Softline, May/June 1983.
When I wrote about Dragon’s Keep, I discussed an event called Applefest that happened in December of 1982. (If you haven’t read that post, I recommend reading it before this one.) The company Sunnyside Soft met Ken and Roberta Williams there, leading to Sierra buying them out and Al Lowe eventually going on to write the Leisure Suit Larry series.
There was another software company at Applefest I’d like to discuss today, one rather less famous: Mind Games. It’s completely understandable if you haven’t heard of them, because they only published one game.
Gil Beyda, David Wilkin, and Greg Segall. From Softalk January 1983.
Greg Segall and Gil Beyda were the founders. I’m not sure what David Wikin’s relationship is but he doesn’t get mentioned in a March 1983 Softline interview; I would guess he helped on the business side getting the crew to Applefest.
The Softline interview indicates that Segall and Beyda had met 8 years before (aged 11) at a Los Angeles Boy Scout troop; both were up for a “promotion” to a troop rank but the two decided to share the position rather than compete for it. They consequently became friends.
They joined the Beverly Hills computer club and did pranks with the DEC-1170 system (as the interview notes, it was one of the only high schools in the country with such a computer); they followed this with computer jobs at early ages, as Beyda got a job at a computer store at 15 (leading to contacts and consulting work on educational software) while Segall got a job at 14 working for Farmers Insurance (also helping Beyda with the consulting).
From Wikipedia.
In 1981 they got the urge to write a game. They wanted something “more complex” than a two-word parser while avoiding the “rigid conventions of the traditional adventure”. Quoting Segall:
Forget this North, South, East, West stuff; I just wanna go through the door!
They wanted multiple responses to commands that have “nothing to do with the adventure” and writing “like a pulp thriller”. Then as a “hook” they decided the game should be “the first adventure to have serious arcade-game levels”. Quoting Segall directly again:
You don’t want to do the obvious rip-offs — walk into an arcade and see what’s hot and copy it — but take an idea, or several ideas, and make a twist on them. So we put arcade games inside an adventure.
It started with Segall working on plot and design and Beyda doing the programming, but they ended up sometimes swapping responsibilities. The process took 11 months working out of their garage, and then they tried shopping it around to distributors with no takers. They decided to pool the rest of their money to get a booth at Applefest.
At Applefest there’s a story which intercrosses with the Dragon’s Keep one. Mind Games had “distributors” ask for copies of the game, who supposedly were told:
You sent back the one we gave you.
Going back to Dragon’s Keep, and the quote from Hackers about Ken Williams:
Ken tried to throw himself into the spirit of the show, and took Roberta, looking chic in designer jeans, high boots, and a black beret, on a quick tour of the displays. Ken was a natural schmoozer, and at almost every booth he was recognized and greeted warmly. He asked about half a dozen young programmers to come up to Oakhurst and get rich hacking for On-Line.
The adventure-game portions of The Desecration have a strong resemblance to Sierra in visual look. Given the prominence of Sierra in California, and the fact they recruited Sunnyside because of Dragon’s Keep being close in look to Sierra products, it seems almost guaranteed Mind Games was one of the companies that Ken Williams talked to; the exact “you sent back the one we gave you” line may have been spoken directly to him.
Mind Games has been Apple-oriented up to this point, but the company is now looking into Atari and Commodore systems to “see what they can be used for.”
“Programmers are coming to us, now. We give them their freedom because we want them to have the same freedom to create that we had.”
I’m not clear what caused this ambition to unravel, but this game is the only evidence I found of Mind Games publishing anything. Ads starting showing up in 1983.
We’ve seen mini-games before, but the ones here genuinely are more extensive than previous ones; the game is fully half arcade and half adventure. (The closest we’ve seen to that is Mad Martha from the UK, created roughly the same time as The Desecration.) The adventure and arcade sections alternate.
Our job is, according to the game, INTERGALACTIC ASSASSIN. Our assignment is to go to Pykron 9, part of the Pykro Corp. Mining Empire, and kill the chairman, Dunmark Pykro, as he has been “KNOWN TO HAVE AN EYE FOR EASY EXPANSION OF HIS CORPORATE EMPIRE.” Some of his “targets” have pooled money together to hire you for “your usual fee” of 10,000 galactic sovereigns.
Action continues directly after receiving the message.
The interview was fussy about games using NORTH, SOUTH, etc. for navigation, so as exact equivalents this game uses RIGHT, LEFT, FORWARDS, BACKWARDS (abbreviated to R, L, F, B). We’ve had authors thinking “but why compass directions” all the way back to Empire of the Over-Mind and Battlestar. As this game maps them as exact equivalents — you don’t have “relative directions” where entering a room from the opposite side means “forwards” is now “backwards” and so forth — I mentally just thought of them as the usual N/S/E/W.
The TRANSPORTER ROOM mentions transporter controls but as far as I can tell there is no way to examine them or refer to them other than KICK CONTROLS. This is equivalent to activating the transporter. Not a great start.
The opening is relatively short — you can make your way over to a ship, but when you try to sneak it you get caught and tossed in a jail.
It’s a laser door, there’s a mirror, and you can USE MIRROR to get out.
There’s a cell where the main character wonders if he should free the locked-up alien. This is what happens if you try.
LAUNCH SHIP is the right action to take off, leading to the arcade game. Before going there, I should point out two things:
a.) As I already alluded to, the parser is miserable; it seems to be completely not only location-bespoke but also looking for exact phrases. That is, it isn’t using a world-model as opposed to just hand-coding each individual scene; you can, for example, go back in the cell, and the mirror is back to where it was.
b.) The authors seem to have written their room descriptions with a particular sequence in mind, as you can turn south (I mean, “backwards”) instead of going straight to the field to find the cell area, and the description implies you are in the middle of making your escape from the cell (when you haven’t been thrown in yet).
Onto the arcade game!
This is, straightforwardly, horizontal Space Invaders. (So much about avoiding taking actual games from the arcade.) The screen above shows one of the vehicles already vaporized; you drop bombs and they shoot up at you while moving left to right. The start is the hardest as the screen is completely filled with projectiles, and as more enemies die while they move faster, there are gaps that you can sneak your spacecraft between. (If you’re playing on keyboard, note you can double-press to scoot over faster. I think the original intended control was paddle.) Here’s Highretrogamelord attempting to get through:
Note that both this walkthrough and the one from AppleAdventures give up at this mini-game, and both imply they somehow give a complete walkthrough of the adventure portion.
You have to not only kill all the enemies once, but twice. It is definitely a pain but it is possible to get a rhythm in after surviving the initial volley. You can die twice and still continue before hitting a game over.
Why did both video walkthroughs cut off there assuming they had seen the entire game? Well, it starts with a menu where you can choose the three mini-games to play individually. I’m guessing they thought there were four discrete sections, adventure-arcade-arcade-arcade, and not an alternating arrangement where if you pick “adventure” you get the “full game” with the arcade games interspersed in a longer experience.
Even I originally thought this might be four separate games where the adventure game is only at the start.
So with the enemies defeated, we can move on to the Dome City wherein our target awaits.
I added the second shot here to show off more of the writing, where they were aiming for “pulp”. It has the feel and quality of written-by-teenager but I appreciate the effort in giving the main character some attitude, which was not common in 1982.
Our inventory has an I.D. card for getting into the dome, but also, weirdly, a TECH GUN, SECRETARY, ALARM, AND ROBOT PATROL. I assume that’s a bug (it may be a cracking-the-disk bug rather than an “authentic” bug).
Heading down from here leads to a STEEL DOOR with a keyboard which I don’t have a password for yet. However, ahead there are doors where the I.D. card can be used to enter the main complex.
To the left (west, whatever), there’s a person with a “purse” you can steal in order to get some food from a supermarket…
…a breathing apparatus lying about a storage room…
…and PYKRO’S ROBOT DOUBLE. I am unable to interact with it in any way.
To the right (east) is a sleeping police officer and some lockers, which are describing as holding STUFF THAT BELONGS TO THE INMATES. Again, the game’s writing assumes a particular sequence, as it says I BET MY STUFF IS IN HERE SOMEWHERE.
To become an inmate, you go back to the main doors and head forward (north). There is a INFORMANT MEETING PLACE but this person is not the correct informant, so if you try to SMILE as the message at the start of the game suggests, you get arrested.
No progress here, and no luck applying any verbs to the mattress.
If you bypass the first “informant” and head north, there’s a second one talking in an alien language. That’s the real informant, and if you SMILE you get some KEYS.
Past that is a robot guard, and it implies there’s something past the guard, but I have (again) yet to get any verb I’ve tried so far to work.
Almost nostalgic for that dodgy Dark Star parser after playing this for a while. I’ll still keep persisting, for if nothing else, two adventure-walkthrough-makers have already made an attempt and fallen.
Renga in Blue 
Putting “the only adventurcade” on your adverts hardly seems like the best idea.
These guys do seem to have fallen off the face of the earth after this game and their new company didn’t exactly light the world on fire, but I did find one funny earlier reference that syncs up well with their origin story. In the October, 1979 issue of the well-known Japanese computer magazine Gekkan Micom, there’s an article where they had a correspondant visit all of the computer stores in the Los Angeles area to see what they were up to, and one of them was Computers are Fun, near UCLA. Amongst the 6 person staff, and listed as being in charge of sales, distribution and management, was one Gil Beyda. Not a bad gig for a 16 year old!
nice catch! page link
https://archive.org/details/micom-1979-10/page/114/mode/2up
Interesting use of the term “arse in gear” in the screenshot. I arrogantly thought that was a distinctly Brit phrase, not one to be found in 1980s California.
There’s a fairly good chance that someone nerdy and techy enough to be in this business would have been familiar with British scifi and comedy such as Doctor Who, Monty Python, and Hitchhiker’s Guide.
“Get your ass in gear” is a perfectly acceptable phrase of American English, which shows up in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead in 1948. (AFAICT this is the first chronological occurrence in the Internet Archive.) It’s “arse” that makes it British–I’d have said that no American would spell it that way, but I guess these guys did.
(Oddly, the first occurrence of “arse in gear” in the Archive appears to be in The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle [1974]. And those guys are American. The character who said it says “bloody” in the previous sentence so I guess he’s supposed to be Future British. Next two occurrences are by Giles Tippette, who was a lifelong Texan according to some totally random website, and in Williwaw by P. S. Moore, who was Canadian. Go figure.)
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@matt w yes, I understand that “arse” instead of “ass” is the point of interest here. I’m saying that they might have picked the word up through British media. I’m not old enough to have been making computer games in 1982, but in 1992 I was definitely using words like “arse” and “bloody” and similar Britishisms because the Doctor Who/Red Dwarf/HHG/Monty Python/etc. pack was de rigeur among the nerds/geeks in my peer group at the time. So I think it’s quite likely the same could be true here.
Gotcha, and that does seem likely. I wasn’t quite old enough to be making computer games in 1982 but was only a few years younger than these guys and it certainly was normal to think that British automatically equaled funny.
“if you SMILE you get some KEYS” – I like to imagine Sam Barlow totally stole that when he wrote Aisle.