Tag Archives: the prisoner

The Prisoner was a big sales success, at least by the standards of a small software house like Edu-Ware. Enough people were eager to believe in a vision of games as Art to embrace it despite its almost aggressively off-putting personality — or, perhaps, they were just desperate enough for new adventures that they were ready to put up with artistic aspirations as long they also had puzzles to solve. Regardless, the game played a crucial role in the company’s idealistic core mission, to bring quality educational software to this new generation of personal computers. The steady flow of profits from The Prisoner gave Edu-Ware, supported by Apple’s own efforts to define the Apple II as “the education computer,” time and resources to build a customer base of schools and engaged parents for titles like their Compu-Math and Algebra series.

Yet times were changing fast in software, and particularly in entertainment software. Even by just eighteen months after its release The Prisoner — with its sluggish all-BASIC implementation, its blocky, monochrome text or low-resolution graphics displays, and its photocopy/Ziploc-bag-based packaging — was beginning to look sadly amateurish in comparison with the latest extravaganzas from the likes of On-Line and Brøderbund. Edu-Ware therefore decided to remake their cash cow in a more polished, slicker, faster edition, with color and more and better graphics. Confusingly, they decided to call the new game The Prisoner 2, even though it was very much a remake rather than a sequel. Marketing never was Edu-Ware’s strong suit.

The new project reflected changing models of development, not only within a growing Edu-Ware but also within a growing software industry. The original had been cranked out by David Mullich in a furious six weeks of hacking. There was no separate design process; he simply designed as he coded, adding in whatever seemed cool and appropriate as it struck his fancy. By the time of The Prisoner 2, however, Mullich had acquired the title of “development manager” at Edu-Ware, with a staff of several programmers working under him on the company’s various projects. Having gotten more adept at 6502 assembly language since the time of the first game, he himself programmed some speed-critical routines for graphics that were also used in other Edu-Ware titles, as well as a text parser. He also drew the game’s graphics on paper. But to translate those drawings onto the computer, and to code everything else, he employed one Mike St. Jean, who worked, once again in BASIC, from a detailed design document provided by Mullich. Mullich was, in other words, transitioning from the jack-of-all-trades hacker typical of the very early PC era to this new creature known as a “game designer.” Those aforementioned assembly-language routines would be, in Mullich’s own words, “among the last programs I actually coded myself” in a career in software that continues to this day.

The results of his efforts are, as is all too typical of remakes, mixed. While it may have had at least as much to do with lack of time, expertise, and resources as artistic intent, the original’s stark, Constructivist appearance did much to strengthen the atmosphere of oppression, coercion, and collectivist subjugation. The Prisoner 2, by contrast, looks at first glance like just another “hi-res adventure” of the sort that were flooding the market by 1982 in response to On-Line Systems’s success, and the maze section that opens the game bears a pronounced resemblance to, of all things, the Wizardry series.

Likewise, the variety of different interfaces found in the original game, which the player had to puzzle out on her own to succeed, is here replaced in almost all places by a two-word parser that is unusually balky even by the standards of the time. It’s tempting to read some of its obstinacy as another instance of the old Prisoner tactic of resisting consistent interface standards to keep the player always ill at ease. How else to read the fact that the parser sometimes demands that you navigate with “forward,” “back,” “right,” and “left,” and other times with traditional compass directions? Still, it just somehow doesn’t quite work as well as the first game’s interface smorgasbord.

The new, more professional presentation must inevitably also become more technically opaque, removing some of the possibility for winning through, um, other means like code-diving. This might be a good thing in any other game, but, as Steve Pederson wrote in response to my article on the original Prisoner, in this case “nothing could be more in the spirit of the game [than cheating].”

A comparison of the manuals also gives me conflicted feelings. The original shipped with only the most essential information on the game and some slightly pedantic “educational notes” penned by Edu-Ware founder Sherwin Steffin. For the sequel, this document was replaced with a slicker production which elaborates a mythology of sorts for The Island and even for the original Prisoner television series. The Island, we are told, was created in the 1960s in response to the agitations of the counterculture.

It was in this climate that The Island was created. Its purpose then was to silence dissenters and to perpetuate authoritarian rule. Leaders of various social movements and government operatives who learned too much of their employer’s plans both unwillingly found themselves a new home on The Island — until such time as they were absorbed back into the system or died. But, from the perspective of the rest of the world, they had vanished without a trace, presumably the victims of foreign or illegal organizations.

Towards the end of the decade came the first exposé of The Island. It was presented in the form of a television adventure series so that its producers could circumvent the problems of censorship. Its focus was as a psychological study and a political statement concerning the problem of keeping one’s individuality and personal freedom in a technological society. While it did gain a cult audience, its messages did not receive the recognition that they deserved.

So, the influence of The Island spread unchecked in the seventies. The “me” generation proved to be a perfect target not only for The Island’s sinister activities, but also for one of the most powerful weapons of mass enslavement ever created: the computer. Ever increasing meddling by computer networks, data bases, and information peddlers in our daily lives forced us close to the verge of becoming mere numbers within the memory banks of hundreds of machines across the country. More and more information about us became accessible to anyone who had a link into the proper data base. With the flip of a switch, instantly our reputations could be tarnished and our influence destroyed. Lives became statistics, and statistics could be altered.

In short, the computer was turning society into a vast collective prison.

In the debate that raged through the 1970s and 1980s (and to some extent still today) on whether the computer was a tool of liberation and creative possibility or a tool for dehumanization and subjugation, this narrative comes down on the latter side. Yet The Prisoner 2 is of course using a computer to make just the sort of creative, humanistic statement it says the computer will stamp out. As always where The Prisoner is involved, the contradictions bite deep.

Mullich has here totally abandoned the notion from the original game of merely being “inspired by” the television show. He is now explicitly playing in the same storyworld as the show — and doing it without any sort of licensing deal with The Prisoner‘s corporate parent ITC Entertainment, who were either unusually benevolent or very unobservant. Ironically, Mullich later in his career would join Disney, where he would spend some of his time stamping out just this sort of intellectual-property infringement.

Eternal debates over intellectual property aside, I’m still not sure how I feel about the sequel’s elaborate backstory. Part of me wants to say that Mullich and company say far, far too much here, that rooting The Island in such a specific historical and cultural context costs them much of the ominously enigmatic feel of both the original game and television series. On the other hand, this more detailed fictional context does enable the most notable new aspect of the sequel: a sharply satirical critique of the videogame craze that was just reaching its first-generational peak when The Prisoner 2 reached stores in mid-1982.

A more disturbing turn of events took place in the eighties, however. Instead of the public becoming cautious of computerization, they took the devices into their very homes. For hours at a time, people would sit blank-faced in front of television sets playing uninspired clones of Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man. An entire civilization was willing to waste their precious lives playing mindless games, relentlessly pursuing nursery-school melodies, high scores, and pointless goals.

In that spirit, the Rovers, the balloon-like guards who prevented escape from The Island in both the television series and the first game, are replaced in the sequel with… Pac-Man.

As good adventure gamers, we might be tempted to agree with Mullich’s criticism of these mindless arcade games, to assume that our more cerebral games are exempt from his criticisms. But then we come to a building he added just for the sequel: the Grail House. Inside is something that was already becoming a symbol of adventure games at their most banal by this time: an extended maze. The maze includes rooms which specifically reference Adventure, Mystery House, The Wizard and the Princess, and the Scott Adams games.

Whether these portrayals are fleshed-out enough to rise to the level of satire is perhaps debatable, but they don’t exactly feel like loving tributes either. The Mystery House room, which flags you as a murderer (presumably of Ken Williams himself) until you find “absolution” in the church, has a particularly abrasive edge to it. Indeed, and especially given the truly awful parser, one could almost read the entirety of The Prisoner 2 as a satire on the absurdities of contemporary adventure gaming. The ultimate goal of the game is after all to free yourself by “escaping” from pointless submission to this world inside your computer, as Edu-Ware’s Steve Pederson is doing in the striking box art.

Leaving aside both other adventure games and The Prisoner 2‘s more colorful but less effective appearance (prompted, ironically, by commercial considerations that required keeping up with those very same other adventure games), much of the subversive, anti-authoritarian message of the original game does remain in the sequel. In some places it is even strengthened. The Library in the original, for instance, contained a hopelessly inscrutable free-association scenario whose issue could be a vital clue or a book getting burned. The sequel tries to force you to actively burn books.

B.F. Skinner’s theories of education come in for even sharper criticism here than in the first game. Succeeding at a series of rote memory exercises leads to a diploma and a wicked pun. (And note the teacher’s apple shaped, once again, like Pac-Man…)

Sometimes the manipulations of truth and perceptions reach new heights of inspiration, such as in this genius re-purposing of a quote from Thomas Jefferson.

We’re tempted to want to add a “be” — or, better yet, a “be free” — to the end. For the record, however, here’s the full quote:

No government ought to be without censors, and where the press is free, no one ever will. If virtuous, it need not fear the fair operation of attack and defence. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting out the truth whether in religion, law or politics. I think it as honorable to the government neither to know nor notice its sycophants or censors, as it would be undignified and criminal to pamper the former and persecute the latter.

Jefferson is here using the word “censor” in an archaic way, as a term for a person who closely monitors and criticizes the actions of another, generally one in a position of power. (Some remnant of this usage persists in the adjective “censorious,” as in condemning an unnecessarily critical critic’s “censorious behavior.”) Thus, far from arguing for censorship in the modern sense, he is arguing for the very governmental openness and transparency that is anathema to the powers that be on The Island.

The Prisoner 2 continues to emphasize that it itself is your enemy. In addition to the established dirty tricks from its predecessor (that bogus error message that tries to trick you into entering your resignation code appears again), it has some new ways to be belligerent. At one point it even threatens to re-format the game disk.

No, it doesn’t go quite that far. If you lose this game of judicial hangman, the game tries to fake you out by grinding the disk just like it would during a format, but ultimately declines to actually do the deed.

Another amusing fake-out is the computerized “Free Information” booth.

Asking “why” in this section makes the computer go berserk, screen flashing gibberish and disk drives wildly blinking and grinding. In addition to several episodes of Star Trek, this sequence also evokes the climax to one of the classic episodes of The Prisoner television show, “The General.” It’s also, of course, the all-important question that B.F. Skinner’s theories of education don’t prepare students to answer.

So, yes, The Prisoner 2 does manage to get its lumps in. If it doesn’t feel quite as laser-focused in its presentation and rhetoric or, well, quite as necessary as its predecessor, it’s certainly not an embarrassment. Yet, and ironically given its more polished presentation, it was not the same sort of commercial success. Steve Pederson estimates that it only sold in the range of 3000 to 5000 units in total, pretty underwhelming figures in comparison to games I’ve covered recently like Choplifter (9000 copies in its first month) or Deadline (25,000 copies in its first eight months). This was in spite of being ported to the Atari 400 and 800 and the IBM PC in addition to the Apple II. The entertainment-software market was growing rapidly, but Edu-Ware’s share in it was not.

To begin to understand why that should be, we might look to tensions and contradictions within Edu-Ware itself. Edu-Ware’s president and founder, Sherwin Steffin, had no great investment in games. As his company’s name would imply, his passion, a product of his long and ongoing career in education, was educational software. The company’s two other important players, Mullich and Steve Pederson, were each a generation younger than Steffin, and much more interested in computers and games for their own sakes. Steffin was happy to allow them to indulge their interest as long as everyone also strove to develop the high-quality educational software that he had founded the company to create — and luckily so, as the first Prisoner turned out to be a gold mine that helped get his own projects off the ground. Yet by 1982 those projects were able to fly on their own, with programs like Algebra 1 selling in the tens of thousands. As Pederson has said, “As time went on, it became harder and harder to justify game development.” Edu-Ware didn’t need games anymore, and with a hungry market for their educational software and a president rather disinterested in the field, the company had begun the gradual process of abandoning the games market even as The Prisoner 2 was being released. As a retread (however well done) of an older game and with an unengaged corporate parent, The Prisoner 2‘s lackluster sales performance is not so surprising. Edu-Ware’s last big game release, the final, less than compelling installment of its Empire trilogy of science-fiction RPGs, appeared early the following year. And that was pretty much that for the Interactive Fantasies line to which The Prisoner games had belonged.

In July of 1983, Edu-Ware was purchased by a much larger company that had heretofore focused on software for big institutional machines, Management Sciences America. There are a couple of ways to see this development. On the one hand, plucky little Edu-Ware looked to already be facing an uncertain future in the educational market it had pioneered, as new companies like Spinnaker with established corporate parents entered with slick new products for the growing numbers of Apple II-devoted educators and parents. Perhaps finding a deep-pocketed parent of its own was the only way for Edu-Ware to have a hope of survival in this new, more crowded world. On the other hand, Sherwin Steffin told me recently via email that “marketing was an area in which I had neither skill nor interest,” and that this purchase was exactly the “exit strategy that I had planned from the beginning.”

What happened next, though, Steffin had most certainly not planned. He, Mullich, and Pederson were allowed to work without disruption for only a short time before relations collapsed in a pile of accusations, ultimatums, and, eventually, lawsuits. The Edu-Ware brand was largely merged into MSA’s Peachtree line of productivity software in 1984, and the last traces of the old company were obliterated by early 1985. By this time Steffin, Mullich, and Pederson were all long gone. It was an inglorious, anticlimactic end for a pioneering publisher, but not, alas, an atypical one.

As usual, I’ve prepared a copy of The Prisoner 2 for those of you who’d like to try it for yourselves. This time that’s especially important. Like its predecessor, The Prisoner 2 writes to the game disk during play, meaning that most of the copies archived on the Internet contain someone else’s half-finished game. I’ve prepared a zip with a clean copy of the Apple II disk, along with the manual (courtesy of the amazing Museum of Computer Adventure Game History). You might also want to have a look at a fascinating document at the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities: David Mullich’s original design document for the game.

Be seeing ewe!

David Mullich’s original plan was to write a game inspired by The Prisoner, but not a direct adaptation — an eminently sensible move considering that Edu-Ware did not own the intellectual-property rights to the show and were hardly in a position to purchase them. But Steffin and Pederson, displaying the cavalier attitude toward IP that would soon get them sued for the Space games, not only insisted that the game be called The Prisoner but even planned to use the original series’s distinctive logo. Understandably concerned, Mullich asked them to at least contact ITC Entertainment about the matter. So Steffin and Pederson called ITC and asked them whether they would mind if they — of all things — opened a Prisoner-themed restaurant. When ITC said that was okay, Steffin and Pederson reported back to Mullich that they had “permission.” They got lucky. ITC was at just that instant busy committing institutional suicide via two ill-conceived feature films: Can’t Stop the Music, a disco extravaganza starring the Village People released just in time for the big anti-disco backlash; and Raise the Titanic, an ambitious thriller which went so far over budget that it prompted ITC head Lew Grade to remark that it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic instead. Not only were both films commercial flops, but both also had the honor of being nominated for the first ever Golden Raspberry for Worst Picture, with Can’t Stop the Music nudging out its stablemate for the prize. Against that calamitous backdrop, the plundering of a ten-year old television series by an obscure little company in the obscure little field of computer games was not much on ITC’s radar. Yes, the media landscape was very different in 1980…

With that problem “solved,” Mullich set to work designing and coding. He created the entire game completely on his own in “about six weeks time.” That doesn’t sound like much, but remember, this is the fellow who created and coded Network from scratch in three days. The Prisoner in fact represented by far the most ambitious and complex project that Edu-Ware or Mullich had yet worked on. It consists of some 30 individual BASIC programs which are shuffled in and out of memory as needed by a machine-language routine, the only non-BASIC part of the structure.

The conflict in the television series revolves around the question of why Number 6 resigned from the service — the forces that run the Village insist he tell them his reasons, and Number 6 stubbornly refuses to do so. (Of course, whether the answer to this question is really the main priority of the Village, or whether they merely want to get him to surrender this point on the assumption that once he does it will be easy to break him entirely is very much an open question.) It’s very difficult for a player to communicate such an abstract idea to a computer program even today, however, much less on a 48 K Apple II. Mullich therefore replaced the reason with a single randomly-generated three-digit “resignation code” which is presented to the player for the first and only time when she begins to play.

From here on, it will be the goal of the Island to get the player to reveal this code, whether accidentally or on purpose, while it will be the goal of the player to preserve the secret at all costs.

You may have noticed that I referred to the “Island” there rather than the “Village.” Perhaps in the interest of having a veneer of plausible deniability should ITC’s lawyers come calling, Mullich made a number of such changes. Rather than Number 6, for instance, the player is known as simply “#,” and the Island is run not by Number 2 but by the “Caretaker.” Even so, one never has to look hard for the source material; the player lives, as expected, in Building 6, and the Caretaker in Building 2. A bit of code diving even reveals that one of the component programs is named “Village”; apparently Mullich started with that name and never bothered to change the internal program name.

There are, however, also other influences at work here. George Orwell’s 1984 is referenced almost as prominently as The Prisoner television series. The three contradictory aphorisms of Orwell’s Oceania — “War is peace”; “Freedom is slavery”; “Ignorance is strength” — pop up over and over, singly or in tandem. The novel was also an important influence on the television show — “Questions are a burden to others; answers a prison to oneself,” reads a sign in the Village that could have come straight from Oceania — but here the debt is even more explicit. The game’s Wikipedia page currently also claims (without citation) a strong influence for Kafka’s Das Schloß (The Castle), but I’m not entirely convinced of this. While the player’s home on the Island is indeed called the Castle, there have certainly been many more surprising coincidences in literary and ludic history. I don’t really sense any other strong notes of Kafka here, and to my knowledge Mullich has never cited him as an influence. (If you know more about the validity or lack thereof of the Kafka claim, by all means chime in in the comments.)

Kafka homage or not, the game proper begins with us in our Castle, which we learn to our dismay is a big maze inside. Here we are introduced to the general tricksiness of the game. We can dutifully work our way through the maze until we come to the exit. However, we can also simply hit the ESC key (get it?) to get the same result. (ESC in fact gives unexpected results in several areas of the Island, as is obliquely hinted in a few places.) Whether we take the easy or the hard way out, we cannot exit until we answer the question, “Who are you?” The correct answer is of course “#,” but here we also see the first of many attempts the game will make to trick us into entering our resignation code. This time it’s pretty transparent, but never fear, the game will soon get much trickier.

Structurally the game is built around a central spine, a map of the Island through which the player can wander.

On this map are 20 individually numbered buildings, each housing a unique experience enabled by a BASIC mini-game all its own. Indeed, these games form a veritable catalog of BASIC game archetypes of the early microcomputer and late institutional computing era, the sort of concepts that in an alternative universe could have easily popped up on an HP-2000 system or the book BASIC Computer Games. In addition to the maze game in Building 6, we have a couple of ELIZA-like exercises in conversation and a game reminiscent of the early agricultural strategy game Hamurabi, albeit with the player manipulating the amount of power allotted to various Island systems rather than manipulating acres of land and bushels of crops.

In contrast to their friendly predecessors, however, this lot is an unforgiving bunch. Their messages are constantly off-putting. For example, two of the screenshots above show a famous John Donne quotation which the game twists into something sinister to join the 1984 sloganeering. If we win the Hamurabi-style game, we get a gold watch and a “place to retire,” the latter being of course the Island itself — a creepy commentary on the fate of those who are no longer considered economically useful to society. It all combines to create a constant sense of unease and paranoia. Instructions for play are often nonexistent and never complete, and the user interfaces are needlessly inconsistent. In some places, for instance, we can move an avatar using keys representing the three-dimensional compass directions of a real environment (“N,” “E,” “S,” “W”); in others, we must use the two-dimensional directions of the screen (“U,” “R,” “D,” “L”). There are hidden tricks everywhere, such that we sometimes feel it necessary to methodically tap every key on the keyboard looking for those commands the game hasn’t bothered to tell us about but which represent the only possible route to victory. And the games get tricky in other ways.

In the screenshot below, we’ve just been told to cross a pit (represented by the large white square) using “any means at our disposal.” Trouble is, all we can do is move our little avatar (represented, naturally, by the “#”) about — no jump command, no bridge-building command, nothing. What on earth to do?

Well, if we methodically move over every square that is available to us, we eventually find a piece of rope. “What do you want to do with the piece of rope?” the game asks us then. “Cross the pit,” we reply. “Sounds doubtful,” says the game. And sure enough, trying to cross still results in us falling into the pit and being returned to the Castle as punishment. So we return and try again. This time we learn that continuing to search after finding the rope yields a “bundle of sticks.” But no dice, we fall in again. Returning again, we find a third object, a “rusty old wash tub.” Into the pit we fall yet again. Finally, the fourth object, an “inflatable raft,” does the trick.

That’s frustrating, but the contents of other buildings are downright baffling. The library quizzes us on our preferences in reading material, then somehow uses that information to decide whether to award us a vital clue or burn a book in our honor. I still don’t have a clue how its algorithm actually works, and suspect that may be part of its rhetorical point.

Some buildings go beyond baffling to disturbing. Building 17 houses the Island’s version of the (in)famous Milgram Experiment, in which test subjects were told by an authority figure to continue shocking another person to the point of death, and to a disturbingly large degree complied. Here we get to do the shocking, if we choose.

Throughout all this the game is constantly trying to get us to reveal our resignation code, through ploys obvious and subtle. The most devious of all comes when we visit the Hospital. In the midst of an absurd free-association personality test, we are suddenly dropped to BASIC with an apparent error message.

The natural reaction to the above would be to LIST line 943 to see what the problem might be. If we do, however, we have just lost. The number 943 is of course our resignation code, and we have just been tricked into revealing it. There was never any real error at all; we are still in the program. We are still the Prisoner.

Just like in the television show, the game is constantly offering us a seeming chance for escape, then pulling the rug out from under us. We can in certain situations escape from the main complex to the wilderness around it. This is the only bit of the game to use the Apple II’s hi-res graphics mode; all other displays are built using low-resolution character graphics, which suit the game perfectly. The stark black-and-white displays have almost a Constructivist feel.

If we can dodge the Rovers, semi-sentient guardians that are lifted directly from the show, we might be able to escape via an improbably placed train station. We do. We return home. We call up the “Company” that employed us.

They ask for our resignation code, and when we refuse to give it we wind up right back where we started. This whole sequence is unusually direct about invoking television episodes like “The Chimes of Big Ben,” “Many Happy Returns,” and “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh, My Darling,” in which Number 6 seemingly returns to his home of London only to realize that his prison has followed him there as well.

Tricks like these leave us feeling a bit like Charlie Brown out for a rousing game of football with Lucy. When we meet a seeming resistance organization called the Brotherhood, we are therefore inclined to expect more of the same.

The questions they ask us when we meet them doesn’t exactly reassure us:

“Are you willing to give your life, commit murder, commit acts of sabotage which might cause the deaths of innocent people, cheat, forge, blackmail, distribute habit-forming drugs for the cause of freedom?”

In addition to illustrating how a totalitarian society has a way of corrupting even those who believe they fight against it, they also parallel a bit too closely the questions that Orwell’s Brotherhood ask Winston and Julia in 1984:

“You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases — to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?”

That Brotherhood turned out to be an elaborate trap concocted by the Party establishment to trap would-be rebels just like Winston and Julia. By this point we’re not expecting much better.

Surprisingly, the Brotherhood turns out to be what it says it is. The fact that we are so inclined to doubt them provides a nice illustration of the effect that constant suspicion and uncertainty has on would-be resistance in a totalitarian society; even those with the bravery and inclination to fight are ineffective for lack of others they feel they can trust. (This idea was beautifully illustrated on several occasions by the television series.) If we do eventually decide to trust, we can carry out a few modest missions of sabotage and culture jamming. For one of these we must change the headlines of the local newspaper.

The screenshot above shows one of the best a-ha moments in the game, a welcome respite from the constant sense of powerlessness and oppression — we need to enter each letter using its ASCII character code.

Carrying out these missions don’t let us do anything so grand as materially overthrow the island. They do, however, score points for us, and that’s very important, because various options only become available and events only occur when our score has reached a certain number. This adds yet another layer of obfuscation to the experience, as the whole world feels in constant flux due to our changing score. Thus we must constantly revisit locations and try things again and again to see if a higher score makes a difference in what we thought we knew. We can’t even use our score to judge how far into the game we really are. While the game gives the score as “XX” of “XX,” the latter value changes along with the former with no apparent rhyme or reason in yet another nasty psychological trick.

So, how does anyone other than a masochist with the patience of a saint ever beat this thing? The answer: you cheat. Here the fact that the whole game is written in BASIC is key. We can comb through the individual programs to figure out everything that is really going on in each one and, eventually, deduce the path to victory. If we’re impatient, we can even change some of the programs to give us a higher score or otherwise make things easier. In engaging in outright psychological warfare on us the game encourages us to break the rules on our side as well. I’m certainly not the first person to make the observation that “cheating” feels right here, entirely within the spirit of the game. Number 6 never got anywhere by behaving honorably to his oppressors; he twisted and lied and manipulated, just like they did, and we love him for it. Why not here as well? There’s a little thrill that comes when we ignore the supposed rules and start to hack. I don’t know whether Mullich imagined The Prisoner this way, but God does it work brilliantly in practice.

However we get there, we ultimately win by visiting the Caretaker and telling him that “the Island is just a computer game.” (We do need to have a sufficiently high score to be “ready for that realization,” contradicting Mullich’s claim in the Tea Leaves interview that it is possible to win instantly just by going to the Caretaker and telling him this.) With that realization behind us, we can unplug the computer and escape.

And after one final halfhearted bid for our resignation code, the game sets us free.

This final collapsing of the fourth wall is pretty brilliant. Just as some have argued that Number 6 was really a prisoner of himself (illustrated by the unmasking of Number 1 in the last episode), we have been voluntarily choosing to spend our time with this dystopian nightmare of a computer game. All along, we could “escape” simply by doing something else with our time. “To win is to lose,” the game tells us as its parting message, describing the feeling all gamers know of struggling with a game for days or weeks, longing for victory, only to wistfully realize… it’s all over now. Have we really won? Did Number 6 really escape?

The Prisoner is teeth grindingly, soul crushingly difficult, but there is an aesthetic point to its cruelty that is absent from other early adventure games. If the design sins of Scott Adams and Roberta Williams are those of inexperienced designers working in a new medium with primitive technology, those of The Prisoner serve a real artistic purpose. It’s the first work of its kind that the nascent computer-game industry produced, a sign of what this new medium could be used for, even (dare I say it) a striving for the claim of Art. Like much conceptual art it’s uncompromising, not really something to be casually recommended as a “fun game,” but fascinating in its commitment. Its approach, of being a sort of holistic computer game that makes the interface and the code used to build it and the fact that you are having this experience on an Apple II computer part of the experience of play rather than merely paths to same, has seldom if ever been duplicated. On today’s vastly more complex systems with less technically proficient users, that would probably not even be possible.

So The Prisoner is historically important, fascinating to talk about, and just brave as hell on the part of Mullich and Edu-Ware… but, no, I’m not sure I can precisely recommend it. In addition to all the usual challenges that games of its era present to the modern player, it requires either the patience of Job or a good subset of obsolete technical knowledge — or both — to beat it. If you do want to experiment, you should be aware that the game writes data to disk as you play; most of the disk images on the Internet therefore contain games already in progress. If you’d like a clean copy to start with on your real Apple II or emulator, I have one for you here. The zip also includes a 1983 SoftSide Selections magazine with instructions for play. (The Prisoner was re-released on the SoftSide disk magazine after the release of the enhanced The Prisoner II made it no longer viable for Edu-Ware to sell on its own.)

Be seeing you!

What with the Cold War threatening to turn into World War 3 more frequently than in any other decade, spy stories were all the rage in the West of the 1960s. There were the James Bond novels and films everyone remembers today, but also The Man from U.N.C.L.E., I Spy, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, “Secret Agent Man,” and of course Get Smart to take the piss out of the lot. On British television, there was the ITC Entertainment program Danger Man, in which, amidst the usual profusion of gadgets, uncertain loyalties, and convoluted plots, Patrick McGoohan saved the free world 86 times in the role of superspy John Drake between 1960 and 1966. And then, just as Danger Man was making a name for itself in North America as Secret Agent and the series was making the big switch to color, McGoohan decided he’d had enough. He pulled the plug after just two color episodes that should have marked the beginning of a whole new, more opulent era for the show, pitching to ITC head Lew Grade a new series to take its place, one to which the existing production crew could be easily transitioned. That idea became The Prisoner, a 17-episode series first broadcast on British television in 1967 and 1968.

In the first episode an apparent spy, once again played by McGoohan, abruptly decides to retire from the service, refusing to give any reason for the decision to his superiors. He is gassed after returning to his home, awakening to find himself in a place known only as The Village. On the surface it’s an idyllic place, a seaside resort of gorgeous views, clean air, and smiling fellow residents. However, said residents are not allowed to leave, and have in fact all been stripped of their identities. Each person on the island is assigned a number in lieu of her former name, and known only by that identifier; our hero, for example, shall be known henceforward only as Number 6. He soon learns that the Village is a sinister place of tricks and tortures mental and occasionally physical, where every resident lives under a paranoia born of constant electronic surveillance by the head of the place, a person known only as Number 2. (The question of who is Number 1 is one of the constant obsessions of the show, and resolved only in an oblique fashion in the final episode.) Oddly, a rotating cast of Number 2s come and go throughout the 17 episodes, mostly officious little types that illustrate the banality of evil. The goal of all of them is to break Number 6, to get him to tell them why he resigned. The bulk of the episodes concern the cavalcade of tricks they employ to try to accomplish that, always to be dashed in the end against the stalwart resistance of Number 6.

Two men are primarily responsible for the conception of The Prisoner: McGoohan himself, who in addition to starring also executive produced, wrote a number of scripts, and directed some episodes; and George Markstein, who served as script editor for most of the show’s run. Like McGoohan, Markstein was a refugee from Danger Man. The Prisoner was largely shaped by the tension between these two men’s ideas about the show. Markstein saw it as essentially a continuation of Danger Man, a confusing but ultimately grounded, understandable story. Tellingly, he tacitly assumed that Number 6, who is never given another name in the show, is in actuality John Drake of Danger Man, now embarked on another, unexpected phase of his “career.” McGoohan, however, saw the show as an allegorical tale of Everyman struggling with modern society. Tension in art is of course not always a bad thing, and in this case it gave The Prisoner space to explore McGoohan’s more heady ideas without coming completely unhinged from reality. After 13 episodes, though, the burgeoning conflict between the two men exploded, and Markstein left the production after an argument so acrimonious that the two men never spoke to one another again, and never spoke of one another in anything other than tones of contempt. (Markstein also reserved plenty of contempt for the series itself, calling the adoration it continues to receive a case of “the emperor’s new clothes” and calling its most rabid fans “pathetic.”) This rupture left McGoohan free to conclude the series with a final episode that abandons any claim to reality and is, depending on your point of view, either brilliant or a meaningless mess — or perhaps both.

When not twisting themselves into knots trying to superimpose a coherent narrative arc and proper viewing order onto the episodes of a very messy, very un-serialized series, fan debates about The Prisoner can spiral into some very heady intellectual territory. The longstanding fascination of the show derives from the questions it poses about the rights of the individual and the needs of society, questions it by design never definitively answers. “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own,” Number 6 announces in the first episode. While the show seems to implicitly ask us to see Number 6 as a hero, a hardcore collectivist could take this as an ironical portrayal, seeing Number 6 as a selfish egomaniac who refuses to abide by the necessary strictures of a civil society. Fans of the philosophy of Ayn Rand, meanwhile, can see Number 6 as their model paragon of selfish individuality. And there are a million other interpretations that line up somewhere between these extremes — and who knows, maybe even outside of them.

By its very nature The Prisoner seems to encourage fans to find inspirations that are dubious at best. As an example of the latter: a number of university courses have been taught about the show over the years, in which a common claim was that The Prisoner draws heavily from Franz Kafka. Certainly the Village and the whole scenario of The Prisoner bears a strong similarity to Das Schloß (The Castle), and the absurd pantomimes of legal trials in the episodes “Dance of the Dead” and the finale seem to have Der Prozeß (The Trial) stamped all over them. In an early 1990s interview, however, McGoohan definitively put paid to these “obvious” inspirations, saying he had “never read a Kafka.” This is not to say that Kafka does not live somewhere within The Prisoner, but filtered through the later, more grounded and obviously political versions of Kafka’s absurdist dystopias found in George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, both acknowledged inspirations of McGoohan, and, just perhaps, within certain individual scripts not written by McGoohan. Even those trial scenes could be inspired by Orson Welles’s film version of The Trial rather than Kafka’s original source.

Some have gone yet further afield in seeking inspirations. There’s a great moment in one McGoohan television appearance in which an earnest young graduate student asks him if Angelo, a dwarf butler to the various Number 2s who is the only character other than Number 6 to appear in every episode, was inspired by the dwarf who accompanies Una and the Redcrosse Knight in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene; poor McGoohan, who obviously has no idea what the kid is on about, doesn’t quite know what to say in response. Even more so than with most works, The Prisoner seems a series in which people can find what they want to find — which is not necessarily a weakness. Certainly Kafka’s own works have the same qualities.

There is one immediately obvious difference between The Prisoner and the works of Kafka, Orwell, and Huxley: Number 6 is never broken. While many episodes end on an ominous note or a reversion to the status quo after a near escape, he never cracks, never breaks down and tells a Number 2 what he wants to know. Not infrequently, he turns the tables and actually wins a round, humiliating his would-be oppressor in the process. In “A, B, and C” Number 2 attempts to get to the truth by injecting Number 6 with a special drug that lets him control his dreams, only to have Number 6 replace the drug with water and lead him on an elaborate wild goose chase through Dreamland; in “Hammer into Anvil” (a genuine Goethe reference, much to the delight of grad students everywhere) Number 6 tells a particularly odious Number 2 he “will pay for this” after a woman escapes Number 2’s torture only through suicide, and makes good on the promise; in the penultimate episode Number 2 and Number 6 engage in an extended psychological battle of wills that ends with a broken Number 2 quivering on the floor rather than Number 6, and marks the apparent moment of Number 6’s final victory over the forces of the Village. The contrast to the fragile protagonists of Kafka, Orwell, or Huxley, who are all in their own ways defeated before they even begin to fight, is striking indeed.

One might argue with some justification that this change is necessitated by the very nature of The Prisoner and the economic realities that constrained it; certainly the show was challenging enough without asking the audience to embrace the nihilistic fun of watching the hero be defeated and relentlessly dehumanized week after week. Yet I sense more than that going on here. McGoohan always steadfastly refused to say “what it all meant” beyond repeating that the show was an allegory, but we might find some clues — anti-New Criticism as it might be — in his own biography and beliefs.

For the creator of a show that has come to be seen as symbolic of the trippy 1960s, McGoohan was, well, a bit of a prude really. He allegedly refused the role of James Bond because he didn’t like 007’s womanizing ways and lack of principles, and even on Danger Man he was always the show’s most stringent censor. He continued in this way on The Prisoner, where he never engaged in even a single onscreen kiss and, apart from the Western pastiche “Living in Harmony,” never even used guns. He repeatedly asserted that The Prisoner was clean, family-friendly entertainment. (That’s a claim that always struck me as really odd; there are many ways to describe The Prisoner, but “family-friendly” has never quite seemed one of them to me.) McGoohan was in fact throughout his life a devoted Catholic. Whatever you think of his beliefs, you can’t help but admire the man for hewing so steadfastly to them, even to the point of scuttling a potential career as Hollywood’s 007. McGoohan simply didn’t want to kiss anyone other than his wife, onscreen or off, and how can anyone really fault a guy for that? He stands as an example as a religious man who practiced rather than preached.

When we allow McGoohan’s Catholicism onto the scene, it takes us to some interesting places. Perhaps we can find in The Prisoner an argument for the ineffability for man, for the ultimate unknowability of (for lack of a better term) the soul. It thus represents a push-back against those who would define consciousness as just a collection of physical processes to be cataloged and understood — a push-back against, for instance, the ideas of B.F. Skinner, against the philosophy of radical behaviorism that I briefly introduced a couple of posts ago. In “The Schizoid Man,” Number 2 implicitly constructs an experiment to test Skinner’s assertion that identity is an entirely social construction. He introduces a perfect doppelganger of Number 6 and tells Number 6 that the doppelganger is the real version of himself, surrounding him with evidence that seems to confirm the point. He even changes Number 6’s handedness with an electronic shock treatment, leaving only the doppelganger with the correct handedness. Yet, in a victory of Nature over Nurture, Number 6 clings to his true self throughout and finally wins the day, comprehensively defeating Number 2 and his doppelganger pal. Another episode, “The General,” launches an attack on Skinner’s approach to education. The Village has instituted a program called “Speed Learn,” in which subjects like history are reduced to a collection of dates and facts inserted into the minds of the residents in “15-Second Courses” that seem to operate through a sort of hypnosis. Afterward, the villagers walk around quizzing one another robotically, with every question having a single answer, a single correct interpretation. Nuance, debate, even thought have been eviscerated. The ending of the episode, in which Number 6 destroys the computer at the root of the program in best Captain Kirk style in a whirl of fire and smoke and the mystical question “Why?”, is weak, but the message is strong.

That, anyway, is some of what The Prisoner means to me. Before I get back to computer games, however, I do want to also make a note of the show’s sometimes overlooked formal qualities. If the fight scenes and special effects are a bit cheesy and the acting sometimes dodgy, there’s still a bracing audacity to the show’s presentation that I find kind of thrilling, even — perhaps most — in the episodes that don’t contribute so much to the show’s themes. “Many Happy Returns,” for instance, features not a word of English dialog until over halfway through its running time. And “Living in Harmony” inserts Number 6 into a Western and plays it to the hilt, even replacing the normal opening credits; only in the last ten minutes are we returned to the familiar environs of the Village. I can’t help but imagine how it must have felt for a 1967 television viewer to tune in to The Prisoner only to be greeted with a Western that happens to star the fellow who used to play Number 6. And then there’s that last episode, outlined in a weekend by McGoohan and improvised from there. It’s a riot of crazy imagery, with the much-speculated-upon Number 1 revealed to be a cackling Number 6 hiding under an ape mask, with a crazed firefight to the strains of the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love,” and with much of the Village launched into space aboard a rocket while Number 6 dances to “Dry Bones” on London’s A20 motorway. The last third is again virtually dialog-free, this time because no one had had time to write any. I’m largely with those folks who say none of it makes a lick of sense, but God do I love it anyway. It just pulses with the last thing you’d expect to find in a downbeat scenario like that of The Prisoner: the improvisatory joy of making art. And when it’s all over I walk away marveling that something this outré once appeared on prime-time television.

So, that’s a little bit of the material David Mullich had to work with in making a computer-game version of The Prisoner. We’ll look at how he ran with it next time.

In the early days of microcomputers, every sizable city seemed to have a store that not only sold hardware and software but became a social nexus for enthusiasts. The role that The Byte Shop played in Silicon Valley and that The Computer Emporium played in Des Moines was assumed in Los Angeles by Rainbow Computing. David Gordon, founder of Programma International, and Ken Williams both bought their first Apple IIs there and became regulars around the place. Sherwin Steffin of Edu-Ware was another regular customer. More than a customer, actually: he worked out a deal with Gene Sprouse, the owner, wherein Sprouse gave Edu-Ware a second Apple II system for the use of his partner Steve Pederson and Sprouse received Edu-Ware’s first game, Space, at cost.

Designed and programmed, like all of the earliest Edu-Ware efforts, by Steffin and Pederson themselves, Space was a science-fiction CRPG, the first of a line of “pure” games Edu-Ware labelled Interactive Fantasies to distinguish them from their educational products. The player generates a character using one module, then — shades of Eamon — imports that character into a scenario for play, and (if she survives) exports her again for play in other scenarios. Designed as just the first of a whole family of Space games, Space I features five scenarios in addition to the character generator. Its obvious inspiration — painfully obvious, in that Edu-Ware would later get sued over it — is the tabletop RPG Traveller (1977) from Game Designers’ Workshop, the first long-lived science-fiction RPG and one of the first of any stripe to appear from a publisher other than TSR.

A unique aspect of Traveller is its detailed character-generation system. Rather than just roll up some statistics, choose a character class and some spells, buy some equipment, and start adventuring as in Dungeons and Dragons, character creation in Traveller is a whole sub-game onto itself, kind of an RPG within an RPG, albeit one played at a much more abstracted level. The player creates not just some vital statistics for her avatar but a whole history, following her career in interstellar military service through a series of terms of service. Each term brings skills and experience, but also age, which eventually starts to have debilitating effects of its own. The player must thus balance experience against age in deciding when to retire from the service and start her adventuring career. Filling more than 20 pages in the original Traveller manual, character creation was so detailed and engaging that some grew into the habit of rolling up characters just for the fun of it.

Space might be described not so much as an adaptation of Traveller as a whole as an adaptation of the Traveller character-generation system. Even after the creation process per se is through, the individual scenarios are played at an unusually high level of abstraction, making them feel like a continuation of the same process. If, as some claim, the essence of a CRPG is the character-building process, Space has to be one of the purest examples of the form ever constructed.

Still, Steffin and Pederson felt constrained in Space and, indeed, many other ideas by their lack of formal programming education and skill. Therefore, when they met a young programmer at Rainbow with the technical skills they lacked and a head full of ideas, they took it as a godsend. His name was David Mullich.

Mullich’s route to computers had been a rather atypical one. As a child he had not been transfixed at all by the mathematics and science that fascinated most hackers; appropriately enough for a kid growing up in Los Angeles, Mullich had been a theater and film buff. With a dream of directing, he had seriously considered making film his major at university, but, according to his now-deleted MySpace page, shied away when he arrived at Cal State Northridge and “saw hundreds of other students who had the same ambition.” Casting about for an alternative, Mullich tried a computer-science class, and fell in love with computers and programming. Soon he was officially a computer-science major, an artsy kid turned hacker. His instructor for a COBOL class happened to be Russ Sprouse, brother of Gene, who hired Mullich for his first contract programming job and later found him a gig as a regular employee at Rainbow.

Steffin and Pederson initially hired Mullich — still finishing up at university — as a part-time contractor. Under those terms he not only coded educational software but also wrote a second set of scenarios for Space as well as the original games Windfall and Network. He not only programmed these games, but conceptualized and designed them from scratch, and quickly at that. Network, for instance, was born when Steffin called Mullich and told him he needed a new game for a trade show next weekend. Mullich designed and programmed Network in three days flat.

As soon as Mullich finished university in 1980, he joined Steffin, Pederson, and sales manager Mike Leiberman at Edu-Ware as Employee #4. There he began working on the most ambitious project he had yet tackled: a computer game based on the classic British television show The Prisoner.