leader Tseng, it makes more of an impact on us.

When I was a kid, every game I played was painfully basic in presentation and interface. The only explanation I have for why I so loved these ancient computer games I wrote about in Thought Catalog today was that I was young, had an overactive imagination and had little else I wanted to do with my playtime — not to mention it’s not like we had many more sophisticated adventures in the 1980s, right?

I also think they impacted me so much because they were SO terse, so crude. That blob on the wall is a cabinet I’m supposed to open? How the eff would I have known that without stabbing in the dark? Why does the game tell me I’m holding a map if it is of no use to read it? I must type ENTER HOUSE and not OPEN DOOR or else the game will tell me that area is not available, and if I go WEST at this intersection I’ll be instantly killed? Cool.

That cursor blinking at me, demanding my next move, frustration a constant pall — and yet the continual possibility of sudden, lucky solution teased at the fringe of my awareness just as much as did the threat of sudden, accidental death. I’d hold my breath and get chills; they remain among my favorite gaming memories.

When young there was nothing I loved more than rich universes. I’d write about my favorite games, draw pictures and play pretend. That’s why so much of my writing lately has hinged on parsing exactly what’s changed — either about games or about me — that makes me so inattentive and easily bored.

When I play games that give me lorebooks, diary entries, character stories hidden off the beaten path, I’m surprised at how little I care. It’s not so simple as impatience for reading — I like reading, and I don’t even mind when reading in text adventures or visual novels comes at the expense of interactivity. “I’ve changed,” I shrug to myself when I have a million New Unread Notes blinking at me in this or that UI and I just scroll through them quickly because the star or dot or highlight or exclamation point that tells me I haven’t read them yet bugs me like it does in Gmail.

Yet as we observe in the FFVII Letters, some types of games can make me go way, way out of my way and to much inconvenience for even the possibility of discovering a new piece of information. Why will I do it for characters and plot threads that are so minimal, when I won’t do it for things rendered in much more depth?

Because I like minimalism, I guess. I like to do the brain-work myself, the imagining myself. And I get such a thrill from looking at the title screens of these old adventure games I can now revisit thanks to the magic of this web-based IIe emulator that I don’t even try to play them that often, because it still feels good to think of them as ghosts I never conquered, awesome machines that have forever outsmarted me. It still feels good to preserve them as half-remembered, near-legendary things.

And also because I still can’t beat most of them without a walkthrough, and you know once you open a walkthrough for one puzzle your tolerance for future ones steadily decreases, and before you know it, you’re just going through the motions, and that’s no way to honor my past. I get addicted to hints (you should have seen our phone bill, and my parents’ consternation, back when Sierra still operated that buck-a-minute hint line).

Anyway, you might have missed this 2009 Classic Moment In SVGL History when I wrote this “open letter” to Bob Blauschild, the designer of two out of five of my best-remembered — and most frustrating — adventure games, whose name sketched on the title screens always stuck with me. I did it mostly as humor, never expecting that he’d ever see it, but he did, and here’s what he wrote back to me.

Hearing from Mr. Blauschild was frankly a little dazzling, because I still maintain that lifeline to the way I felt about those old computer games and the invisible, sadistic entities that made them. Once in a while if I think about it, so is the fact that I now have periodic occasion to be in the same room as “Lord British”, whom as a kid I presumed had to be some real-life mysterious English lord, sitting on a throne made of mainframes, silently challenging the world’s peons to encounter him at Ultima. When I was tiny I thought he maybe wasn’t even real, some artificial consciousness assembled in green pixels.

I think that’s part of the Minecraft juggernaut today, actually. There’s the idea of a single figure who goes by the moniker of ‘Notch’, creating the weather in a savage and lawless, endless world that challenges its players to eke out defiance — and beauty — one hard-won step, one precious discovery at a time. Awe and death are both certain in Minecraft, and you just never know which is coming next.

[Today’s Good Song: Memory Tapes, ‘Today Is Our Life‘]

Bob Blauschild Responds To My Open Letter!

[You may recall I recently wrote an open letter to the designer of a couple obscure adventure games that used to make me pound my little fist against the Apple IIe’s keyboard in frustration in my childhood, at the same time they formed my earliest and best nostalgic memories of gaming. Thanks to the magic of the internet, my letter reached former Sirius Software designer Bob Blauschild, who’s given me permission to publish his response in its unedited entirety. This is one of the coolest things that has ever happened in my career.]

Dear Leigh,

It was quite a shock, seeing your open letter to me. Hard to believe, but the number of letters sent to me by hot young babes (assuming that that’s your picture) has declined significantly over the past several decades. I was initially hesitant to respond. Your letter is so well written that any response I might offer could seem nearly illiterate in comparison. But you’re the pro in this field and I’m but an historical footnote, so with that in mind, here goes –

I’m touched that you fondly remember spending day after day hacking away at my games. I can’t apologize for making them too hard for a six-year-old. The target audience was approximately 10 or 12 to 40, and one goal was to make the puzzles difficult enough to make the game last a week or more to justify the price, without being so difficult as to drive the player to go postal (especially when my name was on the product and my address was in the phonebook).

I take it from the tone of your letter that your claims of suffering “childhood damage” and being “traumatized for life” at the hands of my code are somewhat exaggerated to show your commitment to the intensity with which you attacked the games. If they in any way led to developing a passion for thinking through challenges, then I’ll take just a little credit.

There is one section of your letter that does require a response. You list several Sirius Software games – Critical Mass, Escape from Rungistan, Kabul Spy, Blade of Blackpool, and Gruds in Space – and state that you are unsure about whether I was responsible for of all of those. I was not. The first two were mine, the second two were written by Tim Wilson, and the third I can’t recall much about now. As for your research that told you that Sirius Software’s adventure game titles were merely poor clones of Sierra’s Hi-Res Adventures, everyone’s entitled to their opinion, no matter how horribly wrong it is.

In the early 80’s I was interested in finding out why computer games were so expensive. Must be something there to justify the price, so I plunked down my $40 for “The Princess and the Wizard.” I was quickly hooked, and blew through all the graphic adventure games that were available. But there weren’t many, so thereafter I decided to try writing one myself as a hobby. But I didn’t want to just duplicate what was currently available. “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” with its non-stop action was a big deal then. What if I were to insert action sequences and moments of possible panic into my graphic adventure game? And how about adding some humor? That’s what I did, and the result was something new that outsold all of the Sierra games for a few months.

I wrote a second game, then went back to concentrating on designing chips in Silicon Valley, and then your letter showed up 26 years later.

Thank you for the jolt of nostalgia. Your writing style is terrific, and your success as a writer is well deserved.

Best Regards,

Bob Blauschild

[Bonus Material: Bob directed me to a site where, also thanks to the magic of the internet, Escape From Rungistan is playable — as are Critical Mass and likely a host of other amazing things. I still keep dying, but I’ll conquer it yet!

Thank you for everything, Bob!]

An Open Letter To Mr. Bob Blauschild, Formerly Of Sirius Software

[no. what i need is to bash my face against the keys a few more times, perhaps try typing some curse words.]

Dear Mr. Blauschild,

As you may have realized from my blog and body of work widely available on the Internet, I am a video game journalist. I was tonight the recipient of a sudden electroshock of nostalgia, during which I suddenly remembered that you, sir, are the source of my fear of elevators.

You see, Mr. Blauschild, I am actually the heir to my father’s consumer technology journalism mantle. My father covered a variety of home entertainment products including what were at the time fairly newly-invented items including the home personal computer, the home videocasette player, and the home video game console. As a result, I was raised with plenty of access to press review copies of just about every Apple II and Commodore 64 game ever developed, and that, sir, includes your portfolio of work as a designer of text games accompanied by graphics published under the marquee of Sirius Software.

Mr. Blauschild, you developed quite a few excellent products which stumped me mightily — I was only five or six years old at the time, and precocious but not especially freakish, please understand. So it was that your titles Critical Mass and Escape From Rungistan came to form one of the earliest gaming palettes that I can to this day recall. So did Kabul Spy, Blade of Blackpoole and Gruds In Space, but I am unsure whether you are the one to whom I can assign responsibility for these titles.

Current internet research informs me that indeed Sirius Software’s adventure titles were merely poor clones of what Sierra titled at the time its “Hi-Res Adventures,” but my young mind knew no difference, and I’ll have you know that Escape From Rungistan challenged me for years. That action sequence with the skis? I even consulted my uncle, a ski aficionado, for advice on how commands like LEAN RIGHT and LEAN LEFT might correspond to actual skiing, but all I ever ended up with was a face full of splinters (via text, naturally). I once had a dream I arrived at the animated cannibals that I saw in the game’s manual — and bragged to my friends that I indeed passed the ski sequence — but in truth, it was a dream only.

Although my young days were filled with fantasies of triumph, I never did beat any of your games, Mr. Blauschild. I was only six years old.

However, my particular bone to pick with you hinges on the odd title Critical Mass, which as I’m certain you recall begins in an office in which the word LITHIUM is written on the wall to inform the player of a password for later use. Why should a six-year-old know the meaning of the word LITHIUM, Mr. Blauschild? Well, I knew it not, but what really took its place beneath my skin was the “action sequence” that followed the player character’s exiting his office via text command.

As I’m sure you cannot not have forgotten, almost immediately upon opening gameplay, the player is placed in a plummeting elevator, and if the player does not type “JUMP” at the precisely-timed correct moment (followed, of course, by the seminal ‘Return’ key), the player will die — after being informed that one’s elbows and knees have switched places, or perhaps it was the hips and shoulders, or other such gruesome penalty.

Mr. Blauschild, I was six years old, and it took me months — I jest not, months, sir — of repeated attempts before I fundamentally understood the idea of action gameplay timing. I did pass that point in your game, indeed I did. I arrived at the airport and bestowed the flower upon the Hare Krishna (I had no idea, of course, what Krishnas were). I took the plane to France where I was delighted by your clever street names such as “Rue La Chat” and “Rue La Pig” — and was then immediately frustrated by the key in the drain pipe, the flooding streets.

But to this day, Mr. Blauschild, every time I enter an elevator in my normative adult life — I am now twenty-something, sir — I recall your game, Critical Mass, and wonder whether, should the elevator plummet, my upper and lower joints will trade places if I do not JUMP at precisely the assigned moment. My body temperature perceptibly lowers, and every time — every time I enter an elevator, Mr. Blauschild, and I a New York resident! — I prepare myself to JUMP. I am traumatized, and it is your fault.

This means, Mr. Blauschild, formerly of Sirius Software, developer of the games that formed my childhood sustenance, that I shall never forget you. And this means, in addition to having traumatized me for life, you taught me action gameplay timing, sir. Not only were there the skis in Escape From Rungistan, but there was that hellacious “call Gidget” waterski sequence in Critical Mass. What is with you and skis, dear sir? I know not — but I concede, here and now, that you helped create me as I am.

Today I am a game journalist, Mr. Blauschild. And you taught me not only my terror of elevators and my comprehension of action gameplay timing, but my love of the intellectual interactive puzzle, my yen for banging my head against the steep wall of frustration, my asbsolute addiction to outwitting the sadistic logic of a game designer.

Certainly, you are not sole among my earliest mentors; I must thank early Origin Systems veteran Dallas Snell for Ring Quest, Phillip and Bob Hess for the insanely ruthless Death in the Caribbean, of course, the Williamses Ken and Roberta (because before King’s Quest, there were Mystery House and The Dark Crystal, of course). And slightly later, I owe my gratitude to Al Lowe for teaching me, by way of Leisure Suit Larry, what a “prophylactic” is at the age of eight or so (yes, precocious, intellectual independence, hallelujah)!

But perhaps against all odds, Mr. Blauschild, I loved and loathed alike your titles first and best. Thank you, in both highest esteem and admiration, and in good-natured frustration, bitterness and childhood damage, for my passion and for my livelihood. All that exists to be read with my name beneath the headline was born in part of you.

Sincerely yours,

Leigh Alexander
News Director, Gamasutra
Proprietress, Sexy Videogameland
leighalexander1 at gmail dot com

PS: To all gentlemen and women herein named, I forever adore you, genuinely.