The first in this series of retro photo shoots is a Commodore 64c. The C64c was a re-release of the original C64. The new, angular, grey case was modelled after the Commodore 128, and featured some design changes to the main board that shrunk the number of chips used by integrating them into the new VLSI chip. The original C64 keyboard – which was brutally difficult to type on – was replaced by a slightly different keyboard with lighter springs, while maintaining the familiar hollow clack!-clack! of each keypress. In Canada, the system was sold for $299.99 CAD at Canadian Tire (a national tool and automotive chain), along with the 1541-II disk drive for a whopping $399.99. The matching Commodore 1802 monitor would run you another $399.99.

This particular machine looks like it sat in some young gamer’s room for years, with fingerprint dirt smudges caked on the * and 8 and 1 keys, and finger grease gunked up around the power switch. Well-loved would be an understatement. I dig through the diskette box: this particular gamer was a fan of side-scrolling action games like Bop’n'Wrestle, Epyx Winter Games and California Games. Interspersed with the action games, there are a fair number of AD&D Gold Box games like Pool of Radiance and Hillsfar. A well-worn copy of Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny even has the original cloth map and the Codex coin. I get the sense that I am either looking at the artifacts of one very well-versed gamer, or perhaps two gamers sharing one computer: one who likes their slow-moving RPGs and the other into fast-paced action. A copy of Gortek and the Microchips tells me that mom and dad insisted that the child learn a programming language. Whoever they were, their parent(s) shelled out over $1100 to put together a very slick system, not to mention one heckuva game collection.

I slide MECC’s Odell Lake into the 1541-II’s disk drive, and flip down the locking lever with a satisfying snick! I type LOAD”*”,8,1 and walk away to grab a coffee. I have enough time to pull a shot of espresso, steam some milk, and grab a handful of cookies. When I come back into the living room, the disk drive is still humming away quietly. Odell Lake appears on the screen, with MECC’s particular style of edutainment.

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.)

Not a lot was said about this moment back in the 1980s. In fact, other than the occasional “Floyd was really cool”, almost nothing was said about Floyd prior to the emergence of the post-2005 gamer/nerd aesthetic. Even James A. McPherson’s (1984) Computer Gaming World review (p. 44) paints Floyd in a somewhat ambivalent light, suggesting that he is (at first) an annoyance, which the reviewer slowly grew to see as a companion.

... You will meet a robot named Floyd. In the beginning, Floyd might be a nuisance because of his incessant babbling, but as you have probably already guessed he plays an important part in the completion of the game. Floyd's interaction is a very unique
concept in this game. It adds animation to the game without relying on graphics. (In certain parts of the complex I had already mapped I found myself hurrying through the
rooms. As this left Floyd far behind, I ended up slowing down to wait for Floyd to catch up.)

... The addition of Floyd the robot as your part- ner is a unique boost to the interactive nature of these games and I hope to see more of this type of creative innovation in future games.

Maybe McPherson did not want to ruin the ending for new players, but I don’t see anything approaching the histrionics of gamers today who think back to dear little Floyd. Floyd hardly figures into the review any more than an interesting gameplay innovation. What I’m getting at is that gamers have come, through a combination of blind personal nostalgia and participation within a cloistered gamer culture, to exaggerate the meaning of what is a highly overrepresented aspect of Planetfall. Floyd is not a compelling character, and barely amounts to a loyal dog that stays by your side throughout.

What I’m trying to say is that the vast majority of gamers have missed out on the most important part of the game.

Microcosmicity

The philosopher and phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard has something to say about “cosmicity” – the inconceivable vastness of the universe that we experience when we encounter a cosmic poetic image – in say, a poem. The first stanza of William Blake’s oft-quoted poem Auguries of Innocence is a standard example:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

For Bachelard, perceiving infinitude in the miniature is essential to the growth of consciousness. Our world – quite literally – becomes larger as we imagine cosmic vastness. Simultaneously, as we perceive things in miniature, the geometrically tiny encloses something impossibly large. The examples of this today are innumerable – especially in childrens’ popular culture: Basil the Hare freely commiserates with the mice of Redwall Abbey in Brian Jacques’ Redwall series, Tuck Pendleton of Innerspace is miniaturized (along with his spaceship) and injected into a man’s body, or when Flynn is digitized and inserted into the ENCOM mainframe in Tron. In all of these, a leap of the imagination is necessary: I know that Basil is literally 50 times the size of Matthias in Redwall, but I imagine them to live in the same space. The imagination makes literal impossibilities fictional realities. And for Bachelard, who sees the imagination and consciousness as malleable parts of our human makeup, imagining the impossibly infinite is an expansion of our way of being in the world.

Becoming The Grain of Sand

Where does Planetfall fit in this? It is one of the few games that seamlessly integrates microcosmicity into its experience… so much so that the player can feel the mutual intimacy of the miniature and the vast. The scene happens after Floyd has retrieved the miniaturization card for you and died for his efforts. To get off the island, you must first fix a problem with the computer – there is a fault at Relay Station 384 on the computer’s motherboard. Here is what happens:

You - and the laser beam you carry - climb into a miniaturization booth and are shrunken to a being just a few microns across. The computer's circuit board becomes a gigantic maze of highways and platforms - copper traces, junctions and gates. Wielding the laser, you walk over to a nearby relay station and fire several times at a gigantic meteorite, sitting between the relay and the rest of the circuit, preventing it from functioning. The meteorite - an infinitesimal spec of dust to the naked eye - dwarfs you. You walk back to the entrance and encounter a microbe hell-bent on eating you alive. You fire at the microbe relentlessly, and your laserbeam has no effect on the montrosity. The laser is growing hot in your hands. Finally, frustrated, you throw your laser over the side of the platform and the microbe chases after it into oblivion. You run back to the entrance, and you are re-atomized into your former size. All of this happens in a few nanoseconds.

Experiencing Games

Compare my description above of what I see as the most important scene in the game – of being de-atomized and shrunken, destroying a particle of dust with a laser, and being chased by a gigantic microbe – to the oft-spoken sentiment “Floyd’s death made me sad.” I don’t dispute that Floyd’s death was saddening – what I dispute is that his death carries much significance for us as people. I don’t think about Floyd at night, before I go to bed.

What I do imagine is being shrunken to the size of a butterfly’s eyelash, and running around in a labyrinth of tunnels and junctions. In other words, the simple emotion of sadness does not lead me anywhere new – it is just what it is. But microcosmicity… the experience of vastness in an impossible small space… is a new experience and opens me up to new kinds of imagining.

“My son. He’s such a geek”, my mother ribbed at me in her familiar Québéçoise accent. She flipped over the jewel case in my hands and looked at the back cover, and shook her head.

I looked up at the cashier, my eyes pleading for some way out of this. She giggled instead, and I blushed. I gave my mother an “Aw mom!” look.

I was 15 years old, and we were standing at the checkout of a London Drugs store in the city. The store carried everything, from diapers and bee-sting kits, to Polaroid cameras and Froot Loops. I was here for the computer games.

The back of the store had a bargain shelf lined with computer games..most of them were crap shareware titles like PKWare Utilities and the occasional decent Crazy Nick’s Software Picks: Robin Hood’s Game of Skill and Chance. Among the rows of CD’s and floppies, a Dynamix logo on a white jewel case caught my eye. It was a game I had never heard of before, and it was on CD-ROM! A talkie adventure game. For $19.99. I rescued The Adventures of Willy Beamish from the shelf and carried it back to the cashier like a sacrificial offering.

At the time, my mother didn’t understand. She probably hoped that my crazy obsession with games would pass.. along with saturday morning cartoons and remote control cars. Or maybe she thought it was just another game that I would play for a couple of hours and lose interest in.

But it was a Sierra game. It had Sierra artwork and Sierra music. I played Willy Beamish for months. I relished the stunning artwork and expressive animation. I had never seen a game before – other than Dragon’s Lair – that had every character hand-animated in each scene (instead of using a repeated walk animation). The rich (256) colour palette rotated with night and day. For a nerdy fifteen year-old living on a farm in the middle of nowhere, Willy Beamish’s little suburban neighbourhood and treehouse was a real place to hide out in. The art, the animation, the music and voices, all conspired to create a place for daydreaming.

Fast-forward 15 years. I get a call from a friend of mine, Eriq Chang, whose artwork I featured in an article some time ago. Apparently – for several years – Sierra enthusiasts Brandon Klassen and Eriq Chang, have been secretly working on an Art Book that tells the graphical history of Sierra On-Line adventure games. Eriq would not tell me any more than “we’ll send you some teasers before launch.”

In this article, Brandon Klassen tells us just what The Art of Sierra is, and what the project means for him personally. Brandon and Eriq have generously sent me two promotional teaser shots of the upcoming book (included, see below), and let me tell you: I can’t fucking wait.

CL: So Brandon, what is The Art of Sierra?

BK: The Art of Sierra has been a dream I’ve been waiting to see realized for the past 6 years, and I’m so excited that we’re finally unveiling the project! It’s a visual history of Sierra’s adventure games – a hardcover, oversized coffee table art book filled with an unprecedented amount of rare Sierra art and a wealth of behind-the-scenes material. This is the journey that every Sierra fan has been waiting to take, and we can’t wait for fans to be able to hold this book and flip through it, to remember the magic that happened every time the Sierra logo and fanfare lit up their computer screens!

CL: Who got the AoS project started, and what got things off the ground in the first place?

BK: The genesis of The Art of Sierra was late in 2003 when I was helping manage Ken Williams’ site, SierraGamers.com. Ken had been posting some low resolution scans of King’s Quest design material on the site, and I knew that there had to be a better way to present this rare material! Ken agreed that it would make sense to have someone scan a lot of his material in high resolutions for posterity and, at the same time, I was able to get in touch with Al Lowe, who also had material he was willing to have scanned.

I actually only met with Ken and Roberta briefly, and was soon busily scanning. I don’t think I’d ever done so much scanning in my life – little did I know how much scanning was ahead!

I had a day of scanning at Al Lowe’s house – the most memorable thing about meeting Al was that he made me a chipotle sandwich and iced tea for lunch! It was winter, and Al has quite a steep driveway, so we started to get a bit worried when it started snowing. Luckily, I wrapped up all the scanning before the weather got too bad. Al has some truly historic Sierra materials, including some top secret stuff he wouldn’t let me scan – I can’t even talk about it, I’ve been sworn to secrecy!

Around the same time, I also met with the other Al, Al Eufrasio. Al, like Al, is an incredibly funny guy. He’s an animator who did a lot of work with Al on Larry 7 and Torin’s Passage, so we have a lot of fantastic stuff from him.

One of the first things I knew I had to do was invite my close friend and collaborator Eriq Chang to join the project. Eriq’s a prominent industry artist who happens to be one of the most devoted Sierra fans you’ll ever meet. He’s also done quite a bit of design work in the adventure community. We share an obsessive love for Sierra and we’ve worked together on a number of game development projects. There was no question that I had to have Eriq design and write the book with me, and he instantly understood my vision for the project and knew how to bring it to life.

The project grew from there as we started connecting with other fellow collectors and began to get in touch with more artists and designers who worked at Sierra, and that’s brought us to where we are today!

CL: How much of the book is devoted to the history of Sierra versus Sierra artwork?

BK: It’s interesting you should ask that, because it’s not an entirely straightforward distinction! From rough sketches, to painted backgrounds, to in-game art, to the game boxes and supplemental material, the “art” of Sierra is completely interwoven with the history of the adventure game and the computer game industry. The artwork will definitely be prominent, but just as exciting for fans will be the interviews and history that the book will include. Sierra was very much about the “art” of not only constantly innovating but also making fans a part of the Sierra family, which is why Sierra’s games were so successful and loved.

CL: Who is involved in the Art of Sierra project?

BK: In terms of writing and designing the book, it’s completely Eriq and myself, as mentioned. We have a very specific vision for the book that we know fans are going to love, so we really want to maintain the integrity of that vision. The way that this project has come together, we know it’s something that’s just meant to be. It’s not just been about making the book – it’s meeting the artists and designers, compiling and archiving material, and making this an “experience” for fans that pays tribute to Sierra, in as memorable a way as Sierra would have done themselves back in the day. Eriq and I are both diehard Sierra fans, and we’re both industry professionals. As a result, we have a very stylized, specific idea of how we want to present the art. I’ve worked as an editor with Babylon 5 Books, which started as a script publication team for J. Michael Straczynski’s science fiction TV series, I’ve done music reviews and interviews for national and international press outlets, and, when I’ve had time, I’ve enjoyed interviewing comic artists from Jeff Smith to Paul Gulacy. My passion for The Art of Sierra really comes from my passion for stories and the joy I find in artwork.

If you’ve seen any of Eriq’s work, it’s really second to none. He’s done game packaging, posters, game illustration and background design. He’s done amazing work over the years with projects for Dreamworks and film collectibles for the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series. More recently, he worked with Sierra designer Christy Marx on a gorgeous, hardcover limited edition book for a Slipgate Ironworks MMO project. There’s just way too much other stuff to even begin to list. If there’s one person I trust to bring together the vision for this project, it’s Eriq!

Enough about us though! All the material you’ll see in the book comes from former Sierra staff as well as fans with private collections. I’ll mention a few people, but we have a full contributors list that’s still growing on ArtOfSierra.com, so make sure to check it out. While the book is entering production, we’re still open to contributions – we don’t want to leave anyone out of this once in a lifetime celebration. The contributors have been really fantastic. Some people send us their work to scan, while others scan their work for us. Brad Herbert, a Sierra fan with a truly impressive collection, has been one of our biggest supporters and really a major collaborator. He’s been instrumental in the development of our promotional video work and a lot of the more detailed background artwork acquisition. We have unbelievable art from Sierra legends like Andy Hoyos, Marc Hudgins, Josh Mandel… Christy Marx is providing us with beautiful work from the late Peter Ledger. In particular, Dynamix artists Shawn Sharp and Rhonda Conley have provided us with a lot of material. They were two of the first artists to jump onboard the project, and so I’ve been particularly grateful for their support. I should mention that we’re also including art from Dynamix games.

CL: You’ve been actively involved in the Sierra adventure scene for quite some time. What is your relationship with AGD Interactive [the developers responsible for the excellent remakes of King's Quest I, II and Quest for Glory II]?

BK: Looking back, it’s been very important to me over the years to be involved in various parts of the Sierra fan community, whether that was at SierraGamers.com, AGDI or other projects. In AGDI’s early days, I did some web development for them, and then I went on to do some 3D work with the King’s Quest 2 remake opening cinematic and parts of the AGDI logo movie.
Since then, I’ve been involved with AGDI in various capacities, mostly with team management and design as well as some programming and touch-up art and animation.

CL: Tell me a bit more about yourself.  You’re Canadian, eh? (sigh, sorry).

BK: Yes, I’m Canadian! I live near Vancouver, BC, just a few hours north of Seattle. A lot of Sierra artists and designers are in the Seattle area, which really made it the perfect place to base the project out of. And Eriq’s recently moved from San Francisco to Seattle to make it possible for The Art of Sierra to enter production – he actually bought a house up here which serves as our second studio for Fable Foundry Publishing.

I grew up fascinated with special effects, and I loved art books and “Making of” movie books. I must have asked for that heavy ILM book, “The Art of Special Effects,” for Christmas when I was 10. I always wished that such books would be written about computer games, but the most in-depth “Making of” that computer games ever got were small sections in strategy guides.

I have a modest art book collection – Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Miyazaki, Drew Struzan, Charles Vess, the list goes on and on – all film and comic book stuff, but computer games just don’t get recognized as art. There are so many game companies that must have amazing archives of artwork, and hardly any of it is ever seen, with only occasional exceptions. The World of Warcraft art books, for example, and independent studio Dreams and Visions Press recently did an amazing job with The Art of Tomb Raider – I actually did a very high resolution photo mockup of those books for them to use in their promotions, before the books were printed. But these are the exceptions, and in the case of a company like Sierra, a company that no longer exists, it seemed like no such book could ever be written. Fans know the horror story of Sierra’s demise, years of archived artwork – and not just artwork, but the very history of the computer game industry – being thrown away when the company closed its Oakhurst facility.

How can anything ever make up for that lost history? Adventure games went out of fashion, but Sierra fans have continued to love the adventures that inspired them and their families, and the magic has never died. Now, against all odds, we’ve been given the chance to preserve and celebrate the history of a company that created the graphic adventure genre, a company that grew from a story at a kitchen table to a household name for family friendly entertainment. I can’t even express how exciting that is!

CL: Eriq and I have spent hours talking about how important our early experiences with graphical adventure games were to forming our childhoods. Tell me about your first Sierra adventure experience. I’d like to know why you’re so devoted to a major project like this.

BK: Oh wow, where to start? Growing up, my family didn’t have a TV and we didn’t have a Nintendo, or any other game console. But we had a computer. My love for computers became synonomous with my love for Sierra, and computers have played a large part in my life since then. I had so many important experiences playing Sierra adventures growing up that I actually can’t remember my first Sierra experience! Ask any Sierra fan for a pivotal adventure experience, and you might want to get comfortable! One of the things that always stands out about Sierra’s games for me is that they were constantly innovating and they were always leading the industry – Space Quest III’s incredible soundtrack and King’s Quest V’s gorgeous VGA graphics come to mind. Pretty much all of Sierra’s games were meant to be experienced with your family and friends – I remember countless hours spent with my brother, puzzling our way through adventures together. I remember taking my Dad’s saved game disks and looking at his saved games, because he would play late at night when my brother and I were asleep, and he would get further than we would!

Quest for Glory was the one series I didn’t play more or less as they were being released, so one summer I played through the whole collection – 1 to 4 at the time – what an experience! Most fans had to wait years for the Hero’s story to unfold, and I enjoyed it one game after the other. I remember seeing the Space Quest comic books advertised in InterAction – I HAD to have those comics! I think it was some ridiculous mail order thing that I convinced my parents to go through for me, and it took the comics forever to arrive! I remember playing Police Quest endlessly! I took hundreds of screenshots because I wanted to make a comic book version of the game using screenshots in Dr. Halo, a paint program we had at the time.

CL: Now for some nerd love: I can’t wait for the book to be released! Can you give us any other exclusive details about the book?

BK: We can’t wait for the book to be released either. We have two editions of the book planned – both will be deluxe hardcover printings, but one will be a special commemorative edition that will include collectible lithographs by some of your favourite Sierra and adventure game artists. We actually can’t say too much about the release or the artwork just yet, and we still have surprises to come. You’ll definitely want to follow us on Facebook and register on ArtOfSierra.com to stay up to date with everything. We have lots of stuff coming that you won’t want to miss, including more details on the book, previews, giveaways and more.

Thanks Brandon for taking the time to share with us your joy and passion for this project.

“In this photo, we see some of the most well-known, Saturday morning cartoon styled screenshots from Willy Beamish. Dynamix Art Director Shawn Sharp was responsible for the rich and vibrant world of Willy Beamish, and he contributed a lot of art to the project – you can see here a glimpse of one of Shawn’s original background sketches. Willy Beamish fans are in for some real surprises with The Art of Sierra!”

“Shown here is an original concept sketch of a Barrow Wraith from Quest for Glory 4, drawn by Sierra Art Director Marc Hudgins. When an artist puts so much care into just a concept piece that it’s worthy of framing, you can tell that they were truly inspired!”

Eriq Chang and Brandon Klassen are the creative minds behind Fable Foundry Publishing, an independent studio founded in 2009.

Earlier this year, I worked up the cojones to send a quick e-mail to writer and photographer Christy Marx. As I reviewed her long list of writing achievements, especially in television shows such as Jem and the Holograms, G.I. Joe, Bucky O’Hare and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I was reminded of the importance of saturday morning rituals in which nothing mattered more than sitting down with 2-3 bowls of hypersugary breakfast cereals and sitting 5 feet away from the TV when we could get away with it. At that time, for an awkward 13-year-old boy me, writers like Christy were just mysterious names in the credits whose job it was to keep me entertained between 8am and 4pm once a week.

But I did know her name, and her face, from another place. Christy Marx was that magical person featured on the back of two Sierra adventure game boxes. She designed, wrote and directed Conquests of Camelot (1989) and Conquests of the Longbow (1992).

In the 1990s, the bulk of adventure games followed a fairly common pattern: the hero set off on a quest to (retrieve/save/destroy) an (object/princess/enemy) that usually only the hero cared about. The story, if there was one, usually involved a series of loosely linked scenes that were supposed to add up to a plot. Puzzles were erected like roadblocks, meant to prevent you from finishing the game in less than 5 hours. I enjoyed those games – but later, as an adult with limited time and complex expectations, I now find many of those adventures hard to enjoy.

But Camelot and Longbow offered a different kind of experience. They were the first games I played where the puzzles weren’t culled from a 101 Brain Teasers book, and the NPCs were not item-droppers clothed in a “get me X and I’ll give you Y” interaction. Both Camelot and Longbow had stories and characters that mattered to me (and not just the protagonist) - it was the first time that I cared about the protagonist’s quest and wanted to help him through to the end. It was the first time I worked through a puzzle that was sculpted from the gameworld, rather than one clumsily shoehorned into a pre-existing story. The NPCs had lives of their own, some helping and some hindering my quest, but in all cases appeared to be people who hinted at a background replete with their own responsibilities, goals, friendships, grudges and stories. I played – and finished – both games twice this year and found myself thinking about their worlds and characters months later.

So when I had the chance to ask Christy Marx a few questions about her experiences writing and designing these games, I wanted my questions to count. I wanted to express how different her games were for me as a player. I wanted to ask her (okay – impress her with) what I thought were tough questions that only an articulate designer and writer could answer. In short, I choked.

Thankfully, that did not stop her from drawing thoughtful answers to my – paragraph long, kludgy – questions. In our conversation, Christy Marx articulates her thoughts on writing multi-dimensional characters, games as (a serious) art, storytelling, some of her literary influences behind Camelot and Longbow, and her desire to work on another adventure game (!)

(Minor spoiler warning: if you haven’t played Camelot or Longbow yet and plan to in the immediate future, and you are one of those types that becomes infuriated when someone else talks about the plot or characters of their favourite movie before you’ve seen it, you might want to stop here.)

CL: Your characters, from Jem to Robin Hood to King Arthur – all seem to focus on “inner strength” than outer strength or superhero-like powers. Why do these kinds of characters appeal to you as an author?

CM: Because those are the best kind of characters to write about: characters with depth, direction, purpose, passion and so on. Why would anyone want to write about, read about or watch a character with no dimensions, with nothing to make them interesting or worthwhile? Even an anti-hero character must have some piece of “hero” in there somewhere to make them work.

I think it’s more about making any character interesting by giving them a mix of strong and weak qualities. Where you find poorly done, cardboard cut-outs for characters is where they are presented as having no dimensions. They are simply one thing. That one thing can be heroic or evil, but if they have no other dimensions to them, they are flat. Even the worst people in history has reasons for the things they did, be they justifications or a genuine belief they were doing the right thing for their people, their country, their religion, or if very selfish (say a Henry the VIIIth) for themselves.

I think of people and therefore my characters as being a mix of many different types of qualities, being stronger in some qualities, weaker in others. And these things aren’t static either. If we examine ourselves closely, we’ll find moments when we behave one way and moments when we behave an opposite way, depending on the circumstances or who we’re dealing with.

Each one of us could probably think of one cause to which we’d donate our time and energy, and other causes we’d refuse to touch; or one person we’d go out of our way to help, but other people we’d avoid like the plague. So in one circumstance, we’re generous and helpful and giving, but change the circumstances and suddenly we’re stingy and cold and rejecting. We haven’t necessarily changed as a person, but our core beliefs drive our behaviors.

So when it comes to creating a compelling character, it’s more effective to have those dimensions in mind and let them play out in the character’s actions. A strong character with an inherent weakness is always going to be more interesting. It’s relatively easy to set up physical conflicts, but even more effective to add internal conflicts along with it.

It’s harder to accomplish this in games because you also give up much of the control to the player, as it should be, but you can still present them with ethical or moral choices and let them play out those choices and deal with the consequences.

CL: If you reflect on the last 20 years of children’s television shows (and video games), what kinds of values [if any] do you see expressed in the current crop of mainstream entertainment (films, cartoons, comics, games, etc)?

CM: I see the usual range of values that I’ve seen all along, though there does seem to be a trend toward having to be “dark” or “gritty” in order to be cool, and a higher level of cynicism. While I don’t disagree with being cynical to some degree, it needs to be counterbalanced with positive words and actions. Being cynical solely for the sake of being cool is a losing proposition.

CL: Did you have a specific audience in mind when you wrote the stories for Conquests of Camelot and/or Conquests of the Longbow?

CM: Mainly I wanted to satisfy the people who liked to play Sierra games. I didn’t stop to evaluate who they were, really.

CL: Both Camelot and Longbow are, to my knowledge, the only games in the world that include extensive bibliographies in their manuals. Why was researching the historical and fictional literature so important to you in the process of crafting the story?

CM: I couldn’t imagine trying to create adventure games around legendary characters like those without doing massive research. So many of my best ideas came from doing the research. I’d come across some fascinating tidbit that would spin me off in unexpected directions or spark new ideas. Everyone has heard of “Nottingham”, but what was it really like? I contacted a historical museum in Nottingham and learned about the ancient pub and the secret tunnels and all sorts of wonderful things that went into the game.

Also, there’s what the game seems to be about on the surface and what the game is really about — the theme of the game. As a writer, I want my games imbued with a theme in order to have the depth needed for good storytelling. Research is a vital part of achieving that. And if I was going to do all that research, I might as well share the sources. It only made sense to me.

CL: In the beginning of Conquests of Camelot, I have to admit that I greedily reached into the treasure box in Arthur’s castle to get a few more handfuls of coins than I needed. The parser responds, “Nay leave it be. Your mission must be kept humble, for safety as well as your soul’s sake.” I was struck by the moral tone – that greed/selfishness was antithetical to Arthur’s quest. Later, the game reminds the player that the quest concerns, “Not only finding the Grail, but your worthiness of possessing it.” Even later, Arthur is tempted by sexual pleasure and the easy life … “delights of the flesh” (sweetest fruits and meats) by kissing Fatima. Spirituality and morality seem to be central to the way Arthur’s story is told. Compare that to today’s games in which greed, hoarding, and the accrual of power are prized aspects of the game’s design. Can you tell us a bit about the role spirituality and morality play in the way you wanted to tell the Arthurian legends?

CM: How can you tell the story of Arthur any other way?  The entire Arthurian Cycle as it has developed over the centuries, and especially when it incorporated the Grail mythology, is about morality, trust, faith, love, betrayal and redemption. Those are the vital elements that underpin the stories as we know them today. Yes, you could set out to do a purely historical Arthur (and there have been plenty of attempts to do so) and simply have him be a Romanized Celtic-British cavalry warchief who overcomes various enemies. But that isn’t as much fun as playing with the mythological elements, especially for a game. I feel that the reason the Arthurian legends have such staying power is due to the powerful themes that are woven throughout them. As writer, I never thought twice about the idea of giving the player moral choices. That’s what Arthur’s story is about.

CL: In an interview in Sierra’s “InterAction Magazine”, you mention how you and Peter Ledger worked together as a creative duo, bouncing ideas off one another during the creative process. Did you collaborate on any artistic/creative projects prior to Camelot, or was this your first opportunity? If this is not too personal, what do you miss the most about working with him?

CM: Yes, we’d been working together on comics for many years before that. He did the art for The Sisterhood of Steel graphic novel. We did a three-part story called Carlos McLlyr the Californio, a supernatural historic adventure set in 1840’s Los Angeles, and a number of other stories here and there.

Unfortunately, Peter hated working on computers with a passion, so he wanted nothing more to do with them after Conquests of Camelot. He was an artist who needed the tactile process of working with ink, paper and paint.

CL: I noticed that in both Camelot and Longbow there seems to be an implied tension between the emergence of Christianity and the demise of pre-Christian (Paganist, Anamist, Pantheist) religions. Old-world religion is expressed in the old gods (Mithras) who is “driven away” at the end of the game by the power of Christ and the grail; Marian as a priestess of the old powers of the forest/mother nature in Longbow. As far as I can tell, these were more or less part of the “background” or mythology of both games, yet played a powerful role in how your characters were written. (If I’m not talking out my ass here..) Why is this tension important to the way you tell both stories?

CM: I will admit that I was heavily influenced by the writing of Mary Stewart and her utterly brilliant trilogy about Merlin (The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills and The Last Enchantment). The passing of the old pagan gods and the rise of the Christian god is one of the main themes running through those books.

Unlike Mary Stewart, I’m on the side of the pagan gods. LOL!  I don’t subscribe to the Christian faith and don’t mind tweaking its nose, so to speak.

CL: In Longbow, Robin Hood seems to walk a fine line between brigandry and morality. He robs a jeweller for instance, and is *more* apt to rob him because the jeweller insults his manhood and treats him as a common thief. But instead of robbing the jeweller for his money, he takes the jeweller’s cape instead and “more than repays” the man for the cape. This does not seem to be the same kind of clear-cut morality as Arthur has in Camelot. As a reader/player, does one character appeal to you over the other? What about as a storyteller?

CM: They’re two entirely different types of characters. King Arthur represented nobility, courage, valor and similar values while Robin Hood represented being an outlaw, living by one’s wits, and justice in an unjust time. It wouldn’t make sense to write the same kind of game about two such different characters. In the Camelot game, the moral choices were clear-cut. In Longbow, Robin Hood is a trickster-hero, so I wanted more shades of gray in the choices. By the second game, I had a better sense of how to accomplish that, as well.

With Longbow, I gave the player a number of options for dealing with each person they encountered and hinted at the best choice. But ultimately, the player gets to decide how they want to behave.

Personally, I have a bit more fun writing a trickster-hero like Robin Hood than a more straightforward hero like Arthur.

CL: Camelot ends with Arthur sadly watching the love relationship between Lancelot and Gwenhyver (“But though your land is healed, your heart is not. Perhaps it never shall be.”), while Robin Hood ends in a happy-go-lucky marriage. The former, to me, is a pretty emotionally ambivalent (almost tragic) ending for the protagonist, while the latter ends in comedy. As a reader/player, do you prefer one ending over the other?

CM: One is based on a romantic tragedy and one is based on ballads about cunning and sly humor. The source material dictates the direction, though you can have Longbow end somewhat tragically with Marian dead. I don’t have a strong preference for one over the other. I just want a gripping story that is well told.

CL: In a post on your blog you mention three guidelines for an artistic understanding of video games: a significant/substantive subject matter, attention to writing, acting, and visual presentation, and the maker’s reputation as an artist or outsider-to-art. Given that video games, cartoons and comics are thought of by the public as “mere entertainment”, do you see “art” as an important part of the way you tell your stories? Or did “entertainment” mean something different for you from the beginning?

CM: Those weren’t guidelines for videogames. I was trying to work out what it was that seemed to elevate a movie from being “mere entertainment” to being considered an arthouse film or to have a higher level of artistic quality. Let me go over them again (and revise them slightly):

Guideline #1: the movie needs to be about something significant or of substance that has an impact on the viewer.

Guideline #2: the quality of the audiovisual components, acting, writing, etc. needs to be unique or of special quality (not mundane or commercially ordinary).

Guideline #3: the intent of the film’s primary “creator” (usually the director) is known to be about something other than commercial success or making money.

I used Spielberg as an example. He was lauded when he made big, blockbuster movies that were huge successes.  He was initially lambasted mercilessly when he madeThe Color Purple because people didn’t accept him as a maker of a serious or artistic film. I think it took Schindler’s List for him to finally gain that acceptance.

Then I wondered whether those guidelines could be applied to games. Or to comics, for that matter. I personally feel they can be applied. In comics, for example, look at how differently Maus was treated from other comics. Maybe it only takes two out of three in order to qualify. Maus fulfilled #1 and #2. The art was okay, but nothing special, however the subject matter and the creator’s background was enough to give it the “art” cachet. And possibly to the mainstream the use of anthropomorphized animals was unique (though not to those of us who know the medium well).

There are people making what are called “serious” games, meaning their primary role isn’t to entertain, but to use elements of entertainment in order to teach or train in a real world setting or for a real world purpose. And yet I haven’t heard one of those games being referred to as art, so what’s missing?

This is getting long, so I’ll leave it up to others to decide on the validity of these ideas and explore how they might or might not be applied. It’s something I’m still in the process of thinking about myself.

For me personally, I just love to tell stories. I’m a born storyteller, that’s what I love. I like my stories to have some substance and not be fluff. I strive for quality. But I’m also a professional, and when I’m being paid to produce a piece of commercial work, I deliver what is asked of me with the highest quality I can manage within the parameters of the job.

After all, creative people have to pay the bills, too. Some of the most famous art in history was done on commission. Michelangelo didn’t want to paint the ceiling of the Apostolic Palace, but the Pope made him and what we got out of it is the Sistine Chapel.

CL: Do you have a particular audience that you personally prefer to write for (in any medium)? Has that changed over the years?

CM: No, I don’t. The majority of my work has been for the eight to twelve year old demographic and I enjoy that a lot, but I’m happy to write for any age group or type. I write the stories that I enjoy telling and that seems to work great.

CL: Today, would you ever want to work again as the creative lead/chief writer/designer/head honcho/ on a unique game with a small team, as you did in the 80s and 90s with Peter Ledger and the Sierra On-Line team? In other words: is there a particular story that you’ve always wanted to tell in the form of a game?

CM: I can’t tell you how much I would love to be designing these kinds of adventure games again. I believe a small, tight, well-knit team is better than throwing tons of people at something. I’d love to continue the Conquest series and have Charlemagne in the back of my head as a candidate, though I’d like to use a strong woman of history to build a game around, too.

But I would also love to set a story in 1920’s Hollywood during the silent movies. I adore that time period. I have an anachronistic crush on Rudy Valentino.

Thanks Christy, for taking the time to answering some questions that I’ve had running around in my head for years, as well as ones that I had not even thought of. And while I’m here: Are you there, Mithras? It’s me, Chris. Please set up Christy Marx with a game design studio so she can send us on some wonderful adventures again.

I remember that when I was young, getting a new game was about as exciting as my father coming home with a new bicycle. As I’ve mentioned in a prior post, Monkey Island 2 has a special place in my heart. It was the first game that my sister and I pooled our money together for, after months of back-breaking work on our farm, feeding horses and mowing acres of lawn. In those days, the recession of the early 1990s was hitting my family pretty hard. My mother was attending university at the time, and my father’s carpentry business was not going well at all; money was a constant problem around the house. While my parents paid my sister and I an allowance for doing chores around the acreage, I knew that an allowance was a frivolity that my parents could barely afford. Buying a new game with months worth of our pooled chore money was a big deal.

I would tear open the box as soon as we had left the store, and start digging into the manual. The 45-minute car ride back to my family’s acreage was like torture. The Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge box art (painted by Steve Purcell) became a playground for my imagination; by the time we arrived home I had already created a world and story based on what I saw on the box. My sister and I traded pieces of the game back and forth as we drove home, but inevitably there was something about the box’s front cover art that we both were attracted to. There was something about the cover art that invoked our imaginations. It had horrible tension, an utterly terrifying pirate on the front, and it told a story in one glance: whoever that guy is on the left, he’s in trouble!

So when the new cover art appeared recently for the upcoming release of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, I could not help but notice a stylistic change in the box art. I could not put my finger on it, but it felt like something was missing in the overall presentation. Fearing that this was mere nostalgia rearing its ugly head, I decided to do a side-by-side comparison of the old and the new box art, as well as some of Steve Purcell’s previously unreleased box art. In this article I borrow some terminology from an art critic by the name of Heinrich Wölfflin to help out in distinguishing between the two styles. Keep in mind that I’m no art historian or critic, so any errors I make are mine alone, and not Wölfflin’s. Thanks to Martyn Zachary of Slowdown.vg for posting his own comparison, and my friend Melinda for letting me know about Wölfflin in the first place.

Left: Steve Purcell’s original box art. Right: the new box art.
(click here to compare the box art at higher resolution)

From Painterly to Linear

Wölfflin wanted to distinguish between artistic styles based on a handful of objective principles. The most important, to me, is his distinction between linear and painterly. Wölfflin himself writes, in a linear style, ”stress is laid on the limits of things; in the other the work tends to look limitless. Seeing by volumes and outlines isolates objects: for the painterly eye, they merge. In [a linear painting] interest lies more in the perception of individual material objects as solid, tangible bodies; in [a painterly painting], in the apprehension of the world as a shifting semblance.” In my own words: linear styles tend to define sharp separations between objects, while painterly styles tend to allow things in the scene to flow into one another. Linear paintings also tend to have “flat” surfaces, make use of photorealism, and are often seen in comic-book style artwork. Painterly works rely upon visible brush strokes that give the piece a “textured” appearance, usually use wider brushes, and mix together uniform colours in the same region for expressive effect.

So how do I see this playing a role in the above paintings? The original Monkey Island 2 box art by Steve Purcell on the left seems to take a more painterly approach, while the new box art on the right takes a more linear approach. Look at LeChuck’s beard in Purcell’s painting: a light source from the mast plays off his beard, creating a strange mix of yellows, browns and oranges. In the new box art, LeChuck’s beard is no longer curly and frazzled, but a series of grey-black blocks. The ropes on Purcell’s work are textured and tactile, while the new artist flattens all texture out of them so they blend into the background. Guybrush goes from a flowing and smooth style in Purcell’s painting, to a series of geometric angles in the new painting (compare the shirt collars and hair for instance).

What does this ACTUALLY mean for a player?

The overall effect is that the second work is presented in a much more linear manner than Purcell’s original (more painterly) work. While the depicted content of the two paintings are almost identical (they both have the same objects), the expressive qualities are certainly different. The new painting “flattens” out all features for an overall balance between each element of the scene; in particular the bodies of LeChuck, the voodoo doll, and Guybrush are “equally important” to the scene. My eye is caught by the pin in LeChuck’s hand, but afterwards I find myself struggling to follow the action of the scene. Guybrush might either be playing Hide-and-Go-Seek, listening to an iPod, or in actual physical pain. I can’t tell, given the (lack of) expression on his face. LeChuck looks non-human, comic bookish, and a hobbyist evil-doer. The monkey on the mast is either whistling or leering. Because nothing is textured or exaggerated for expressive effect, I don’t have much of an emotional “grip” on the scene.

In Purcell’s painting, he is clearly playing favourites: my eye immediately goes to LeChuck’s face, then to what he is staring at (the voodoo doll), then to the threatening hand, and finally to Guybrush’s agonized face. Purcell wants to tell the story of Monkey Island in one glance, and he excels at it. My emotional grip is set up by the kind of story that Purcell is trying to tell, where there is explicit tension between the characters. Guybrush isn’t just in pain, he is in agony as LeChuck tortures him. LeChuck isn’t just a goofy villain with an obsession for voodoo dolls, but a human being-truly-gone-bad, evidenced in his “undead” look. The monkey on the mast looks truly concerned, mirroring our own horror at the sight of LeChuck.

In the end, the new cover art loses all of its dramatic tension, giving way to Monkey Island’s lighter comedic side. The new cover art belongs to a generation of gamers, in my opinion, that welcome flat representation over painterly expression. As photorealism and linear comic book artwork become increasingly popular among gamers, I suspect that we will see less of Purcell’s painterly style, and more linear and representational art styles. Given the differences in how I understand the narrative (see above) through the cover art, a move to linear styles might be to our detriment as gamers who want a good yarn.

At the same time, Wölfflin’s point was there neither linear nor painterly styles are “better” than one another, they just express different things. Ultimately however, this depends on how you see each art style. Which of the above appeals to you more? Why?

Finally, here are some original unreleased paintings that Steve Purcell did for Monkey Island 2. Note that these are even more painterly in style than the final box art:

I’ve been dying to review Policenauts for months, but wanted to try something slightly different since it was an unpaid, unofficial, translation team that took on the job of translating this Japanese cult classic into English. I managed to track down Marc Laidlaw, the lead translator on the project, who was generous in answering some questions I had about the game and the localization process.

The editors and writers of 4colorrebellion were gracious in offering me a space for such a wonderful interview. Specifically, I wish to thank my friend Jamie Love for his hard work in setting me up over at 4CR, and putting together the entire article in its final form. Head over to my 4colorrebellion article to read the entire inter-review.

A developer himself, Eric Viennot has interviewed Chahi and Mechner, each answering the same question. It is an interesting opportunity to see how two authors who may share a spiritual style, living on opposite sides of the ocean, come up with different answers. I firmly believe that a game can (and must!) be understood and enjoyed without referring to the life of the artist or their opinion, but for those who have already played their games and admire their artistic styles, the interview is a goldmine. This is part of a series of interviews that Viennot has done of the giants of gaming… a prior interview between Frédérick Raynal (Alone in the Dark) and Paul Cuisset (Flashback: The Quest for Identity) is just as fascinating. I hope that you can read French – if not, try out one of the various translators (Google translate seems to do an okay job)… otherwise, Gamasutra is in the midst of translating the latest interview into english.

The game takes place on the Orient Express, days before WW1 breaks out, and quickly embroils you into intrigue as you are implicated in the murder of your own best friend. The game has an elaborate branching narrative system in which all the characters have their own plots, their own desires, and often results in player experiences being radically different from one another. If you go to sleep early, or spend too much time exploring the sleeper cabins, there’s a good chance that you’ll miss a juicy conversation in the dining room. And what other game has a 15 minute violin and piano concerto, played from start to finish, that you can either attend or use it as an opportunity to scout out the cabins of your fellow passengers? What other game follows the romantic entanglement of two female passengers, allowing you to sneak a peek at one of their private diaries? Aside from Roberta William’s The Colonel’s Bequest, there is no other game that has this kind of living, breathing, world of layer upon layer of developing plots. And aside from the beauty of the narrative, the game has a wonderful Art Nouveau flair reminiscent of famed artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as rotoscoped animation that gives Eric Chahi a run for his money.

For nearly a decade, little was written about the game and only recently a few very good articles recognized that the game has a charm and sense of poetic (perhaps magical?) realism that has went unmatched since its release.

Tom Cross’s article, All Aboard The Last (Narrative) Express reflects upon how the kinds of narrative and visual styles the game relies upon opens up an emotionally realistic space within the constrained physical quarters of the Orient Express. In it, Cross makes the argument that poetic realism (I’m paraphrasing him freely here) creates a truly believable and intimate world, whereas the geometric or representational realism we find in 95% of modern games truly fails to. It suitably whets the gaming appetite of someone who has never played the game, yet desires to.

Chris Remo’s article, The Last Express: Revisiting an Unsung Classic, consists of a lengthy interview with two of the gamer’s developers and provides a sense of the technical (and motivational!) feats involved in creating a truly unique adventure game. The article makes good background reading for someone who has already played through it a couple of times, and gave me a real sense for how a game could become a critical success yet fail financially.

If I’ve piqued your interest at all, you have quite a few options for playing it. Thankfully, the game runs just fine in Windows XP and Vista. GameTap subscribers have had access to it for years, but it is not available on GOG.com yet unfortunately. (Please Jordan, release it on GoG.com.. the folks there really do care about the classics!) If you’d like a physical copy, there are a few reasonable auctions on eBay, including a very nice boxed (complete) version. The game runs on Mac in “Classic” (OS9) mode, but not in OS X – so I’d suggest either booting to XP with boot camp, or playing the game in Dosbox.

I’d love to play through this game again, so if there is any interest in starting an ongoing play-through by e-mail, let’s get a discussion going!

Last night I was sitting with a friend of mine talking about our experiences playing games as kids. We were surprised to learn that we had both owned the cult classic (yet poorly marketed) ToeJam & Earl for the Sega Genesis/Mega-Drive in the 1990′s and brought back some fond memories for each of us.

Its re-appearance on the Wii Virtual Console was a welcome gesture, but I was disappointed with reviewer responses who felt that characters move “lethargically slow”, the gameplay was “unfair”, the funky visual style too “dated” to be enjoyable, and that its 16-bit synth music was too crippled for contemporary gamers. At the same time, most of these reviewers begrudgingly admit that it’s likely a “classic” and enjoys some nostalgic street cred, especially for its two player co-op mode.

After reading those reviews, I realized that ToeJam & Earl - a cult staple of the average SEGA generation child’s household -- has become just another brief glint in the endless library of emulated games available for casual play. This is where I want to part ways with the average reviewer out there, and try to show why ToeJam & Earl is still an important game today, and offers something wonderful to the kind of curious, exploration-driven, non-competitive, fun-loving, and non-violent child (or adult!) gamer that we talked about previously. It’s a game that you should be playing with your partner, your child, or a close friend, right now. Nostalgia for its own sake is a very real, and I think very dangerous, part of reflecting on older video games. I think that re-vitalizing them and finding value in them for a new generation is a noble, and difficult task. I’ll do my best.

It’s important to understand that TJ&E is thoroughly nonsensical and excels at it. It’s a game about a three-legged red alien reminiscent of Flavor Flav and his slug-shaped hot-dog eating alien buddy from the planet Funkotron, who crash their boom-box/surfboard equipped space ship on Earth. The introduction sets the players on a quest for retrieving the 10 parts of their funkay spacecraft that are strewn over tens of randomly generated levels. I won’t comment on the single-player mode, as the game was originally offered as a “two-player game with a single player option”. In the two-player co-op mode, one person walks TJ around while the other has Earl. TJ walks faster than Earl, but Earl has a larger health bar. Inevitably there is a fight over who gets to be TJ, as he can run away from most enemies. My friend and I both shamefully admitted that we always forced our younger sisters to play Earl.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vloYvK2sK1g

A Brief Tour of the Game

TJ and Earl both amble around the level and search for parts of the space ship while avoiding all sorts of bizarre enemies: “insane dentists, hula girls, obese stay-at-home mothers, and phantom ice cream trucks”. Dropped randomly on each level are presents filled with all sorts of items: super hi-top sneakers that give you a speed bonus, rocket skates that send you flying off at breakneck speed, a telephone that reveals hidden areas of the level’s overhead map, springy shoes that allow you to jump across crevices, or a dummy that draws enemies towards it. Whenever one present is opened, both players receive the same the benefit (or punishment). Familiar to most Mario Kart 64 players, some presents with a question mark just ain’t safe to open. Randomly found throughout the game are helper (and hinderer) characters such as Santa Claus (who will drop a bunch of presents if you sneak up on him), Carrot Wise Man who can identify your mystery presents for a few bucks, the Viking opera singer who destroys all enemies on the screen with her awful singing, or the stampeding pack’o'nerds that will flatten you if you get in their way. Every imaginable hyperbole of American 90′s life is packed into the game.

TJ&E’s Unique, Funky, Style

Pulling all of these elements together is the famously funky soundtrack and visual style. Visually, the game reminds me a bit of the style of animation used in the cartoon Dr. Katz, called “squiggle-vision” meets the colourful personality of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Straight lines and fonts and backgrounds all move around randomly and suggest to the players that gaming is about having fun! Similarly, the excellent bass guitar-driven funky beats lend your efforts at exploration a rhythm that I’ve rarely seen elsewhere… every track encourages you to bob your head along as your fingers do the hard work. This seems like a trite thing, but with the wild visual style and bright colours, the music definitely adds something unspeakably fantastic to the gameplay.

But those things, while goofy and entertaining in themselves, are not what makes the game great.

A Perfect Expression of Co-Operative Play

Jason Moses writes,

What makes TJ&E a great game is its cooperative mode. Playing with someone else opens up a lot of avenues for interaction that aren’t present when playing alone. Pooling information on presents together, arguing about the best route to the exit in a given stage, yelling obscenities when one player gets sucked into a tornado and dropped to a lower level.

Better than that, even, is that playing with someone else allows you to give the other player a high five (in the game, natch) in order to equalize both players’ lifebars. If Earl gets pretty beat up, all it takes to get him back up to speed is a high five. Best play mechanic ever? It’s up there.

In my experience, the 2-player co-op mode also invites (our admittedly adolescent minds) to all kinds of pranks. Threatening to cast a shower of tomatoes on the world (especially when your partner was in lifebar distress), or using the rocket skates present when they were near the edge of the screen, both guaranteed a scuffle at the controllers. At the same time, helping one another explore the world and uncover the fog of war on the map, or putting enemies to sleep by opening a boom-box gift, require a team effort.

And if actually collecting the spaceship parts is one of your goals, then cooperation is a must because the game can be a little unforgiving at times. If you fall off the edge of the map, you land on a lower level of the game. TJ can comfortably navigate level 4, even after Earl has fallen down to level 3. In order to get to level 5, Earl has to make his way back up to level 4, and both have to walk into the elevator. You can imagine how irritating this gets when someone opens up a rocket skates present and you go flying off the edge of the world.

Beyond the narrative’s stated goals however, I think the real value in the game is exploration and creative playfulness pure and simple. Finding each of the ship’s parts is simply an excuse to get into the elevator and hop onto another level where you might have a random encounter with Santa or something new that you haven’t seen yet. There’s even a “Jam Out” mode (separate from level exploration) that disables the drum track so you can play your own beats to the music, while TJ and Earl bust a move. The win in this game, if there is one, is in new encounters and the pure enjoyment of opening up mysterious gifts.

If gamers today believe that they have lost interest in the unforgiving cruelty of 1990′s platformers like Wonder Boy, or the barely-entertaining insane difficulty of the Mega Man series, then ToeJam & Earl should be the exact kind of game that caters to their desire for non-violent exploration and co-operation for its own sake. If you’ve played this game with a friend or partner or child, or have memories of playing it, I’d love to hear your about your experiences.

Note: My thanks to Mobygames for supplying the screenshots.

When we think of computer and video games, the word “space” is almost automagically translated into “coordinate space” or Cartesian space. After all, almost all games since the late 70′s used some kind of X/Y coordinate system to plot pixels on a screen; in the 90′s that became X/Y/Z space as 3D games took off. This is a technological understanding of space -- it envisions space as a kind of empty vacuum in which objects can be arranged in a consistent way -- and we perceive those objects according to some kind of spatial formula (ie. 2D or 3D coordinates).

I want to affirm a very different understanding of “spatial” than what most gamers and writers think it means. Space, as we experience it playing games, is not a Cartesian coordinate system for representing objects, characters, narrative, or sound… I believe that there is a much deeper understanding of space in video games that we implicitly live as we play them. And I’ll try doing articulating this different theory of space without any kind of techno-jargon — just a bunch of examples from a game that expresses the kind of space I’m talking about. My point is going to be that gamers experience space in a totally different way than mathematicians like Descartes did or programmers do.

Space is created the second a player sits down and begins playing a game. Most of the time we think of this as an dialogical “interactive space” -- the player issues commands to the computer, and the game responds in some way, which the player responds to, ad infinitum. When we think of interaction in this way, we think of the player and game in some kind of unfolding dialogue with one another. But I’m not convinced that players really dialogue with games or computers. I see the player doing something different when they act in an interactive space. Let’s take the prologue to The Curse of Monkey Island as an example of an expressive interactive space.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IBUfXq0nbk

At the beginning of the game (ffwd to 7:40), Guybrush Threepwood is held captive inside of the hold of LeChuck’s ship; he stands up and exclaims (in the voice of a Shakespearean aside), “I’ve got to get out of here and help Elaine! If I could only get through this one door…”

Here’s where the interactive space begins to unfold. As a first-time player I explore the scene with my hand -- I move the cursor around and click on a few items around Guybrush. A long pole hangs on the wall opposite me -- literally opposite me as a player and for Guybrush too -- so I instinctively reach towards it. Guybrush dramatically drops it into his pants, somehow defying physical reality. I realize -- this game is not just about solving problems or fulfilling quests or hearing a story -- it’s also about finding silliness and humour in the profane. Greedily, I reach for the cannon balls. Guybrush gripes, “Mmmh… they’re too heavy to carry.” I gesture toward the hole beside the cannon, Guybrush partly squeezes himself through the gunport and gets stuck. I motion him back to the hold. Curious at what is in the next room, I gesture toward the door. Guybrush peers into the keyhole of the door, ”I see a diorama of the children of the world living in peace and freedom! …… No wait -- it can’t be that -- it’s just too dark to make out what’s in there.”

As I play with the different items and places in this first scene, a space of possibilities begins to cohere for me. Guybrush is a weakling, so brute force ain’t going to work. Convincing “Bloodnose the Pirate” (aka. Wally) to open the door is not a straightforward request -- it requires neither threats nor persuasion -- but incessant adolescent goading of Wally’s piratehood. If I use the cutlass on Wally, Guybrush grimaces, “I don’t wanna disembowel poor Wally!” This is not the same kind of interactive space as, say, TES: Oblivion which all but encourages the player to slice and dice everything in sight and complete tasks in a straightforward and efficient manner. Instead, Guybrush takes a swipe at a hanging piece of rope, ”Hah-ha! Taste cold steel, feeble cannon restraint rope!” This is definitely not your average adventure hero. He’s got the arms of a palsied 7-year old with rickets!

What I’m getting at here is that our perception is partly shaped through our exploration (touching, smelling, walking, reaching at and taking things), partly through Guybrush’s relations to his world (how he judges things as valuable or interesting or frightening), and partly through Guybrush’s interactions with other characters in that world (how he addresses Wally or Murray the Demonic Skull, for instance). Of course, my perception is shaped partly by the fact that this is a 2D visual space with objects represented in spatial relationships to one another, but the fact is that those spatial mathematical relationships are not what makes the game “matter” for me. The game matters to me because somehow Guybrush has a quest worth pursuing, interesting relationships with his friends and enemies, and a hilarious world in which every action has some kind of unintended and hilarious outcome. So, the “interactive space” in which Guybrush’s world is expressed in is one inherently tied up with my cultural values, senses of humour and morality. Every element of style -- Guybrush’s gawky and loping stride, the expressionistic “painterly” style of the backgrounds, and the lateral-thinking approach to solving puzzles, together evoke an interactive space for the player that encourages creativity and a desire for hilarious misadventure.

Now imagine something different. Imagine that the player only cares about the linear plot, and could care less about the puzzles or fumbling around with each item on the screen. S/he grabs a walkthrough and burns his/her way through the entire game. This is a completely different kind of interactive space; one in which it is no longer experienced in terms of the player’s investment in Guybrush’s world per se, but rather a kind of “storybook” that gets played out in front of her/him. The range of possibilities for creative expression for this player is much, much, smaller than in our previous case. What I’m getting at is that the player has a personality or psychological habitude that typically results in a certain play-style that also contributes to the kind of interactive space s/he experiences. This means that the game’s design both sets limits on the kinds of experiences possible in the game, and the player’s expressive style also sets limits on the kinds of experiences they will have as they play. Players who refuse to “explore” or “dwell” in a world and who see the game as just a bunch of quests that they need plow through, or players who see a game as essentially a storybook or television show, lose out on other expressive qualities the game might have to offer. Alternately, players who see a game as a tool for their personal gratification are likely to miss out on the emotional aspects that the narrative or character interaction might offer.

Like many other kinds of creative games, LucasArt’s The Curse of Monkey Island offers a world that players can come to “dwell” in and understand the range of expression possible within it. Without an adequate understanding of space and how space creates metaphorical boundaries within which we can express things, I suspect that we will continue to reduce a game’s qualities to it’s formal graphical style (2D/3D/isometric/etc) or narrative style (linear/non-linear/emergent/etc). Space is always value-space or cultural-space or dwelling-space or emotional-space, and not the rational Cartesian coordinate space that we’ve been stuck with in our thoughts for over 400 years.

As a final example of an interactive space that encourages creativity, one of the funniest scenes in CMI:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AawQvD8L_h4

Classic.

Please visit the Blog of the Round Table’s main hall for links to the rest of this month’s entries.

Note: If you’re a philosopher type, the thinkers who inspired this post were those from the Expressivist-Romantic tradition, like Charles Taylor, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Martin Heidegger.

Although I am still living in exile from my beloved blog, I did manage to get an editorial piece published over at Toronto Thumbs. In it I reflect on the problem of “nostalgia” and whether playing old games is a case of wearing rose-coloured glasses, or does it have to do with something something deeper..

Thank you to the Toronto Thumbs staff for giving me this opportunity to write something for them, especially to Sir Jamie Love for the impetus to try writing this in the first place.

Bye for now. Miss y’all!

Although many of you probably did not grow up in the 80s with text-based and graphical adventure games, my sister and I did. We practically grew up on a steady diet of King’s Quest, Quest for Glory, and Space Quest games. The days of huddling in front of the 13″ VGA monitor and solving puzzles together are gone. My sister lives an entire continent away, and we don’t play games together much anymore. Until today, that is.

Which would you prefer more:
A) being able to play your favourite Sierra On-Line adventure games in a web browser?
or
B) being able to play those games in a multiplayer environment?

A + B = Martin Kool’s Sarien.net

Much in the spirit of Jet Set Willy Online, this means that you can now play a handful of Sierra’s old adventure games in a browser-based multiplayer environment. Imagine having 100 Roger Wilco’s walking around, exploring the Arcada. Imagine solving puzzles in The Black Cauldron with a friend 1000 miles away.

And all done by one guy (with the help of a friend). Spectacular.

So head over to Sarien.net if you have a chance and enjoy the ride. The only thing I’d love to see would be names above the avatars (so we can identify each other) and perhaps picking different colors for our characters. It gets tough figuring out who’s who on a screenful of Roger Wilco’s.

For many of us, Zork hangs among our earliest memories of computer games. In many ways the series’ massive fanbase – in its entire gamut of casual and hardcore and obsessive players – is our miniature equivalent of the Star Wars fanbase: it is rabid.. it demands quality.. it cannot tolerate any deviation from canon.

So designing a new game based on the Zork franchise was a dicey and dangerous decision, especially considering the close ties the series has with the history of video games in general (it was among the first games derived from Colossal Cave Adventure). Stakes were high for everyone involved.

Yet, for every aging gamer out there worried about how the latest instalment of the Zork series would fare, there are 1000 more that did not grow up with text adventures. They did not get eaten by grues. They did not integrate the bizarre and off-kilter humor of The Great Underground Empire into their jargon. They are not used to directing a game’s action through computer-parsed language. They do not have to imagine themselves into a world constituted by text.

A Short Review

Here are a few comments selected from the aforementioned thread:

“That is my main and only complaint about the game: it’s absolutely passive. It’s the exact contrary of every other Zork game, where it was your wits and skills that saved the say rather than an automatic dice roll.”

“I like it and I’m playing it(played some beta aswell). I never played the original and frankly; I don’t wanna play text based rpg in this day and age.”

“I have a workmate who did grow up with the Zork originals and I pointed him in the direction of LoZ. His reaction is quite the opposite than John Biggs’ whereby he moans at me there aren’t enough action points in the new one (suggesting he wants to keep playing) but when he tried out the Flash based originals again, he was, like I was, simply frustrated by the continuous ‘I do not understand that word’ type of comments, and not knowing what phrases are actually accepted by the game.”

“Point and click/graphical games always will pale to each of our individual Zork experiences — at least for those of us who played the original text games. LoZ is the same. It isn’t much for “Zorkiness” as it’s a totally different style of game. But I really enjoy it.”

“Legends of Zork is the kind of game that you play for 10-15 minutes in the morning, between checking your e-mail and reading the news. It’s an entertaining diversion.”

These mixed reactions provide an interesting cross-section what happens when people have to make sense of a twist in the path. As several of the commenters point out, Legends of Zork is a turn-based lightweight RPG that is very reminiscent of the BBS door game Legend of the Red Dragon: you walk from town into the forest, kill monsters, return to town with loot, and rest when your hit points are low. In many ways, it is a browser-based incarnation of Diablo, sans a coherent storyline. All battles are decided through visible statistics: an encounter with an enemy plays back a script that describes hit percentages, chances of winning, experiences points gained, HPs lost, and zorkmids won. All and all, the game is a fantastic reinterpretation of hack’n'slash games, repackaged with an eye for 15-minute casual gaming. The artwork comprising the interface reminds me of both Professor Layton and the Curious Village, as well as The Curse of Monkey Island, and seems to do the trick.

Living with Cultural Change

Yet, if I may summarize the collective reaction, it goes something like this: “It’s a fun, cute, game. I can see some people liking it. But it’s no Zork.”

Beyond the pessimism of nostalgia, I think gamers have recognized that something is indeed missing in the formula. Sure, the writing might not be as humorous. Sure, the art style might not suit some people. Sure, going into statistical battles ain’t too much fun after a while. But I think something deeper, more dangerous, lies at the heart of the issue.

The problem is that Legends of Zork is the distant echo of a death knell that rang out in the 1990s when text adventures lost their sheen, and were replaced by clumsy graphical interpretations. Soon afterwards, graphical adventure games themselves were tossed in favour of real-time tactical and FPS games. A rift in our way of living, as gamers, has opened up between the 1980s and the present. Legends of Zork, while a noble attempt at bridging the gap between these alienated gaming eras, has only shown us just how wide the gap is.

The Dialectics of the Imagination and the Game

When I sit down to Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, I am greeted by a stark black space. I hit return – the space fills with white text against the black space – words! My eyes skim across the white-on-black space: I do not see words, I imagine places. I see things. I am located somewhere. The world opens up around me.

I am standing west of the white house. I imagine the texture of the boarded front door: When I was a young boy, there was an abandoned home down the street that I used to sneak into, and steal utensils from its dusty kitchen. The window was boarded up with rough spruce plywood, with a dark knot nestled into the top right corner. It is that rough piece of plywood that I imagine on the front door of the white house. The fear and excitement of the abandoned home is sparked in me for a moment – I do not consciously remember the abandoned home as I play – but the feelings it evokes persist.

I look over at the mailbox. The mailbox is the standard issue grey American mailbox that stands at the end of one’s yard. I recognize it from a scene in Stand By Me in which a group of hooligans drives around smashing mailboxes with a baseball bat. While I do not consciously remember the scene, my limited experience with Americana is stirred for a second.

Curious of the mailbox, my fingers dance over the keys on the keyboard – my eyes fixed on the screen. I do not consciously notice the keys clacking under my fingertips, but my intentions – my whole imagination – leans toward the mailbox.

I smirk a bit realizing how silly my action was – the world resists my clumsy intentions. I try again. This time my hands know exactly what to do. My fingers walk me to the mailbox.

It is one of the leaflets that I stuffed into people’s mailboxes in 1988, when I helped my mother distribute advertisements for a friend of hers who was running in a local election. I was nine years old. The leaflets were a bright orange, filled with text about the “New Democratic Party”. A large dog chased me from one of the yards, and I ran back to our Ford Econoline van, screaming and crying. It is that orange leaflet that I find in the mailbox, but I do not consciously recall the childhood memory of the leaflet – I am only filled with a sense of foreboding sparked by the terrifying dog. A call to adventure. I pick up the leaflet and read it.

I laugh and the tension is relieved. There is something strange about this place – a world that is part fictional world and part my world. I should be writing my dissertation, and the thought of it provokes guilt in me, but I want to play along. I want to be in the Great Underground Empire, just for a little while.

Imagination Lost

Legends of Zork is neither a bad game, nor is it a trivialization of the Zork series. It is the expression of the generational gap we find ourselves in today.

When I stare at the map of the Great Underground Empire as the creators of LoZ imagine it, my eyes take in the gorgeously drawn map – not the places themselves – but the world as seen from a bird’s eye view. I do not walk through the world. My fingers do not dance over the keyboard and do the walking for me. I point with my cursor, and the cursor – the computer and its algorithms – transports me to another place. I magically re-appear in front of the white house. But this is not the abandoned white house of my youth. It is not the house that I stole a rusted swiss-army knife from. It is a white house that corresponds to a popular modern children’s art style. It evokes nothing for me.

I click on the Dark Forest just as I would click on a news link or an RSS feed. The page reloads, and I am presented with a cute illustration of a forest and troll. I am about to choose whether I should run away or fight, but an AJAX script instead takes over and plays back the results of the battle – I do nothing. To the left of the adventure window is a menu that allows me to read a FAQ, change my account settings, or read posts over at the forums.

After a while, my interest wanes. I realize that the game is, for all intents and purposes, a wonderful thing in its own right. It is a game crafted for my 13-year-old cousin who spends most of his day on Facebook. It is crafted for him and his generation, because sitting in front of a black-and-white screen and walking through the world using his fingertips is not possible anymore. He does not imagine himself as a part of the Great Underground Empire, nor is he beckoned by the mailbox. He wants action and he wants cute illustration and he wants it now. He will use up his fifteen minutes of “action points” today and come back to the game tomorrow, nestled in between Twittering and posting his Facebook status. If I ask him, the art style will likely remind him of a handful of Miyazaki films that he’s seen. But it is not a part of his life – it is a part of his day.

Finding the Bridgeheads

We are likely to see more games like Legends of Zork in the future, and I welcome them. These kinds of games will come to define the basis for meaning for an entire generation of gamers that are coming into their own now, just as some of us did in the 1980s. No doubt some of those gamers will eventually come to reflect, not without a touch of sadness, that the games they played and loved as children are gone too.

I do not mourn the loss of text-adventure games; after all, I suspect that more text adventures are being crafted in the homes of indie game designers than ever were created back in the day. What I mourn is the loss of a way of life. Gamer culture has changed so much that a new Zork adventure game no longer would make sense to us. And we know it ourselves: one commenter said that he was “simply frustrated by the continuous ‘I do not understand that word’ type of comments, and not knowing what phrases are actually accepted by the game.”

I am fragmented inside. Part of who I am – my identity as a gamer – still lives in a world where my fingertips walked me through the Great Underground Empire like little feet in a vast geography. The GUE is world that lives only in my fingertips and my mind; the game itself is only a focus for my imagination. But it is the past, and I can only look back it over a great distance. 

Another part of me lives in the present. I walk in the Fallout 3 world by holding down the ‘W’ key. Every detail of that world – from the shapes of the mountains to the kinds of needles on the trees, has been provided for me. When I reach out to open a mailbox, I never fail. I hit the ‘E’ key. I cannot fail at opening the mailbox for a computer algorithm opens the mailbox for me. The mailbox opens without the help of my imagination.

Bridging the gap between these two estranged worlds requires something more than a translation of Zork for a new audience. It requires that we, as gamers, discover new ways of using our imaginations in a world that all but prevents us from doing so. It requires that we, as developers, discover ways of expressing subtlety and nuance using whatever tools we have. It requires that we, as an older generation, find common ground with younger gamers and share in new gaming experiences with them. The outrage levied at Legends of Zork is in many ways unfounded; it is a projection of anger stemming from our social anomie.

Until we locate those bridgeheads and begin building common experiences between them, I think that we will find ourselves constantly disappointed with anything new.

As the game loaded, Jeff said, “This is gonna be the biggest game of the year.”

He cranked up the speakers and blared metal synth midi music; the rest of the family in the other room yelled at us to keep it down. KABOOM! The first panicked shot from the shotgun exploded snargling imps into giblets.

“Over to your right! It’s coming! SHOOT!” we shrieked as another imp advanced on Jeff.

We had never played anything so fast before… all of us broke into a nervous sweat as the man in the hotseat explored the rest of the level. For the first time in our collected lives, we experienced terror playing a computer game.

My uncle picked up the phone and dialed the 1-800 number listed on the exit screen to purchase us a registered copy of the game. We had to have it.

Fast-forward over 16 years.

Yesterday, John Romero edited and posted a video of a trip that Dan Linton (sysop of The Software Creations BBS) took to id Software way back in 1993. The video features composer Bobby Prince giving a demo of some of his work (ie. Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3-D, etc), and John Romero playing an early version of Doom.

What I like the most about the video is that the folks over at id show so much passion and energy for their work. They love what they do, and they’re having fun doing it. There is something very familiar about watch Romero play Doom, as his friends and co-workers crowd around the monitor and express their enthusiasm. That kind of excitement and communal gawking is something I sorely miss now that games have become a much more individualized form of entertainment.

I highly recommend checking out the video for a blast to the past, even if you weren’t a Doom fan.

I’m not much for hyping up news, but I came across quite a few exciting stories this week. Because writing ‘feature articles’ is so darned difficult, I thought that an occasional ‘Artful Times’ newsletter might be a fun way to end the week

GDC ’09

The 2009 GDC begins next monday, and I’ll be there! If you’d like to get together for a lunch or coffee, please drop me a line. This is my first GDC and I plan to document the whole thing as well as do a handful of interviews while I’m there. I’ll post whatever I can here during the week!

Lovin’ Rhythm

Jamie Love posted a very enjoyable interview with japanese rhythm master Masaya Matsuura, otherwise recognized for his brilliant PaRappa the Rapper series that initiated the whole ‘rhythm game’ genre. Matsuura does not appear often in interviews, and his insights into Western (and japanese) gaming culture are poignant. In response to the idea that we, as gamers, tend to idolize certain characters and games from our past that are nonetheless exploited commercially in sequel after sequel; sacrificing our personal values for profit, he says:

We should talk about cultural values and proprietary values separately. Nowadays, nobody really has the idea that “Copies” are worse than the “Original” anymore. When I think about that, it is no wonder that new ways of thinking about possession will be eventually spreading and changing. When, for example, we have a million seller game, it is difficult for us to decide if there is only one main character, or a million of them, but for now we should appreciate that both assumptions can be held as valid.

I think companies and/or producers have a tough mission to bring imaginary characters to life both culturally and proprietarily. Also the imaginary character will doubtless become increasingly realistic and tangible in the near future. Then we will be forced to rethink how we treat them once again.

(Apologies for the news image – I couldn’t help myself)

New Bible Unearthed; Church of the Mushroom Cloud Believers Deny Existence

Over at the IDGA Game Preservation Mailing List, Elliot Davis mentioned that someone has posted a scan of the complete design document for the cancelled Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel 2 game. We all know that Brotherhood of Steel was a terrible followup to Fallout 1 and 2, but apparently BoS was only intended to cover the costs of the game engine. BoS 2 was the game that Interplay wanted to pursue – but filed for bankruptcy before production could begin. The design “Bible” reads like a D&D campaign manual and features a lot of previously unseen sketches and artwork consistent with the Fallout universe. I suggest getting it while it’s hot – who knows how long it’ll be before the nasty C&D letters are fired off.

“Ifnkovhgroghprm” actually means “Nikstlitselpmur”

AGDInteractive let me know that their amazing re-makes of King’s Quest I and King’s Quest II have been once again remade! The artists have went back to them and redrawn all of the background art at high resolution, and made improvements to the music and speech packs. (Not to mention that their website was re-designed and re-launched by the wonderful Eriq Chang). After investing thousands of hours in these projects, their efforts have finally been ‘rewarded’ and recognized by Activision (the company that swallowed up Vivendi & Sierra On-Line’s properties): in a newsletter AGDI said, “We were informed that Activision would honor our outstanding agreements with Vivendi by allowing us to finish our pending contractual projects, but that we will not be granted permission to start any new Sierra remakes in the future.” Bad news: we won’t see a King’s Quest IV or Quest for Glory remake. Good news: we’ll see Himalaya Studios work on their own original ideas and hopefully see a new adventure game in the next couple of years!

(and if you recognized the title of this news item, you’ve played too much King’s Quest)

A History of LucasArts – Thankfully not written by George Lucas

Although the book was released in December 08, I somehow missed it! Rob Smith, the editor of PlayStation magazine, writes the history of LucasArts and fills it with amazing (previously unseen!) production artwork and paintings. I have some strong attachments to LucasArts, despite their 10 year dive into obscurity. The years between Maniac Mansion and Grim Fandango punctuated some of the best gaming experiences of my adolescent and post-adolescent life. Even now, when I load up Loom and Sam and Max Hit the Road on my Nintendo DS (thank you ScummVM!) I am reminded that true mastery involves insight and constant revision. I’m looking forward to reading this book; if you have read it, please chime in with your (dis)recommendation. This seems like a nice coffee table book, especially with the glossy photos inside.

Home of the Underdogs Revived After Being Euthanized

And I wasn’t planning on announcing this for at least another two weeks, but my good friend gnome das Gnome’s Lair beat me to it After Sarinee, the old curator and creator of Home of the Underdogs (a site devoted to posting ye olde abandoned games) lost HoTU due to a mixture of disinterest and her web host dying, a few folks from the community decided to lend a hand and get it back up to speed. There are several ongoing revitalization projects, but the one that has caught my attention the most is HOTUD.org – a complete revision of the site using Joomla and community-driven content. The site is currently in an ‘alpha’ stage and you should not yet start posting reviews/content, but if you’re as excited as I am about the project, head over to the forum to keep an eye on the site development. We’ll let everyone know there when it’s ready to rock’n'roll.