Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

But as far as I was concerned, computers were business machines. They weren’t fun machines. You do things with them that you need. I certainly did not realize that there is such a relatively large segment of the population that has the computer only or mostly for pleasure.

— Fred Sirotech, president of Sir-Tech

Sir-Tech’s story is now well covered in many sources; I recommend Jimmy Maher’s essay or the transcript of They Create Worlds Episode 114 for anyone who wants the details going back to the Sirotecks fleeing from Communist Czechoslovakia. I’m going to give a briefer version as I have a focus different from the usual (the Wizardry series which would revolutionize gaming in both the US and Japan).

By the 1970s, Fred Sirotek was in multiple businesses in Canada, including manufacturing collectible spoons; he ended up investing with Janice Woodhead in New York, who had a resin company (the main components of said spoons).

Janice had a son (Robert Woodhead) who had a fascination with programming kicked off by a chance copy of Ahl’s 101 Basic Computer Games, but he had no computer at the time (nor access to time-sharing) so did “paper programming” using a device called the CARDIAC.

From Brian Stuart.

He eventually got access to the Dartmouth Time Sharing system, and finally went to college at Cornell which had access to the PLATO system, allowing him to leap from text-only games into graphics. The PLATO system was addicting enough he spent many more hours playing than studying, to the detriment of his grades. Simultaneously, he was working at a Computer Land to help pay tuition, which sold Apple IIs which he admired but were far past his price point.

That was when they were 4K. I remember a customer who had 12K in his machine and we all thought he was nuts. He could actually run hi-res graphics. We looked at them and said, ‘Enh, so what, good grief, lo-res is much better; more colors.’ We couldn’t see what you could do with hi-res. We weren’t ready for the potential of the machine.

He ended up going to a Radio Shack to obtain a TRS-80 instead, which directly led to him being fired by the Computer Land (as now he was using the hardware of a “competitor”).

Fred Sirotek and Janice Woodhead had the issue that the price for the raw materials involved kept changing price every week and constantly needed recalculation. Robert was asked to make a program to help; Fred bought one of the very expensive Apple IIs that Robert had been pining after to do production on. The program was eventually polished into Info-Tree and first showcased at the Trenton Computer Festival, April 1979.

Scenes from Trenton, via Creative Computing.

Norman Sirotek drove Robert up to the event, and ended up interested enough in the computers at the show that he suggested working together as business partners. They founded a new company, Siro-tech, with capital provided by Fred. Norman at first worked on the weekends before becoming the director of finance and administration full-time. Norman’s brother, Robert Sirotek, joined not long after with a focus on marketing.

Robert Woodhead started work in 1979 on Galactic Attack, copying ideas from the PLATO game Empire. Empire has a lot of name-clashes, so to be clear, this one is a multi-player game by John Daleske and Silas Warner involving Romulans, Kazari, Federation, and Orions doing battle in a manner similar to the mainframe game Star Trek; the first version was from 1973, and multiple variations through the 70s added features, so it was up to Empire IV by the time Woodhead started work.

There was the catch that Woodhead wrote the game in Apple Pascal, and by the time Robert finished the game in 1980 a promised method (via Apple) of running Pascal on standard 48K Apple IIs had not yet surfaced; an extra memory expansion would have been needed, meaning it needed temporarily to be put on ice. Robert embarked then on another game called Paladin (also in Pascal) based again on a PLATO system game, this time the first-person RPG Oubliette.

At the same time as this, another Cornell student, Andrew Greenberg, was working on his own Apple II game. Greenberg was an administrator for the PLATO system, so had the job of booting pesky students off the system who were playing games when they were supposed to be using it for serious purposes (but had experience playing said games himself). Greenberg had been playing (in-person) D&D but was getting tired of playing with the group and ended up starting work on his own first-person game, Wizardry; his initial versions were in BASIC.

The pair of Robert and Andrew were connected up where they joined forces (settling on Pascal, Robert’s computer language, and Wizardry, Andrew’s title). They sold a “release beta” at the Boston Computer Society conference in 1981, followed by the full release of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord in the same year.

As I’ve already indicated, Wizardry has had its story well-told elsewhere, so I want to jump to 1982, when Wizardry was wildly successful, and the sequel Knight of Diamonds had just finished and was being shown off at the same conference in Boston.

Boston Phoenix, May 11, 1982. I mentioned this ad recently while talking about Suspended.

In addition to Galactic Attack (their first game product) and Starmaze (designed by Robert Woodhead, programmed by Gordon Eastman over ten months on weekends) the company was now soliciting games from outside authors.

Authors … looking for recognition? We are eager to explain job opportunities and/or market your software masterpiece. For details, please ask for Robert Sirotek.

This resulted in new games, the first being Police Artist by Elizabeth Levin. She worked with Sesame Workshop and a year later released her own file system for children under the name Lizzycorp, so had no affiliation with Sir-Tech otherwise. This was the start of Sir-Tech as a pure publisher; despite the early “internal” work by Woodhead, they started to rely on outside developers.

In the November 1983 of Softalk, a whole page of Softalk was dedicated to Sir-Tech’s “other games”:

Rescue Raiders is notable: it has credits of Arthur Britto II and Gregory Hale and was played by both The Wargaming Scribe and Data-Driven Gamer; it’s one of the contenders for “first real-time strategy game”. (It’s Choplifter-esque where you can summon units by spending resources.) However, this is All the Adventures, so we’re instead focused on Crypt of Medea, with Arthur Britto II (again) and Allan Lamb.

Allan Lamb is the less famous of the two, so let’s do him first. Other than this program he’s credited with programming for a much later adventure game, Questmaster 1 (see here and here); that was meant to be the first of a series where experience points from the main character carry on to later iterations (kind of like Quest for Glory) but only one of the games came out. He contributed a Nibble article once but I otherwise haven’t been able to find any other instances that are definitely the same person.

Arthur Britto II is famous enough that some people probably arrived at this post looking for him. Out of the various cryptocurrencies, the most popular is Bitcoin, followed by Ethereum, followed by XRP. The three founders of XRP — starting from a 2011 forum discussion about “Bitcoin without mining” — are David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto. It was a (successful) attempt to make a more-energy efficient version of Bitcoin without the need for power-guzzling mining sites. Arthur Britto famously is reclusive (like Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of Bitcoin) and there has been speculation he isn’t even real, although he recently tweeted a single emoji on an account that had been around since 2011 with no messages. The upshot for a historian is that there have been crypto-enthusiasts combing the Internet already for his presence and the very real possibility some information was intentionally scrubbed.

For our purposes: through the 80s, at least, he remained an Apple tech maven, producing the Apple II version of Strategic Conquest and being one of the independent contractors producing software copy protection for companies.

Did you have any interaction (e.g. to compare methods, share code, etc) with other people (e.g. Mark Duchaineau from Sierra On-line) who were developing protections? What can you tell us about this?

Nope, it seems that copy protection was very secretive back then. I didn’t even know who else did copy protection, I was on my own! Only later did I talk to others who produced copy protection, mainly a guy by the name of Arthur Britto. If I’m not mistaken, he was the one that gave me some ideas regarding how to better control the stepper motor for the drive head.

— From an interview with Roland Gustafsson on software cracking

A later patent he is named on (2007) entitled “Storing chunks within a file system” has some resemblance to file-protection methods, and while this isn’t the venue to do it in, it looks like XRP itself may have drawn some inspiration from old-school Apple II programming.

From Mobygames.

The pair produced an Apple II horror-themed adventure which Sir-Tech published in 1983, using the Penguin Software graphical tools. I am incidentally playing 4am’s dump as is usual, but I need to be alert to the fact that the game may be broken as-is as one of the earlier dumped copies was unfinishable; there’s a patch based on that version. I’m not clear if the bug was due to buggy copy protection removal or something “authentic” to the game, but I’m going to assume the former for the moment and stay ready to swap if something goes awry.

Rick Austin was the local high school art teacher; he also made the iconic dragon cover art of Wizardry.

As you drive along the narrow and tortuous road, you feel an eerie sense of uneasiness. There is something about this night that just does not seem right, but you find it hard to put your finger on it. The sky is clear and cloudless, stars upon stars fill the sky, the moon glows with a mysterious aura, yet strangely enough, it is very, very dark. As a matter of fact, it’s so dark you find it increasingly difficult to see the road.

The plot, as the manual narrates, has you driving a car where “something terrible, shimmering grotesquely” appears in the road. You crash the car, go unconscious, and find yourself awake in a “crypt or mausoleum”.

WELCOME TO THE CRYPT OF MEDEA …

WE’VE BEEN EXPECTING YOU .. .

Your goal is escape.

This takes a different tack than our other graphical adventures so far; even our games with a graphical screen/text screen split like Saigon: The Final Days and Caves of Olympus have had some text on the graphical screens, but this seems to be a complete split. Graphics screens only have graphics on them, and you can press CTRL-P at any time to turn the graphics on or off. If the graphic screen changes you’ll get an update. For instance, the starting room has “six tombstones”, a “glass case”, and a “candle”; if you GET CANDLE the graphics will re-display with the candle removed:

You can try to OPEN TOMBSTONE and the game will tell you to try PULL; PULL TOMBSTONE will reveal a “crypt”.

>LOOK CRYPT

THOUSANDS OF MAGGOTS FEAST UPON THE REMAINS OF A BODY INSIDE THE CRYPT.

YOU FIND SOME MATCHES!

With the matches I tried lighting the candle and looking at the case — no dice — the item inside was “dark”. OPEN CASE doesn’t work, and for good measure I tried PULL CASE:

TRY PUSH….

Fine, PUSH:

MOVING IT REVEALS A PASSAGE DOWN!

The passage leads down to a “dirt tunnel”, dead-ending where there is a “severed hand” and a “shovel”.

Getting the hand is fatal.

THE HAND GRABS YOUR WRIST AND SLOWLY CLIMBS YOUR ARM. IT REACHES YOUR NECK AND RIPS A LARGE PIECE OF YOUR THROAT AWAY. YOU ARE DEAD.

The same thing happens if you try to get the shovel instead.

>BURN HAND

WITH WHAT? (TRY BURN XXXX WITH XXXX)

>BURN HAND WITH CANDLE

THE HAND BEGINS TO BUBBLE AND BLISTER.
THE HAND BURNS AND DISINTEGRATES!

This lets you grab the shovel and DIG. While digging underground does nothing, going back to the starting room and digging reveals a secret knob (how is it we know where in the entire room to dig?!?) Pulling the knob then opens a new passageway, with a BUTTERKNIFE along the way (that must be referred to as a KNIFE) followed by a secret laboratory.

YOU ARE IN A BLOODY LABORATORY. A TRAIL OF FRESH BLOOD LEADS SOUTH. SOUNDS EMANATE FROM BEHIND THE WALLS.

VISIBLE OBJECTS: A LAB TABLE, A FLASK

VISIBLE EXITS: SOUTH, EAST, WEST

This seems like a good place to stop, as this passes through an area which is explained in the manual complete with a map.

Next time: probably lots of deathtraps!