THE IMPLEMENTOR’S CREED
I create fictional worlds. I create experiences.
I am exploring a new medium for telling stories.
My readers should become immersed in the story and forget where they are. They should forget about the keyboard and the screen, forget everything but the experience. My goal is to make the computer invisible.
I want as many people as possible to share these experiences. I want a broad range of fictional worlds, and a broad range of “reading levels.” I can categorize our past works and discover where the range needs filling in. I should also seek to expand the categories to reach every popular taste.
In each of my works, I share a vision with the reader. Only I know exactly what the vision is, so only I can make the final decisions about content and style. But I must seriously consider comments and suggestions from any source, in the hope that they will make the sharing better.
I know what an artist means by saying, “I hope I can finish this work before I ruin it.” Each work-in-progress reaches a point of diminishing returns, where any change is as likely to make it worse as to make it better. My goal is to nurture each work to that point. And to make my best estimate of when it will reach that point.
I can’t create quality work by myself. I rely on other implementors to help me both with technical wizardry and with overcoming the limitations of the medium. I rely on testers to tell me both how to communicate my vision better and where the rough edges of the work need polishing. I rely on marketeers and salespeople to help me share my vision with more readers. I rely on others to handle administrative details so I can concentrate on the vision.
None of my goals is easy. But all are worth hard work. Let no one doubt my dedication to my art.
Stu Galley wrote the words you see above in early September of 1985, a time when Infocom was reeling through layoff after torturous layoff and looked very likely to be out of business in a matter of months. It served as a powerful affirmation of what Infocom really stood for, just as the misplaced dreams of Al Vezza and his Business Products people — grandiose in their own way but also so much more depressingly conventional — threatened to halt the dream of a new interactive literature in its tracks. “The Implementor’s Creed” is one of the most remarkable — certainly the most idealistic — texts to come out of Infocom. It’s also vintage Stu Galley, the Imp who couldn’t care less about Zork but burned with passion for the idea of interactive fiction actually worthy of its name.
Galley’s passion and its associated perfectionism could sometimes make his life very difficult. In the final analysis perhaps a better critic of interactive fiction than a writer of it — his advice was frequently sought and always highly valued by all of the other Imps for their own projects — he would be plagued throughout his years at Infocom by self-doubt and an inability to come up with the sorts of original plots and puzzles that seemed to positively ooze from the likes of Steve Meretzky. Galley’s first completed game, The Witness, was developed from an outline provided by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling, while for his second, Seastalker, he collaborated with the prolific (if usually uncredited) children’s author Jim Lawrence. After finishing Seastalker, he had the idea to write a Cold War espionage thriller, tentatively called Checkpoint: “You, an innocent train traveler in a foreign country, get mixed up with spies and have to be as clever as they to survive.” He struggled for six months with Checkpoint, almost as long as it took some Imps to create a complete game, before voluntarily shelving it: “The problem there was that the storyline wasn’t sufficiently well developed to make it really interesting. I guess I had a vision of a certain kind of atmosphere in the writing that was rather hard to bring off.” Suffering from writer’s block as he was, it seemed a very good idea to everyone to pair him up again with Lawrence late in 1985.
Just as Seastalker had been a Tom Swift, Jr., story with the serial numbers not-so-subtly filed away, the new game, eventually to be called Moonmist, would be crafted in the image of an even more popular children’s book protagonist with whom Lawrence had heaps of experience: none other than the original girl detective, Nancy Drew. She was actually fresher in Lawrence’s mind than Tom: he had spent much of his time during the first half of the 1980s anonymously churning out at least seven Nancy Drew novels for the Stratemeyer Syndicate, creators and owners of both the Tom and Nancy lines. As in Seastalker, you provide Moonmist with a name and gender when the game begins. The game and its accompanying feelies, however, would really kind of prefer it if you could see your way to playing as a female. Preferably as a female named “Nancy Drew,” if it’s all the same to you.
The plot is classic Nancy, a mystery set in a romantic old house, with a hint of the supernatural for spice. You’ve received a letter from your friend Tamara, for whom a semester abroad in Britain has turned into an engagement to a Cornish lord. It seems she has need for a girl detective. She’s living with her Lord Jack now at his Tresyllian Castle — chastely, in her own bedroom, of course — and all is not well. Lord Jack’s uncle, Lionel, was a globetrotting adventurer who recently died of “some sort of fatal jungle disease” that he may or may not have accidentally contracted. Lord Jack’s last girlfriend, the beautiful Deirdre, became entangled with his best friend Ian as well, and then allegedly committed suicide by drowning herself in the castle’s well after Jack broke it off with her in retaliation. Now her ghost is frequently seen haunting the castle and, Tamara claims, trying to kill her with venomous spiders and snakes. Joining you, Lord Jack, Tamara, and Ian at the castle for a memorial dinner marking the first anniversary of Lord Lionel’s death are Vivien, a painter and sculptor and the local bohemian; Iris, a Mayfair debutante who may or may not have something going with Ian; Dr. Wendish, Lord Lionel’s old best mate; and a slick antique dealer named Montague Hyde who’s eager to buy up the castle’s contents and sell them to the highest bidder.
Labelled as an “Introductory” level game, Moonmist splits the difference between earlier Infocom games to bear its “Mystery” genre tag. It doesn’t use the innovative player-driven plot chronology of the most recent of those, Ballyhoo, opting like Deadline, The Witness, and Suspect for a more simulationist turn-by-turn clock that gives you just a single night to solve the mystery. However, you the player don’t have to engage in the complicated, perfectly timed story interventions demanded by those earlier mysteries. After the events of the dinner party that sets the plot in motion, Moonmist is actually quite static, leaving you to your own devices to search the castle for clues and assemble a case that will reveal exactly what happened to Deirdre and who is dressing up as her ghost every night. (You didn’t think the ghost was real, did you? If so, you haven’t had much exposure to Nancy Drew or the works she spawned — like, for instance, Scooby-Doo.) You’ll also need to find a mysterious treasure brought back to Cornwall by Lord Lionel after one of his expeditions abroad. Depending on which version of Moonmist‘s mystery you’re playing, therein may also lie another nefarious plot.
But wait… which version? Yes. We’ve come to the most interesting innovation in Moonmist. The identity of the guilty one(s) and the nature of the treasure change in four variations of the plot, which you choose between in-character by telling the butler your “favorite color” at the beginning of the game: green, blue, red, or yellow. (I’ve listed them in general order of complexity and difficulty, and thus in the order you might want to try them if you play Moonmist for yourself.) Infocom had tried a branching plotline once before, in Cutthroats, but not handled it terribly well. There the plot suddenly branched randomly well over halfway through the game, leading you the intrepid diver to explore one of two completely different sunken shipwrecks. If the objective was to make an Infocom game last longer, the Cutthroats approach was nonsensical; it just resulted in two unusually short experiences that added up to a standard Infocom game, not a full-length experience that could somehow be experienced afresh multiple times. And randomly choosing the story branch was just annoying, forcing the player to figure out when the branch was about to happen, save, and then keep reloading until the story went in the direction she hadn’t yet seen. The worst-case scenario would have to be the player who never even realized that the branch was happening at all, who was just left thinking she’d paid a lot of money for a really short adventure game.
While it’s not without problems of its own, Moonmist‘s approach makes a lot more sense. I do wish you were allowed to name your color a bit later; this would save you from having to play through a long sequence of identical introductions and preparations for the dinner party that kicks off the mystery in earnest. Still, Moonmist‘s decision to reuse the same stage set, as it were — rooms, objects, and characters — in the service of four different plots is a clever one, especially in light of the limitations of the 128 K Z-Machine. It’s of course an approach to ludic mystery that already had a long history by the time of Moonmist, beginning with the board game Cluedo back in 1949 and including in the realm of computer games the randomized mysteries of Electronic Arts’s not-quite-successful Murder on the Zinderneuf and the hand-crafted plots of Accolade’s stellar Killed Until Dead amongst others.
Moonmist is, alas, less successful at crafting 4 mysteries out of the same cast and stage than Killed Until Dead is at making 21. Moonmist‘s variations simply aren’t varied enough. Although the perpetrator, the treasure, and the incriminating evidence change, the process of finding them and assembling a case is the same from variation to variation. After you’ve solved one of the cases, and thus know the steps you need to follow, solving the others is fairly trivial. The process of finding Lord Lionel’s treasure is literally a scavenger hunt, a matter of following a trail of not-terribly-challenging clues in the form of written messages until you arrive at its conclusion. The guilty guest, meanwhile, is readily identifiable as the one person who leaves the dinner party and starts poking restlessly around the rest of the castle. And once the treasure is secured and the guilty one identified it’s mostly just a matter of searching that person’s room carefully to come up with the incriminating evidence you need and making an “arrest.” The changes from variation to variation amount to no more than a handful of objects placed in different rooms or swapped out and replaced with others, along with a bare few paragraphs of altered text. Although they’re not randomly generated, the cases feel unsatisfying enough that they almost just as well could have been; there’s a distinct “Colonel Mustard in the lounge with the candlestick” feel about the whole experience. Even the exact words that the guilty party says to you never change from variation to variation. Most damningly, Moonmist never even begins to succeed in giving you the feeling that you’re actually solving a mystery — the feeling that was so key to the appeal of Infocom’s original trilogy of mystery games. You’re just jumping through the hoops that will satisfy the game and cause it to spit out the full story in the form of the few bland sentences that follow your unmasking of the mastermind.
Some of these shortcomings can doubtless be laid at the feet of the aging 128 K Z-Machine, whose limitations were beginning to bite hard into Infocom’s own expectations of even a modest work like Moonmist by 1986. Even reusing most of the environment apparently didn’t give Galley and Lawrence enough room to craft four mysteries that truly felt unique. On the contrary, they were forced to save space by off-loading many of the room descriptions into a tourist’s guide to Tresyllian Castle included with the documentation. So-called “paragraph books” fleshing out stories (and providing copy protection) via text that couldn’t be packed into the game proper would soon become a staple of CRPGs of the latter half of the decade wishing to be a bit more ambitious in their storytelling than simple hack-and-slashers like Wizardry and The Bard’s Tale. But a CRPG is a very different sort of experience from a text adventure, and what’s tolerable or even kind of fun in the former doesn’t work at all in the latter. Having to constantly flip through a slick tourist brochure for room descriptions in Moonmist absolutely kills the atmosphere of a setting that should have fairly dripped with it. Tresyllian Castle is, after all, set on a spooky moor lifted straight out of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and comes complete with everything an American tourist thinks a British castle should, including a hedge maze (thankfully not implemented as an in-game maze), a dungeon, and a network of secret passages.
The text’s scarcity is doubly disappointing because the writing, when it’s there, is… well, I’m not sure I’d label it “great” or even “good,” but it is perfectly evocative of the sort of formulaically comforting children’s literature Jim Lawrence had so much experience crafting. How you react to it may very well depend on your own childhood experiences with Nancy Drew — or, perhaps more likely if you’re male like me, with her Stratemeyer Syndicate stablemates The Hardy Boys (yet another line for which Lawrence, inevitably, wrote a number of books). Just the idea of a white-haired old man raised in the swing era trying to write from the perspective of a 1980s teenager is weird; Nancy, born a teenager in 1930, is like Barbie and Bart Simpson eternally stuck at the same age both physically and mentally. Given that Nancy is, like Barbie, largely an aspirational fantasy for those who read her, Lawrence tries to make her life everything he thinks a contemporary twelve-year-old girl — the sweet spot of the Nancy Drew demographic — wishes her life could be in a few years. And given the artificial nature of the whole concept and its means of production, Nancy, and therefore Moonmist, inhabit a sort of cartoon reality where people routinely behave in ways that we never, ever see them behaving in real life. See, for example, your first meeting with Ian and Iris, nonsensically dancing together to pass the time before dinner “to the faint sound of rock music from a portable radio on a table nearby.” I mean, really, who the hell starts dancing just to pass the time, and who dances to the “faint sound of rock music?” Once or twice the writing veers into the creepy zone, as when Lawrence declares, “My, what a fine figure of a woman!” when you take off your clothes preparatory to taking a bath. But mostly it manages to be quaint and nostalgically charming with its mixture of Girl Power and romantic teenage giddiness.
"My fiance, Lord Jack Tresyllian," Tamara introduces him. "Jack, this is my friend from the States, Miss Nancy Drew."
"So you're that famous young sleuth whom the Yanks call Miss Sherlock!" says Lord Jack. "Tammy's told me about the mysteries you've solved -- but she never let on you looked so smashing! Welcome to Cornwall, Nancy luv!"
Before you know it, he sweeps you into his arms and kisses you warmly! Let's hope Tamara doesn't mind -- but for the moment all you can see are Lord Jack's dazzling sapphire-blue eyes.
Considered as an Infocom game rather than a Nancy Drew novel, however, Moonmist is afflicted with a terminal identity crisis. Infocom had been making a dangerous habit of conflating the idea of an introductory-level game for adults with that of a game for children for some time already by the time it appeared. Seastalker, the first game to explicitly identify itself as a kinder, gentler Infocom product, had originally been marketed upon its release in June of 1984 as a story for children, trailblazer for a whole line of “Interactive Fiction Junior” that would hopefully soon be selling madly to the same generation of kids that was snapping up Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks by the millions. Sadly, that never happened — doubtless not least because a Choose Your Own Adventure book cost $2 or so, Seastalker $30 or more. Upon the release exactly one year later of Brian Moriarty’s Wishbringer, an introductory-level game written using the same adult diction of most of Infocom’s other games, the “Junior” line was quietly dropped and Seastalker relabeled to join Wishbringer as an “Introductory” game, despite the fact that the two were quite clearly different beasts entirely. Then, in October of 1986, Moonmist was also released as simply an adult “Introductory” game — but, as just about the entire article that precedes this paragraph attests, Jim Lawrence and Stu Galley apparently didn’t get a memo somewhere along the line. Moonmist the digital artifact was, in opposition to Moonmist the marketing construct, plainly children’s literature. At best — particularly if she used to read Nancy Drew — the adult player was likely to find Moonmist nostalgically charming. At worst, it could read as condescending. Any computer game released into the cutthroat industry of 1986 was facing a serious problem if it didn’t know exactly what it was and whom could be expected to buy it. Moonmist, alas, wasn’t quite sure of either.
That said, Moonmist actually did somewhat better than one might have expected given this confusion. Its final sales would end up at around 33,000 copies, worse than those of Seastalker but not dramatically so. There’s good reason for its modern status as one of Infocom’s less-remembered and less-loved games: it’s definitely one of the slighter works in the canon. Certainly only hardcore fans are likely to summon the motivation to complete all four cases. Despite its shortcomings, though, others may find it worth sampling one or two cases, and historians may be interested in experiencing this early interactive take on Nancy Drew published many years before the long-running — indeed, still ongoing — series of graphic adventures that Her Interactive began releasing in the late 1990s.
Moonmist would mark the last time that Stu Galley or Jim Lawrence would be credited as the author of an Infocom game. Lawrence returned to print fiction, where he could make a lot more money a lot more quickly than he could writing text adventures. Galley remained at Infocom until the bitter end, working on technology and on one or two more game ideas that would frustratingly never come to fruition. Given just how in love he was with the potential of interactive fiction, it does seem a shame that he never quite managed to write a game that hit it out of the park. On the other hand, his quiet enthusiasm and wisdom probably contributed more than any of us realize to many of those Infocom games that did.
(In addition to the Get Lamp interviews, this article draws from some of the internal emails and other documents that were included on the Masterpieces of Infocom CD. An interview with Galley in the June 1986 issue of Zzap! was also useful.)
Duncan Stevens
March 12, 2015 at 3:20 pm
I’m pretty sure the game says “My, what a fine figure of a man!” if you play as male. Whether anyone has used that phrasing ever in reference to a male is another question.
I didn’t remember the game telling you to read the tourist brochure for room descriptions. Were there instances of important information only appearing there?
X
March 13, 2015 at 6:18 am
Let me Google that for you: fine figure of a man
Jimmy Maher
March 13, 2015 at 6:58 am
I just know it as the first line of a great Elvis Costello song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwGdB4Gj7Js
Jimmy Maher
March 13, 2015 at 6:35 am
Actually, if you’re playing as a man, you get this instead:
>remove outfitOkay... You immediately wish for central heating!
And yes, there’s lots of absolutely essential information in the tourist brochure. For instance, the umbrella stand in the entryway, which is never mentioned at all by the game’s text, but critical to solving one of the cases.
Duncan Stevens
March 13, 2015 at 7:44 pm
I don’t remember ever seeing that line at all (and I know I tried playing both as male and female because I noticed some of the other changes, like Jack smooching me). Different releases? It seems unlikely.
Duncan Stevens
March 13, 2015 at 7:49 pm
This magazine article quotes the “what a fine figure of a man” line:
http://rupazero.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Volume-2-Issue-2-gender-and-sexuality.pdf
So maybe it really did change in different releases.
Rob Childers
July 27, 2021 at 11:10 pm
The game gives you that line if you used a gender-neutral prefix (instead of Mr, Ms, or what-have-you) when giving your name and favorite color at the beginning.
Lisa H.
July 28, 2021 at 6:28 pm
The game recognizes several gendered titles from a fixed list; if you give any other word at all in that position (including things that are not titles), it flags the player as “unknown gender”.
Rob Childers
July 28, 2021 at 9:01 pm
And if you pick some color other than blue, red, yellow, or green, you’ll be assigned one of those colors, Bolitho telling you that the guest room is decorated in your chosen color plus one of the main colors. I don’t think the color assigned to you in these circumstances is entirely random; purple, for instance, always seems to get me yellow along with it.
Lisa H.
July 28, 2021 at 11:02 pm
There actually used to be violet and orange variations, but they were taken out before release. https://github.com/the-infocom-files/moonmist/blob/develop/colors.zil has the routines that deals with the player’s name and color selection, GET-NAME and GET-COLOR. The list of titles it recognizes is readable in GET-NAME and I got the general idea of what it was doing with the GENDER-KNOWN flag, but I don’t know enough about the workings of ZIL to understand how it’s picking a color if you don’t enter one of the preset ones. I thought I’d read elsewhere that it was supposed to be random, but I’m not seeing PROB or RANDOM kinds of commands in the routine, so maybe not. As I said, though, I don’t really know what I’m looking at so I could be wrong.
Duncan Stevens
March 12, 2015 at 3:42 pm
Also, the ghost is real in one version. (Which, as I recall, makes the gameplay more annoying, as you have to be in the right place to find the ghost when it shows up, not just ferret out the costume.)
Jayle Enn
March 12, 2015 at 5:01 pm
That one stymied me until I typed ‘scream’ and the ghost responded like any other character in the game.
Rob Childers
July 28, 2021 at 5:00 am
The version where you actually encounter the ghost is the only place you really have a use for the aerosol device Bolitho gives you after he shows you to your room (you spray it in the “ghost’s” eyes), and you don’t even really need it there. It’s in all four scenarios, and Bolitho makes a point of giving it to you, and you don’t even really need it for anything.
Jimmy Maher
March 13, 2015 at 6:40 am
The ghost is never actually real. In one variation you do catch the ghost in the act rather than just finding the costume, but it’s nevertheless a costumed person. The ending text explains very clearly who and why.
Peter Piers
January 5, 2016 at 8:24 pm
Funny, I seemed to remember the ghost being real in one variation… with nothing to back me up, though, I’ll put it down to memory playing tricks.
Peter Ferrie
February 5, 2016 at 10:51 pm
I seem to remember that if you know the location of a particular entrance to the secret passages (by having played previously), you can just wait there until the “ghost” arrives, and solve that mystery immediately.
Duncan Stevens
March 12, 2015 at 3:46 pm
On artificial behavior, the game has something like an “angry” flag that is triggered if you’re discovered searching a person’s room. If the flag is on, the person won’t talk to you (or allow you to keep searching the room). APOLOGIZE, and the person will happily start talking again and, I think, leave the room so you can continue to search. It’s the Radio Button Theory of Emotions.
Jayle Enn
March 12, 2015 at 5:05 pm
I remember enjoying Moonmist, but I was young and a big fan of books like Nancy Drew and the Three Investigators, so definitely part of the target audience. I still look back on the Ghosts of Cornwall feelie booklet fondly.
Nathanael
March 6, 2021 at 11:02 am
Likewise. I also enjoyed Moonmist enough to play all four variations (!!!) but I have a very long set of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books lurking in my closet…
The slightly cardboard/cliched nature of the characters helped a lot with the problem of having plausible NPCs in interactive fiction. You don’t expect them to have complex responses, they don’t in the Hardy Boys either!
Keith Palmer
March 12, 2015 at 10:09 pm
Moonmist has stuck with me, but I’d say a big part of that could well have been, oddly enough, finding a thoroughly negative review of it in the May 1987 issue of 80 Micro in the early 1990s. That magazine hadn’t bothered to review any of the other Infocom games since Deadline and Starcross; even though it was then adding coverage of Tandy’s MS-DOS clones in an increasingly uneasy blend with coverage of the old Z-80 “TRSDOS” computers, it pretty much seemed pitched to a subscriber base of “Serious Self-Sufficient Programmers” at that point. (It had, however, run an equally negative review of the “Rambo: First Blood Part II” text adventure the year before, and in the very issue the Moonmist review was complaining about how similar the variants were and how “nowhere is there the least hint that your character is any danger,” the editor did muse about the good old days of low-resolution TRS-80 games…)
In any case, when we did get “The Lost Treasures of Infocom” I’d wound up with the impression it would be best to get to Moonmist quickly. I seem to recall playing it right after Zork I, and I have the impression I managed to finish it without resorting to the hint book, which I have to admit still means a good deal to me… although, while I figured out how to prompt the other three variants, I never bothered to play through them. In any case, it seems it was only while contemplating the upcoming discussion of the game here that I really started to think the game character was “supposed” to be female, what with being invited to visit a just-married female friend (the letter that set that up wasn’t included in “The Lost Treasures of Infocom” manual, although I’ve since managed to see it), although I then got to wondering if that was just letting “gender expectations” show. I also have the impression the game wasn’t completely unfavourably compared to a more recent text adventure with its own “variants” in a review, but when I went looking at “An Act of Murder” on IFDB I couldn’t turn it up, so now I have no idea of where I might have seen the comparison.
Mark Ricard
April 10, 2015 at 3:30 am
Keith ,I also remmeber that review on IFDB. So you did not imagine it.
Peter Piers
January 5, 2016 at 8:26 pm
I did a double-review of Moonmist and Act of Murder once. It’s not there anymore, by choice. You didn’t imagine it, folks. :)
Lisa H.
March 12, 2015 at 10:43 pm
After finishing Seastalker, he had the idea to write a Cold War espionage thriller, tentatively called Checkpoint: “You, an innocent train traveler in a foreign country, get mixed up with spies and have to be as clever as they to survive.”
I take it Checkpoint eventually became Border Zone?
including a hedge maze (thankfully not implemented as an in-game maze)
If you’ll permit me a moment for some heartfealt swearing at Hollywood Hijinx…
Lisa H.
March 13, 2015 at 12:31 am
*heartfelt. I can’t type.
Jimmy Maher
March 13, 2015 at 6:56 am
Yes, the bare idea was obviously recycled to become Border Zone. I get the impression, however, that the text and code of that game was all pretty much original to Marc Blank. More when we get there and I’ve researched a bit more!
Scott Gage
March 13, 2015 at 3:32 am
Typo time:
(You didn’t the ghost was real, did you? If so, you haven’t had much exposure to Nancy Drew or the works she spawned — like, for instance, Scooby-Doo.)
Need a think in there.
Jimmy Maher
March 13, 2015 at 6:57 am
Thanks!
Jason Scott
March 13, 2015 at 6:52 am
If a fairy came down and said “ok, you will have never made GET LAMP but Stu Galley becomes your dad” I would have jumped at it. What a great guy.
Brian Moriarty
March 13, 2015 at 11:14 pm
A bit of Moonmist trivia.
Also: Border Zone is a completely different game from Checkpoint (which still exists, by the way).
Jimmy Maher
March 14, 2015 at 8:29 am
I certainly noticed it, but didn’t want to say anything definite about it because it’s never definitely stated as such in the game’s text. I would have considered baldly claiming Deidre and Vivien to be a “lesbian couple,” as the article referenced in the Wikipedia link does, to be majorly overreaching on the evidence of the text alone. Isn’t it more a depiction of unrequited love than a relationship?
Part of the reason that I was reluctant get deeper into this aspect of the game may be because it would represent such a depressingly typical depiction of homosexuality for its era. A stereotypical dike is obsessed with a young, heterosexual virtuous girl, and it drives her to murder… Yuck. In retrospect, though, that’s important in its own right.
Peter Piers
January 5, 2016 at 8:32 pm
“Checkpoint (which still exists, by the way).”
The collector in me has sprung to attention! Where would it exist, specifically?
Lisa H.
March 14, 2015 at 5:05 am
Re: player gender, You can get some sorta-gender-neutral gameplay and a few amusing responses if you don’t follow the game’s prompting to use a gendered title like “Lady” or “Mr.” and instead type in something nonsensical.
Jimmy Maher
March 14, 2015 at 8:38 am
Okay, mystery solved. I had entered by name as “Herr Helmut Kohl” just for grins. I’d assumed the game had recognized the “Herr,” which was impressive but not entirely unexpected, as the documentation mentions it understanding things like “Dame,” etc. It seems it really didn’t understand at all, and just went the sexually ambiguous route…
Michael Davis
March 21, 2015 at 11:53 pm
So is that maybe why you didn’t get the “fine figure of a man” line?
Oren Ronen
March 14, 2015 at 10:46 am
Reading this made me revisit the Japanese version of Moonmist, the oddest choice of the four Inform games localized into the language years after the originals had been published.
Much like the other games, this is an impressive effort, and I’d love to hear the story behind it and how it was implemented. The feelies are all represented: the letters are written in what seems to me like a proper young Japanese woman’s handwriting, and the rest, though pushed to the back of the instructions manual instead of being separate booklets, are reproduced in full. They even added a few pages of character descriptions complete with illustrated portraits.
The game opens with an elaborately animated reproduction of the Moonmist cover art for a title screen, and then, much like the other Japanese Infocom games, goes into a somewhat enhanced version of the Zork 0 interface. You get a graphical compass rose, an illustrated background behind the text that changes along with the location, customizable shortcuts for common verbs as well as a list of items available in the current location and a graphical inventory where each item gets its own little icon, Monkey Island style. The full Invisiclues hints are also included online, along with a system that prevents you to look at too many of them.
The game features a full-sentence Japanese parser accepting both kanji and input written just in kana (if you don’t know why this is impressive for an early ‘90s game, trust me that it is). The translation itself is excellent, though I was struck by a few oddities the very first minute of the game. The original game tried to deduct your sex from the title you choose when entering your name. This doesn’t work at all in Japanese, and so you choose your sex from a menu. Thing is, the menu has three options – the expected male and female, but also okama. Reading the comments above I can see why it’s there — the original game code had a path for uncertain gender which the translators had to deal with — but it’s a very odd term to come across on the game’s second move. Color is also chosen from a menu and unlike the original the game then asks for your age, though I have no idea whether it has any effect on the text later on or not.
Maybe I’ll play some more along with the English original and try to figure it out.
Oren Ronen
March 14, 2015 at 10:48 am
Alas, the link in the comment above got broken — just remove the extra quotation mark from the end of the URL.
Jimmy Maher
March 14, 2015 at 11:32 am
I edited the link for you. It works now. ;)
And thanks for this! It’s quite fascinating, especially the amount of effort that was put into the port. It’s doubly odd to do so much work for such a — if saying this is not too unkind — slight game.
And replacing the gender-neutral choice with an explicitly gay one? That’s *really* weird, especially as I was under the impression that Japanese culture of the 1980s and 1990s was even more conservative about that sort of thing than American.
Mark Ricard
April 10, 2015 at 3:32 am
Was this like the format Legend used with it’s text adventures in the 90s?
Andrew McCarthy
March 17, 2015 at 3:34 pm
Only four colors? But I expressly requested six!
“Play it again, Sam.”
Four colors? I thought we agreed to six.
SHOlafsson
March 20, 2015 at 2:34 pm
Finally made it here after a reading binge much to the chagrin of my family. I must have been very much a middle of the road adventurer, since I never made it anywhere with either Seastalker or Moomist (much as I didn’t with the hard ones, Starcross, Suspended or Sorcerer). Gee now I need to dig up the list of completed text adventures from my youth :). I am thoroughly enjoying your work, it brings back so many memories plus all the things I was not aware of.
Your Amiga book is on my Amazon wishlist for purchase when I make it to the States. (A second passion we seem to have shared.) If I am ever in your neck of the woods I offer to buy beers, unfortunately my coming trip to Jylland probably does not allow a stop in Odense. All the best to you and your family, and may this blog continue for a long time to come!
CJGeringer
January 13, 2016 at 7:20 pm
Could it be that the nfour variations of plots were nto so much to increase replay value, but to give diferent people slightly diferent experiences? similar to how the Little computer people had variations?
The colour question does not seem to indicate what it does, and someone replaying the game does not really have a reason to change this answer.
Maybe Infocom, just wanted it to foster interesting conversations that would help the game´s sale,s since infocom seem to have been unusually savvy in how to foster a kind of community among it´s fans?
Jimmy Maher
January 13, 2016 at 7:34 pm
No, it was pretty prominently promoted on the basis of being replayable. From The Status Line newsletter, Summer 1986:
Moonmist has four different variations[…]. This gives Moonmist more replay value than any other Infocom story to date.
Daniel
April 26, 2019 at 2:14 pm
Nitpicking (and a few years late), but I think it should be venomous instead of poisonous. Poisonous kills you if you ingest it, venomous is if it kills you when it bites you.
Jimmy Maher
April 27, 2019 at 7:37 am
Fair enough. Thanks!
Jake
August 26, 2021 at 1:19 pm
I noticed the Moonmist article is not included in the .epub Infocom Ebook. Is this an oversight?
Jimmy Maher
August 26, 2021 at 3:05 pm
Yes, must have been. Sorry. I’ll look into it and report back…
Jimmy Maher
August 30, 2021 at 10:27 am
Fixed now!
Uka
December 1, 2023 at 4:51 pm
Thanks for the review! I have played so far only two versions of “Moonmist”, Blue and Green, and I did not like it that much unfortunately. Indeed, there are so many locations and secret passages – and only a couple of logical things to do, as identifying the ghost is a very simple task, and in order to find the treasure you may just examine each object in each room instead of following and solving the clues… Actually, my favorite Infocom game is “Cutthroats” and other “adventure” series, while those titled “mystery” seem to be too shallow.
A couple of nitpicking notes:
“Lord Jack’s father, Lionel, was a globetrotting adventurer who recently died of “some sort of fatal jungle disease” that he may or may not have accidentally contracted” – Lionel was Jack’s uncle, not father.
“… and then allegedly committed suicide by throwing herself off some nearby cliffs” – she is said to drown herself in the well right in the castle.
Jimmy Maher
December 5, 2023 at 1:48 pm
Thanks!