Video Game Replay: Portal/Portal 2

Spoilers Ahoy

No seriously, I’m about to spoil two of the best games of the last 20 years, and if you somehow still haven’t played them, bookmark this post and head over to Steam right now trust me.

I’m Serious, go play it.

My kids had never played either of the Portal games, so on a whim a couple of weeks ago we fired them up on the SteamDeck and played through them as a team. (Technical sidebar: the PS5 controller makes an excellent bluetooth controller for the SteamDeck when it’s connected to a TV, and really easy to set up! Ironically, a million times easier than trying to use my old Steam Controller.) I played them both when they came out, but hadn’t since.

Portal is a perfectly crafted jewel of a game. The gameplay is perfect, the puzzles are interesting, the design and look of the game perfectly matched with what the game engine can do.

It’s also got maybe my all time favorite piece of narrative slight-of-hand I’ve ever seen in a video game.

Recall that the frame for the game is that you’re Chell, a “test subject” for Aperture Science Labs, testing out their “Portal Gun.” Structurally, you move through a series of levels, each of which is a confined space where you need to use the gun in increasingly complex ways to make portals to get from the entrance door to the exit. The portals themselves are person-sized wormholes or connections that you can drop onto most flat surfaces, connecting disparate areas of the geography. But also, objects—including yourself—keep their momentum as they pass through the portals, so not only can you use them to navigate around obstacles but to build a variety of slingshots, catapults, launchers. You redirect lasers, confuse turrets, bounce objects. Critically, you also don’t have another kind of gun, just the portal one, so puzzles that in a “regular” first person shooter would be solved via firepower here have to be solved by variable cartography.

The puzzles are from the “duplicate, then elaborate”school of design, each one adds some new twist or obstacle or complication that you have to combine with what you leaned last time.

The only other character is the robot voice that’s giving you instructions—that’s GLaDOS, voiced by the staggeringly good Ellen McLain, who seems to be running the show. She’s a computer mastermind in the HAL/SHODAN sense, but a little ruder, a little funnier.

Each test chamber has an opening graphic or placard, giving the chamber number, counting up to 19. The opening sign also has a series of icons indicating which obstacles this room has, with the array lighting up more and more as you move through the game.

The visual design of the game also perfectly matched what the upgraded Half-Life 2 engine it was using could do. The test chambers were mostly white high-tech spaces, sort of 2001 crossed with the Apple store, with the occasional moving panel or window. Big doors slide open to reveal pneumatic tube–like elevators between levels. Metalic panels indicate walls that can’t have portals opened on them, as opposed to the normal glowing white walls. Most of all, the visual design was very clear and focused. Considering the strange geometries you could create with the portals, this was critical to making the puzzles solvable, you could always get your bearings and get an eye-line to where the exit door was, regardless of if you could see how to get there yet.

This is where I pause and remind everyone that Portal wasn’t released on it’s own. It was the “other, other” new game in the Orange Box collection, bundled with Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Team Fortress 2. Portal was clearly the one they had the least commercial expectations for; Team Fortress got all the ads and early chatter, Episode 2 was exciting because it was moving the Half-Life story forward, Portal had the quality that it was the bonus track on the album, the fun tech demo.

And so there was no reason to believe that Portal was anything other than it presented itself as: 19 puzzles with this cool portal tech, which would presumably show up in Half-Life 3 as part of a “real game.”

If you paid attention, though, there were some indications that things weren’t quite right. Every test chamber had at least one observation window looking down into it, and while you could see chairs and computers, you never saw a person moving around on the other side of the translucent glass. GLaDOS wasn’t ever openly malevolent, but sometimes seemed a little off. And there were a few places where you could slip “backstage” of a test chamber, and find strange graffiti and other abandoned debris. There was nothing you could do to interact with it, though? GLaDOS never mentions it? Just a fun little easter egg, I guess, like the G-Man peeking through windows at you at the start of the first Half-Life A little strange though, for a glorified tech demo?

So then, when you get to Test Chamber 19 and then instead of the game ending GlaDOS tries to dump you into the incinerator, you get to have the absolutely breathtaking realization that no, you fell for it, you didn’t just beat the game, you beat the tutorial.

The rest of the game is making your way through the infrastructure of the testing facility towards GLaDOS, using all the portal tricks the game carefully tought you earlier. You find out that, hey, the reason you never saw anyone behind those windows was because GLaDOS killed them all, and now instead of a fun tech demo puzzle game you’re in a 1:1 duel to the death with an evil computer. It’s great! Then there’s a song at the end!

Part what makes it so great is the length: it’s not short short, but it knows how not to wear out its welcome. Replaying it, I think we beat in in three after-school nights, neither rushing nor going terribly slowly. Perfectly paced, satisfying without being overlong, trim without leaving you feeling cheated.

It did, however, leave everyone wanting more.

It was, and I’m marking it down here, a huge success. Portal ripped through the circa 2008 nerd culture like few things I’ve ever seen before or since. It quickly flipped from “the bonus track” to “really, there’s no way to get this without that dumb-looking Team Fortress?” The cake memes were everywhere. Making a sequel was an absolute no-brainer.

They announced Portal 2 in 2010, it was released the next year. Unlike the first game, this was a full triple-A standalone release. In a world where it had already become clear that Half-Life 3 was never going to happen, this was Valve’s Next Big Thing. Structurally, Portal wasn’t a lot like Valve’s other work, Portal 2, on the other hand, was absolutely A Valve Game.^TM

This is where I pause and admit that my opinion most of-of-step with the video game–playing mainstream is that I do not, personally, care for either of the Half-Life games. This is not a contrarian hot take, I’m not about to try to convince you that they’re Bad Actually, I understand why they are as popular and beloved as they are, I am aware of all the ways they were incredibly innovative and influential.

I feel the same way about the Half-Lifes that I do about Cola: I acknowledge that it’s very popular, don’t have anything against it, but it is not my preferred flavor. I guess, in this strained metaphor, the original Deus Ex is Mountain Dew?

Because this is going to be relevant in a moment, let me attempt to sketch for you what I don’t like about them. I’ve thought about this a lot, because it’s very strange to beat a game, think to yourself “well, that was okay I guess, but not that great” and then have everyone you know declare it to be the greatest game of all time, and then have that happen even more so with the sequel. You gotta stop and make sure you’re not the idiot, you know?

Valve shooters tend to be extremely linear games where you make your way though an environment, alternating segments of “traversal” where you have to find the one way forward, and “encounters” which are either an in-engine cutscene, a shootout, or more rarely, a puzzle to get past. They very much like to imply a larger, more complex environment out and around you, but all the doors are locked and impassable except the one door or vent you can go through. It’s all stage scenery, basically. And while it’s cool that the cutscenes don’t take your control away, it sometimes feels like you’re watching the game get played for you. In my less charitable moods, I describe the Half-Lifes as “slowly walking down an elaborately decorated single hallway.”

And the obvious follow-up question here is, well buddy, even just limiting ourselves to first person shooters from the turn of the century, that also pretty much describes Max Payne, which you loved, so what gives? Broadly, I think it’s two things. First, those fake environments. I prefer sprawling non-linear environments in games, but I don’t mind something more linear. What drove me crazy about Half-Life 2 especially was you’d get these vast city-scapes, and then only a tiny little alleyway was available to you. Vice City had already been out for two years! Deus Ex did all kinds of things with open spaces on limited computers! Max Payne didn’t irritate me as much because you spent all your time in naturally-enclosed areas; abandoned subways, empty office buildings, and the like. I spent a lot of time wishing City 17 was more like Hong Kong in Deus Ex and less like the Black Mesa facility.

But mostly what I didn’t like was I thought most of the actual shooting was pretty boring. I like games that structure “encounters” more like puzzles—this is why I prefer turn-based tactical fights in RPGs, why I like X-COM more than Diablo, and so on. One of the things I loved so much about Max Payne, was that between the fact you really could take cover and the bullet time mechanic, each shootout functioned as a puzzle—how do I get through this without being hit? More than once I’d get through a fight, and the reload, muttering “I can do better.”

The parts of Half-Life 2 I really liked—the sawblades vs zombies village, that big physics puzzle with the crane—were encounters that functioned more like puzzles. It wasn’t just “keep an eye on your ammo remaining and watch the floor for those crab things.”

I disliked the way Half-Life 2 would get you to the next set-piece, and then say “okay, this is a gravity gun puzzle” or “nope, this is just shooting,” or “yeah, this is a laser-guided missile puzzle.” There were very very few opportunities to mix and match, or find your own solution to anything.

This sounds like snark but isn’t: my favorite part of Half-Life 2 was the final level where you have to use the gravity gun to bounce those energy spheres around and disintegrate things. That was something new, and didn’t play like anything else. I wish the whole game has been like that.

I bring all this up because Portal 2 has this exact structure, and I loved it.

Portal 2 opens with the swagger of a game being make by people who know they’re making a hit. Portal sometimes has a slightly hesitant quality to it, beyond just being the “bonus game,” in that you can tell the developers aren’t quite sure if the audience is going to buy what they’re selling. Portal 2, on the other hand, is clearly made by people who know the audience loved what they did last time. It has a really solid take on what worked from the first game and leans into them. Among other things, that means more humor and more atmospherics. It also knows it has more space, so it settles in, puts its feet up, and gets comfortable.

Valve hadn’t been known for funny games, and while Portal was funny that humor tended to be subtle and deadpan. But the jokes were everyone’s favorite part, so Portal 2 comes out of the gate making it clear that this is a comedy: a terribly dark comedy, but a comedy.

It opens with a fairly bravura set-piece, where you start in what looks like a 1950s hotel room, do a couple of tutorial moves to learn the controls, go to sleep, and then wake up terribly far in the future. The room is ruined and overgrown, and things have clearly gone wrong. The first new character of the game, Wheatley, quickly arrives to finish your tutorial. He’s a spherical robot driving around on a track on the ceiling, and he’s played by Steven Merchant, who at the time was mostly known for the UK version of The Office. The opening turns into something of a technical flex as Wheatley starts driving your hotel room around on a larger set of tracks, crashing into things, disintegrating the walls, as you have to move around and avoid being thrown out. As the walls fall apart, you get glimpses of that same backstage infrastructure from the first game—you’re still in the same Aperture Science facility, just in a new part. On paper, this is a classic Valve “live action cutscene”, a lot like the opening train rides of both Half-Lifes, but the key difference for me was that it was very funny. The slapstick of the room crashing into things, Wheatley’s stuttered apologies, great stuff.

You’re once again playing Chell, a silent protagonist in the style of Half-Life’s Gordon Freeman. Unlike Half-Life which dances around why Freeman never says anything, here’s it’s lampshaded directly; Wheatley thinks you have brain damage, GLaDOS later refers to you as a “mute lunatic”; the writer, Erik Wolpaw has said several times that she just refuses to give anyone the satisfaction of a response.

The utilitarian, 2001-esque test chambers of Portal were very spooky in their own subtle way, and then the backstage areas even more so. Portal 2 knows not to try to recreate either of those, but keeps finding new ways to riff on the same basic environmental grammar.

You quickly find yourself back in the facility from the first game, but long-abandoned and gone to ruin. The first few levels are the same intro test chambers from the first game, but now overgrown and abandoned. It’s an inspired way to reacclimatize returning players to the game while also onboarding new ones, while still making it clear this this game is going to be different, and very spooky.

But, like the first game, Portal 2 knows not to overstay its welcome with any particular batch of ideas. The game passes through, roughly, five acts. After the opening act in the ruined facility, you accidentally wake GLaDOS up, and she retakes control, and she decides to get back to work.

This second act is the one most the first game, with GLaDOS running you through new test chambers. The facility itself becomes much more of a character, with the chambers “waking up”, walls reorganizing themselves, the various panels shaking off years of debris before re-assuming their test configurations, becoming less ruined and more like they were before.

The best example of the second game’s swagger is the way it uses GLaDOS herself. While she was used sparingly before, here they know she’s the best part of the game, and make sure to use her to the fullest. Her voice is less artificial, and she has more things to say, and they’re funner.

My favorite example of this is that as her frustration mounts, we end up with an extended series of jokes where rather than questioning your skills or value, she just starts calling you fat in increasingly bitchy ways. GLaDOS is far more human in this game to the character’s immense benefit, there’s a sense that her behavior in the first game is her “professional demeanor”, and in the second game she’s gotten tired and frustrated enough that the “real her” is spilling out.

While this is going on, most levels have a spot where Wheatley peeks through a half-opened panel or around a corner. A carefully-designed set of blink-or-you’ll-miss-it encounters that make sure you never blink. Eventually he stages a rescue, and the third act is once again backstage of the testing facility, making your way towards GLaDOS. Similar in design to the backstage second half of the first game, the facility here come across as larger and more menacing, with more things going on that just your strange tests. Views recede into a blue haze past the industrial strutures, where is all this, exactly?

The closest the game comes to replicating the first game’s surprise twist is at the fight with GLaDOS—it looks like so far we’ve mostly been re-staging the plot of the first game with better graphics and funnier writing, but then Wheatley takes over, goes all megalomaniacal, straps GLaDOS to a potato battery, and throws the pair of you down a long shaft.

The best, and most famous part of the game is the fourth act, set in the abandoned 50s, 70s, and 80s–era testing facilities. Turns out the whole facility was built inside an abandoned salt mine, working from the bottom up, and everything you’ve seen so far was just the very top layer.

This is where we meet the last new character—Cave Johnson, played by JK Simmons in full “bring me pictures of Spider-man” mode, the founder and now deceased CEO of Aperture Science, via his leftover recordings. Johnson’s rants, and GLaDOS’s snark in return from her position as a potato perched on your gun, makes for the game’s best writing.

This is where the game most settles into it’s Half-Life 2 style structure, you alternate between navigating your way up to the next level through the abandoned structures, then solve a test chamber or two designed with an appropriately retro style of tech, and then go back to traversal. Like the first game, it does a remarkable job of teaching you some new portal tricks with the test chambers, and then letting you loose to use them as you try and move around between those test chambers.

It’s worth noting how much exposition they cram into the jokes Cave Johnson and GLaDOS make at each other—most specifically how much time they spend talking about moon dust, which seems like just another wacky detail until you find out why, and realize they’ve been giving you the solution to a puzzle the whole time.

Finally, you make it back up to the “modern day”, facility, where things have gone horribly wrong with Wheatley in charge. It’s a remarkable piece of design work that, using the same basic pieces, the freshly re-ruined facility manages to be the most menacing yet. It’s positively apocalyptic with tangled up rooms and looming fires on the horizon as you try to keep the whole place from being destroyed and solve Wheatley’s terrible puzzles.

The key difference structurally between the two games is that the second knows it can’t recreate the Big Surprise of the first, so it doesn’t try. Instead, the second game is built around anticipation, each act has an end goal that gets declared at the start and that you spend the whole time working towards: escape the facility, escape GLaDOS, climb back out, defeat Wheatley. While this keeps the game moving forward, it does tend to blunt the puzzles a little; unlike the first game there’s a tendency to try and rush through them so you can see what happens next.

That’s part of how Half-Life 2 structure’s worked too: you’d get a goal, then fight your way through whatever it was to get where the goal needed you to be.

Which brings me back around to why did I like Portal 2 so much more than the Half-Lifes? For starters, I like the humor a lot more than the post-apocalyptic melodrama. Mainly, though, it’s the puzzles. While I found the shooting encounters frequently boring, the portal puzzles never were, and kept building on themselves in fun and interesting ways. There was never an “oh this again” moment, there was always some new twist or “yes and”. And whereas the linear and confined nature of the Half-Lifes felt limiting, here it made the puzzles feel even possible. Knowing there’s one way through keeps the tangled wreckage at the bottom of the test shaft from feeling overwhelming. You’re not going to get lost, you’re not going to chase the wrong path, let’s just look around for the one place you can shoot a portal and keep moving.

As an aside on that point: there’s a regular Discourse that pops up with video games around how much player affordance is too much, every 9–18 months someone would get mad about yellow paint on ladders back on the old twitter. Portal 2 does a really elegant job of this by using light; most of the facilities are very dark, especially the older ones, and the few spotlights that are there will just casually play across the area where you need to shoot a portal. It’s a slick way to draw the eye without making it insultingly obvious. (There are a few places where you’d have a collapsed bridge but then the fallen wreckage would just happen to form a perfect walkway over to where you need to be, which gets a little eye-rolling.)

Both Portal games are a masterclass in this, in game design that subtly wiggles its eyebrows at the right answer and then lets you think you solved it all on your own.

Narratively, the game has a pretty conclusive end, there’s room for more but no real un-pulled threads. From a design perspective, this also felt like the definitive statement on these mechanics. Half-Life 3 has become a vaporware meme because there’s still so much plot and mechanics you could build on top of those games, but conversely no one really clamors for a Portal 3, because it doesn’t need one. Any new game with those portal mechanics would need to do something new, something different, and whatever that might be, it wouldn’t be Portal. The Portal/Portal 2 diptych might be the only perfect 1-2 punch in all of video games, and there’s no reason to make more. Outstanding work, just as fun over a decade later as they were when they were new. I’d say something like “they don’t make ‘em like that anymore,” but no, they never made them like that at any time, except those two.

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I will just throw this out here though: I’d pay real money for a game just called “Three” that let you play as Gordon Freeman, Chell, and Alyx simultaneously, swapping between them to solve portal/gravity/bullet gun puzzles as you had to team up with GLaDOS to defeat those aliens.

TTRPGs I’m Currently Playing: Cypher System + It’s Only Magic

It can’t have escaped notice that I written something like fourteen thousand words on “new kinds of D&D” on the ‘cano so far this year, and all of those pieces ended with a kind of “well, not really what I’m playing these days but seems neat!” Which brings up the obvious follow-up question: what am I playing these days? Well…

Something that I think is really under-theorized in TTRPGs are GM Playstyles. Every decent RPG these days has a list of player archetypes: the actor, the puzzle-solver, the rules lawyer, etc, but very rarely do you see GM style addressed in anything more detailed than a reminder that it’s not a competition and you need to support your players.

I think a big part of the reason for that is that GM Style ends up being closely linked to the design of the particular game itself. Most games—and I realize the word “most” is a load-bearing word in this sentence—support multiple player styles, but generally have a much narrower list of “right” ways to run them.

The result of that is that most people who run games, especially those of us who've run multiple systems, will find one and glom on—“this is the game I’m running from here on out.” We can’t always articulate why, but you’ll settle into a ruleset and realize how much easier and more fun it is to run, and I think that’s because it’s a game where the designer runs games the same way you do.

I’ve said before that 5th edition D&D is the first version of that game that I didn’t feel like was fighting me to run it the way I wanted to. I genuinely loved the whole 3.x family, and that’s probably the ruleset I have the most hours with at this point, but at least once a session I would say both “bleah, I don’t remember how that works,” and “man, I don’t care. Just roll something and we can move on.”

A big part of that is I like to run games in a more “improvisational” style than D&D usually assumes—and just to be crystal clear, I’m using “improv” in the formal, technical sense as a specific technique like with Improv Comedy, not as a synonym for “ad lib” or “just making things up.”

And it’s not that you can’t Improv D&D, it’s just that for any given mechanical encounter you need to know a lot of numbers, and so the game tends to screech to a halt as you flip through the Monster Manual looking for something close enough to run with.

(My go-to guidelines were when in doubt, the DC was 13, and the players could always have a +2 circumstance bonus if they asked.)

So with that as prologue, let me tell you about my favorite tabletop RPG out there: Monte Cook’s Cypher System.

Like a lot of people, Cook was somebody whose name I first learned due to his being one of the three core designers of 3rd Edition D&D, along with Johnathan Tweet and Skip Williams. Tweet, of course, was the big name rockstar developer, having done both Ars Magica and Over the Edge, and was supposedly the guy who came up with most of the d20 system’s core mechanics.

Cook, though, was one of those people I realized I already knew who he was despite not knowing his name—he was one of “the Planescape Guys,” and was the one who wrote the modules that brought Orcus back.

After 3.0 came out, Cook did a bunch of weird projects like the criminally underrated Ghostwalk, and got hit in one of the early waves of layoffs. He started his own indie company, and ended up as one of the first people to explore selling PDFs on their own as a business model. (Which sounds absolutely ancient now.)

I thought his indie stuff was some of, if not the best third party 3e D&D material out there. But even more so, I found his stuff incredibly easy to use and run. This was a guy who clearly ran games the way I did. By contrast, my reaction to Tweet’s stuff, who I respected and admired tremendously, was to stare at it and think “but what do I do, though?”

Cook also had a blog—I think on LiveJournal, to really emphasize the 2004 of it all—which had a huge influence on how I ran games, mostly because I’d get halfway through a post and already be shouting “of course!”

He also did a mostly-forgotten game published variously as Arcana Unearthed and Arcana Evolved that I thought was the best version of 3rd edition; it was the game 3.0 wanted to be without all the D&D historical baggage. One of the many neat things it had—and this is foreshadowing—was a much cleaner & more comprehensive system for crafting magic items, including a very cool way to make single-use items. Want to store a bunch of single-use Fireball spells in marbles and distribute them to your fellow party members? You can do that.

Flash forward a decade. Just before 5e came out, Cook released his big magnum opus game, Numenera. I bounced off the setting pretty hard, but the rules, those I really liked.

Imagine the initial 3.0 version of D&D, and strip it down until all you have left are Feats and the d20. The core mechanic is this: everything has a difficulty from 1 to 10. The target number is the difficulty times 3. Meet or beat on a roll to accomplish the task.

And here’s the thing: that’s the only way tasks work. All you need to do to make something work in game is give it a difficulty score. Going hand in hand with this is that only the PCs roll. So, for example, monsters use the same difficulty score for what the PCs need to roll to hit them, and also what the PCs need to roll to avoid being hit by them. Occasionally, something will have something at a different level than the default, a difficulty 3 monster with stealth as level 6, for example. It’s incredibly easy to improv on this when you really only need one number, and you can focus on the big picture without having to roll the dice and do math yourself on the fly.

It's funny—on 3rd Edition/D20 Jonathan Tweet always got the credit for the clean and simple parts of the game ("Um, how about if Armor Class just went up?") and Cook got the credit for all the really crunchy rules & wizards stuff. Which made sense, since Tweet has just done Over the Edge, and Cook had just spent years working for ICE on Rolemaster. So, building his own system from scratch, Cook ends up with something from the "bare minimum number of rules to make this playable" school, whereas Tweet’s 13th Age went completely the other direction.

Alert mathematicians will have noted that difficulty levels higher than 6 are impossible to hit on a bare roll being above 20. Rather than modifiers to the roll, you use things to increase or decrease the difficulty level. (When the game came out, I cracked that Cook had clearly won a bet by making a game where the only mechanic was THAC0.)

Most of where the PC’s options come from are their Abilities, which are effectively 3e D&D feats. They’re some thing a PC can do, a power, a bonus to some kind of task, a spell, a special attack.

Players can also have skills, in which they are either trained or specialized, which decrease the difficulty by one or two steps respectively. A player can use up to two “Assets” to decrease the difficulty by up to another two steps, and they’re delightfully abstracted. An Asset can be anything: a crowbar, an NPC assisting, a magic gauntlet, a piece of advice you got last session about where the weak point was. They’re as much an improv prompt for the players as they are a mechanic. If you can decrease the difficulty down to zero, it’s an automatic success, and you dont have to roll.

Which brings me to my two favorite features of the mechanics.

First, the PCs have three Stats—Might, Speed, Intellect—but rather than scores, they’re pools. Your skills & abilities & assets represent your character’s baseline normal everyday capabilities. Your Stat Pools represent how much extra “oomph” you can deploy under pressure. So if you’re trying to Bend Bars & Lift Gates, and having a friend help with a crowbar didn’t get the job done, you can spend some Might points and really get that portcullis open.

Your pools also act as your hit points—physical damage drains your Might pool, psionic attacks drains your Intellect. Special powers or spells also spend pool points to activate.

“I have to spend hit points to kick the door open?” is a reaction most everyone has to this at first glance, but that’s the wrong approach. Your pools are basically a representation of how much “spotlight” time your character can have during an encounter, how much cool stuff they can do before they have to sit down and rest.

Because also, getting your points back is incredibly easy; there’s really no reason to ever enter an encounter—combat, social, or otherwise—without a full tank.

This works for all tasks, not just the punchy combat ones. So you get these great moments where someone will be trying to bluff their way past the border patrol and decide they’re going to be charming as hell as they empty out their Intellect pool, or yell that they’re going to bullet time as they dump their speed pool on a dodge check.

Which brings me to my single favorite RPG mechanic of all time: something called “The GM Intrusion.” At any point, the GM has the option to throw a wrinkle in and call for a roll anyway, usually when the party has cleverly knocked a difficulty down to nothing.

The examples in the book are things like a PC trying to climb a cliff with a specialized rockclimbing skill and a rope harness making the climb check zero, and then the GM says “well actually, it was raining earlier, so I’m gonna need a roll.”

But, the kicker is that the GM has to pay the PC for it. The GM offers up an XP for the Intrusion, and the player has the option to accept, or two spend one of their XPs to reject it. Actually, the GM has to offer up 2 XPs, one of which the player being intruded on has to immediately give to another player, which also does a really neat job of democratizing XP rewards.

Cypher is one of those games where “1 XP” is a significant item, players generally get 2–4 a session, upgrades cost 3 or 4 depending on what you want.

The place where this really works is if you use cards to represent those XPs. (They have a bunch of really cool XP decks for sale, but they’re dirt easy to make out of 3x5 cards or use repurposed playing cards.) A player saying “and that makes it difficulty zero!” followed by the GM silently sliding an XP card into the middle of the table is peak. I like to give the card a couple little taps before I say something like “so what really happens is…”

This gets objected to from some quarters, usually in the form of something like “putting your thumb on the scale is what I was already doing as a good GM, why should I have to pay for it?” And, well, that’s the reason, so that you have to pay for it. This makes the extra difficulty both explicit and collaborative. Instead of monsters suddenly growing an extra 30 HP they way they tend to do in D&D, here the GM has to openly offer the extra challenge, and allow the player to turn it down. Sometimes they’re just not in the mood, and would rather pay the XP to get past this to what they really want to do.

Like the stat pools, XPs aren’t just a score to make characters better. In addition to actual character upgrades, you can also spend them on things like retroactively creating an NPC contact, or acquiring a base of operations. They’re the currency the players get to use to wrest control of the game away from the GM.

Rounding out the mechanics are the Cyphers themselves. In simple terms, Cyphers are powerful, single-use magic items. In the original Numenera they were all assumed to be scavenged and barely understood ancient tech. So an item that acts as a single-use Fireball grenade might actually be an ancient power cell that no one knows how to use anymore, but they know if they mash these two metal bits together it blows up real good.

Later settings introduced more “subtle” cyphers, as appropriate for the world. In the game I’m running now, Cyphers have included a marble that if you throw it grows to the size of a bowling ball and does a tremendous amount of damage, a high-powered energy drink that does a bonus to any speed task, and “the advice your aunt gave you when you were young,” which they haven’t tried to use yet. (It’s a -2 to any task difficulty, as long as they yell “oh! That’s what she meant!” before rolling.)

PCs can only have a few Cyphers on them at a time, and are supposed to always be finding new ones, so the game operates on the assumption that the players always have a small set of very powerful one-shot powers they can deploy. It keeps the game fresh, while discouraging hoarding. Like XPs, these also work best on cards.

I saw someone complain that Cypher was just “the players and GM handing metaplot coupons back and forth,” and yeaaaahhhh?, I can see why you might get that impression but also that’s the completely wrong philosophy. There are definitely sessions that feel more like a card game, with XP and Cypher cards slapping onto the table. But this is what I was talking about with GM style; I like having a formalized, easy to deploy way where both the GM and the players can go “well, actually…” at each other.

Character creation is similarly stripped down, and is one of the signature elements of the system: you make your character by filling in the blanks of the sentence “I’m an [adjective] [noun] who [verbs].” The noun is effectively your character class, but they’re more like a starting template. The default nouns are “strong guy”, “fast guy”, “smart guy”, “talky guy”—Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, Bard, basically. The other two let you pick up some specializations. In practice, those three choices just determine which ala carte menu you get to pick your starting powers from.

That all lands somewhere around “rules medium”, in that you can probably fit all the mechanics on a single postcard, but the book is still 400+ pages long to fit all the Abilities and Verbs and all.

Despite the heft of the book, I’ve found it to be a system where the rules just melt away, but still give you enough framework to actually resolve things. When I really need the rules to back me up, there’s something there, otherwise, just say “sure, let’s call that difficulty 3,” and keep moving.

As I said, I bounced off the original Numenera setting pretty hard. Briefly: the setting is a billion years in the future, full of super-science and nanotech and post-plural-apocalypse. "Now", is roughly a medieval setting, where everyone runs around with swords fighting for feudal lords. But, instead of magic we have rediscovered super-science, monsters are the results of ancient genetic experiments, or aliens, or long-abandoned robots. Cook always enjoyed playing with the Arthur C. Clarke line about "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", and here took that all the way up to eleven—the only magic is terribly advanced technology.

The other place he leans into his strengths is that his previous games (Ghostwalk, Ptolus, the setting for Acana Unearthed) had very cool, evocative, exciting setups, and then tended to have a tremendously boring resolution or explanation. Here, mysteries about but are fundamentally unexplainable. “Who knows, it’s weird!!” is the end of every adventure; a setting built around all cool setups that can never be explained or resolved ever. That’s a real “your mileage may vary” flavor if ever there was one.

But the problem is that all ends up just being “turbo D&D” but with different latin stems on the words describing the superpowers. Despite being a world dripping in nanotech, crashed spaceships, power armor, genetically-engineered robots, jetpacks, and all, for some reason the equipment chapter is all swords and polearms. Dude, I didn't buy a book with a robot on the cover to pack a halberd.

I can see why they decided to use this as the setting for the Torment-not-a-sequel. There are ways in which it’s a lot like Planescape, just without all the D&D baggage.

But there is something so deeply joyless about the setting. In the back, he has a list of Inspirations/Recommended Reading, which is both his homage to Gygax's similar appendix in 1E D&D, and also his list of primary sources. Nausicca, which is what I think the setting most resembles, is listed under movies, not books. Which means he only saw the movie, which is 90 minutes of crazy stuff happening, and not the book, where you get to find out what the heck is going on. And then he lists Adventure Time, and I'm all, Monte—where's the sense of fun? Ninjas never steal an old guy's diamond in this game. Maybe he only saw that episode where Bubblegum dies?

As an aside: later releases for Numenera did a better job of embracing the “weird superscience future” side of setting. I know this because despite bouncing off the game I kept picking up supplements for it because I wanted to find a way to make it work and I kept trying to figure out how to shear the rules away from the setting. They did a couple of other games with the same basic mechanics—including the spectacular “RPG for kids” No Thank You Evil which we played the hell out of.

Fortunately, they eventually pulled the combined rules from the other games and broke them out into their own book as just The Cypher System Rulebook. Like I said earlier, it’s a hefty tome, but it has all the “stuff” from the previous stand-alone games, along with a whole bunch of advice on how to lean into or out of various genres with the same rules, especially regarding how to make Cyphers work depending on the vibe and setting you’re going for.

Speaking of advice, the Cypher core book came out at roughly the same time as another book Cook did called Your Best Game Ever, which is a system & setting–agnostic book on “here’s how I think RPGs can and should work”. I cannot think of another example of this, where someone wrote a whole about RPGs, and then separately put out a book of “and here’s the rules I built specifically to support the philosophy of play from the other book.”

So not only does the Cypher core rule book have some of the clearest “here’s how this game is supposed to work and here’s how to make that happen” text I’ve ever read, but then if you have follow-up questions there’s another 230 pages of philosophy and detail you can read if you want.

This should happen more often. I’d love to read a “philosophy of RPG design and play” book from Tweet, or Robin Laws, or Steve Jackson, or the Blades in the Dark guy, or Kevin Siembada, or any of the other people who’ve been around making these games for long time. I don’t know that I’d agree with them, but I’d sure like to read them.

The “generic RPG” is a hill a lot of people have tried to climb, with mixed success. The obvious primary example here is GURPS, but then you have games like Shadowrun which are really four or five different games stacked on each other in the same cyber-trenchcoat.

Cypher is also a swing at the Generic RPG, but a better example of what it’s going for is the post-3.0 D&D d20 era, or the constellation of games “Power by the Apocalypse,” not so much one big game as a core set of bones you can assemble a game on top of. You could mix-and-match stuff from d20 Modern and d20 Future, but you’ll probably have a better time if you don’t.

The Cypher book doesn’t talk about settings but it does talk about genres, and has a long chapter outlining specific advice and tools for making the rules work under the narrative conceits of various genres. The list of genres is longer than I was expecting, there’s the usual Modern/Fantasy/Science-Fiction entries, but also things like Horror, or Romance.

The place where it really started to shine, though, is when then started doing “White Books”, separate genre & settings books to plug into Cypher.

On paper these aren’t that different than the sort of settings books GURPs or d20 would do, but the difference is that with Numenera covering the bases for all the classic science fiction & fantasy tropes, the White Books have the flexibility to get into really narrow and specific sub-genres. The generic stuff is back in the core book, these are all books with a take. They tend to be a mix of advice and guidelines on how to make the genre work as a game, a bunch of genre-specific mechanics, and then an example setting or two.

They did a fantasy setting, but instead of Tolkien/Howard/Burroughs–inspired it’s Alice in Wonderland. They did a Fallout-in-all-but-name setting with the wonderfully evocative name of Rust & Redemption that makes the mechanic of “Cyphers as scavenged technology” work maybe even better than in the original.

And then they did a book called It’s Only Magic, which might be the best RPG supplement I’ve ever read. The strapline is that it’s “cozy witchcore fantasy.” It’ a modern-day urban magic setting, but low-stakes and high-magic. (And look at that cover art!)

The main example setting in the book is centered around the coffee shop in the part of town the kids who go to the local magic college live in. The “ghost mall” is both a dead mall and where the ghosts hang out. It has one of those big fold-out maps where practically every building has an evocative paragraph of description, and you’ve knocked a skeleton of a campaign together halfway through skimming the map.

Less Earthsea and more Gilmore Girls, or rather, it plays like the lower-stakes, funnier episodes of Buffy. Apocalyptic threats from your evil ex-boyfriend? No. Vampire-who-can’t-kill-anymore as your new roommate? Yes. The Craft, but there’s three other magic-using witch clubs at the same school.

The other (smaller) example setting is basically Twin Peaks but the ghosts aren’t evil and the whole town knows about them. Or the funnier monster-of-the-week episodes of the X-Files.

It’s really fun to see what “Urban Fantasy” looks like with both “Cthulhu” and “90s goth vampire angst” washed completely out of its hair.

There’s the usual host of character options, NPCs, equipment, and the like, but there’s also a whole set of extra mechanics to make “casual magic” work. Cyphers as scented candles and smartphone apps! Theres a character focus—the verb in the character sentence—who is a car wizard, a spellcaster whose feeds all their spellcasting into making their muscle car do things. It’s great!

There’s a bunch of really well thought through and actionable stuff on how to run and play an urban fantasy game, how to build out a setting, how to pace and write the story and plot in such a genre. One of my themes in the all the RPG writing I’ve done this year has been how much I enjoy this current trend of just talking to the GM directly about how to do stuff, and this is an all time great example. The sort of work where you start thinking you probably know everything they’re going to say, and then end up nodding along going “of course!” and “great point!” every page.

It’s exactly what I look for out of an RPG supplement: a bunch of ideas, new toys to play with, and a bunch of foundational work that I wouldn’t have thought of and that’s easy to build on.

This is where I loop back around to where I started with GMing styles; whatever the term for the style I like is the style this game is written for, because this is the easiest game to run I’ve ever played.

Like I said, I tend to think of the way I like to run as “Improv”, but in the formal sense, not “just making stuff up.” Rules-wise, that means you need a ruleset that’s there when you need it to resolve something, but otherwise won’t get in your way and keep you from moving forward. You need ways the players can take the wheel and show you what kind of game they want to be running. And you need a bunch of stuff that you can lay hands on quickly to Improv on top of. I used to joke that I’d prepare for running a TTRPG session the same way a D&D Wizard prepares spells—I sketch out and wrap up a bunch of things to keep in my back pocket, not sure if I’m going to need them all, and with just enough detail that I can freestyle on top of them, but don’t feel like I wasted the effort if I don’t.

The example setting here is perfect for that. One of the players will glance at the map and say “you know, there’s that hardware store downtown,” and I can skim the two paragraphs on the store and the guy who runs it and have everything I need to run the next 30 minutes of the game.

Great stuff all around. Gets the full Icecano Seal of Approval.

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Edited to add on Dec 16: Regarding the list of people who I suggest should write books about RPGs, it’s been brought to my attention that not only did Robin Laws write such a book, but I both own it and have read it! Icecano regrets the error.

Don’t Panic: Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at 40

Well! It turns out that this coming weekend is the 40th anniversary of Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky. I mentioned the game in passing back in July when talking about Salmon of Doubt, but I’ll take an excuse to talk about it more.

To recap: Hitchhiker started as a six-part radio show in 1978, which was a surprise hit, and was quickly followed by a second series, an album—which was a rewrite and re-record with the original cast instead of just being a straight release of the radio show—a 2-part book adaptation, a TV adaptation, and by 1984, a third book with a fourth on the way. Hitchhiker was a huge hit.

Somewhere in there, Adams discovered computers, and (so legend has it) also became a fan of Infocom’s style of literate Interactive Fiction. They were fans of his as well, and to say their respective fan-bases had a lot of overlap would be an understatement. A collaboration seemed obvious.

(For the details on how the game actually got made, I’ll point you at The Digital Antiquarian’s series of philosophical blockbusters Douglas Adams, The Computerized Hitchhiker’s, and Hitchhiking the Galaxy Infocom-Style.)

These are two of my absolute favorite things—Infocom games and Hitchhiker—so this should be a “two great tastes taste great together” situation, right? Well, unfortunately, it’s a little less “peanut butter cup” and a little more “orange juice on my corn chex.”

“Book adaptation” is the sort of thing that seemed like an obvious fit for Infocom, and they did several of them, and they were all aggressively mediocre. Either the adaptation sticks too close to the book, and you end up painfully recreating the source text, usually while you “wait” and let the book keep going until you have something to do, or you lean the other way and end up with something “inspired by” rather than “based on.” Hitchhiker, amusingly, manages to do both.

By this point Adams had well established his reputation for blowing deadlines (and loving “the whooshing noise they make as they go by”) so Infocom did the sane thing and teamed him up Steve Meretzky, who had just written the spectacular—and not terribly dissimilar from Hitchhiker—Planetfall, with the understanding that Meretzky would do the programming and if Adams flagged then Meretzky could step in and push the game over the finish line.

The game would cover roughly the start of the story; starting with Arthur’s house being knocked down, continuing through the Vogon ship, arriving on the Heart of Gold, and then ending as they land on Magrathea. So, depending on your point of view, about the first two episodes of the radio and TV versions, or the first half of the first book. This was Adams’ fourth revision of this same basic set of jokes, and one senses his enthusiasm waning.

You play as Arthur (mostly, but we’ll get to that,) and the game tracks very closely to the other versions up through Arthur and Ford getting picked up by the Heart of Gold. At that point, the game starts doing its own thing, and it’s hard not to wonder if that’s where Adams got bored and let Meretzky take over.

The game—or at least the first part—wants to be terribly meta and subversive about being a text adventure game, but more often than not offers up things that are joke-shaped, but are far more irritating than funny.

The first puzzle in the game is that it is dark, and you have to open your eyes. This is a little clever, since finding and maintaining light sources are a major theme in earlier Zork-style Infocom games, and here you don’t need a battery-powered brass lantern or a glowing elvish sword, you can just open your eyes! Haha, no grues in this game, chief! Then the second puzzle is where the game really shows its colors.

Because, you see, you’ve woken up with a hangover, and you need to find and take some painkillers. Again, this is a text adventure, so you need to actually type the names of anything you want to interact with. This is long before point-and-click interfaces, or even terminal-style tab-complete. Most text games tried to keep the names of nouns you need to interact with as short as possible for ergonomic reasons, so in a normal game, the painkillers would be “pills”, or “drugs”, or “tablets”, or some other short name. Bur no, in this game, the only phrase the game recognizes for the meds is “buffered analgesic”. And look, that’s the sort of think that I’m sure sounds funny ahead of time, but is just plain irritating to actually type. (Although, credit where credit is due, four decades later, I can still type “buffered analgesic” really fast.)

And for extra gear-griding, the verb you’d use in reglar speech to consume a “buffered analgesic” would be to “take” it, except that’s the verb Infocom games use to mean “pick something up and put it in your inventory” so then you get to do a little extra puzzle where you have to guess what other verb Adams used to mean put it in your mouth and swallow.

The really famous puzzle shows up a little later: the Babel Fish. This seems to be the one that most people gave up at, and there was a stretch where Infocom was selling t-shirts that read “I got the Babel Fish!”

The setup is this: You, as Arthur, have hitchhiked on to the Vogon ship with Ford. The ship has a Babel Fish dispenser (an idea taken from the TV version, as opposed to earlier iterations where Ford was just carrying a spare.) You need to get the Babel fish into your ear so that it’ll start translating for you and you can understand what the Vogons yell at you when they show up to throw you off the ship in a little bit. So, you press the button on the machine, and a fish flies out and vanishes into a crack in the wall.

What follows is a pretty solid early-80s adventure game puzzle. You hang your bathrobe over the crack, press the button again, and then the fish hits the bathrobe, slides down, and falls into a grate on the floor. And so on, and you build out a Rube Goldberg–style solution to catch the fish. The 80s-style difficulty is that there are only a few fish in the dispenser, and when you run out you have to reload your game to before you started trying to dispense fish. This, from the era where game length was extended by making you sit and wait for your five-inch floppy drive to grind through another game load.

Everything you need to solve the puzzle is in the room, except one: the last thing you need to get the fish is the pile of junk mail from Arthur’s front porch, which you needed to have picked up on your way to lie in front of the bulldozer way back a the start of the game. No one thinks to do this the first time, or even first dozen times, and so you end up endlessly replaying the first hour of the game, trying to find what you missed.

(The Babel Fish isn’t called out by name in Why Adventure Games Suck, but one suspects it was top of Ron Gilbert’s mind when he wrote out his manifesto for Monkey Island four years later.)

The usual reaction, upon learning that the missing element was the junk mail, and coming after the thing with the eyes and the “buffered analgesic” is to mutter, screw this and stop playing.

There’s also a bit right after that where the parser starts lying to you and you have to argue with it to tell you what’s in a room, which is also the kind of joke that only sounds funny if you’re not playing the game, and probably accounted for the rest of the people throwing their hands up in the air and doing literally anything else with their time.

Which is a terrible shame, because just after that, you end up on the Heart of Gold and the game stops painfully rewriting the book or trying to be arch about being a game. Fairly quickly, Ford, Zaphod, and Trillian go hang out in the HoG’s sauna, leaving you to do your own thing. Your own thing ends up being using the backup Improbability Generator to teleport yourself around the galaxy, either as yourself or “quantum leap-style” jumping into other people. You play out sequences as all of Ford, Zaphod, and Trillian, and end up in places the main characters never end up in any of the other versions—on board the battlefleet that Arthur’s careless coment sets in motion, inside the whale, outside the lair of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. The various locations can be played in any order, and like an RPG from fifteen years later, the thing you need to beat the game has one piece in each location.

This is where the game settles in and turns into an actual adventure game instead of a retelling of the same half-dozen skits. And, more to the point, this is where the game starts doing interesting riffs on the source material instead of just recreating it.

As an example, at one point, you end up outside the cave of the Ravenenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, and the way you keep it from eating you is by carving your name on the memorial to the Beast’s victims, so that it thinks it has already eaten you. This is a solid spin on the book’s joke that the Beast is so dumb that it thinks that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you, but manges to make having read the book a bonus but not a requirement.

As in the book, to make the backup Improbability Drive work you need a source of Brownian Motion, like a cup of hot liquid. At first, you get a cup of Advanced Tea Substitute from the Nutrimat—the thing that’s almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. Later, after some puzzles and the missile attack, you can get a cup of real tea to plug into the drive, which allows it work better and makes it possible to choose your destination instead of it being random. Again, that’s three different jokes from the source material mashed together in an interesting and new way.

There’s a bit towards the end where you need to prove to Marvin that you’re intelligent, and the way you do that is by holding “tea” and “no tea” at the same time. The way you do that is by using the backup Improbably Drive to teleport into your own brain and removing your common sense particle, which is a really solid Hitchhiker joke that only appears in the game.

The game was a huge success at the time, but the general consensus seemed to be that it was very funny but very hard. You got the sense that a very small percentage of the people who played the game beat it, even grading on the curve of Infocom’s usual DNF rate. You also got the sense that there were a whole lot of people for whom HHGG was both their first and last Infocom game. Like Myst a decade later, it seemed to be the kind of game people who didn’t play games got bought for them, and didn’t convert a lot of people.

In retrospect, it’s baffling that Infocom would allow what was sure to be their best-selling game amongst new customers to be so obtuse and off-putting. It’s wild that HHGG came out the same year as Seastalker, their science fiction–themed game designed for “junior level” difficulty, and was followed by the brilliant jewel of Wishbringer, their “Introductory” game which was an absolute clinic in teaching people how to play text adventure games. Hitchhiker sold more than twice those two games combined.

(For fun, See Infocom Sales Figures, 1981-1986 | Jason Scott | Flickr)

Infocom made great art, but was not a company overly-burdened by business acumen. The company was run by people who thought of games as a way to bootstrap the company, with the intent to eventually graduate to “real” business software. The next year they “finally” released Cornerstone—their relational database product that was going to get them to the big leagues. It did not; sales were disastrous compared to the amount of money spent on development, the year after that, Infocom would sell itself to Activision; Activision would shut them down completely in 1989.

Cornerstone was a huge, self-inflicted wound, but it’s hard not to look at those sales figures, with Hitchhiker wildly outstripping everything else other than Zork I, and wonder what would have happened if Hitchhiker had left new players eager for more instead of trying to remember how to spell “analgesic.”

As Infocom recedes into the past and the memories of old people and enthusiasts, Hitchhiker maintains it’s name recognition. People who never would have heard the name “Zork” stumble across the game as the other, other, other version of Hitchhiker Adams worked on.

And so, the reality is that nowadays HHGG is likely to be most people’s first—and only—encounter with an Infocom game, and that’s too bad, because it’s really not a good example of what their games were actually like. If you’re looking for recommendation, scare up a copy of Enchanter. I’d recommend that, Wishbringer, Planetfall, and Zork II long before getting to Hitchhiker. (Zork is the famous game with the name recognition, but the second one is by far the best of the five games with “Zork” in the title.)

BBC Radio 4 did a 30th anniversary web version some years ago, which added graphics in the same style as the guide entries from the TV show, done by the same people, which feels like a re-release Infocom would have done in the late 80s if the company hadn’t been busy drowning in consequences of their bad decisions.

It’s still fun, taken on its own terms. I’d recommend the game to any fan of the other iterations of the Guide, with the caveat that it should be played with a cup of tea in one hand and a walkthrough within easy reach of the other.

All that said, it’s easy to sit here in the future and be too hard on it. The Secret of Monkey Island was a conceptual thermocline for adventure games as a genre, it’s so well designed, and it’s design philosophy is so well expressed in that design, that once you’ve played it it’s incredibly obvious what every game before it did wrong.

As a kid, though, this game fascinated me. It was baffling, and seemingly impossible, but I kept plowing at it. I loved Hitchhiker, still do, and there I was, playing Arthur Dent, looking things up in my copy of the Guide and figuring out how to make the Improbability Drive work. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t amazing, it was amazingly amazing. At one point I printed out all the Guide entries from the game and made a physical Guide out of cardboard?

As an adult, what irritates me is that the game’s “questionable” design means that it’s impossible to share that magic from when I was 10. There are plenty of other things I loved at that time I can show people now, and the magic still works—Star Wars, Earthsea, Monkey Island, the other iterations of Hitchhiker, other Infocom games. This game, though, is lost. It was too much of its exact time, and while you can still play it, it’s impossible to recreate what it was like to realize you can pick up the junk mail. Not all magic lasts. Normally, this is where I’d type something like “and that’s okay”, but in this particular case, I wish they’d tried to make it last a little harder.

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As a postscript, Meretzky was something of a packrat, and it turns out he saved everything. He donated his “Infocom Cabinet” to the Internet Archive, and it’s an absolute treasure trove of behind-the-scenes information, memos, designs, artwork. The Hitchhiker material is here: Infocom Cabinet: Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy : Steve Meretzky and Douglas Adams

Apple vs Games

Apple Arcade is in the news again, for not great reasons; as always, Tsai has the roundup, the but the short, short version is that Arcade is going exactly as well as all of Apple’s other video game–related efforts have gone for the last “since forever.”

My first take was that games might be the most notable place Apple’s “one guy at the top” structure falls down. Apple’s greatest strength and greatest weakness has always been that the whole company is laser focused on whatever the guy in charge cares about, and not much of anything else. Currently, that means that Apple’s priorities are, in no particular order, privacy, health, thin devices, operational efficiency, and, I guess, becoming “the new HBO.” Games aren’t anywhere near that list, and never have been. I understand the desire to keep everything flowing through one central point, and not to have siloed-off business units or what have you. On the other hand Bill Gates wasn’t a gamer either, but he knew to hire someone to be in charge of X-everything and leave them alone.

But then I remembered AppleTV+. Somehow, in a very short amount of time, Apple figured out how to be a production company, and made Ted Lasso, a new Fraggle Rock, some new Peanuts, and knocked out a Werner Herzog documentary for good measure. I refuse to believe that happened because Tim Apple was signing off on every production decision or script; they found the right people and enabled them correctly.

At this point, there’s just no excuse why AppleTV has something like Ted Lasso, and Apple Arcade doesn’t. There’s obvious questions like “why did I play Untitled Goose Game on my Switch instead of my Mac” and “why did they blow acquiring Bungie twice”. Why isn’t the Mac the premier game platform? Why? What’s the malfunction?

Bad Art is Still Art

It’s “Spicy Takes Week” over at Polygon, and one of the bits they’re kicking off with is: Roger Ebert saying video games are not art is still haunting games.

For everyone that made better choices about how to spend the early 00s than I did, almost two decades ago film critic Roger Ebert claimed that video games were not and could not be art, which was an opinion that the video game–playing denizens of the web took in good humor and weren’t weird about at all. HAHA, of course I am kidding, and instead it turned into a whole thing which still has occasional outbreaks, and the vitrol of the response was in retrospect was an early-warning sign of the forces that would congeal into gamergate and then keep going.

At the time, I thought it was terribly funny, mostly because of the irony of a critic of a new-ish artform that was only recently regarded as art kicking down the ladder behind him, but also because the movie that inspired him to share this view was the 2005 adaptation of DOOM, and look, if that movie was my only data point I’d deny that games were art too.

Whenever the videogames-as-art topic pops back up, I’m always briefly hopeful, because there are actually a lot of interesting topics here—what does it mean for authorship and art if the audience is also invited to be part of that authorship? If video games are art, are tabletop games? Can collaborative art made exclusively for the participants be art? (For the record, yes, yes, and yes.) There’s also fun potential side-order of “games may not be art but can contain art, and even better can be used to create art,” which is where the real juice is.

But no, that’s never what anyone wants to talk about, instead it’s always, as polygon says, about people wanting to sit at what they see as the big kids table without having to think through the implications, with a side-order of the most tedious “is it still art it you make money” arguments you’ve ever seen, surrounded by the toxic sheen of teenagers who don’t think they’re being taken seriously enough.

I think one of the reason’s that the “Ebert thing” specifically has stuck around long past his death is that of all the mainstream critics, he seemed the most likely to be “one of us.” He was always more sympathetic to genre stuff than most of his colleagues. He loved Star Wars! He called out Pauline Kael by name to argue that no, Raiders of the Lost Ark is great, actually. He wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, for heavensakes. It sure seems like he’s be the kind of guy that would be all “heck yeah, I love video games!” and instead he said that not only they weren’t at the adults table, but that they could never get there.

Kind of a surprise, but everyone is entitled to their opinion. And look, whatever argument that there might have existed to change Ebert’s mind, a bunch of 16-year olds telling him that Halo of all things was the greatest piece of art ever created was the exact opposite.

Mostly, I’m “yes, and-ing” polygon’s article so I finally have an excise link to this interview with George Lucas at Cannes from a few months ago, which apparently only exists on the wreckage formerly known as twitter?.

The whole interview is great, a classic sharp-and-cranky Lucas interview. It’s all worth watching, but the bit I’m quoting here starts at about 7:40. The interviewer asks him about Martin Scorsese saying that Marvel movies aren’t cinema, and Lucas manages to look even grouchier and with a sort of sigh says "Look. Cinema is the art of a moving image. So if the image moves, then it’s… cinema.” (Seriously, the look on his face, a sort of patronizing exhaustion, is great.)

And I think that really cuts to the core of these weird semantic gatekeeping debates: Cinema you don’t enjoy is still Cinema. Bad Art is Still Art.

There’s so much to enjoy here. It’s not clear from the way he asks the question if the interviewer knows how much backstory there is to that question. Does he know that George and Marty have been friends for half a century? Does he know that Marcia Lucas edited a bunch of Marty’s movies. Does he know Marty has been talking shit about Star Wars since before it was released, in exactly the same way he talks about Marvel movies? Lucas’ demeanor in this is as if that Franco “First Time?” meme came to life, an air that he’s been having this exact conversation since before the guy asking the question was born, and is resigned to continuing to do so for the rest of his life.

But it’s the same set of arguments. It’s not art because it’s fun, or made money, or has spaceships, or because I just didn’t like it very much. I have a list of qualities I associate with art, and I can’t or wont recognize their presence here.

All these arguments, with video games, or superhero movies, or Star Wars or whatever, always centers around the animus of the word “art”, and the desire to make that word into a synonym for “quality”, or more importantly “quality that I, personally, value.”

It always seems to boil down to “I have a lot of emotional investment in this word meaning this exact list of things and I find it threatening whenever someone suggests the tent should be wider,” which semantically is just “TRUKK NOT MUNKY” with extra steps.

Anyway, if people make something for other people to enjoy, it’s art. Even if it’s bad.

40 years of…

Just about 40 years ago, my Dad brought something home that literally changed my life. It was a computer—a home computer, which was still on the edge of being science fiction—but more than that, it was a portal. It was magic, a box of endless possibilities. It’s not even remotely hyperbole to say that bringing that computer home, which had just been released into the world, utterly changed the entire trajectory of my life.

I am, of course, talking about the Tandy 1000.

That’s not how you expected that sentence to end, was it? Because this year is also the 40th anniversary of the Mac. But I want to spend a beat talking about the other revolutionary, trend-setting computer from 1984, before we talk about the ancestor of the computer I’m writing this on now.

I’ve been enjoying everyone’s lyrical memories of the original Mac very much, but most have a slightly revisionist take that the once that original Mac landed in ’84 that it was obviously the future. Well, it was obviously a future. It’s hard to remember now how unsettled the computer world was in the mid-80s. The Tandy 1000, IBM AT, and Mac landed all in ’84. The first Amiga would come out the next year. The Apple IIgs and original Nintendo the year after that. There were an absurd number of other platforms; Commodore 64s were selling like hotcakes, Atari was still making computers, heck, look at the number of platforms Infocom released their games for. I mean, the Apple ][ family still outsold the Mac for a long time.

What was this Tandy you speak of, then?

Radio Shack started life as a company to supply amateur radio parts to mostly ham radio operators, and expanded into things like hi-fi audio components in the 50s. In one of the greatest “bet it all on the big win” moves I can think of, the small chain was bought by—of all people—the Tandy Leather Company in the early 60s. They made leather goods for hobbyists and crafters, and wanted to expand into other hobby markets. Seeing no meaningful difference between leather craft hobbyists and electronics ones, Charles Tandy bought the chain, and reworked and expanded the stores, re-envisioning them as, basically, craft stores for electronics.

I want to hang on that for a second. Craft stores, but for amateur electronics engineers.

It’s hard to express now, in this decayed age, how magical a place Radio Shack was. It seems ridiculous to even type now. If you were the kind of kid who were in any way into electronics, or phones in the old POTS Ma Bell sense, or computery stuff, RadioShack was the place. There was one two blocks from my house, and I loved it.

When home computers started to become a thing, they came up through the hobbyist world; Radio Shack was already making their own parts and gizmos, it was a short distance to making their own computers. Their first couple of swings, the TRS-80 and friends, were not huge hits, but not exactly failures either. Apple came out of this same hobbyist world, then IBM got involved because they were already making “big iron”, could they also make “little iron”?

For reasons that seem deeply, deeply strange four decades later, when IBM built their first PC, instead of writing their own operating system, they chose to license one from a little company outside of Seattle called Microsoft—maybe you’ve heard of them—with terms that let Gates and friends sell their new OS to other manufacturers. Meanwhile, for other reasons, equally strange, the only part of the IBM PC actually exclusive to IBM was the BIOS, the rest was free to be copied. So this whole little market formed where someone could build a computer that was “IBM Compatible”—again, maybe you’ve heard of this—buy the OS from that outfit up in Redmond, and take advantage of the software and hardware that was already out there. The basic idea that software should work on more than one kind of computer was starting to form.

One of the first companies to take a serious swing at this was Tandy, with the Tandy 2000. In addition to stretching the definition of “compatible” to the breaking point, it was one of the very few computers to ever use the Intel 80186, and was bought by almost no one, except, though a series of events no one has ever been able to adequately explain to me, my grandmother. (I feel I have to stress this isn’t a joke, Grandma wrote a sermon a week on that beast well into the late 90s. Continuing her track record for picking technology, she was also the only person I knew with a computer that ran Windows Me.)

As much as the original IBM PC was a “home computer”, it was really a small office computer, so IBM tried to make a cut down, cheaper version of the PC for home use, for real this time. I am, of course, talking about infamous flop the IBM PCjr, also 40 years old this year, and deserving its total lack of retrospective articles.

Tandy, meanwhile, had scrambled a “better PCjr” to market, the Tandy 1000. When the PCjr flopped, Tandy pivoted, and found they had the only DOS-running computer on the market with all the positives of the PCjr, but with a keyboard that worked.

Among these positives, the Tandy 1000 had dramatically better graphics and sound than anything IBM was selling. “Tandy Graphics” was a step up from CGA but not quite to EGA, and the “Tandy Sound” could play three notes at once! Meanwhile, the Tandy also came with something called DeskMate, an app suite / operating environment that included a text editor, spreadsheet, calendar, basic database with a text-character-based GUI.

So they found themselves in a strange new market: a computer that could do “business software”, both with what was built-in and what was already out there, but could also do, what are those called? Oh yeah, games.

The legend goes that IBM commissioned the nacent Sierra On-Line to write the first King’s Quest to show off the PCjr; when that flopped Sierra realized that Tandy was selling the only computer that could run their best game, and Tandy realized there was a hit game out there that could only run on their rigs. So they both leaned all the way in.

But of course, even the Tandy couldn’t match “arcade games”, so the capabilities and limits helped define what a “PC game” was. Adventure games, flight sims, RPGs. And, it must be said, both the words “operating” and “system” in MS-DOS were highly asperational. But what it lacked in features it made up for in being easy to sweep to the side and access the hardware directly, which is exactly what you want if you’re trying to coax game-quality performance out of the stone knives and bearskins of 80s home computers. Even when the NES cemented the “home console” market that Atari had sketched in a couple years later, “PC games” had already developed their own identity vs “console games”.

Radio Shacks got a whole corner, or more, turned over to their new computers. They had models out running programs you could play with, peripherals you could try, and most critically, a whole selection of software. I can distinctly remember the Radio Shack by my house with a set of bookstore-like shelves with what was at the time every game yet made by Sierra, Infocom, and everyone else at the time. Probably close to every DOS game out there. I have such clear memories of poring over the box to Starflight, or pulling Hitch-hiker’s Guide off the shelf, or playing Lode Runner on the demo computer.

A home computer with better graphics and sound than its contemporaries, pre-loaded with most of what you need to get going, and supported by its very own retail store? Does that sound familiar?

I’m cheating the timeline a little here, the Tandy 1000 didn’t release until November, and we didn’t get ours until early ’85. I asked my Dad once why he picked the one he did, of all the choices available, and he said something to the effect of he asked the “computer guy” at work which one he should get, and that guy indicated that he’d get the Tandy, since it would let you do the most different kinds of things.

Like I said at the top, it was magic. We’re so used to them now that it’s hard to remember, but I was so amazed that here was this thing, and it would do different things based on what you told it to do! I was utterly, utterly fascinated.

One of the apps Dad bought with computer was that first King's Quest, I was absolutely transfixed that you could drive this little guy around on the screen. I’d played arcade games—I’d probably already sunk a small fortune into Spy Hunter—but this was different. You could do things. Type what you thought of! Pushing the rock aside to find a hole underneath was one of those “the universe was never the same again” moments for me. I could barely spell, and certainly couldn’t type, but I was hooked. Somewhere, and this still exists, my Mom wrote a list of words on a sheet of paper for me to reference how to spell: look, take, shove.

And I wasn’t the only one, both of my parents were as fascinated as I was. My mom sucked down every game Infocom and Sierra ever put out. The Bard's Tale) landed a year later, and my parent’s played that obsessively.

It was a family obsession, this weird clunky beige box in the kitchen. Portals to other worlds, the centerpiece of our family spending time together. Four decades on, my parents still come over for dinner once a week, and we play video games together. (Currently, we’re still working on Tears of the Kingdon, because we’re slow.)

Everyone has something they lock onto between about 6 and 12 that’s their thing from that point on. Mine was computers. I’ve said many, many times how fortunate I feel that I lived at just the right time for my thing to turn into a pretty good paying career by the time I was an adult. What would I be doing to pay this mortgage if Dad hadn’t brought that Tandy box into the house 40 years ago? I literally have no idea.

Time marched on.

Through a series of tremendous own-goals, Radio Shack and Tandy failed to stay on top of, or even competitive in, the PC market they helped create, until as the Onion said: Even CEO Can't Figure Out How RadioShack Still In Business.

Meanwhile, through a series of maneuvers that, it has to be said, were not entirely legal, Microsoft steadily absorbed most of the market, with the unsettled market of the 80s really coalescing into the Microsoft-Intel “IBM Compatible” platform with the release of Windows 95.

Of all the players I mentioned way back at the start, the Mac was the only other one that remained, even the Apple ][, originally synonymous with home computers, had faded away. Apple had carved out a niche for the Mac for things that could really take advantage of the UI, mainly desktop publishing, graphic design, and your one friend’s Dad.

Over the years, I’d look over at the Mac side of the house with something approaching jealousy. Anyone who was “a computer person” in the 90s ended up “bilingual”, more-or-less comfortable on both Windows and Mac Classic. I took classes in graphic design, so I got pretty comfortable with illustrator or Aldus Pagemaker in the Mac.

I was always envious of the hardware of the old Mac laptops, which developed into open lust when those colored iBooks came out. The one I wanted the most, though, was that iMac G4 - Wikipedia with the “pixar lamp” design.

But the thing is, they didn’t do what I was mostly using a computer for. I played games, and lots of them, and for a whole list of reasons, none of those games came out for the Mac.

If ’84 saw the release of both the first Mac, and one of the major foundation stones of the modern Windows PC platform, and I just spent all that time singing the praises of my much missed Tandy 1000, why am I typing this blog post on a MacBook Pro? What happened?

Let me spin you my framework for understanding the home computer market. Invoking the Planescape Rule-of-Threes, there are basically three demographics of people who buy computers:

1. Hobbyists. Tinkerers. People who are using computers as a source of self-actualization. Hackers, in the classical sense, not the Angelina Jolie sense.
2. People who look at the computer market and thought, “I bet I make a lot of money off of this”.
3. People who had something else to do, and thought, “I wonder if I could use a computer to help me do that?”

As the PC market got off the ground, it was just that first group, but then the other two followed along. And, of course, the people in the second group quickly realized that the real bucks were to be made selling stuff to that first group.

As the 80s wound on, the first and second group clustered on computers running Microsoft, and the third group bought Macs. Once we get into the late 90s the hobbyist group gets split between Microsoft and Linux.

(As an absolutely massive aside, this is the root of the weird cultural differences between “Apple people” and “Linux people”. The kind of people who buy Apples do so specifically so they don’t have to tinker, and the kinds of people who build Linux boxes do so specifically so that they can. If you derive a sense of self from being able to make computers do things, Apples are nanny-state locked-down morally suspect appliances, and if you just want to do some work and get home on time and do something else, Linux boxes are massively unreliable Rube Goldberg toys for people who aren’t actually serious.)

As for me? What happened was, I moved from being in the first group to the third. No, that’s a lie. What actually happened was I had a kid, and realized I had always been in the third group. I loved computers, but not for their own sake, I loved them for the other things I could with them. Play games, write text, make art, build things; they were tools, the means to my ends, not an end to themselves. I was always a little askew from most of the other “computer guys” I was hanging out with; I didn’t want to spend my evening recompiling sound drivers, I wanted to do somethat that required the computer to play sound, and I always slightly resented it when the machine required me to finish making the sausage myself. But, that’s just how it was, the price of doing business. Want to play Wing Commander with sound? You better learn how Himem works.

As time passed, and we rolled into the 21st century, and the Mac moved to the BSD-based OS X, and then again to Intel processors, I kept raising my eyebrows. The Mac platform was slowly converging into something that might do what I wanted it to do?

The last Windows PC I built for myself unceremoniously gave up the ghost sometime in 2008 or 9, I can’t remember. I needed a new rig, but our first kid was on the way, and I realized my “game playing” time had already shrunk to essentially nil. And, by this time I had an iPhone, and trying to make that work with my WindowsXP machine was… trying. So, I said, what the hell, and bought a refurbed 2009 polycarb MacBook). And I never looked back.

I couldn’t believe how easy it was to use. Stuff just worked! The built-in apps all did what they were supposed to do! Closing the laptop actually put the computer to sleep! It still had that sleep light that looked like breathing. The UI conventions were different from what I was used to on Windows for sure, but unlike what I was used to, they were internally consistent, and had an actual conceptual design behind them. You could actually learn how “the Mac” worked, instead of having to memorize a zillion snowflakes like Windows. And the software! Was just nice. There’s a huge difference in culture of software design, and it was like I could finally relax once I changed teams. It wasn’t life-changing quite the way that original Tandy was, but it was a fundamental recalibration in my relationship with computers. To paraphrase all those infomercials, it turns out there really was a better way.

So, happy birthday, to both of my most influential computers of the last forty years. Here’s to the next forty.

But see if you can pick up some actual games this time.

X-Wing Linkblog Friday

The Aftermath continues to be one of the few bright spots in the cursed wasteland of the digital media. And yes, I realize Icecano is slowly devolving into just a set of links to the aftermath that I gesture enthusiastically towards.

Today’s case in point: X-Wing Is Video Gaming's Greek Fire

And, oh man, Yes, And.

This gist here is that not only were the X-Wing games the peak of the genre in terms of mechanics, and not only has no one been able to reproduce them, no one has really even tried. It’s wild to me that space fighter “sims” were a big deal for the whole of the nineties, and then… nope, we don’t do that anymore. Like he says, it’s remarkable that in the current era of “let’s clone a game from the old days with a new name”, no one has touched the X-Wings. Even Star Wars: Squadrons, which was a much better Wing Commander than it was an X-Wing, didn’t quite get there.

And yeah! You boot up TIE Fighter today, and it still genuinely plays better than anything newer in the genre. It’s insane to me that the whole genre just… doesn’t exist any more? It feels like the indy scene should be full of X-Wing-alikes. Instead we got Strike Suit Zero, the two Rebel Galaxys and thats it? Yes I know, you want to at-me and say No Man’s Sky or Elite and buddy, those could not be less what I’m talking about. That goes double for whatever the heck is going on down at Star Citizen.

(Although, speaking of recapturing old gameplay mechanics, I am going to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Descent 4 came out, it was just called Overload.)

A while back my kid asked me what video game I’d turn onto a movie, and without missing a beat and not as a joke, I answered “TIE Fighter.”

“Dad!!” he yelled. “That already has a movie!”

And, obviously, but the Star War I keep wishing someone would make is the X-Wing pilot show; Top Gun or Flight of the Intruder, but with R2 units. I don’t understand why you spend a quarter billion dollars to set some kid up to fail with his bad Harrison Ford impression before you do this.

So, he said as an artful segue, in other X-Wing news, remember Star Wars fan films?

There was a whole fan film bubble around the turn of the century, during the iMac DV era. The bubble didn’t pop exactly, but now that energy mostly gets channeled into 3 hour Lore Breakdown Videos on youtube that explain how the next 200 million dollar blockbuster is going to fail because it isn’t consistent with the worst book you read 20 years ago. ( *Puts finger to earpiece* I’m sorry, I’ve just been informed that The Crystal Star was, in fact, thirty years ago. We regret the error.)

But! People are still out there making their indie Star Wars epics, and so I’d like to call to your attention to: Wingman - An X-Wing Story | Star Wars Fan Film | 2023 - YouTube

(Attention conservation notice: it’s nearly an hour long, but all the really good ideas are in the first 15 minutes, and in classic fan film fashion it just kinda keeps… going…)

It’s the fan-filmsiest possible version of the X-Wing movie idea. It’s about 20 guys filming an X-Wing movie in their basement for something like 4 grand. They only have one set: the cockpit, and some really nice replica helmets. They use the sound effects from the cockpit controls in the X-Wing games! The group that this this are all in Germany, so the squadron looks like it’s made up entirely of the backup keyboard players from Kraftwork. It’s an interesting limit case in “how can we tell a story when the characters can’t even stand up or be on screen at the same time.”

I was going to put some more snark here, but you know what? It’s a hell of an impressive thing, considering. I’d never show this to someone who wasn’t already completely bought in at “surprisingly good X-Wing fan film”, but I think it demonstrates that the basic premise is sound?

This feels like the ceiling for how good a fan film should get. Could it be better? Sure. But if you put any more effort into an indie movie than this, you need to pivot and go make Clerks or El Mariachi or A Fistful of Fingers or something. The only person who got a ticket into Hollywood from a fan film was the guy who made Troops, and even he never got to direct a big-boy movie.

So, okay, what have we learned from today’s program:

1. Someone needs to make an X-Wing-alike.
2. If you’re about to spend a second thousand dollars on your X-Wing cockpit, maybe try and make an indie festival film instead?

3. Now that Patty Jenkins' Rogue Squadron movie is cancelled, someone pitch a fighter pilot show to Disney+.

   I should probably have another paragraph here where I tie things up? But it’s Friday, don’t worry about it.

Doom @ 30

I feel like there have been a surprising number of “30th anniversaries” this year, I hadn’t realized what a nerd-culture nexus 1993 was!

⁂

So, Doom! Rather than belabor points covered better elsewhere, I’ll direct your attention to Rock Paper Shotgun’s excellent series on Doom At 30.

I had a little trouble with experienced journalists talking about Doom as a game that came out before they were born, I’m not going to lie. A very “roll me back into my mummy case” moment.

⁂

Doom came out halfway though my second year of high school, if I’m doing my math right. My friends and I had all played Wolfenstein, had been reading about it in PC Gamer, we knew it was coming, we were looking forward to it.

At the time, every nerd group had “the guy that could get stuff.” Which usually meant the one with well-off lax parents. Maybe going through a divorce? This was the early 90s, so we were a little past the “do you know where your kids are” era, but by today’s standards we were still pretty… under-supervised. Our guy showed up at school with a stack of 3.5-inch floppies one day. He’d got the shareware version of Doom from somewhere.

I can’t now remember if we fired it up at the school or if we took it to somebody’s house; but I _do_ remember that this was one of maybe three or four times where I genuinely couldn’t believe what I was seeing.¹

Our 386 PC couldn’t really handle it, but Doom had a mode where you could shrink the window down in the center of the monitor, so the computer had fewer pixels to worry about. I played Doom shrunk down nearly all the way, with as much border as image, crouched next to the monitor like I was staring into a porthole to another world.

I think it holds up surprisingly well. The stripped-down, high-speed, arcade-like mechanics, the level design that perfectly matches what the engine can and can’t do, the music, the just whole vibe of the thing. Are later games more sophisticated? Sure, no question. Are they better? Well… Not at shooting demons on a Mars base while early 90s synth-rock plays, no.

⁂

Reading about Doom’s anniversary this last week, I discovered that the current term of art for newly made Doom-like retro-style shooters is “Boomer Shooter.” I know everyone forgets Gen-X exists, that’s part of our thing, but this will not stand. The Boomers can’t have this one—there is no more quintessentially, universal “Gen-X” experience than playing Doom.

Other than everyone forgetting we exist and giving the Boomers credit, that is.

---

1. The others, off the top of my head, were probably the original Kings Quest, Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto III, and Breath of the Wild.

Tuesday linkblog, video-game-trailer-edition

After some shenanigans the trailer for GTA 6 is out. Looks like GTA all right. Tome Petty song! Like those gators!

My first reaction, though, was “man, I feel like I’ve already played this game about, oh, five times”.

On the other hand, I guess it has been a decade since the last one? I supposed doing a sequel/redo every decade or so to see what the next generation of game hardware can do is a fair way to go? I wish we could get a PS5 version of Rock Band.

On the gripping hand, I also don’t think I’m in the target audience for this anymore? The GTA game I always wanted finally came out: Spider-man.

This is not a joke. I distinctly remember the first time I saw GTA 3 running on a friend’s computer. It was one of those moments, like Doom before it, where you sat there going “wow, they can do this now?” And then you sat there imagining all the other games that just became possible. I turned to my friend and the first thing I said was “I can’t wait for them to make this game, but you’re Spider-man.”

Anyway, I hope they mix the gameplay up more than it looks like. Like by adding Spider-man.

Friday linkblog, video game music piano covers edition

Check out this great piano cover of "Erana's Peace” from the first Quest for Glory!

There are maybe a dozen pieces of video game music from the 90s that I’ve had stuck in my head for thirty years now. Mostly bits from LucasArts games: The first two Monkey Islands, TIE Fighter, Sam & max Hit the Road, Full Throttle. But man, that first Quest for Glory was full of music I’m still humming years later, and this was absolutely one of those tracks. Great version!

(Via Laughing Squid)

Microsoft buys Activision, gets Zork and Space Quest as a bonus

Well, Microsoft finally got permission to assimilate Activision/Blizzard. Most of the attention has centered around the really big ticket items, Microsoft hanging Candy Crush, WoW, and CoD on the wall next to Minecraft.

But Activision owned and acquired a lot of stuff of the years. Specifically to my interests, they now find themselves the owner of the complete Infocom and Sierra On-Line back catalogs. Andrew Plotkin does a good job laying out the history of how that happened, along with outlining some ways this could go. (Although note that in his history there, the entity called Vivendi had already consumed what was left of Sierra after its misadventures with various french insurance companies.)

I know they’re mostly just looking for hits for the XBox, but Microsoft have found themselves the owners of a huge percentage of 80s and 90s PC gaming. Here’s hoping they do something cool with it all. There has to be some group of Gen-X mid-level managers who want to run with that, right?

Why didn’t you just use…

It’s an embarrassment of riches in big open world video games this year. I’m still fully immersed in building bizarre monster trucks in Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, but Bethesda’s “Skyrim in spaaaace”-em-up Starfield is out.

I’ve not played it yet, so I’ve no opinion the the game itself. But I am very amused to see that as always with a large game release, the armchair architects are wondering why Bethesda has continued to use their in-house engine instead of something “off the shelf,” like Unreal.

This phenomenon isn’t restricted to games, either! I don’t have a ton of game dev experience specifically, but I do have a lot of experience with complex multi-year software projects, and every time one of those wraps up, there’s always someone that looks and what got built and asks “well, why didn’t you just use this other thing”

And reader, every time, every single time, over the last two decades, the answer was always “because that didn’t exist yet when we started.”

Something that’s very hard to appreciate from the outside is how long these projects actually take. No matter how long you think something took, there was a document, or a powerpoint deck, or a whiteboard diagram, that had all the major decisions written down years before you thought they started.

Not only that, but time and success have a way of obscuring the risk profile from the start of a project. Any large software project, whatever the domain or genre, is a risky proposition, and the way to get it off the ground is to de-risk it as much as possible. Moving to new 3rd party technology is about as risky a choice as you can make, and you do that as carefully and rarely as possible.

I don’t have any insight into either Unreal or Betheda’s engine, but look. You’re starting a project that’s going to effectively be the company’s only game in years. Do you a) use your in-house system that everyone already knows that you know for a fact will be able to do what you need, or b) roll the dice on a stack of 3rd party technology. I mean, there are no sure things in life, but from a risk reduction perspective, that’s as close to a no-brainer as it gets.

At this point, it’s worth publishing my old guideline for when to take after-the-fact questions seriously:

• “Why didn’t you use technology X?”—serious person, has thought about the tradeoffs and is curious to know what let you to make the choices you did.
• “Why didn’t you JUST use technology X?”—fundamentally unserious person, has no concept of effort, tradeoffs, design.

Like, buddy, I if I could ”just” do that, I’d have done it. Maybe there were some considerations you aren’t aware of, and probably aren’t any of your business?

Thus what I part-jokingly call Helman’s Third Law: “no question that contains the word `just’ deserves consideration.”

Ridiculous Fishing!

Holy smokes! Ridiculous Fishing is back in a new and updated form in Apple Arcade.

The original was a game my kids and I played constantly a decade ago. I still get the background music from the first zone stuck in my head from time to time.

One of the most irritating things about the Apple iOS app store ecosystem is the way apps will just rot, and as the platform moves forward apps that can’t or wont support regular updates will fall away and disappear. (To be clear, I understand why Apple requires developers to keep their apps up to date, I just disagree.. There’s no reason why an app from 2014 shouldn’t be able to run just fine on the same platform in 2023. Heck, with the increase in power of a modern iPhone’s processor, the OS and app store could provision an entire fully-sandboxed VM running the older version of iOS the games were designed for. But I digress.)

However, something Apple is very good at is announcing that they’ve fixed all the problems with a previous product or service, without ever actually admitting that the problems existed in the first place. In a lot of ways, Apple Arcade feels like an apology for how the app store treats games in the first place.

One of the fun things about the service is the number of primal app store games that have come back to life with a + version in Arcade—Osmos, Angry Birds, Stardew Valley, Ridiculous Fishing—it’s like someone looked at my iPad’s homescreen in 2013.

In any case, I’m glad it’s back.

Of course, its not just a “remaster”, but a full-remake, with new graphics, new game modes, more fish. Plus! The updated version replaces the original spoof social network “byrdr” with the even funner “Bik Bok”.

I’ve very much enjoyed re-exploring the old map, re-discovering the weird fishes, and having the same argument I had with my kid before about which guns are the best.

Thirty Years of Tentacles

How can Day of the Tentacle possibly be thirty years old?

A stone cold classic, and still one of the best adventure games ever made.

I have an incredibly clear memory of standing in the games section of CompUSA as a teenager, watching the opening of DOTT loop on one of the demo machines there, and literally laughing out loud in the middle of the store. I couldn’t believe a game could actually look like that. It was actually funny! And well animated! One of those times where the future has arrived and you can’t quite believe your eyes. I wish it had been more of trendsetter in that regard, and that more games had chased “Chuck Jones Looney Tunes” as a model, instead of “photo-real direct-to-video action movie.”

As another sign of the changing times, as if CompUSA wasn’t enough early 90s nostalgia, I never would have remembered that DOTT came out in June. I got it for christmas that year, and it’s hard to believe we waited for six months. And I remember agonizing about getting the floppy disk or CD-ROM version, since we were worried the CD versions “full voice” might be “too distracting.” Too distracting! Phew, maybe it has been 30 years.