Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

The year is 1893 and you are the aristocratic British explorer, Sir Percy. Life as a great explorer has its excitement of recovering precious gems and gold trinkets, but currently you are hopelessly lost in the middle of nothing but sand. You will need to avoid dangerous snakes and cliffs, and find water before dying of thirst.

Before embarking on today’s game, a more general question: how does historical context help us decide why certain games are designed the way they are?

The most obvious and common thing to look at is influences. Games with authors looking at Crowther/Woods Adventure copied specific elements, especially if that was the only game they had as a model. PLATO Adventure was an amalgam of both Adventure and Zork. The authors of Warp specifically wanted to outdo Zork and came up with a unique macro system. Some of the early home computer authors had exposure to Scott Adams but not Crowther/Woods, and the look of their games was influenced accordingly. Escape From Rungistan was written with Wizard and the Princess and Indiana Jones in mind. Japanese authors had Omotesando and Mystery House to look at, leading to Diamond Adventure being a combination of both.

Another element to consider is the technical conditions: what limitations did platforms, tools, and their own coding skills put on authors? The mainframe platform and modular programming made it easy to expand Crowther/Woods Adventure, or even make a brand new game treating the base code as an “engine”. Some early authors have games solely with or almost solely with exploration because they didn’t have the technical capability to be more complex. Bruce Robinson’s even-more-minimalist-than-minimalism style came from working with the unexpanded VIC-20 memory.

More subtly, we can look at motivations. Roberta Williams talked about the fascination of entering a world, wanting one that went on endlessly, which explains the size of Time Zone. Robert Lafore mentioned an interest in “using computers for literature” so had his free-typing system which encouraged the player to use punctuation like they were adding to a story. Roger Schrag cared about the intellectual challenge of coding so devised an elaborate first-person graphical view.

Alternately, we can look at environmental circumstances, or relatedly, financing. The college games (like Battlestar or Haunt) were designed while the students were around for an entire school year, using school resources, so they could afford to be large and sprawling and also include sexuality in a way commercial games couldn’t. The author to Transylvania had a game already done and was given nearly an entire year to work on art. The Mask of the Sun was made in a business with a professional framework where there wasn’t just an artist, but a team backing the artist.

The first three (influences, technical conditions, motivations) are nearly guaranteed to have some sort of effect; the last one (environment) is a little more up in the air. Imagine a 1982 UK coder who is writing an adventure from their house vs. the same coder in a parallel universe at the back of a computer store producing an adventure they know is for money. Will the game necessarily come out different? In this era it’s not like “beta testing” or checking for typos is guaranteed.

All this brings us to the unusual conditions behind Datasoft, 1980-1989, which mostly cranked out arcade games in the early 1980s, and where there’s a moderate chance their initial funding was via crime. Do either or both of these things affect the adventure game they produced in 1982?

Via the CoCopedia.

Let’s start with the crime, tracing specifically to the late 70s when companies were wanting computer chips with ever-increasing demand, and companies could not produce enough of them. Hence: an underground market.

In one business letter discovered at Space Age Metals, a Republic vice president told a Space Age official that he was amazed at the quantity and price of this product that was being offered, given their scarcity in the marketplace, but that he wanted to close the deal and was not stupid enough to ask any dumb questions.

— Hearings Before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs United States Senate Ninety-Seventh Congress Second Session, 1982

Specifically, this regards the 32-bit Eprom (“erasable programmable”), the Intel model 2732. Demand was enormous, and Siemens in West Germany, despite being a valuable customer, could only obtain 1000 of the chips a month.

Enter Jack Jackson, previously involved in less high-profile crime like bad checks and burglary, now in Silicon Valley circa 1979 working in “remarketed” devices. Most of the chip theft (90% according to Jackson) was done in the shipping process, but one particular job involved stealing directly from Intel’s manufacturing facility.

Jackson arranged with an inside man to have Intel make 10,000 extra of the chips, and have them erased from the records. The next step was to steal the new chips outright. There was 24-hour security, an alarm system, and closed-circuit television to deal with, so Jackson had a security guard, Albert Williams, nab the chips away using garbage bags and the liner of his leather jacket. These were then sold to Siemens for enormous profit. Jackson admits to getting cardboard boxes with $350,000 or $400,000 or more (but hard to say exactly, as no records were kept).

There couldn’t be a direct route from the theft to Siemens, so there was laundering:

Via Computerworld, 7 Sep 1981.

The chips first went through Jackson’s own distribution company, Dyno Electronics, over to a metal reclaimer named Space Age Metals. From there they went to two separate companies, Mormac Technology and Republic Electronics, before finally going to a distributor in West Germany and finally Siemens.

The way the whole arrangement was got, incidentally, was glorious. Siemens, not paying attention to what was legit and what was from the “grey market”, had complained to Intel about faulty chips; Intel soon realized after what had happened.

One of the people in the chain, of the consulting form Mormac Technology, was Pat Ketchum, founder of Data Soft.

He faced serious indictments himself, but the don’t-ask-questions method was sufficient for cover and prosecutors weren’t able to bring a case. Jackson tried to finger in particular a colleague of Ketchum’s, Terry Koosed, as having Mafia involvement, and having an operation on a 150-foot yacht to put counterfeit marks on the chips, but investigators turned up no evidence of such a ship existing and Jackson’s credibility was not high. Ketchum himself was accused by Jackson of selling some of the chips to middlemen who then traded on to the Soviet Union; again, keep some skepticism as this is based solely on Jackson, who already had racked up a fraud conviction even before going into the stolen chips market.

With that context in mind, let’s go to Ketchum discussing the founding of the company in an interview:

Actually, I was involved with a very successful distribution company called Unidata Investments. In 1980 Terry Koosed, Bill Morgan, and I tried to buy a software company, but Hayden Publishing ended up with it. We got so excited about what we learned, however, that we knew we wanted to be in this business. We were already into computer hardware with California Computer Systems. We were already into retailing and mail order with H.W. Computers. And we were already into integrated circuits. So at Unidata we had all the ingredients to diversify, and it was my task to organize the new software company DataSoft. We incorporated on June 12, 1980.

Terry Koosed, remember, was the second person indicted at Ketchum’s link in the chain. This feels a little like dirty money funding a more legit spin-off, or maybe ask-no-questions money. Either way, they focused mainly on arcade games, with a mixture of Tandy CoCo, Atari 400/800, and TRS-80 games. Two high sellers were Popcorn! in 1981 for the Tandy CoCo and Zaxxon in 1983 for the same machine, both written by Steve Bjork.

Bjork, one of the authors on Sands of Egypt, claimed that it was “the most costly” project Datasoft had done up to then, and took five months of work, between himself (direction) Ralph Burris (special effects) and James Garon (story). The interview neglects the mention of Frank Cohen, who is credited on the box as “Screen Play” — that is, he did the writing.

Arcade games also sell better because of impulse buying, the graphics, clever sounds and eye-catching title screens. “The Sands of Egypt” is a mixture of the graphics of an arcade game and the challenge of an Adventure.

So, returning to that question of if the environment this game was made in was relevant to the design, I would say at least the “arcade” identification is important: this was described by Bjork himself as infusing the arcade look into an adventure game.

The Tandy CoCo version of the game came first, followed by a Atari port (also in 1982) and finally an Apple version (in 1983). I tried all three of them. Here’s some of the animation from each.

The scrolling (with a background layer moving independently) is a standard arcade effect but not one we’ve seen yet with adventure graphics. The scrolling doesn’t entirely make sense. East and west causing the scroll to go right and left, sure, but north and south also have the same type of scroll, so it appears that south and west are going the same direction even when they aren’t.

The Apple II version does not have animated clouds, but rather puts an animated sandstorm front and center with the sky holding still. The port was by an entirely different person (Brian Mountford) who either decided the sandstorm was more realistic, or that the scrolling was hard to pull off with Apple II graphics.

At the very top of this post I referenced the plot: we’re a “gentlemen archaeologist” from the late 19th century who was trying to lead a dig in Egypt but was abandoned alone. If that sounds to you a bit like Infocom’s later game Infidel, yes it does, and it even keeps having a letter in the packaging which makes clear the main character is a bit of a jerk.

Being the author of nineteen critically acclaimed etiquette books, I was diligent in trying to teach the others proper digging methods and the proper way to keep their khakis starched.

Will it have the same type of Infocom ending? We’ll find out this week, I suppose. But first I need to decide: which version should I play? I won’t open this up to a formal vote, but you’re welcome to try to persuade me in the comments. The game is supposedly short enough I can probably do a replay on a different platform after winning anyway (akin to Rungistan).