Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Alfred Milgrom, Australian Business Review Weekly, Feb. 1984.

The early 1970s were some of the most tumultuous years in Australian politics. The Australian Labor Party, defeated since 1949, finally regained power in 1972. Gough Whitlam took the spot of Prime Minister, running on an agenda of progressive reforms and a slogan of It’s Time.

In that span, amongst other things:

• The last Australians returned from the Vietnam War in December 1972, the same month Whitlam took office
• The Health Insurance Bill was proposed in 1973 and passed in 1974, giving universal health insurance
• An Aboriginal Land Fund was created
• There was a significant increase in the education budget, and college school fees were abolished in 1974 (this one didn’t last, University fees came back in 1989)
• The “White Australia” policy favoring Europeans for immigration was ended

Due to complex reasons including budgetary stalemate, in December of 1975 Governor-General Sir John Kerr terminated Gough Whitlam’s appointment, explaining that he has the power to do so under section 64 of the Constitution. (This is as wildly abnormal as it sounds, and constitutional scholars are unclear if the move was even legal.) Labor lost the election that followed, and while Whitlam maintained party leadership, he eventually lost that too in 1977 and resigned.

In the middle of these progressive years, 1973, Outback Press was founded.

There would be whole years when no one would publish a single Australian novel … No one was publishing, so we decided, in the pub, there were four of us.

— Morry Schwartz

From left to right, Colin Talbot, Alfred Milgrom, Morry Schwartz, Mark Gillespie. Photograph taken by Carol Jerrems.

The quartet above formed the leadership aiming for a young market. Quoting the writer Colin Talbot from a contemporary account:

The books we plan to publish will rely heavily on fiction, on poetry, on large format graphic and photographic works, sociojournalistic studies, that higher consciousness stuff, but not ecology. We will be relying on offset printing, eye-grabbing graphics and unconventional typography. The new journalism is one of our strong things.

They set up offices in what Morry Schwartz calls a “barn of place” that was “previously a junk shop for used plumbing fitments”. Three of the four — excluding Milgrom — moved in and “in between incessant debate, chess play-offs and live rock practice, some publishing actually happened.” It helped that they started the same time as the Whitman government was in full swing, as part of their educational push they established grants in literature, giving Outback Press $5000.

They managed to get some significant poetry, plays, and art photography books, although rather infamously the print quality was low and the books now are known to fall apart; however, keep in mind this was a time when Australian publishing was still being built from very little.

Part of the issue was the Traditional Market Agreement, which essentially gave Britain stewardship of the Australian market. If a British publisher got rights from an American publisher they immediately got the Australian rights by default. This understandably upset Australian publishers who in 1976 — via an anti-trust case in the United States — forced the agreement to be abandoned.

Outback saw this as an opportunity to get American authors, and while they had luck with some titles, on a trip of Milgrom’s he found that the publishers were still reluctant to sell to an Australian market without a British market attached; the Traditional Market Agreement, no longer law, held in spirit.

This led him to decide, if what publishers wanted was a British publishing company, he needed to make one; that way he could get American rights for both markets. Once finishing his work for Outback he moved with to London his wife Naomi Besen to form Melbourne House.

Speaking of Naomi Besen, now known as Naomi Milgrom (current job, billionaire philanthropist), despite being brought up in a rich family she always had a progressive bent, studying language and education in college and spending the three years before moving to London teaching language to autistic and schizophrenic children. Prior to the 70s, education to disabled children in Australia was not considered a right, and it wasn’t until ’73-’74 (Whitlam administration, again) that government funds started to be put towards precisely this issue. This means both directors of Melbourne House were involved in cutting-edge progressive causes immediately before founding their new company.

1980s photo of Naomi Besen. Source.

The selection of Melbourne House varied widely, with everything from the The Complete Book of Walking (by exercise expert Dr. Charles Kuntzleman) to the Commies-in-the-Vatican novel The Last Conclave (by the exorcist Malachi Martin).

From a later paperback edition.

The co-directors had interest in computers — Alfred even had supercomputer and mainframe experience from his college days — and they formed an offshoot company, Beam Software, in 1979. This is contrary to a date of 1980 you may have seen elsewhere but 1980 is when they were founded in Australia; the initial Beam Software was London-based, and you can see some of their catalog from this August 1980 ad:

Note their sales of “Adventure”: specifically, they offered the Scott Adams games up through Pyramid of Doom, selling for TRS-80, Apple II, Commodore Pet, and Exidy Sorcerer.

ADVENTURE by Scott Adams is incredibly complex, detailed and fascinating. It is like no other program you have ever seen! Defeat exotic wild animals to get treasures, or work out how to get out of a quicksand bog. You can communicate through two-word commands such as ‘go south’, ‘climb tree’, ‘throw ax’, ‘look around’, etc.

Unlike most available games ADVENTURE is full of surprises. It may take you more than an hour to ‘find a treasure’ and will probably take days or weeks of playing to get a good ‘score’.

This same ad also contains, importantly, their first original product. Milgrom had read an article in the Australian newspaper Financial Review mentioning a need for books for home computers users, so Milgrom went on to write 30 Programs for the Sinclair ZX80. The launch of the book coincided with him and his wife moving back from London, starting the (always planned) Australian versions of their two companies.

I should emphasize — for anyone thinking of Milgrom as “just” a publisher — that the ZX80 book has some very technical stunts, like a version of Gomoku that manages to wrangle 1k of memory by using the screen itself as memory storage and requiring the user to POKE memory locations outside of the regular type-in. Programming technical proficiency became a signature of Melbourne House and it was only years later that they hired a “designer” that was a non-programmer.

Speaking of hiring programmers, Milgrom made his first hire in December 1980, William Tang. They had no office at the time and the ZX80 was so low on capability their first program was sketched out on paper.

Source.

ZX80 doesn’t even do machine language by default so hacky methods (detailed in the ZX80 book) had to be used in order to do input. The first Melbourne House tape — a ZX80 version of Space Invaders — came out in February 1981, just in time for the ZX81 to drop and make all the retailers want to wipe the slate clean.

Melbourne House incidentally ran into some difficulty with the Beam Software name as well, clashing with another company. From Personal Computer World, December 1980:

As you may be aware, we advertised in the August issue of PCW, offering software and books under the name Beam Software.

Our advertisement attracted not only useful business but an objection from Beam Office Equipment who have established extensive trademarks and other rights in the Beam name.

As you know, we have discontinued use of the name Beam Software, and apologised to Beam Office Equipment for the inadvertent infringement of their right.

We will be continuing our business in software and books under our registered name, Melbourne House Publishers.

This was eventually smoothed over as Beam Software started to be used in Melbourne House products, but one certainly gets the impression there was hardscrabble chaos and Melbourne House made their finances work purely with their book sales. Even that aspect was in danger at the transition from ZX80 to ZX81 in early 1981 as the ZX80 book suffered the same fate as the ZX80 tape, and the only reason the company hung on is that the US version of the ZX81 wasn’t out yet; Melbourne House kept selling the US version of their book, giving enough time for Melbourne House to produce a ZX81 edition.

Despite this, there must have been some starry optimism, as Beam Software — according to their archived company web page — got the rights to The Hobbit in 1980.

The Hobbit was always the project I wanted to do. I think it is the premier fantasy adventure in British literature and that’s why we went for it. We had some contingency plans if the Tolkien Estate could not give us permission to do it, but luckily they were delighted with the idea.

— Milgrom in 1982

Space Invaders obviously isn’t The Hobbit, but it was clearly what was in mind when Melbourne House started advertising for a programmer at the University of Melbourne. Veronika Megler, a computer science student in her last year, responded and brought her friend Philip Mitchell on board; they became hires number 2 and 3 after Tang.

Veronica Megler in 1983. Source.

Another hire on the project, Stuart Ritchie, was to specifically focus on semantics: As Veronica notes in an interview:

Alfred’s dream was to provide a natural language interface, and he hired Stuart, who was a language expert, to figure out how to do that.

That’s a team of four, and that’s what gets stated in the 1984 book titled Guide to Playing the Hobbit…

The program was written as a group effort by Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler, with Alfred Milgrom and Stuart Ritchie over a period of 18 months.

…as well as an interview with Milgrom made right at the game’s release, where he refers to the “four of us” making the game. I’m emphasizing this point clearly because I have seen elsewhere a.) just crediting Philip Mitchell as “writing the Hobbit” b.) just crediting Megler and Mitchell.

Milgrom’s directive was to write the best text adventure ever.

We looked at ordinary adventure games and decided that we wanted to do something that would gо further and really stretch micros to the limit.

The micro in question they were using was a TRS-80 (the ZX81 clearly not being up to the task at hand, and the TRS-80 being the original home of the Scott Adams games that Beam Software briefly was a reseller of). It was written entirely in machine code — remember, all four of them were quite technical — and as Mitchell notes, by the time the ZX Spectrum came out (early 1982) they had done enough development to have a “basic TRS-80 version”; since both machines were Z80 based it was possible to port machine code from one to the other.

Megler designed the overarching structure of the game, selecting locations and designing the characters as well as the underlying artificial intelligence engine behind them. Philip worked on the overall engine as well as screen interface, while Ritchie worked on the parser.

We were very fortunate to have the services of Stuart Ritchie who developed what he calls his Inglish program. Stuart did a dual major in English Linguistics and Computer Science so he was really the ideal person to do it.

(I’m curious if the other language expert of the company — co-director Naomi Besen with experience in teaching language to autistic people — had any input into this, but she isn’t mentioned in any of the materials.)

There’s other materials out there on the history, and I haven’t gotten into the bizarro existence of Arkenstone, but I’m going to leave that behind all for now and get into the game itself. It launched to a spectacular reception, spreading from the original ZX Spectrum version to many other computers, and sold copies in the hundreds of thousands. There are numerous testimonials about this game forming core memories, so I was looking forward to finally popping it open, but the question arose: which version to play with?

I could use version 1.0, as the Data Driven Gamer did, but that version is allegedly quite buggy; a version 1.2 works a bit better, and if I go far enough along there’s Apple II and Macintosh versions with lengthier text. A shot from the admittedly lovely Macintosh port:

Original text: “You are in a comfortable tunnel like hall”. I’m keeping this version as a backup.

The other issue, other than bugs and changing text, is that of graphics. The early ZX Spectrum versions have art — part of the whole point of switching from TRS-80 — although the art was re-worked later.

Something about the ZX Spectrum version made me quite uncomfortable to play, and as I’ve written about before with Demon’s Forge, I don’t always feel obliged to play the earliest version of a game. Especially here, based on the timeline, many people played one of the later ports (either 1.2 ZX Spectrum or a different platform). I did worry the augmented text may have been a step too far, but I found a port that had both the original text and the new art: the MSX version.

Mind you, I was still a bit uncomfortable playing, and you’ll see why in a moment. The premise has us as Bilbo Baggins, where Gandalf the wizard and the dwarf Thorin accompanying us on a quest whilst following a “curious map”, on the way to get the dwarf treasure from the dragon Smaug. Notice: only one (1) dwarf. Understandable.

The opening room has a wooden chest. Trying to open it, examine it, or search it reveals nothing. I have no idea what the chest is about. The curious map is similarly unrevealing, where trying to read it just shows curious symbols. Trying to talk to either Gandalf or Thorin generally leads to no response or “No.” Gandalf in particular starts wandering on his own with on apparent rhyme or reason, and while Thorin follows me, I have yet to get him to do anything helpful. The closest I was able to do in terms of interaction was (following the manual) give the command SAY TO GANDALF (or THORIN) “READ MAP” but neither one has anything useful to say, as they can’t read the symbols either.

The manual comes with a verb list…

…but none of them seem specific to character conversation. I admit perhaps being a bit spoiled by the setup of Deadline, with a host of autonomous characters that you can talk to and will react to most every normal action. Here the characters seem a little more abstract, kind of like mobs in a MUD, but the intent seems to be to have characters that respond to commands but not to conversation. Deadline’s characters tended to the opposite, responding to conversation but not commands.

The map has the same “geographic jumping” as Arkenstone, but is more mixed:

That is, the spans are unequal between jumps; getting to Rivendell (see above) is just a matter of going EAST and then SOUTHEAST, but other times a single “step” is more like a traditional adventure. I also don’t understand how (on the map above) NORTH and EAST from the Lonelands lead to the troll clearing while NORTHEAST leads to a new area. (If nothing else, if you’re planning to have raw beginners play the game as Helen Stucky did with a museum exhibit, this aspect is bound to be confusing.)

Inevitably, with either route, you start by coming by a troll which has a key you need:

If you linger here, or head back in while the troll is still around, the troll will kill you. The idea here is — following the book — noting that this game has time pass (you’ll see the sun rise/set) so if you leave and come back not long after the trolls will now be stone.

Fortunately the key itself does not turn to stone, and you can head north over to a troll lair and unlock it.

The lair has a “strong short sword” and a “rope” that seem like they’ll be useful. With the troll area done we can go back past the troll to Rivendell, where Elrond hands over some lunch but I’m otherwise unable to make conversation.

Surely there’s some actions that work? Otherwise he feels like a prop here.

Past this the game suddenly switches to traditionalist mode with what is more or less a regular maze. I had to drop items to map it out properly.

There’s a “narrow path” that eventually leads to a “steep zig-zag” where at the end there’s a “deep misty valley” with a golden key, but the only exit I could find goes back to the narrow path.

I assume I’m missing an exit although I’ve combed over twice already. Maybe there’s some character that needs to be at a particular spot at a particular time. Gandalf still acts erratically; here he is grabbing the large key I had (which unlocked the troll lair) and asking “what’s this?”, a question I have no way of answering.

I have a feeling I’m dealing with very different norms than traditional adventure gameplay and I’ll need to puzzle out things like a.) are there hidden secrets in random spots? b.) do the characters give mention of these spots? c.) even though it seems like the characters act at random, is there anything useful they can do?

For now, please no hints whatsoever! Two more Mac pictures to close things out for now:

Not every room in the ZX Spectrum (and the corresponding room in the MSX version) is illustrated, but the Macintosh version has pictures everywhere.

The extra text may serve to make the game harder, not easier; there’s no reference to a Homely House in the MSX game, and it can’t be referred to in either version.