Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

A bicycle can get you from New York to LA, so will a jet plane. In one sense they are the exact same thing; in another they are nothing alike. In one sense we are working within traditional genres — mystery, fantasy, science fiction — and in another we are still teaching ourselves, laying out the groundwork for what these things could be. For the most part, we are working without pioneers. In our own way we are like Louis L’Amour or Agatha Christie or Dashiell Hammett.

— Michael Berlyn, from the 1984 article Masters of the Game

The Boston Computer Society (founded by Johnathan Rotenberg) has briefly shown up here in regard to Tim Quinlan, and the company Mad Hatter Software which had published the game Sleuth right before disappearing. Rotenberg himself describes the early days of the group as “a fairly obscure computer group” even up to 1982, when their membership was north of 4,000. While famous amongst computer insiders, enough so that Jobs offered Rotenberg a job in 1981 (he declined, wanting to finish college) that didn’t mean recognition amongst the general public. 1982 was when that would change.

Their big event of the year was Applefest, the East Coast equivalent to Applefest in California.

Picture of 1982 Boston Applefest, From Facebook. The balloon was attached to the ground but people could ride up a couple feet and get an Apple balloon pin.

1982 had Jobs and Wozniak themselves as keynote speakers. The BCS publication Computer Update quoted one attendee that

I kind of expected them to come out in white robes.

indicating religious fervor. The audience was standing-room only.

Software had a strong reception, with games especially doing well on Saturday when many children were in attendance. Sir-Tech, which had debuted Wizardry in 1980, had come back with the just-completed sequel Knight of Diamonds in tow.

Via The Boston Phoenix 11 May 1982.

This time, a feature landed in the Wall Street Journal in October, featuring the “whiz kid” Jonathan Rotenberg, and suddenly Boston Applefest was mainstream.

Somehow, I hit the “tipping point” in October and was besieged by press from all over the world…including BusinessWeek, People, Time, Sports Illustrated, CBS News, numerous magazines and talk shows, and even the National Enquirer (which threatened to “stake me out” if I didn’t cooperate with them).

Just like California Applefest was a source of backroom deals (leading to Al Lowe starting with Sierra, for instance) this could happen on the East Coast as well; this is where Marc Blank of Infocom and Michael Berlyn first met. This was before Zork III came out, so Infocom was still fresh off the thunderbolt of Deadline. Marc enjoyed the technical challenge, but he did the story as well, as it was simply standard that the entire work be done by one person; however, as he stated in a later interview, he “always loved the idea that someone who’s more talented than I am in writing could take this and do something that’s really much better than I could do.”

So the idea for me was really just experimenting with another style of telling, of having the story evolve, a different interface just to see where it would go. And to me that was more important than the story.

While Michael Berlyn’s novels were not considered Pulitzer-worthy or Hugo-worthy, he was a “real author” who also had adventure experience with his works Oo-Topos and Cyborg. Berlyn’s weak spot was his hand-written BASIC source code, so the Infocom’s parser and overarching world system would let him create a next-level product. The pair struck a deal; originally Michael intended to stay in Colorado, but the difficulty of working with ZIL remotely meant he and his wife Muffy moved to Boston a month later.

The mention of Muffy is important in that she already helped with Oo-topos and Cyborg and apparently contributed “significantly” to Suspended. (Eventually, the fact she couldn’t be hired officially — there was a policy against family member hires at Infocom — led to Michael Berlyn leaving, but that’s a bit farther along in the story.)

The structure of Deadline was a good place to start from, as Blank had already done hard work in establishing a complex system of NPCs, really more complex than any other product on the market at the time (The Hobbit would be an exception, except it wasn’t out yet). Berlyn had already experimented in Cyborg with having the player merged with a character in the world. Expanding the idea from Cyborg led to a game where the player awakens from cryofreeze and can only see, hear, and interact with the world via multiple robots. The object-oriented nature of Infocom’s ZIL system meant the Deadline NPCs could be adapted easily to become PCs for the player to jump into instead.

…it was his story and I did some of the tools, the technology that he needed to get all the robots moving around like they were on tracks.

The resulting product, originally titled Suspension, eventually landed on the moniker Suspended.

My own copy of the game, from Michael Berlyn’s garage. This version’s on 8-inch disk for the NEC APC. I got it back in 1998 as a prize in IFComp.

Just like Starcross, the packaging is (in)famous amongst collecting circles for being highly elaborate with a facemask and a fold-open map with figures representing the locations of six robots. The map is extremely important as the game is wildly unusual for Infocom, or really, adventures as a whole: there is no standard exploration. You are given the entire map at the start, but without details as far as what you can find where, just names of places. The overall feel is akin to one of the strategy games from the time that came with a board where the player was intended to move pieces around based on the computer’s instructions. Compare with, for example, Chris Crawford’s Tanktics, originally developed on a KIM-1 with a six-character display (just like Kim-Venture).

Part of the chart for the Commodore PET version of Tanktics, from Data Driven Gamer.

There’s even multiple difficulty levels to add to the strategy game feel, but I would still call Suspended a full adventure at heart. (Although I wouldn’t object if The Wargaming Scribe tried the game out just for fun!)

Starting positions of five of the six main robots.

I incidentally found moving the real pieces on a real board (see picture above) to be a pain — again similar to a wargame setup, it requires a flat surface to be handy near your computer, which I don’t have — so I made a Figma page to work with instead. I may re-scan the map image later but it works for now.

My normal next step would be to collect and read all the documents that come with the game, but I hit one other curious snag. There’s a “memo” that’s in my version of the game I wasn’t finding elsewhere.

It mentions specifically that cables need to be changed with the syntax REPLACE (cable in groove) WITH (cable a robot is holding), and that erratic behavior may manifest itself in a “crash”. Does it mean a literal game crash? This feels out of character for Infocom, who I think are more likely to fix a bug rather than go through the effort of printing an entire extra piece of documentation to cover over a problem. The reference to the sixteen-inch cable being broken also seems more like a hint than a bug aspect.

I crowdsourced this over to Bluesky and Mastodon. Chris Kohler found a “facemask” version of the game on eBay had the memo; I had confirmation from Andrew Plotkin their early copy did not have the memo. I’ll need to investigate this further, but I’m playing a later release first (Release 8 / Serial number 840521) and then will check earlier release for bugs. Unfortunately I do not have a 8-inch disk drive in order to extract the data file I have so I can’t tell exactly which release it is.

Everything else you can find at the Infocom documentation project or the nine versions of Suspended up at the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History (one which has the memo).

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History.

It is the far future: the planet Contra has been terraformed with settlers from Earth. They have conquered their world and live in a highly controlled environment: perfect weather, perfect growing of food.

Rather like the story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, there is a dark side to this, in that the system running the planet needs a human in stasis. The human is “put under” for 500 years but some aspect of their brain is enough to support the systems for that long; if everything goes well, they are awoken after 500 years and the cycle is renewed, with a “recruit” gathered from a planetary lottery.

In Suspended, you have won the planetary lottery.

You should only awake in the case of an emergency, which the manual emphatically explains, won’t happen. This is despite a previous disaster involving “the Gregory Franklin incident”.

Gregory Franklin was awoken after 467 years, but there was no emergency, so he decided to create one:

Overriding the three Filtering Computers, he directed the transportation systems to kill whoever happened to be walking outside or riding on any of the glide ramps. Psychologists believe that he must have possessed a twisted sense of humor–to have people maimed, run over, chased by robot-taxis provided him with pleasure for the moment. However, he soon tired of this and decided to eliminate a larger section of the population in a far easier manner.

Ever since weather had been controlled, dwellings had not been designed to withstand snow and sleet. Franklin altered the pressure in the Weather Towers near the cities, setting off raging storms and creating freezing temperatures. Thousands perished from exposure; thousands more became popsicles.

The upshot is that anything that seems to go awry means that you might find yourself replaced with a “clone”.

FC ALERT! Planetside systems are deteriorating. FC imbalance detected. Emergency reviving systems completed. You are now in control of the complex.

SENSA INTERRUPT: Seismic aftershock detected ten meters north of Beta FC. Tremor intensity 9.7. Projected damage: connecting cables in Primary and Secondary Channels.

FC INTERRUPT: All Robots, report locations.

IRIS: In the Weather Monitors.
WALDO: In the Gamma Repair.
SENSA: In the Central Chamber.
AUDA: In the Entry Area.
POET: In the Central Chamber.
WHIZ: In the Advisory Peripheral.

This is from the game itself. The manual includes special commands…

REPORT LOCATION
ARR (all robots report)
ARL (all robots report locations)
QUERY ABOUT (used for)
ALL ROBOTS, (do something)
DRAG (robot) TO
BOTH (robot) and (robot), (do something)

…but for the most part, your command is in the format ROBOT, DO THING. If you are using a particular robot, you can skip the “ROBOT” preface.

Robots all have individual abilities. Iris, the “visual robot” who can see, starts out nonfunctional. I don’t know the exact boundaries but Iris cannot move about the whole facility.

>IRIS, GO WEST
FC: Cryolink already established to Iris.
Internal map reference — Main Supply Room
Visual function nonfunctional.

Auda is the robot that can hear, although it starts at the northern part of the map.

>w
Internal map reference — Decontamination Chamber
A small hissing can be detected overhead, as if a small port leaked a semi-liquid compound.

>w
Internal map reference — Sterilization Chamber
A loud whirring noise can be detected from the west.
A small plaque makes tinging noises here.

Notice that the plaque might say something, but since Auda can only hear we don’t know (yet) what it says.

Waldo is a “grasping robot” with six arms, sonar, and a well-developed sense of touch.

WALDO: Internal map reference — Gamma Repair
I have reached the south end of this area. The walkway ends here.
The walkway is not in motion.
A large object sits before me. Sonar indicates it is hollow, but not empty.

Whiz is a robot restricted to the “Central Core” that can make queries, and is sort of an encyclopedia. I haven’t tried searching through entries yet.

>whiz, look
FC: Cryolink established to Whiz.
WHIZ: Internal map reference — Advisory Peripheral
CLC tagged object indicates it is the Advisory pedestal before me.

>whiz, plug in
FC: Cryolink already established to Whiz.
It’s great to be home. Plugged in to the Advisory Pedestal. Ready to process queries.

Poet and Sensa start in the same place, the “Central Chamber” (right next to Aura). Poet is a “diagnostic robot” who can activate its sensor with the TOUCH command, but has a cryptic style of speaking.

>POET, WEST
FC: Cryolink established to Poet.
POET: Internal map reference — Weather Monitors
They puff and billow and strain a bit, roar then ebb with time.
In the room with me is Iris.

>TOUCH IRIS
Sensory pads detect no abnormal flow.

>EAST
Internal map reference — Central Chamber
It hops and skips and leaves a bit, and can’t decide if it should quit. It tells the world what it should know, but doesn’t know when it’s been shown.
In the room with me is Sensa.

Sensa has a mixture of operations and “can detect vibrational activity, photon emission sources and ionic discharges”; Sensa also has appendages like Waldo.

>SENSA, LOOK
FC: Cryolink established to Sensa.
SENSA: Internal map reference — Central Chamber
All around me charges flow, shaped by the very nature of this room. The electrons are being channeled into an electrical column, central to this environment.
In the room with me is Poet.

That’s six robots; there’s a seventh the manual mentions that was put out of service by Franklin (and will become important later).

I use the phrasing “and will” because: yes, I have played and beaten this game before. Like Zork III, it was quite a while ago, and I don’t remember much, but I do know where the seventh robot is and what I thought at the time was a highly unfair command to get to it. (Now that I have a full manual, I see it’s listed in the manual; I played the Lost Treasures of Infocom version which I’m pretty sure did not give this game’s “special commands”.) I remember that at some point humans arrive, presumably thinking another Franklin incident is happening; I also remember there’s an acid drip somewhere that’s a pain (that is, if you roll a robot through a particular room they’ll become disabled). Other than that I’m pretty memory-free, other than I enjoyed the game quite a lot.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. I’ll give the layout of the complex (as far as I can figure) in my next update. In the meantime for anyone who wants to skip ahead, you can check Jimmy Maher, Drew Cook, and Aaron Reed, all who have their own takes on the game. Also, thanks to Jonathan Rotenberg for sharing some documentation about Applefest 1982.