Monthly Archives: December 2011

There are two conflicting stories about how the game that Richard Garriott sold in that Houston-area ComputerLand store made it to the West Coast offices of California Pacific, one of the most prolific and prominent of early Apple II software publishers. One says that the man who had prompted Garriott to start selling Akalabeth in the first place, ComputerLand manager John Mayer, did him a second huge favor by sending a copy of the game to CP for their consideration. The other says that the game got to CP’s offices within a few weeks of appearing in that ComputerLand via software-piracy channels. The latter story is the one Richard himself tells today, and, for what it’s worth, the one I tend to subscribe to. Perhaps the former was invented closer to the events themselves, to avoid anyone having to explain just how pirated software made its way into CP’s offices. However Akalabeth came to their attention, CP’s founder, Al Remmers, called Richard before the summer of 1980 was out, offering to fly him to Davis, California, to discuss a publication contract that would give Akalabeth nationwide distribution.

In those days game designers and programmers (almost always embodied in the same person) who could push the envelope conceptually and technically were worshiped within the still small but rapidly growing community of Apple II users. Amongst the most prominent of these was the star in CP’s stable, Bill Budge, who made his name during 1979 and 1980 with a series of frenetic action games considered remarkable for their graphics. Garriott, like any engaged Apple II user, knew Budge’s work well, so much so that his first reaction on getting the call was amazement that his work could be considered worthy by the publisher of the great Budge. He made the trip to California with nervous parents in tow, who wanted to be sure their son would not be ripped off by the fast-talking Remmers. They found no grounds for concern, and the deal was quickly done.

It was Remmers, who could show a keen promotional instinct when the mood struck him, that suggested they credit the game not to Richard Garriott but only to his in-game alter ego, Lord British, starting a tradition that would persist for many years. Upon Akalabeth‘s CP release, probably in late October or November of 1980, Remmers orchestrated a contest with Softalk magazine, in which the magazine would publish a series of cryptic clues from which readers were expected to guess Lord British’s real identity:

Lord British is not a member of the Silicon Gulch.

Lord British attends the largest university in the state of friendship.

He and his home city are closely related to present and future blastoffs.

He works at a store on the King’s Highway near the city of the clear lake in the land of computers.

ComputerLand knows him as the Son of Skylab I and if you call you’ll know him too.

No one who wasn’t already a Richard Garriott acquaintance managed to decipher the clues, and the contest fizzled out rather anticlimactically with a series of consolation prizes for things like most imaginative solution methodology in Softalk‘s May, 1981, issue. The following issue featured a full profile of Garriott that revealed all at last. Still, yet another thing that would follow Garriott throughout his career, his larger-than-life persona in the computer press as Lord British, was now in place, and once again largely accidentally, at the behest of others. Truly the young Richard Garriott led a charmed life.

While Akalabeth and Garriott did receive considerable press thanks to Remmers’s cozy relationship with Softalk, the question of its actual sales is one I can’t quite consider settled. Garriott himself recently reiterated in this blog’s comments a claim he has often made, that Akalabeth sold some 30,000 copies and netted for its author at least $150,000. There are however, several pieces of admittedly circumstantial evidence that do tend to pull against this a bit.

As a point of comparison, we might take a game I discussed earlier in this blog, On-Line Systems’s The Wizard and the Princess. According to official histories from Sierra (the company that On-Line Systems morphed into), this game eventually sold 60,000 copies. However, in the September/October, 1982, issue of Computer Gaming World, we find a list of the top sellers of various game publishers as of June 30, 1982. There, The Wizard and the Princess is listed as having sold just 25,000 copies by that date, almost two years after its release. That’s surprising, but not untenable; the microcomputer industry was growing so quickly in the early 1980s that sales even of older games could increase month by month and even year by year simply because there were so many new consumers always coming online to buy them. So, let’s run with The Wizard and the Princess as a 25,000-copy seller through mid-1982. As I noted in an earlier post, The Wizard and the Princess was a perennial on Softalk‘s best-seller top ten for well over a year after its release, spending much of that time in the top five. Akalabeth, by contrast, made just two appearances in the top 30, appearing in the January, 1981, list at number 23 and then disappearing for two months, only to bubble up one last time at number 26 in the April issue. Given that Akalabeth would permanently disappear from shelves in 1982 for reasons we’ll get to down the road a bit, and thus would not be able to benefit from the long tail of new consumers that presumably benefited The Wizard and the Princess, this is hard to reconcile with the idea that Akalabeth outsold The Wizard and the Princess by 5000 copies between the former’s late 1980 release and mid-1982.

On that same mid-1982 Computer Gaming World list, California Pacific claims Garriott’s next game, Ultima, as its own top seller, with sales of — and this is interesting — just 20,000 copies. And then there is a question that’s been raised in vintage-software-collector circles: if 30,000 copies of Akalabeth were sold, where are they? The California Pacific Akalabeth (let’s not even talk about the ComputerLand version) remains exceedingly rare, much more so than other titles of similar vintage which allegedly sold in much smaller numbers.

Now, it’s very true that objections could be raised to many of these points. Softalk‘s sales listings, for instance, were generated by surveying “Apple-franchised retail stores representing approximately 15 percent of all sales of Apple and Apple-related products [who] volunteered to participate in this poll.” Notably, mail-order sales were not considered at all. Since it deals only in ratios, not absolute numbers, Softalk‘s editors assumed the poll to be a valid reflection of the Apple II software market in general, but perhaps this assumption did not entirely hold true. Even the Computer Gaming World list was generated by simply asking the various publishers. It’s entirely possible that, due to conscious deception, confusion that grew from an admittedly rather poorly worded premise, or simple mistakes, some of these numbers are inaccurate — perhaps dramatically so. And I do want to emphasize again that, if the 30,000-copy figure is not correct, I certainly don’t attribute the confusion to deliberate deception on Garriott’s part — merely to 30-year-old events and poor record keeping in a software industry that, as we’ll see all too clearly when we get to later events in Garriott’s career, was not exactly a model of responsible business practice.

Whatever its sales figures, we can feel confident that Akalabeth generated a nice chunk of money for its starving-student creator. Garriott has characterized this time in the software industry as the “free money era,” during which even programs that frankly weren’t very good could generate a lot of money for their creators — such was the demand for new software, any software among new minted Apple II zealots. CP sold Akalabeth for $35 (up from the $20 Garriott had charged at ComputerLand). Accounting for inflation, this figure puts it right in line and then some with a hot new AAA console title of today. CP was known for offering a very generous royalty rate to its developers, often as high as 50%. Garriott presumably gave a little something to his title-screen artist Keith Zabalaoui, but the rest was all his. Even if Akalabeth didn’t sell anywhere near 30,000 copies, that adds up to one hell of a windfall for a university student. (If Garriott earned $15 per copy and Akalabeth sold even 10,000 copies, there’s your $150,000 right there.) As Garriott recently said in a lengthy interview by Warren Spector, it’s been “all downhill from there” as far as return on investment in the computer-game industry. Indeed, I find the idea that it was for at least a year or two possible to make $150,000 from a 22 K BASIC program you wrote all by yourself simultaneously exciting and vaguely horrifying. Alas, I was born ten years too late…

Even before he returned to Austin for another year of classes and SCA events, Garriott began working on another game. This one would be more ambitious than Akalabeth, his first creation conceived and written entirely on the Apple II and his first to be consciously crafted for commercial sale. We’ll get to that soon, but next I want to switch topics yet again to look at the origins of the company many of you who read this blog love more than any other.

Richard Garriott was a remarkable kid, but he was also a teenage dungeon master. So if we cringe a bit when Akalabeth opens with what seems a veritable caricature of teenage-dungeon-master speech which we can imagine issuing from some spotty kid in the lunch room crouching behind his Keep on the Borderlands adventure-module cover, we’ll also have to accept it as a product of its time and of its maker’s time of life.

Just a couple of idle muses, issued in said spirit of acceptance:

Why do writers of medieval fantasy (including plenty who ought to know much better than our young Mr. Garriott) always turn to the Renaissance-era Shakespeare when they want to make their English diction sound all high-falutin’ and authentic-like? There is a fellow named Geoffrey Chaucer, you know…

And given Garriott’s documented dissatisfaction with the approach Crowther and Woods took in Adventure, is “Beyond Adventure” (or should I say “Beyond Adventure“?) a not-so-subtle dig at the competition?

While both of his parents and presumably others of course offered ideas and suggestions, Akalabeth is completely the work of Richard alone, the culmination of three years of tinkering, first on that teletype terminal in his high school and then on his shiny new Apple II Plus. The one exception comes in the form of title graphics, provided by a Houston neighborhood friend, Keith Zabalaoui, and sufficient to earn him a “Graphics” credit on the packaging.

After we have paged through Zabalaoui’s title graphics and the in-game instructions, the BASIC code of the game itself is loaded in and run. Everything that follows is implemented in a single BASIC program of some 22 K. First, we are told to “Type thy lucky number.” This number will serve as a seed to the random-number generator, determining almost everything that follows: the attribute scores we begin with, the layout of the wilderness and dungeon maps, etc. Thus, typing the same lucky number effectively guarantees us the same game, right down to the character we start with, and doing the exact same thing from there will literally result in the exact same game, for even “random” die rolls are ultimately controlled by this magic number. Generating a virtual world mathematically, on the fly as needs must rather than storing it as prepared data that simply needs to be retrieved from disk, was by no means unheard of in other early computer games that struggled with their hosts’ limited memories and disk capacities; most famously, Elite built its whole eight-galaxy universe dynamically from Fibonacci sequences. It is interesting that Garriott chose that approach here, however, rather than just using the Apple II’s perfectly adequate “real” random-number generator to present a truly random storyworld and gameplay.

Anyway, after making that most critical of decisions we next get to choose a difficulty level of between 1 and 10, which controls how tough the monsters we fight will be and how many quests we will need to complete to win the game. Next we see our character, consisting of a subset of the typical Dungeons and Dragons markers: hit points, strength, dexterity, stamina, wisdom, gold. We also can choose between two classes, fighter or mage. And so we end up in the inevitable shop, although this time without the chatty shopkeepers and haggling of Temple of Apshai or Eamon.

Like Temple of Apshai, Akalabeth‘s equipment list is pretty basic, consisting of just the handful of generic items shown above, without even any possibility of finding special loot in the dungeons. Notably, however, here we have to deal with maintaining our food supply; our avatar will consume a little bit of food with every single turn, and if we run out he dies instantly. Starvation can be a real threat early in the game when gold is scarce, but soon enough we can afford hundreds of packages of food, and death by starvation becomes likely only through carelessness.

When the game proper begins, the basis of Garriott’s only half joking assertion that he spent the first 15 years of his career making the same game over and over really becomes clear. We are presented with an outdoor map, seen from an overhead perspective, which we navigate around using one-key commands. Any Ultima veteran should feel right at home, although unlike in the Ultimas, which eventually grew to use just about every key on the keyboard, we have just 10 or so options, most dealing simply with movement.

Note that the display above is implemented using the Apple II’s unique hi-res graphics mode with four lines of regular text at the bottom for status messages — Wozniak’s gift that kept on giving for game programmers.

Also like in later Ultimas, our first real mission must be to find the castle of Garriott’s alter ego, Lord British. After calling us a “peasant” (tell us how you really feel, Richard), he will assign us the first of a series of “quests” to simply kill monsters of increasing difficulty. The number of these quests we must complete to win the game is controlled by the difficulty level we chose at the beginning.

Isn’t that “a(n)” bit above priceless?

It’s in the dungeons scattered around the outdoor map that we find monsters to fight. These dungeons are the real meat of the game; we’ll spend most of our time exploring and mapping them and of course fighting their inhabitants, which grow increasingly fearsome as we descend to lower and lower levels. It’s also here that we find the game’s most obvious formal innovation, its use of a three-dimensional, first-person perspective that puts us right into the storyworld.

The use of such a perspective was not completely unprecedented even in 1980; there was of course that Escape game that had inspired Richard in the first place. And better remembered is Flight Simulator, the fruit of many years of 3D graphics experimentation by Bruce Artwick, which first appeared on the Apple II in 1979 or very early 1980. Garriott was, however, the first to implement it in a CRPG. As such, it would be very influential on a whole generation of dungeon-crawl games to follow, even as Garriott’s own Ultima series would ironically place increasingly less emphasis on its own dungeon delving in favor of creating ever richer above-ground worlds. And if we take Akalabeth‘s 3D dungeons out of the strict context of CRPG history, they stand near the top of a slippery slope that eventually led to Doom and, well, most of the hardcore games of today.

Still, Akalabeth isn’t generally accorded a whole lot of respect as a game qua game today. The CRPG Addict, for instance, calls it “more of a demonstration project than a game.” Certainly the garish artwork and teenage DM diction make it seem even more of an amateurish creation than most games from its early era. There’s some fitful stab at a milieu and a story, but it doesn’t really make any sense in light of the player’s goal to simply kill monsters and become a knight; after the introductory stuff, there are fewer total words in the game proper than there are in this paragraph. And there are things that feel just plain odd. For instance, Akalabeth has no concept of character levels; after exiting from a dungeon you are rewarded only in hit points, based on the quantity and quality of monsters you slew down below. The game has no concept of healing or of some theoretical maximum hit-point value; hit points are simply a collectable commodity, like gold. This system would persist even into Ultima I. As the CRPG Addict notes about that game, “it[‘s] the only game I know in which when you’re low on hit points, you’d better head straight for the nearest dungeon and find some monsters to fight!” Counter-intuitive as it is, fighting is literally the only way to recover hit points. (Which means, of course, that if you somehow manage to run your hit points too low without killing some pretty tough monsters, you’re effectively screwed.)

Yet there’s also a surprisingly smart design sensibility in evidence here in addition to the technical innovation of the 3D dungeons. These are aspects for which Akalabeth doesn’t get enough credit. In fact, I was surprised at how playable Akalabeth really is — much more playable than, say, the more conceptually ambitious Temple of Apshai and its successors. Part of the problem others have had with it may be a failure of expectations. Akalabeth is not trying to give its player an extended, epic experience like its Ultima successors; it does not even have a save capability. It’s rather designed as a replayable exercise in dungeon delving. The difficulty system assures that the player is always challenged, and the magic-number system allows her to generate an almost infinite variety of maps while also being able to return to exactly that pesky setup that got her killed last time, should she so desire. Taken in that light, Akalabeth is a remarkably forward-thinking, even player-friendly design for its era. And while I won’t say that I was captured for days by it or anything, I genuinely had fun toying around with it in preparation for writing this entry, something I certainly can’t say about all of the historically important early games I’ve covered previously.

Other common criticisms provide an object lesson on the need to do this sort of software archaeology using as authentic a setup as possible. In 1997, Electronic Arts released The Ultima Collection, a collection of the first eight games in the series. They also included as a bonus a port of Akalabeth to MS-DOS, marking the first such ever done after the Apple II original. Most people who attempt to play Akalabeth today use this version, as it is more accessible than getting a real Apple II or Apple II emulator working. The problem is, this version actually appears to be less sophisticated than its antecedent. For instance, in the port every single dungeon on the map is a clone of every other; in the original, each dungeon is unique. Thus we are left with a false and unfavorable impression of Garriott’s original design.

Another common criticism is that the magic amulet effectively breaks the game. Some quick background: one of the items the player can buy or find in dungeons is a magic amulet, which, in addition to a few usefully predictable functions such as making magic ladders to move up or down in a dungeon, also has a sort of wildcard option. Most of the time the results of choosing this are bad in the extreme, such as being turned into a toad. Occasionally, however, the player will get turned into a lizard man, which might not sound so great but actually is: all of her stats instantly and permanently increase by 150%. The exploit, then, is to save the game — a feature the MS-DOS port, unlike the original, did include — and try your luck. If something bad happens, you simply restore and try again, until you become a lizard man. Do this a few times and you are effectively invincible. Fine — but we need to remember that players of the original didn’t have the comfort of a save command, or even an emulator’s saved state. So trying this would have been a truly desperate roll of the dice, probably undertaken when the player had nothing left to lose. Seen the way a player in 1980 would have seen it, it’s not a game breaker at all, but a clever touch that just might once in a blue moon provide a miracle to the desperate.

So, taken all in all, it’s not hard to see why the software publisher California Pacific came calling after Richard, wanting to give his game a national release. I’ll get into that story next time.

If you’d like to try out the original Akalabeth for yourself in the meanwhile, here’s an Apple II disk image for ya.

Just to demonstrate how thoroughly rotten my commercial instincts are, for my first post after returning from my little holiday hiatus I’m going to go all meta and esoteric on you and talk about a truly burning question: the exact dates of events in Richard Garriott’s early career as a game designer. I have a couple of reasons for picking these particular nits. The first and most self-interested is that I’m about to begin looking at old Richard, whom you might better know as Lord British, as my next big subject for discussion, and I want to preemptively defend myself against hordes of Ultima fans taking issue with my dating of events. The other is that this little tale may serve as an example of the process I go through to come to (my version of) historical truth, as well as the advantages and drawbacks of different sorts of sources. If you’re an historian, a reporter, or a researcher, you’re likely all too familiar with trying to reconcile separate pieces of credible evidence that nevertheless contradict each other. If you’re not, though, maybe you’ll be interested to know just what a digital antiquarian has to go through these days.

Garriott’s life and career has been better documented than that of all but a handful of game designers. In addition to countless magazine and Internet profiles, much of the book Dungeons and Dreamers was devoted to him, and the various editions of Shay Addams’s The Official Book of Ultima all fawned over him and his history with abandon. Given that, I was surprised to find myself so uncertain about the dating of Garriott’s first game, Akalabeth.

The story of Akalabeth has been told many times; if you haven’t heard it yet, stay tuned for my next post, wherein I’ll get back to historical narrative and tell you all about it. For now, though, the short version is that Garriott wrote it on his Apple II in the summer of 1979, while he was working at an Austin, Texas, ComputerLand store between high school (which he’d finished that spring) and starting at the University of Texas. His boss saw the game and suggested that he package it and sell it in the store, which Garriott did. Within days a copy had made its way — probably through the magic of piracy — to California Pacific, a major early software publisher. They flew young Richard out to California to sign him to a distribution deal, and Akalabeth became a huge hit, selling 30,000 copies and netting Garriot some $150,000 — not a bad nest egg for a kid to carry off to college. This is the story told in both of the books I mentioned above, and the one that Garriott has repeated in interviews stretching back literally decades. As the guy at the center of all these events, Garrott certainly ought to know. Yet when we start to dig into some primary sources the waters quickly muddy.

By far the best way I know to track the month-by-month doings of the early computer industry is via the magazines. In them we can watch as products are introduced and trends come and go, all with hard dates indelibly stamped right there on the covers. Sometimes, as in this case, the things we find there can upset chronologies that have come to be accepted as unchallenged fact.

Softalk magazine is one of the best resources on the early Apple II market. Surprisingly, Akalabeth does not appear there until the January, 1981, issue. Once it does, however, it appears in a big way, with a prominent mention in an article on California Pacific, a feature review, a listing at position 23 in Softalk‘s list of the top 30 Apple II software bestsellers, and the inauguration of a contest to deduce the real identity of Akalabeth creator Lord British (i.e., Garriott). Allowing for the typical magazine lead time of a couple of months, everything would seem to indicate that Akalabeth was in late 1980 a brand new product (at least on the national stage), more than a year after the standard narrative says Garriott wrote it. If we accept that, we are left with two possibilities, both of which to some extent contradict Garriott’s story. Either Akalabeth was not in fact picked up by California Pacific until more than a year after its creation, languishing in that time in obscurity while Garriott did the college thing, or it was not created in the summer of 1979, after his senior year in high school, but rather in the summer of 1980, after his freshman year at university. Howard Feldman recently scanned a copy of an original ComputerLand Akalabeth for his superb Museum of Computer Adventure Game History. That edition bears a copyright of 1980, which leaves me pretty confident that the latter scenario is in fact the correct one; Garriott himself as well as the conventional histories are off by fully one year. Further, I also find myself doubting Garriott’s sales claims. An article in the September/October, 1982, issue of Computer Gaming World tells us that The Wizard and the Princess, a game that was a Softalk top 10 perennial throughout late 1980 and 1981, had by mid-1982 sold just 25,000 copies. It’s hard to imagine how Akalabeth, which sneaked into the bottom parts of the top 30 only a few times during that period, could have ended up with the sales figures claimed.

Which of course leaves me wondering why Garriott has for so many years been saying things I’m almost certain are not true. While anyone who went around calling himself “Lord British” without a trace of apparent irony is maybe not quite the self-effacing sort, I’ve never seen anything to indicate that Garriott is dishonest. Indeed, in every interview I’ve seen he seems very level-headed and trustworthy. And it’s hard to see a reason why he might choose to knowingly falsify his dates. If having Akalabeth out in 1979 rather than 1980 maybe makes him seem slightly more of a pioneer, Garriott’s real record of accomplishments is certainly strong enough that it needs no boosting. Nor does an earlier release date give him a claim to any additional firsts; a 1979 Akabaleth is still far from the first CRPG, and his game is still not even all that impressive against the likes of Temple of Apshai, a much more ambitious and sophisticated piece of software already released by that summer of 1979. And as for sales… well, Garriott’s later games would sell in such quantities that he hardly needed to inflate the numbers for Akalabeth to assert his claim to importance.

So, no, I don’t believe that Garriott is knowingly lying to us. I do believe, however, that the human memory is a tricky thing. Much as the current fad for all things neuroscience annoys me, I found this episode of Radiolab about the workings of memory pretty fascinating. It describes remembering as an act of imaginative recreation rather than a mere retrieval from storage, and makes the counter-intuitive claim that the more we remember something, the more we dwell on it, the more distorted and inaccurate it can become. That’s one reason I’m very sparing in my use of direct interviews (another reason of course being that plenty of people have better things to do than talk with me anyway). It’s very easy for a person to start to believe his legend, whether it originated with his own early press releases or elsewhere, and to insert that version of events into his memory in lieu of reality. Ironically, I find that less heralded figures such as Lance Micklus often offer the most trustworthy recollections, as their versions of the past have not been distorted by years of repeating the same deeply engrained stories.

Anyway, this provides an example of the process I go through in trying to get to historical truth, balancing sources against one another and trying to reconstruct the most viable version of the past. The most frustrating cases are those for which I just can’t gather enough evidence, as in the case of the Eamon timeline, in which I had a creator who refuses to talk about his creation, a major figure (John Nelson) absolutely certain of one timeline of events, a single magazine article which would seem to imply another timeline but which doesn’t do so quite definitively, and otherwise a complete void of credible information. That’s when I have to just throw up my hands and admit I just don’t know — which is frustrating, because if I can’t document this stuff it may never get done.

Actually, that raises a good point: the “so what?” aspect of all this. In the end it’s maybe not of world-shaking importance to know whether one game designer released his first creation in 1979 or 1980, nor whether it sold 30,000 or 3000 copies. But in another way it’s important to me to get this stuff right, and not just because of the trite but true maxim that anything worth doing is worth doing right. Interactive entertainment looks certain to be the defining media of the 21st century, and therefore to be something eminently worth studying. Those who write about videogames have generally done the form few favors — just another aspect of a form of media that seems to have a hard time growing up and realizing its potential. Whatever you think of books of lists, I can’t help but compare the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die or 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die books with 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die. The former are thoughtful, filled with a defensible if not absolute canon of genuinely great films and music; the latter is a mishmash of titles apparently plucked out of thin air, with commentary that often reads like it was lifted straight from the box copy. I’m not at all sure there even are 1001 videogames you “must” play, but surely there’s been enough good work produced in the last 35 years or so that we can do it a little bit better justice. I don’t want this to turn into a rant on the state of game journalism, so I’ll just say that I think we can do a better job of chronicling this medium’s history, and that this blog is my humble contribution to that ambition.

In addition, it’s kind of exhilarating to dig through the past and turn up things you didn’t expect. That’s already happened a number of times for me in the months I’ve been researching this blog, as when I discovered that Scott Adams had written eight of his “classic dozen” adventures before the 1970s were even over, or that the TRS-80 sold so well in its first couple of years that it left all the other platforms (including the legendary Apple II) fighting over the tiny non-Radio Shack scrap of the PC market. Put another way: primary sources rule. And hey, if stuff like that doesn’t interest you you probably never made it through this post, much less this blog. Let’s wallow in trivia together, shall we?