Category Archives: Modern Times

First, the bad news: I’m afraid I won’t have a new article for you this Friday. My wife Dorte and I are going to take a long weekend in beautiful Bornholm, and I’ve been using this shortened work week to do some preparations for my next few months of writing. Both this site and The Analog Antiquarian will be pushed back one week because of this.

By way of compensation, though, I do have a new ebook for you, covering 1992 in this blog’s chronology. As usual, its existence is down to the good offices of Richard Lindner. You’ll find his email address on the title page of the ebook, so if you enjoy it, by all means send him an email to thank him.

A new ebook means, of course, that we’ve made it through another year. In fact, we’ve already started on 1993 with the Return to Zork coverage.

This one isn’t just any old year: a strong argument could be made that 1993 was the pivotal year in the entire history of computer gaming, the dividing line between its antiquity and modernity. For this was the year when CD-ROM finally went mainstream, virtually eliminating any and all technical restrictions on the size of games. The transformation this wrought on the graphics and sound of games, on their budgets, on their potential consumer appeal, and, indeed, on their very nature is almost impossible to overstate. We’ll have to wait until the rise of ubiquitous digital distribution well into the 2000s before we again see any single technology remotely as disruptive.

But as if the CD-ROM revolution wasn’t enough to make 1993 a special year, there was also the 3D graphics revolution, as exemplified by Doom, the game many would doubtless consider the game of the 1990s, at least in terms of pure populist appeal.

In addition to these two seismic events, the year is positively bursting with other themes, technologies, and franchises that remain inescapable today. An exciting time indeed.

So, here’s a broad outline of the specific topics I anticipate covering as we make our way through this year for the ages. (Needless to say, if you want to be totally surprised by each new article, skip this section!)

• In addition to all of the multimedia flash that marked 1993, it was also the year when the groundwork for an Interactive Fiction Renaissance was laid, thanks to a game called Curses! which re-purposed Infocom’s legendary Z-Machine for its own ends. We’ll look at where the technology to make that seminal title came from as well as the game itself.
• In the view of many fans, 1993 was the year that LucasArts peaked as a maker of graphic adventures, with perhaps the two most beloved games they ever made that don’t have “Monkey Island” in their names. Both will get their due here.
• 1993 was the year that Sierra went into an economic tailspin, thanks to budgets and multimedia ambitions that were increasing even faster than sales. We’ll follow them as they start down this beginning of the road to acquisition and eventual oblivion — and we’ll also look at some of Sierra’s individual adventure games from the year, especially the much-loved first Gabriel Knight title.
• 1993 was the year that Legend Entertainment finally had to face market realities and drop the parser from their adventure games, marking the definitive end of the text adventure as a commercial proposition. (Lucky that aforementioned amateur Renaissance was waiting in the wings, eh?) We’ll look at this end of Legend’s first era and beginning of their second, during which they became a maker of point-and-click adventures.
• 1993 was the year that Alone in the Dark invented the survival-horror genre. We’ll look at where that game came from and how it holds up today.
• 1993 was the last big year in CRPGs for quite some time, as a glut of samey titles tried gamers’ patience past the breaking point. We’ll look at Sierra’s Betrayal at Krondor, one of the less samey titles, and also at how the end of the CRPG gravy train affected Origin Systems and SSI, two of the leading practitioners of the genre.
• 1993 was the year that the wheels came off for Commodore even in Europe, thanks to new Amiga models that arrived as too little, too late. We’ll look at the sad end of a company and a platform that once held so much promise.
• 1993 was the year of the sequel to Lemmings! Enough said.
• 1993 was the year of a little game from Interplay that I’ve always wished I could like more, Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space. We’ll use the occasion of its release to examine the checkered history of space-program management simulations in general, a sub-genre that seems like it ought to have worked beautifully but somehow never quite did.
• 1993 was the year of Master of Orion, perhaps not the first grand 4X space opera in absolute terms but the one to which every subsequent game of the type would always be compared. Enough said.
• 1993 was the year when shareware peaked. We’ll look at this rich culture of amateurs and semi-professionals making games of many stripes and asking people to pay for them after they got them.
• 1993 was the year that The 7th Guest, the poster child for form over substance in gaming, popularized SVGA graphics, pushing the industry onward at last after six years stuck on the VGA standard. Along with The 7th Guest itself and the meteoric rise and fall of its maker Trilobyte, we’ll find out how a computer industry that had always looked to IBM to set its standards finally learned to drive its own technological evolution in a world where IBM had become all but irrelevant.
• 1993 was the year of Myst, the best-selling adventure game in history. Was it a brilliant artistic creation, or did it ruin adventure games for the rest of the decade? Or are both things true? We shall investigate.
• And 1993 was, as mentioned, the year of Doom, the yang to Myst‘s yin, the only shareware product ever to make its sellers multi-millionaires. We’ll try to address the many and varied aspects of what some would consider to be the most iconic computer game of all time. We’ll start with its incredible technology, end with the way its defiantly low-concept, ultra-violent personality coarsened the culture of gaming, and cover a heck of a lot of ground in between.

As some of that last bullet point would imply, not everything that happened in 1993 was unadulteratedly positive, but it was all important. And certainly the year produced more than its share of classic games that still stand up wonderfully today. I’m looking forward to digging into it.

So, let me close by thanking all of you who support this ongoing project in one way or another. Without you, it just wouldn’t be possible. If you’ve been reading for a while and you haven’t yet become a supporter, please do think about contributing through Patreon or PayPal (you’ll find the links in the right-hand sidebar). It really does make all the difference in the world to my ability to continue this work. And if you’re interested in history more generally, do check out The Analog Antiquarian as well. I’m very proud of the writing I’m doing there.

See you all in a week and half, when we’ll buckle down and get started on the to-do list above. Until then, thanks again for being the best readers in the world!

Sharp-eyed readers may have already noticed that I’ve changed the subtitle of this blog from “a history of computer entertainment” to “a history of computer entertainment and digital culture.” This is not so much indicative of any change in focus as it is a better description of what this blog has always been. I’ve always made space for aspects of what we might call “creative computing” that aren’t games, from electronic literature to the home-computer wars, from the birth of hypertext to early online culture, from influential science fiction to important developments in programming, and that will of course continue.

That is all. Carry on.

I’m afraid I don’t have a standard article for you this week. I occasionally need to skip a Friday to store up an independent writer’s version of vacation time, and the beginning of a five-Friday month like this one is a good time to do that. That said, this does make a good chance to give you some updates on the latest goings-on here at Digital Antiquarian World Headquarters, and to solicit some feedback on a couple of things that have been on my mind of late. So, let me do that today, and I’ll be back with the usual fare next Friday. (Patreon supporters: don’t worry, this meta-article’s a freebie!)

First and foremost, I’m pleased to be able to release the latest volume of the growing ebook collection compiling the articles on this site, this one centering roughly — even more roughly than usual, in fact — on 1991. Volume 13 has been a long time coming because the last year has brought with it a lot of longer, somewhat digressive series on topics like Soviet computing and the battle over Tetris, the metamorphosis of Imagine Software into Psygnosis, the world of pre-World Wide Web commercial online services, and of course my recently concluded close reading of Civilization, along with the usual singletons on individual games and related topics. This ebook is by far the fattest one yet, and I think it contains some of the best work I’ve ever done; these are certainly, at any rate, some of the articles I’ve poured the most effort into. As usual, it exists only thanks to the efforts of Richard Lindner. He’s outdone himself this time, even providing fresh cover art to suit what he described to me as the newly “glamorous, visual” era of the 1990s. If you appreciate being able to read the blog in this way, feel free to send him a thank-you note at the email address listed on the title page of the ebook proper.

Next, I want to take this opportunity to clear up the current situation around Patreon, something I’ve neglected to do for an unconscionably long time. Many of you doubtless remember the chaos of last December, when Patreon suddenly announced changes to their financial model that would make a blog like this one, which relies mostly on small donations, much less tenable. I scrambled to find alternatives to Patreon for those who felt (justifiably) betrayed by the changes, and had just about settled on a service called Memberful when Patreon reversed course and went back to the old model after a couple of weeks of huge public outcry.

Despite sending some mixed messages in the weeks that followed that reversal, I haven’t ever implemented Memberful as an alternative funding model due to various nagging concerns: I’m worried about tech-support issues that must come with a bespoke solution, not happy about being forced to sell monthly rather than per-article subscriptions (meaning I have to feel guilty if due to some emergency I can’t publish four articles in any given month), and concerned about the complication and confusion of offering two separate subscription models — plus PayPal! — as funding solutions (just writing a FAQ to explain it all would take a full day or two!). In addition, a hard look at the numbers reveals that a slightly higher percentage of most pledges would go to third parties when using Memberful than happens with Patreon. It’s for all these reasons that, after much agonized back-and-forthing, I’ve elected to stay the course with Patreon alone as my main funding mechanism, taking them at their word that they’ll never again do do anything like what they did last December.

I do understand that some of you are less inclined to be forgiving, which is of course your right. For my part, even the shenanigans of last December weren’t quite enough to destroy the good will I have toward Patreon for literally changing my life by allowing me to justify devoting so much time and energy to this blog. (They were of course only the medium; I’m even more grateful to you readers!) At any rate, know that except for that one blip Patreon has always treated me very well, and that their processing fees are lower than I would pay using any other subscription service. And yeah, okay… maybe also keep your fingers crossed that I’ve made the right decision in giving them a second chance before I hit the panic button. Fool me once…

So, that’s where we stand with the Patreon situation, which can be summed up as sticking with the status quo for now.  But it’s not the only thing I’ve been a bit wishy-washy about lately…

As a certain recent ten-article series will testify, I fell hard down the Civilization rabbit hole when I first began to look at that game a year or so ago. I’ve spent quite some time staring at that Advances Chart, trying to decide what might be there for me as a writer. I’m very attracted to the idea of writing some wider-scale macro-history in addition to this ongoing micro-history of the games industry, as I am by the idea of writing said history in terms of achievement and (largely) peaceful progress as opposed to chronicles of wars and battles won and lost.  Still, I’ve struggled to figure out what form it all should take.

My first notion was to start a second blog. It would be called — again, no surprise here for readers of my Civilization articles! — The Narrative of Progress, and would be structured around an Advances Chart similar but not identical to the one in the Civilization box. (Intriguing as it is, the latter also has some notable oddities, such as its decision to make “Alphabet” and “Writing” into separate advances; how could you possibly have one without the other?) I even found a web developer who did some work on prototyping an interactive, dynamically growing Advances Chart with links to individual articles. But we couldn’t ever come up with anything that felt more intuitive and usable than a traditional table of contents, so I gave up on that idea. I was also concerned about whether I could possibly handle the research burden of so many disparate topics in science, technology, and sociology — a concern which the Civilization close reading, over the course of which I made a few embarrassing gaffes which you readers were kind enough to point out to me, has proved were justified.

But still I remain attracted to the idea of doing a different kind of history in addition to this gaming history. Lately, I’ve gravitated to the Wonders of the World. In fact, Civilization prompted my wife Dorte and I to take a trip to Cairo just a month ago — a crazy place, let me tell you! — to see the Pyramids, the Egyptian Museum, and other ancient sites. I think I could do a great job with these topics, as they’re right in my writerly wheelhouse of readable narrative history, and it would be hard to go wrong with stories as fascinating as these. Up until just a couple of weeks ago I had schemed about doing these kinds of stories on this site, but finally had to give it up as well as the wrong approach. I would have to set up a second Patreon anyway, as I couldn’t possibly expect people who signed up to support a “history of interactive entertainment” to support this other stuff as well, and running two Patreons and two parallel tracks out of a single WordPress blog would just be silly.

All of which is to say that I’m as undecided as ever about this stuff. I know I’d like to do some wider-frame historical writing at some point, almost certainly hosted at a different site, but I don’t know exactly when that will be or what form it will take. Would you be interested in reading such a thing? I’d be interested to hear your opinions and suggestions, whether in the comments below or via email.

Whatever happens, rest assured that I remain committed to this ongoing history as well; the worst that might result from a second writing project would be a somewhat slower pace here. I’m occasionally asked how far I intend to go with this history, and I’ve never had a perfect answer. A few years ago, I thought 1993’s Doom might be a good stopping place, as it marked the beginning of a dramatic shift in the culture of computer games. But the problem with that, I’ve come to realize, is that it did indeed only mark the beginning of a shift, and to stop there would be to leave countless threads dangling. These days, the end of the 1990s strikes me as a potential candidate, but we’ll see. At any rate, I don’t have plans for stopping anytime soon — not as long as you’re still willing to read and support this work. Who knows, maybe we’ll make it all the way to 2018 someday.

In that meantime, a quick rundown of coming attractions for the historical year of 1992. (If you want to be completely surprised every week, skip this list!)

• Jeff Tunnell’s hugely influential physics puzzler The Incredible Machine
• the seminal platformer Another World, among other things a beautiful example of lyrical nonverbal storytelling
• a series on the evolution of Microsoft Windows, encompassing the tangled story of OS/2, the legal battle with Apple over look-and-feel issues, and those Windows time-wasters, like Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Hearts, that became some of the most-played computer games in history
• William Gibson’s experimental poem-that-destroys-itself Agrippa
• Shades of Gray, an underappreciated literary statement in early amateur interactive fiction which came up already in my conversation with Judith Pintar, but deserves an article of its own
• Legend’s two Gateway games
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
• Electronic Arts in the post “rock-star” years, Trip Hawkins’s departure, and the formation of 3DO
• The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, which might just be my all-time favorite Holmes game
• Interplay’s two Star Trek graphic adventures
• the adventures in Sierra’s Discovery line of games for children, which were better than most of their adult adventure games during this period
• Quest for Glory III and IV
• the strange story behind the two Dune games which were released back-to-back in 1992
• Star Control II
• Ultima Underworld and Ultima VII
• Darklands

Along with all that, I’ve had a great suggestion from Casey Muratori — who, incidentally, was also responsible for my last article by first suggesting I take a closer look at Dynamix’s legacy in narrative games — to write something about good puzzles in adventure games. I’ve long been conscious of spending a lot more time describing bad puzzles in detail than I do good ones. The reason for this is simply that I hesitate to spoil the magic of the good puzzles for you, but feel far less reluctance with regard to the bad ones. Still, it does rather throw things out of balance, and perhaps I should do something about that. Following Casey’s suggestion, I’ve been thinking of an article describing ten or so good puzzles from classic games, analyzing how they work in detail and, most importantly, why they work.

That’s something on which I could use your feedback as well. When you think of the games I’ve written about so far on this blog, whether textual or graphical, is there a puzzle that immediately springs to mind as one that you just really, really loved for one reason or another? (For me, just for the record, that puzzle is the T-removing machine from Leather Goddesses of Phobos.) If so, feel free to send it my way along with a sentence or two telling me why, once again either in the comments below or via private email. I can’t promise I can get to all of them, but I’d like to assemble a reasonable selection of puzzles that delight for as many different reasons as possible.

Finally, please do remember that I depend on you for support in order to continue doing this work. If you enjoy and/or find something of value in what I do here, if you’re lucky enough to have disposable income, and if you haven’t yet taken the plunge, please do think about signing up as a Patreon supporter at whatever level strikes you as practical and warranted. I run what seems to be one of the last “clean” sites on the Internet — no advertisements, no SEO, no personal-data-mining, no “sponsored articles,” just the best content I can provide — but that means that I have to depend entirely upon you to keep it going. With your support, we can continue this journey together for years to come.

And with that, I’ll say thanks to all of you for being the best readers in the world and wish you a great weekend. See you next week with a proper article!

From the Publications Department:

Those of you who enjoy reading the blog in ebook format will be pleased to hear that Volume 12 in that ongoing series is now available, full of articles centering roughly on the year 1990. As usual, the ebook is entirely the work of Richard Lindner. Thank you, Richard!

From the Security Department:

A few days ago, a reader notified me of an alarming development: he was getting occasional popup advertisements for a shady online betting site when he clicked article links within the site. Oddly enough, the popups were very intermittent; in lots of experimenting, I was only able to get them to appear on one device — an older iPad, for what it’s worth — and even then only every tenth or twelfth time I tapped a link. But investigation showed that there was indeed some rogue JavaScript that was causing them. I’ve cleaned it up and hardened that part of the site a bit more, but I remain a little concerned in that I haven’t identified precisely how someone or something got access to the file that was tampered with in the first place. If anything suspicious happens during your browsing, please do let me know. I don’t take advertisements of any sort, so any that you see on this site are by definition a security breach of some sort. In the meantime, I’ll continue to scan the site daily in healthily paranoid fashion. The last I thing I want is a repeat of the Great Handbag Hack of 2012. (Do note, however, that none of your Patreon or PayPal information is stored on the site, and the database containing commenters’ email addresses has remained uncompromised — so nothing to worry too much over.)

From the Scheduling Department:

I’ve had to skip publishing an article more weeks than I wanted to this year. First I got sick after coming home from my research trip to the Strong Museum in Rochester, New York. Then we moved (within Denmark) from Odense to Aarhus, and I’m sure I don’t need to tell most of you what a chaotic process that can be. Most recently, I’ve had to do a lot more research than usual for my next subject; see the next two paragraphs for more on that. In a couple of weeks my wife and I are going to take a little holiday, which means I’m going to have to take one more bye week in June. After that, though, I hope I can settle back into the groove and start pumping out a reliable article every week for a while. Thanks for bearing with me!

From the Long-Term-Planning Department:

I thought I’d share a taste of what I plan to cover in the context of 1991 — i.e., until I write another of these little notices to tell you the next ebook is available. If you prefer that each new article be a complete surprise, you’ll want to skip the next paragraph.

(Spoiler Alert!)

I’ve got a series in the works for the next few weeks covering the history of computing in the Soviet Union, culminating in East finally meeting West in the age of Tetris. I’m already very proud of the articles that are coming together on this subject, and hope you’re going to find this little-known story as fascinating as I do. Staying with the international theme, we’ll then turn our attention to Britain for a while; in that context, I’m planning articles on the great British tradition of open-world action-adventures, on the iconic software house Psygnosis, and finally on Psygnosis’s most enduring game, Lemmings. Then we’ll check in with the Amiga 3000 and CDTV. I’m hoping that Bob Bates and I will be able to put together something rather special on Timequest. Then some coverage of the big commercial online services that predated the modern World Wide Web, along with the early experiments with massively multiplayer games which they fostered. We’ll have some coverage of the amateur text-adventure scene; 1991 was a pretty good year there, with some worthy but largely forgotten games released. I may have more to say about the Eastgate school of hypertext, in the form of Sarah Smith’s King of Space, if I can get the thing working and if it proves worthy of writing about. Be that as it may, we’ll definitely make time for Corey Cole’s edutainment classic The Castle of Dr. Brain and other contemporary doings around Sierra. Then we’ll swing back around to Origin, with a look at the two Worlds of Ultima titles — yes, thanks to your recommendations I’ve decided to give them more coverage than I’d originally planned — and Wing Commander II. We’ll wrap up 1991 with Civilization, a game which offers so much scope for writing that it’s a little terrifying. I’m still mulling over how best to approach that one, but I’m already hugely looking forward to it.

(End Spoilers)

From the Accounting Department:

I’ve seen a nice uptick in Patreon participation in recent months, for which I’m very grateful. Thank you to every reader who’s done this writer the supreme honor of paying for the words I scribble on the (virtual) page, whether you’ve been doing so for years or you just signed up yesterday.

If you’re a regular reader who hasn’t yet taken the plunge, please do think about supporting these serious long-form articles about one of the most important cultural phenomenons of our times by signing up as a Patreon subscriber or making a one-time donation via the links to the right. Remember that I can only do this work thanks to the support of people just like you.

See you Friday! Really, I promise this time…