The Artful Gamer

Every time I hear Infocom’s text adventure Planetfall brought up amongst gamers, usually my age or a bit older, someone inevitably brings up their relationship with Floyd – a little ‘bot that is your sole partner for the bulk of the game. Floyd follows you around the abandoned planet, making the occasional smart-assed comment, and helps with the occasional task. At a critical moment of the game, Floyd – and I quote wikipedia here – “performs the ultimate sacrifice and gives his life to retrieve the vital Miniaturization Card from the Biolab” [1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetfall].

In recent years, Floyd dying in the Biolab has become a touchstone for gaming emotion. It is now often cited as a critical moment in the developmental path of gaming, along with (of course) Aerith dying in Final Fantasy VII. (For instance – in the comments area of 11 Nerdy Moments Guaranteed to Make You Cry a few people mention Floyd and effectively put it on the same spectrum as Spock dying in Star Trek and Gandalf dying in Lord of the Rings.) Character death is now a celebrated aspect of the gamer mythos. In this article I take apart what I see as false nostalgia that has sanctified one of the least important parts of Planetfall at the cost of missing the one thing that makes Planetfall stand out as one of the most important text adventures of today.

(If you care about “spoilers”, and haven’t, in the last 27 years taken the time to play Planetfall – now might be a good time to stop reading and start playing.)

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