At Random: Magician Lord (Neo Geo, 1990)

It's been quite a while since I've posted anything here, and I'm heading into another busy period so this may be my only post for a while to come as well.  But I've recently found myself drawn back to SNK's Magician Lord, a launch title for the Neo Geo arcade system/console.

He's a Magician!  He's a Lord!  He's Magician Lord!

This side-scrolling, single-player fantasy action game was developed by Alpha Denshi working closely with SNK during the Neo Geo's development.  And it was fairly impressive when it hit arcades in 1990 -- the graphics were bold and colorful with scaling sprites and deep parallax scrolling, the audio included digitized speech and music with sampled instruments, and while it was an arcade machine with a difficulty level designed to keep the coin slot fed, it was possible to get a feel for the visual style and gameplay on a single token.

But what I think appealed most to me was that you could play THIS version, exactly as it was, at home on SNK's Neo Geo console in 1991.  Today we're used to coin-ops arriving at home in arcade perfect form, or as close as emulation and control options will allow, but the Neo Geo was the first system to deliver actual arcade hardware to the living room.  The system was an investment -- around US$600 for the system, and building a game collection was even more expensive with titles in the neighborhood $200 apiece.  But look at that massive Magician Lord cartridge -- packed with so much gaming goodness it needed TWO edge connectors!

23 Megabits of Magic + 23 Megabits of Lordliness

Magician Lord isn't a bad game, but it falls short of being a great game.  The action is simple and repetitive -- walk, shoot magic, jump, duck, climb a ladder, take a couple of hits, use up your lives, and put another token in to continue.  Occasionally there are transforming power-ups to acquire, with six different alternate forms for hero Elta the Magician Lord to take, but the game throws so much at our man that (at least in my less-than-capable hands) these temporary modes tend to be very temporary indeed. 

There are also some unintentionally amusing bits between levels when the main villain stops by to complain about the player's progress, from the days before careful Japanese-to-English localization was a thing:

Sticks and stones...

Aren't we all, dude.  But we're only two stages in.  Chin up!

Magician Lord was an early title for the Neo Geo, and the relatively small 46 megabit cartridge's limitations become apparent as one gets deeper into the game.  Many enemies encountered in later stages are palette-shifted versions of earlier foes, the excellent 80's-synth background music gets reused on multiple levels, and the maps are generally compact aside from a few late-game mazes that seem very out of place in an arcade experience.  The bosses are large and nightmarish and varied enough, but rather stiffly animated and predictable, and the end of the game wisely features a mini-boss rush rather than revisiting the big guys. 

But maybe these limitations are part of what I like about this title -- it feels stuck halfway between a coin-op and a home console experience, and it's more richly textured and progression-oriented than most of its arcade and Neo Geo brethren.  Over time, it only became more unique as SNK's later success (and title releases) focused almost exclusively on fighting games.

As tempted as I often was, I could never quite convince my checkbook to ante up for the Neo Geo console back in the day, so I only actually played Magician Lord a few times in the arcades, most memorably for the first time at The Circus in Marinette, Wisconsin.  I remember being surprised and disappointed that it was never ported to home consoles -- it seems like the Genesis and SNES could have handled a reasonably accurate conversion, or the Playstation if cartridge space limitations were the problem.  Maybe it just wasn't popular enough to be worth the effort; the game didn't resurface in any officially licensed form until emulation of the original arcade software became possible some fifteen years later on the Wii, PS2, Playstation Vita, SNK's own Neo Geo Mini line, and most recently on the Nintendo Switch, PS4, XBox One and PC via HAMSTER's Arcade Classics Archive series.

And despite owning the game in multiple forms over the years (even the physical cartridge shown above, despite never owning the console... yeah...) -- and playing it many times -- I realized recently that I'd never actually finished Magician Lord, or even gotten very close to the end.  So I bought the most recent PC emulated version (from Microsoft's store, as it doesn't seem to be available via GOG.com or Steam) and set out to tackle it seriously.  This time I finally navigated patiently through a couple of frustrating, game length-padding later levels where I'd gotten stuck before, where visually identical doors and ladders are not in fact identical, and made it to the penultimate stage.

It was here that the nails-hard difficulty very nearly exceeded my abilities, where a series of platforming moves are combined with a plethora of floating, firing enemies and, despite the game's generous continue approach, I couldn't survive long enough to get anywhere at all before putting the next virtual token in.  The idea is to jump/walk across a series of floating platforms without getting hit by the floating spheres or their fireballs.

I either fell off the platform or exploded into Elta fragments while trying to capture this screenshot

But!

I did finally make it -- not quite getting all the way across, but somehow getting far enough that keeping the joystick pressed leftward allowed me to land on a lower level instead of falling to my usual untimely death.  And a little more navigation led me to collect the final book (yes, each boss guards a mystical tome of power that will ultimately restore freedom to the land when the magical, lordly shelf is filled or something to that effect):
 

I am not an animal!  I am not a human being!

After this point, inserting far more in virtual quarters than the $7.99 I paid for this incarnation of the game to continue whittling down the various mini-bosses and final boss while getting my hat handed to me every few seconds, I managed to make it to the end!

Not the final boss either, but these giggling, leaping mini-boss twins are just too cute

"Of course, everyone has died while crops and water were unavailable all this time.  I survived by eating my beard."

So now I have experienced all that Magician Lord has to offer, and yes, I still have a nostalgic soft spot for this game and will probably return to it now and then.  If I'm honest, it was the technology advance the Neo Geo represented, and the just-out-of-my-reach pricing at the time, that really made an impression on me, and this game was just the most personally appealing of the launch titles.  But it still makes me very happy to be able to finally play it at home more than 25 years later.

Adventure of the Week: Marketing Adventure (1981?)

While I occasionally cover a well-known adventure here, part of the fun of writing this blog is in discovering and exploring more obscure games.  This week, I'm very happy to have run across an oddity with genuine historical significance -- something called Marketing Adventure, written by Rob Fulop (Demon Attack) in-house at Atari as a prototype/corporate in-joke over a long weekend, per Mr. Fulop's recollections in a 2013 discussion at the AtariAge.com forums.

 

There's no year given, but as Fulop left Atari to help found Imagic in 1982 and he was at the company from 1978 until that time, my guess would be that this was put together circa 1981.  The game has historical significance because it's set (in thin disguise) at the one-time Atari Headquarters on Borrega Avenue, and the game itself satirizes the corporate culture at Atari, complete with certain legendary sex-and-drugs references from the Grass Valley era.

The game itself is fairly straightforward, though the limited parser gets in the way a lot and the unpolished, old-fashioned scrolling text interface gives away the game's prototype/not-for-publication nature.  Our goal is to locate a golden disk (production ready code, in game development parlance) and deliver it to the marketing department.

Interested adventurers are encouraged to embark upon a firsthand Marketing Adventure, but general readers and Atarians should feel welcome to read about my own experience in detail below.  As far as I can determine, the game does not actually have a "good ending," so some may find it unsatisfying as a traditional text adventure.  In any case, there are bound to be historically interesting...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

We begin in the parking lot of a famous video game company -- that just happens to be located at specific addresses on Borregas where Atari resided at the time -- and note that There are many sports cars here.  The two-word parser is very simple, with no EXAMINE verb, so we have to take things at face value, and many objects are not in the game's dictionary.  The engine does not like to repeat room descriptions, even when significant details have changed, so we have to use L (LOOK does not work) to redisplay them if we think we might have missed something.

East of our starting point is Borregas Drive, which connects the two company buildings, 1265 and 1272.  In the real world, 1265 Borregas Avenue was Atari's Corporate Headquarters, and 1195 housed the Consumer Division, not included in this game.  1272 was the Engineering Building, built in 1978; this suggests that this game dates from the early 1980s, as the company moved to new headquarters in July 1984.

There's a tamale truck parked here, but we can't BUY TAMALE or even take INVENTORY or INV -- only I works to establish that we're carrying nothing.  The map is also fairly tight, as from this point we can only head North into the Lobby of CHQ.  A guard blocks entrance to an arcade to the east, and a staircase leads up.

We can't get rid of the guard, and I can't find any way to interact with him, so we'll head upstairs to a landing.  Stairs continue up to the Marketing Department, and a sign reads, "ONLY THE APPROPRIATELY DRESSED MAY ENTER."  If we try to go U, we are told only that SOMETHING IS IN YOUR WAY; this engine feels very much like an in-house tool, and real playability is not a primary concern.

I'll head back to the west end of Borregas to visit the company cafeteria in the Engineering Building.  There's a special today, and an elevator to the east with no visible means of access.

Heading north from the cafeteria confirms one long-standing bit of Atari lore -- the Engineering Building was a coveted place to work, in part due to the co-ed Hot Tub and Sauna here!  But there's nothing we can really do here besides bask in the reflected glow of naughty Atari history, as the hot tub is under repairs.

West of the cafeteria is a Lush Courtyard where people are playing frisbee, and where we can pick up a blue card.  The parser is definitely limited -- I try to GET CARD, GET BLUE, TAKE BLUE, TAKE CARD, and finally succeed when I TAKE BLUE CARD.  Whew!

We can't TAKE TAMALE from the truck, or INSERT BLUE CARD into the elevator.  I try asking for a HINT, and am told (as I assumed) that The blue card is an access card.  I try to SHOW CARD and USE BLUE CARD, and finally WAVE BLUE CARD works.  The elevator door opens, and we can use it to reach the Secretary's Area on the second floor (the elevator only travels between these two floors.)

A large locked cabinet here is marked #3; we're told that The secretary has the key to this cabinet, but she is at lunch today.  A locked door to the west is marked "MANAGER."

From this area, we can travel north into a long north-south hallway, which spans two locations.  At the far, northern end, we hear people arguing about colors to the west.  This turns out to be Lab C, where people in three-piece suits are crowded around a TV, reviewing an epic new game cartridge today. 

Heading south into the deserted Lab B, where computer games are developed, we find a sign on the door reading, "Marketing review today, lab C."  North of Lab C is Lab D, where in what is almost surely an Atari in-joke, A strange looking woman tries to crash into you on a chair.

We can travel west into a Short Hallway, with tacky artwork on the wall and a sweetish odor to the north.  This leads into the Ladies' Lounge, where the MRB holds its meetings.  If I had any doubts that this was an in-house adventure never meant for public consumption, they are erased as the author tells us more about the MRB:

There's also a chalkboard with the words, "ITS A SMALL BUSINESS MACHINE," perhaps a dig at Atari management's position on the company's home computers and gaming.  It might also be a password, so we'll make note of it.

East of the Ladies' Lounge is the Computer Room, with a very expensive tandem computer that has never been used.  A terminal here tells us to clean up our files on the 11/34, and prompts us for a project code.

West of the Ladies' Lounge is a Vice President's Office, with electronic toys and games scattered about.  The VP may be at the long range planning meeting; this week being sponsored by Club Med in Mazatlan.  There's a company badge here, and we can TAKE BADGE, though when I try to WEAR BADGE, THAT HAS NO EFFECT HERE.

I head back to the long hallway and explore its southern end, entering Lab A to the west where people are engrossed in games of Atari's 8-bit computer hit Star Raiders.  A tall, wiry man with glasses looks over software specifications, and it's noted that A new person is hired every day here.  This room reconnects to Lab B to the north -- the engine doesn't always tell us about which directions are navigable, so mapping this out requires a little trial and error.

East of the southern end of the long hallway is the Hardware Lab, where signs of the impending videogame industry crash may be in evidence: "It is rumored that nobody works here anymore, there are cobwebs everywhere."  There is a key labeled MANAGER here, though, so we should go visit the Manager's Office.

The manager's door stands open now -- maybe because the engine doesn't really support unlocking things -- and we can enter to find papers everywhere.  One looks interesting -- a memo labeled CONFIDENTIAL.  We can't TAKE MEMO, but we can READ MEMO -- it pertains to coffee duty, but we find another scrap of paper in the process bearing the word, "ROCKFIGHT."

Hmmmmm.  Is that a project code?  I go to the computer room and try to TYPE, ENTER or SAY ROCKFIGHT -- only the latter produces a meaningful response, and that's just the standard non-response THAT HAS NO EFFECT HERE.  HINT here tells us, This terminal is capable of speech recognition.  So we're on the right track, but we must need a different word.

I try going to Lab C where all the marketing people are, and SAY ROCKFIGHT here -- Everybody beams and an official looking person whispers into your ear.... 'project code is 3V2000'.  Okay?

I return to the computer room and SAY 3V2000, and the printer produces a 2-page status report.  I TAKE STATUS REPORT (TAKE REPORT doesn't work) and now we have the price of admission into the room to the west of the short hallway.

Now we're in the office of the Games Manager, littered with old racing forms (an in-joke about Imagic co-founder Dennis Koble, per Mr. Fulop's 2013 comments.)  The manager is playing Missile Command (Fulop worked on the Atari 2600 conversion released in 1980, so that suggests this game was written between 1980 and 1982) and there's a round metal can here with a sign: "STATUS REPORTS GO HERE."  There's also a crowbar, which we'll take with us as this is always a useful adventuring tool.

I think I know what to do with the crowbar, so I return to the Secretary's Area and locked cabinet #3.  But I can't UNLOCK CABINET or OPEN #3 or UNLOCK LARGE CABINET or BREAK INTO LARGE LOCKED CABINET #3, and the parser doesn't seem to recognize any combination I can come up with so I'm at an impasse until I think of something better to try.

I wander south into a corner office, filled with people playing backgammon, then head back to the other building to see if I can get into the arcade.  With the security badge in hand, the guard lets us past.

Inside the arcade, we are dazzled and deafened by the company's own game room.  There is a Pierre Cardin tie draped over a pinball machine, which we should probably TAKE and WEAR to get into the marketing department upstairs.

Now we can travel upstairs to Marketing, where all major corporate decisions are made.  We learn from a beautiful secretary that the entire department is at Charlie Brown's for lunch, and they have been there since yesterday -- yet another corporate Atari reference, I suspect, though I wasn't able to find any information about Charlie Brown's establishment with a quick Internet search.

East of the Marketing offices we find the Competitive Product Display Room, where competitor's computers line the walls.  We're informed that You must have the golden disk to enter the president's office.  So we'll want to come back here after we track that down.

What about this cabinet?  It doesn't seem like the parser even recognizes the word CABINET -- OPEN CABINET yields OPEN WHAT? -- so we must need to focus on the crowbar.  USE CROWBAR and THROW CROWBAR and WAVE CROWBAR are ineffective, but (after quite a bit of experimenting) I discover that SWING CROWBAR does the trick, opening the cabinet to reveal a gold disk (Dysan).   This is another now-historical reference -- Dysan was key in developing floppy disk technology, and its media products had a reputation for quality.

I think we're close to victory now -- we take the gold disk to the president's office, and as we enter, a hush falls over the room full of marketing people having an intense discussion.  We GIVE DISK... no, DROP DISK... DELIVER DISK?  Nope.  HINT suggests that these people are waiting for us to say something, so I try to SAY ITS A SMALL BUSINESS MACHINE, and fail miserably to the jeering of the marketeers-- apparently, that was yesterday's password!

Restoring from an earlier emulator save state (the game has no native SAVE capability), I learn that SAY ROCKFIGHT and SAY 3V2000 have no effect or impact either.  I try to SAY ITS A SMALL BUSINESS MACHINE in Lab C where the other marketing team is residing, and am ignored.  And HINT in the Ladies' Lounge where we found this catchphrase tells us, "Remember these words well."  Trying to SAY other random words produces no response.  So this seems to be the only place we can employ this particular phrase, but I'm perplexed because this consistently results in losing the game.

There are no published walkthroughs for Marketing Adventure, so I dissect the disk image a bit -- the text is fortunately in clear ASCII for the most part -- and I have to conclude that there is no real victory condition!  For better or worse, then, this is the intended ending of the game -- a suitably nihilistic conclusion to a futile corporate errand.  It's not a victory, but we've successfully completed the game!

Marketing Adventure isn't a fully-realized adventure game, but it's a great little slice-of-history experience for anyone interested in the Atari generation.  Getting to "visit" Atari's Corporate HQ through Rob Fulop's eyes circa the early 1980s makes for a compelling interactive experience, even if we can't "get" all of the in-jokes.  Fun and funny stuff, and I'm very glad Mr. Fulop spent a little time goofing around and creating this project, and that somehow it has been preserved for posterity.  Truly unique.

Go visit Gamasutra!

Up today in the Features section at Gamasutra is my brief gaming history of the Radio Shack TRS-80:

Games from the Trash: The History of the TRS-80

Cover to Cover: Jaguar EGM Promo (pp. 14-end)

Life has settled down a bit, so I'm finally getting around to wrapping up our most recent cover-to-cover series.  Atari and EGM collaborated on this paid advertising insert in 1994, as the legendary videogame company tried to convince gamers to adopt t its newest (and final) console, the Atari Jaguar.

Page 14 includes a couple of Amiga ports, the weakest entry in a popular series, and the beginning of a long-running modern franchise:

Cannon Fodder is still one of my favorite Jaguar games, even though it's a port; the comical action/strategy is augmented with a simultaneously cute and dark British sense of humor about the horrors of war.  Theme Park is also a great game, a forerunner to the modern Tycoon games, though it was slightly clunky running on Atari's powerful but unwieldy console.  Double Dragon V sullies its family name with lame one-on-one fighting action. And Michel Ancel's beautiful platformer Rayman was slated to premiere on the Jaguar -- but cartridge manufacturing lead time meant that the Playstation version arrived a little bit earlier, and I was one of many Jaguar gamers who ended up buying it for the PSX instead.


Page 15 features one original title, a couple more PC/Amiga ports, and an actual sports game:

Flashback remains a classic, though its polygon graphics occasionally chug a bit on the Jag -- the system's multiprocessor power remained difficult to harness, with many ports relying on the 16-bit CPU with minimal optimization.  Syndicate's cyberpunk mission gameplay translated well, throwing followers and flamethrowers around with aplomb and making good use of the Jaguar's multi-button controller to handle weapon changeups.  Ultra Vortex was another Mortal Kombat-inspired fighting game that failed to better its inspiration.  And Troy Aikman Football made it to market, at least, unlike many of the licensed Jaguar sports titles planned, but it felt a lot like the Genesis/SNES versions and couldn't compete with EA's Madden juggernaut as the Playstation and Saturn came to market.

And the back cover's "LET THE GAMES BEGIN" once again serves as documentation of Atari's hopes for its fading console, listing a bevy of upcoming titles, many of which never saw the light of day even in prototype form:

Note a few artifacts of the pre-World Wide Web era -- Atari had a presence on Compuserve and Genie, promoted in the ONLINE FEVER! section of this page. 

And I wonder if anybody called the "exclusive" ATARI TIP LINE! to find out what the pre-release testers were up to.  Was there ever a time when they answered "Pffft... not much"?  Or had the line already shut down as the software pipeline dried up?

Cover to Cover: Jaguar EGM Promo (pp. 12-13)

We're finally getting back to our current cover-to-cover series, with a few more pages from a circa-1994 Atari Jaguar promo insert packaged with Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine.  We're into the latter pages of the 16-page insert, with some of the older and less-promotable titles from the Jaguar's small catalog.

Page 12 features one port, a semi-sequel and a couple of Jaguar exclusives:

Zool 2 is another U.K. platformer, with the alien ninja Zool leaping around a colorful, literally candy-colored world sponsored by the Chupa-Chups company; it's a competent action game with decent music, but was another 16-bit port that failed to take much advantage of the Jaguar's advanced hardware.  Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales brought Acclaim's entrant in the furry mascot sweepstakes to the Jaguar; the game featured all-new levels but failed to make a positive impression.  Cybermorph was the Jaguar's original pack-in game -- it made good use of Gouraud-shaded polygons and the battle/collecting gameplay was interesting enough to be worth playing, but it was already looking dated as texture mapping was starting to become the standard on PCs and the upcoming Playstation and Saturn.  Val d'Isere Skiing and Snowboarding -- licensed based on the ski resort, not an individual skier -- remains a personal favorite of mine.  The smooth-scaling sprites and subtly graded blue-white coloration of the track looked good and played at top speed, making for an exhilarating downhill run.

Page 13 rallies with a few new but arguably niche titles, including one that never made it to market:

Battlemorph was the worthy sequel to Cybermorph, upping the ante with more complex geography, spot texture-mapping and the benefits of CD-ROM capacity.  Blue Lightning brought the popular Lynx air-combat game to the Jaguar as one of the pack-in titles shipped with the Jaguar CD; this version wasn't as impressively smooth as the handheld edition, and didn't do much to promote the capabilities of the new CD platform.  Space War 2000 was an attempt to update the classic player-versus-player space battle, one of the very first computer games in the mainframe era, but it was never completed or commercially released.  Brutal Sports Football was another Amiga port, a fairly early Jaguar cartridge with loose rules and clunky animation; it was fun in small does, but it was never really a substitute for a proper football title.

We'll wrap up this up next weekend if all goes as planned.

Cover to Cover: Jaguar EGM Promo (pp. 10-11)

Our current cover-to-cover series continues, from the 1994 Jaguar ad insert in Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine.  We see almost all of the limited Jag software lineup on parade, as Atari tries to convince gamers to buy its 64-bit console.

Page 10 features three of the Jaguar's less successful titles:

Checkered Flag was a competent racer with untextured polygon graphics, meant as a true 3-D upgrade of the Pole Position-style title by the same name on the Atari Lynx handheld; it ran smoothly enough, but the action never really became very intense.  Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, under license based on the reasonably decent biopic about the famous action star, has very little to do with Lee's actual life and more to do with pitting him against various cheesy enemies in one-on-one fighting action.  Hover Strike began life as a Battlezone update -- its graphics were more heavily textured than most Jaguar titles, but the frame rate was uneven and gameplay was clunky; I did play through the whole game back in the day, but pack-in title Cybermorph did something similar, better.

By the time we get to page 11, we're down to several launch titles, as aging warehouse stock is employed to provide a free "bonus" title to entice new Jaguar owners:

Raiden was a solid conversion of the classic vertical scrolling shoot-'em-up -- the only problem was that the game was already several years old when this version was released, and while it was a step above Xevious it wasn't much to look at in the bullet-hell era.  Dino Dudes was a competent little puzzle game with entertaining cartoon graphics -- it played well enough for me to own and finish it at the time, but felt like an Amiga/PC conversion and took no real advantage of Atari's hardware.  And the less said about Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy, the better -- it showed off the Jaguar's 24-bit color depth to good advantage, but felt like a Photoshop tutorial gone mad, with cut-and-pasted sprite enemies attacking with little style or sense of design.

There's still more to come!

Cover to Cover: Jaguar EGM Promo (pp. 8-9)

We're paging through Atari's 1994 promo insert for the company's Jaguar console, published with an issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine.

Page 8 features the Jaguar's most indelible exclusive -- Jeff Minter's Tempest 2000, a throbbing techno reimagining of the classic Atari coin-op designed by Dave Theurer.  Minter reportedly didn't have access to an actual Tempest machine during the game's development, so he was going on memory, but the resulting game remains technically impressive and highly playable, with an excellent soundtrack.  It was hard to promote this kind of experience in a print ad -- still shots tend to look bare and simplistic -- but Atari did its best:

Page 9 gets us past the big titles and into the second-tier games, with half-pages devoted to id's Wolfenstein 3D and the freewheeling polygonal racer Club Drive.  I confess to playing through the Jaguar version of Wolfenstein 3D before I ever went back and played through the PC version, and it's actually quite a bit different from the original, with different levels and some additional weaponry, though the basic technology remains the same.  id intended this port as a test before tackling DOOM, but Atari was impressed (and desperate for software) enough to urge release of Wolfenstein 3D as well.

Club Drive was meant to be a 3-D Micro Machines sort of game, with a style reminiscent of Atari Games' Hard Drivin', but the game was not well received by critics or players.  The untextured polygon graphics were already starting to look outdated, and the engine didn't use the complicated Jaguar hardware very efficiently.  As a result, the game was sluggish, with imprecise controls, and the handful of imaginative racing environments were not enough to make it playable or successful.

Next weekend, we'll continue...

Cover to Cover: Jaguar EGM Promo (pp. 4-5)

We're paging through Jaguar's 1994 ad insert in Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine, and finally getting to some actual game advertisements.  Click to enlarge these for a closer look, I won't have a lot of commentary to add.

Page 4 features Rebellion's Alien vs. Predator, an excellent game that spawned a series that continues to this day.  This early first-person shooter features a boxy Wolfenstein-style engine, but the detailed, digitized character models and wall textures, with claustrophobic, tense play, made it a memorable experience.

id Software was also a supporter of the Jaguar, bringing a half-resolution, music-free, slightly-truncated but still very playable version of their seminal shooter DOOM to the console.  And I have to give Atari credit for the "Oh @#%!! Out of ammo!" caption, capturing the game's feel nicely:

More to come next weekend!

Cover to Cover: Jaguar EGM Promo (cover - p. 3)

Back in the mid-1990s, Atari's Jaguar console was trying to gain a market foothold.  It was a tough road -- the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System were still going strong with solid software support, the 3DO was out and arguably flashier with its CD-ROM standard hardware, and Atari was having a hard time convincing gamers and developers to commit to its new system. 

The struggling Atari lacked the marketing capital to run a major television ad campaign, and mainstream retailers were quite happy with the Sega and Nintendo lines; the demand for the Jaguar was failing to materialize according to plan.  So the company engaged Sendai Publishing to include a 16-page full-color brochure in an issue of the company's popular Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine.  (I'm inclined to believe that Sendai's design department had a hand in it, as well, as some of the "new" material looks a lot like the EGM of the time.)

The cover features Atari's always striking Jaguar logo, which promised mind-ripping 64-bit power that the software library didn't always live up to.  There's also a good picture of the memorable "toilet" CD-ROM add-on:

Good thing I didn't sit down!

Atari's promotion, like its Lynx ads at the time, treated the hardware specs as the main selling point.  The Jaguar was a complicated system, with a mixture of 64-bit and 16-bit processors that made programming the beast a bit daunting.  Witness the carnage as Atari attempts to link the system's raw power to the gaming experience, both overstating -- "combat games that'll drain pints of your blood" sounds dangerous -- and misstating -- what the heck is 850 million pixels-per-INCH rendering speed supposed to mean?

Feel the turf burn!

There's no question that the system had power -- the Cinepak rendering did make Dragon's Lair look better on the Jag than on the competing 3DO and Sega CD systems, and Jeff Minter was clearly able to synthesize psychedelic gaming intensity out of the complex array of processors.  And Atari's foray into VR gaming was forward-looking, although it never came to market despite its "Coming Soon!" promo below.  The table-of-specs marketing approach, used to sell stereo systems and home consoles in decades past to a knowledgeable geek-insider market, was starting to become obsolete as video gaming became more mainstream.  I doubt this carried a lot of weight with mid-90s EGM readers:

Tote bags!  Oh yeah!

The hardware was impressive, but you'll note that none of the awards listed on the right were for specific games.  The Jaguar's power didn't necessarily lead directly to great software -- the few third-party publishers that did produce Jaguar games generally played it safe, producing experiences that were not too different from the 16-bit systems already on the market.   We'll take a look at the Jaguar's library as this cover-to-cover series continues.

Airwave Adventures!

I had forgotten completely about Tiger Media's Airwave Adventures series -- in fact, I had forgotten it was a series until I ran across this old ad in MPC World magazine:

The company only ever produced these two games, using CD-ROM technology to provide digitized, non-animated comic-book artwork and radio drama-style voice tracks.  Their products originally ran on the Japanese FM-TOWNS computer and Commodore's ill-fated CDTV system, but came to DOS PCs later on as the technology became available.

Neither of the Airwave Adventures seems to have sold particularly well -- while the visuals and voice acting are nicely done for the era, the gameplay wasn't great even then, and the retro 1930s style may not have been appreciated by the core video game market in those pre-Bioshock days.  I own a copy of The Case of the Cautious Condor -- we have to solve the case within a 30-minute time limit, but if we don't visit the right locations and talk to the right people to discover all the right details, then we have to start over.  And it's not really an adventure game -- it's more like The Manhole, with limited opportunities for exploration and interaction.  This rigid structure quickly becomes repetitive, and I never finished the case.  From what I can find online, Murder Makes Strange Deadfellows is similar in style -- it came out later, and apparently escaped my notice (or at least my memory) completely.

What I do remember about Tiger Media is that I was very impressed by their customer service department.  My original copy of Condor was bought at a Radio Shack, in the early days of CD-ROM when very few games took advantage of the medium.  Much to my chagrin when I got home, this edition was designed strictly for use with the Tandy 1000/2000 computers' audio hardware, so I was unable to play it on a system with a Soundblaster-compatible card.  I messed around with the raw audio data a bit and was able to listen to some of it after correctly guessing the sample rate, but it wasn't the same as hearing the audio in synch with the game.

I filed the disc away and forgot about it until a few years later, at which time I phoned Tiger Media to see if they had ever released a Soundblaster version.  They had, and when I explained the situation and asked if there was an upgrade price, they just sent me a new disc, free of charge, without asking for so much as a proof of purchase.  I appreciated that -- the company took its products seriously, and while they didn't make a big splash in the game marketplace, they did contribute to the development of the art form.  One of their staff members even published an AES (Audio Engineering Society) paper discussing the use of low-bandwidth audio on CD-ROM, an abstract of which can be read here.

Maybe that's why they're still around today, as Iacta, developing interactive TV software for set-top boxes.

True Crime in the TRS-80 Era

I've recently been playing Bill Miller's 1980 adventure game, House of Thirty Gables, published by Instant Software on the TRS-80; it's targeted for a future Adventure of the Week post if I ever manage to solve it.  In the middle of what's otherwise a fairly ordinary dungeon treasure hunt, I came across this cryptic reference:

For clarity if the screenshot is painful to read: a small room with yellow tile walls contains A MAN WITH A FRIENDLY SMILE OFFERING YOU A GOLD COIN.  If the player opts to TAKE COIN, a tempting choice as one of the game's goals is to collect a certain number of them, the man vanishes in the traditional puff of smoke.  And, much to the player's chagrin, any coins accumulated up to this point are replaced by:

AN I.O.U. FOR 10 GOLD COINS SIGNED BY WORLD POWER SYSTEMS

This struck me as odd and intriguing -- usually these kinds of "gotcha" incidents are accompanied by puns, jabs at the player's misstep, or pop culture jokes with an obvious reference.  But this mention of WORLD POWER SYSTEMS was new to me.  I thought it might be an in-joke of some sort, and a little research established the fascinating story behind it.

Norman Hunt, an escaped convict and "bust out" con artist, started a mail-order home computer peripherals company called World Power Systems in the late 1970s.  Using a false name, he ran advertisements in Byte and Creative Computing magazines, took people's money, and of course never delivered the promised goods (if these "products" even existed beyond the photo mockup stage.)

I suspect that adventure author Bill Miller (who also wrote several non-adventure games for Adventure International) may have been among the defrauded.  In any case, this in-game reference stands as a contemporary record of the incident's impact on the computing community of the time -- "Jim Anderson" is now forever immortalized as the MAN WITH A FRIENDLY SMILE.

You can read the details of the scam at www.trs-80.org, documented by Matthew Reed.  This site has some additional scans of World Power Systems' fraudulent ads.

The Standard That Time Forgot

Today, we take full-motion video and digitized audio on a variety of devices for granted, even on the Web.  But the transition to this level of capability on home computers was one of fits and starts.  Early CD-ROM drives were designed to read large quantities of data, like encyclopedias and mailing lists, and not necessarily for video playback; many could sustain only short bursts of full (single) speed reading, and access time to read a different section of the disc was often abysmal.  Raw CD Redbook audio was the only reliable standard, with the Soundblaster, AdLib Gold, Pro Audio Spectrum and other varied and incompatible sound cards competing for marketshare.

So an organization called the Multimedia PC Marketing Council was formed by the industry, and the official "MPC" label was introduced to help consumers identify machines and upgrade kits which met the defined specifications.  There was even a magazine dedicated to promoting the MPC standard:

If the cover seems like a parody of a computer magazine, you're not far off.  It's a bit odd, thin and generic in terms of content, and even advertisers seemed unsure about what they should be advertising; gaming was already driving PC improvements on the "multimedia" front, so most of what we see are ads for educational and reference titles taking advantage of the newfangled CD-ROM medium.  Most of the articles have a vaguely optimistic "The Future Is Now!" tone about all the great things that would happen now that we could access a whopping 650 MB of text, video and sound on our PCs, but they don't really say much about specifics; it wasn't clear at the time that the Internet was still the missing ingredient that would make PCs truly useful for most people.

The MPC label itself failed to catch on, primarily because the industry matured faster than anyone anticipated and these kinds of features became must-haves around the time The 7th Guest came out.  With the arrival of Windows 3.1, device drivers at the DOS level became less of an issue -- games could just rely on the operating system to provide the necessary services via a standard API.  And the MPC standard didn't really go far enough -- it said nothing about video resolution or color-depth, focusing only on minimal CD-ROM drive and sound specifications:

* CD-ROM drive capable of a sustained transfer rate of 150k per second (1x!)

* Maximum CD-ROM seek time of 1 second (no Dragon's Lair please!)

* Digitized audio support at an 11 Khz sample rate, 8-bit resolution for recording, 22 Khz, 8-bit for output (below CD standard, 44.1 KHz, 16-bit)

* Audio mixing capabilities to blend digital audio, MIDI music and CD-audio (using an external mixer if necessary)

Fortunately, most of this has been sorted out now; PCs are able to accommodate a range of devices, even in the graphics card arena where technical variation is still substantial.  MPC World magazine eventually morphed into Multimedia World magazine before disappearing entirely; even for an old gamer like me, this one fails to inspire the warm glow of nostalgia.

Cover to Cover: Infocom 1987 Catalog (pp. 17-18)

We've reached the end of another Cover to Cover pagethrough series, as we wrap up the 1987 catalog from interactive fiction pioneer Infocom.  The company had been acquired by Activision at this time and would soon be pressured to include graphics in its future and final products; in some ways this feels like the last of the "old" Infocom era.  The last two pages feature support for frustrated adventurers and faithful fans alike.

Page 17 promotes the legendary Invisiclues -- sold separately, these packages included full maps and hint books, with clues printed in invisible ink that could be developed with a special marker.  Infocom's hint design originated with an unofficial adjunct called the Zork Users Group, and was eventually made part of the company.  The concept worked very well -- ideas and suggestions were revealed gradually, and red herrings were included among the questions, so players could get themselves unstuck without cheating themselves completely out of those memorable "Eureka!" moments:

Infocom also published a promotional quarterly newsletter called The Status Line (originally The New Zork Times) which included news, hints, and behind-the-scenes articles.  It was provided free to people who registered their Infocom games and was always an entertaining read.

And that's it for this trip down memory lane.  These old catalogs fascinate me because they capture moments in time -- the games that were being promoted in this printing, and moreover the games that were not, say something about the state of Infocom and the text adventure genre in 1987.  In the digital distribution era, games need not go "out of print," but physical production concerns and sales to date likely account for the absence in these pages of Cutthroats, Seastalker, Suspended, Starcross and other Infocom titles of the early-to-mid-1980s.

Cover to Cover: Infocom 1987 Catalog (pp. 15-16)

Our current cover-to-cover series is coming down the home stretch, with just four more pages of the Infocom 1987 product catalog to go...

Page 15 presents another box set collecting three Infocom science fiction titles:

I have to wonder about the logic used to determine which games went into this particular Science Fiction Classics set -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Planetfall are certified classics, but were more comedy than hard sci-fi; A Mind Forever Voyaging was true sci-fi, but more about atmosphere than puzzle solving and not a huge success.  And Infocom's early serious sci-fi classics Starcross and Suspended are out of the picture altogether.   My guess is that AMFV hadn't sold tremendously well and was available for the set, while the other two were popular and therefore still in print.

Page 16 collects three Infocom mysteries as the Classic Mystery Library, with what looks like similar logic:

In this case, the earlier Deadline was omitted from this collection, while the newer Moonmist makes an appearance.  This means that this three-game set includes two introductory-level mysteries, Moonmist plus The Witness, plus the more challenging Suspect. 

I have to confess that I was never very good at the Infocom mysteries -- I played The Witness back in the day, but never quite found an ending I was satisfied with.  I think my methodical, exploratory approach to adventure gaming isn't a great fit for the style -- part of the challenge is being in different places at the right time to witness the autonomous characters doing or saying certain things, which requires a certain amount of efficiency and replaying to piece together the whole story and gather the best possible evidence.  I ought to try again sometime soon.

Next week, I think we'll wrap this one up!

Cover to Cover: Infocom 1987 Catalog (pp. 13-14)

Our cover-to-cover pagethrough of Infocom's 1987 product catalog continues, with a couple of trilogy box sets.  These preceded the Lost Treasures collections, and still featured the original packaging with the classic Infocom "feelies" included.

Page 13 begins the series, with the always popular ZORK trilogy:

ZORK will always be the granddaddy of the genre, with a sophisticated parser that made it more playable than the original Crowther/Woods Adventure, while still focused on classically challenging puzzles, sword-and-monster themes, and rich prose.

Page 14 continues the theme with the Enchanter Trilogy:

I've recently been inspired to start replaying these games -- I had almost forgotten they were a ZORK spinoff, set in the same universe and written by original Infocom Implementors Marc Blank and Dave Lebling.  I'm working on Enchanter at the moment -- it feels very Zorkian, but with better storytelling and more interesting magic-based puzzles -- so keep an eye out for that one to show up as an Adventure of the Week sometime soon.

Next time, the box sets continue...

Cover to Cover: Infocom 1987 Catalog (pp. 11-12)

Here's some more from the 1987 Infocom product catalog as we continue our current cover-to-cover pagethrough.  We see some then-recent introductory games, urging the new and nervous to come on in and see what this interactive fiction thing is all about, as well as some established classics...

Page 11 features the introductory-level gothic mystery, Moonmist, and the original ZORK:

Stu Galley and Jim Lawrence also wrote Infocom's only Junior-level adventure, Seastalker, which I will be writing about later this week, so the Introductory difficulty of Moonmist (not to mention the titular alliteration) made for a reasonable followup.  And ZORK I: The Great Underground Empire remains the classic enter-the-white-house, open-the-mailbox, move-the-rug and now-it's-Thursday ZORK.  Most people who have only once played a text adventure sampled ZORK, I suspect; I have no doubt that it was indeed "the world's best-selling entertainment software product" at the time.  It reportedly sold some 380,000 copies in an era when this was still a niche hobby; today, of course, a new entry in a major videogame franchise typically sells millions of copies, but nearing half-a-million with a text adventure in the early 1980s is still quite an accomplishment.

Page 12 features a similar mix of introductory adventuring and an established standard:

Wishbringer was not the first Infocom game I ever played, but it's the first I covered on this blog; it's a whimsical, well-rendered fantasy effort by Brian Moriarty that encourages exploration and iss fairly forgiving with its puzzles.  And the Enchanter trilogy by Marc Blanc and Dave Lebling remains one of my all-time favorites -- it plays like a ZORK spinoff with a more compelling narrative, and allows quite a bit of experimentation with the spellbook for fun and disaster.

More to come next week, as I continue to add more Infocom titles to my mental must-play list...

Cover to Cover: Infocom 1987 Catalog (pp. 9-10)

We're up to pages 9 and 10 of our continuing cover-to-cover pagethrough of Infocom's 1987 product catalog, featuring several of the company's established titles.  Few game genres have had the technical longevity of the classic text adventure -- while audiovisual technology was advancing by leaps and bounds, keyboards and text displays were perfected very early on.  Infocom's earliest works of interactive fiction were still marketable in the late 1980s, although these four were more recent.  Page 9 features "Hollywood" Dave Anderson's Hollywood Hijinx and Brian Moriarty's Trinity:

I haven't played Hollywood Hijinx at all -- in fact, it's one of the few Infocom games I'd forgotten about completely -- and I've only briefly sampled Trinity.  I've enjoyed many of Brian Moriarty's adventures, so I'll have to put it higher on my mental list; what I do remember about it is that it was one of the first Infocom games to require the additional memory available on newer computers like the IBM PC.

The page 9 games appear to feature prominently because they were still fairly new; page 10 features a couple of games that were and are established classics of interactive fiction:

I haven't seriously played Leather Goddesses of Phobos, or its graphically-enhanced sequel that came out late in Infocom's existence, but I fully intend to; in the same way that Steve Meretzky's Planetfall seems to have influenced Sierra On-Line's Space Quest, I've never been able to shake the impression that Sierra's successfully smarmy Leisure Suit Larry series inspired Meretzky to create a bawdier adventure with more "adult" humor.  The game was well-received at the time and obviously sold well.

And what more is there to say about Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?  Adams' spacefaring satire has been rendered in numerous media -- as a radio play, a novel, a TV series and a feature film, at last count -- and its absurdist sensibility survived intact in the text adventure medium, with the player cast as the hapless Earthman Arthur Dent.  Care was taken to prevent knowledge of the story's other manifestations from making the game too easy; in fact, if anything, Adams pushed the difficulty envelope to new extremes, with the opening babelfish puzzle pushing "almost got it... but" design to new heights.  This is an acknowledged classic, and the involvement of the original author manages to make the game feel just the way it should.  It was even recreated as an illustrated adventure by the BBC some years ago.

We'll continue our journey next weekend -- assuming I can survive the pressure of realizing just how many great Infocom games I haven't yet played.

Cover to Cover: Infocom 1987 Catalog (pp. 7-8)

We're continuing our leisurely stroll through the pages of Infocom's 1987 product catalog.  Activision had acquired the legendary interactive fiction publisher, but the push for graphics and "marketability" had not yet begun, and some of these late games are among Infocom's best lesser-known efforts.

Page 7 features one of Infocom's two romances -- Amy Briggs' swashbuckling Plundered Hearts, featuring a female protagonist, which I have already written about in some detail:

Page 8 features Douglas Adams' second Infocom game, following the best-selling adaptation of his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Bureaucracy was an original work created by Adams especially for the interactive fiction medium, a unique literary work by one of the greats; the game didn't sell particularly well, but the industry itself was failing at the time, and Douglas Adams fans should definitely track this one down.  (And I am making a note to myself not to let this one go unplayed for too much longer.)

Next week, more pages...

Cover to Cover: Infocom 1987 Catalog (pp. 5-6)

Continuing our leisurely stroll through the pages of premier interactive fiction publisher Infocom's 1987 product catalog, we come upon a spinoff from a popular trilogy, and an experimental work that isn't as well-remembered as it probably ought to be.

Brian Moriarty created Infocom's Wishbringer and Lucasarts' Loom, as well as some lesser-known type-in text adventures for magazines early in his career, but I had forgotten that he created Beyond Zork.  I haven't played it, but the ad copy here indicates it was an attempt to incorporate role-playing gameplay into the Infocom style (there were some random combat elements in the original ZORK trilogy, but this one aims more explicitly for stat-building, combat and dungeon exploration.)  This may have been the first Infocom title to incorporate graphics of any kind, with an onscreen map.

On page 6 we find the experimental Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It, a series of short interactive puzzles -- ostensibly stories, but focused primarily on wordplay and puns.  I haven't played this one either, but it's on my list and sounds like it's intended to be a quick, friendly, and funny, experience for word game enthusiasts.  Unlike the more substantial Infocom titles, this one didn't come with any physical "feelies" as supplementary materials, but cartoonist Kevin Pope was engaged to provide a booklet of cartoons for added entertainment.

Next weekend, our journey continues, deeper downward into pages 7 and 8...

Cover to Cover: Infocom 1987 Catalog (pp. 3-4)

We're paging through the 1987 Infocom product catalog, and pages 3 and 4 start to get into the meat of the matter, pushing a couple of then-new works of interactive fiction.  I'm not going to comment too much on these pages, as they're pretty text-heavy already and Infocom's ad copy speaks for itself.  But given the stripped-down releases that came along a few years later under Activision's cost-cutting regime, it's nice to see the classic Infocom packaging featured, complete with a list of the memorable pack-in "feelies" for each title.

Page 3 promotes Steve Meretzky's Stationfall, a followup to his classic Planetfall.  Somehow I haven't gotten around to covering either of these sci-fi comedies as an Adventure of the Week here; while I played and loved Planetfall back in the day, I've never tackled the sequel.  25-YEAR-OLD SPOILER:  Our hero's faithful and self-sacrificing robot companion Floyd is alive and kicking.  It would definitely not be the same universe without him around

Page 4 features Infocom's one and only assay into true horror fiction, The Lurking Horror.  I've written at length about this one already, but seeing it in historical context reminds me that the layout of the G.U.E. Tech campus always made me think of Michigan Technological University, where I was studying Computer Science and Classical Literature at the time this game came out.  It's not a close resemblance by any means -- I believe the map was actually based on M.I.T. -- but in the "theatre of the mind" that makes interactive fiction so effective, I always pictured the Computer Lab and the snowy courtyard in Houghton, Michigan terms.

Next weekend, we'll continue the journey.