The Stack

Time Zone was released in 1981 or 1982. (Again I’m finding contradictory claims. The edition I’m playing says “Copyright 1982”.) It was the sixth of Sierra’s “high-res adventures”, and the fourth designed by Roberta Williams. Graphic adventures had been around for about a year, but they were still a novelty, and Sierra didn’t have any real competition. I said before that it uses the same engine as Mission Asteroid, but there was one significant enhancement to it: the use of multiple disks. If I understand correctly, the only previous multi-disk game from Sierra was Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, and the only thing resembling a multi-disk adventure game predating it that I know of is the Eamon adventure/RPG system (which isn’t really the same thing, because instead of being parts of a whole, the disks there were unconnected modules, sharing only the character data on the loader disk.) Sierra was pretty much the first to need multiple disks, because they were filling those disks up with graphics. They’d continue to make multiple-disk games even as disk capacities increased, ultimately turning out several multi-CD FMV behemoths. As far as I can tell, their code for handling resources spread across multiple volumes didn’t change in any fundamental way from King’s Quest 1 onward. But in these earlier days, the Apple II days, things were a little shakier, the seams more obvious. As I mentioned before, different areas in Time Zone recognize different verbs; this seems to correspond to what disk you have currently inserted.

In content, Time Zone reflects a medium in transition. The earliest adventure games, such as Zork and Scott Adams’ Adventureland, were imitations of the original Adventure: treasure hunts set in caves, in an eclectic vague fantasy setting. There’s no story to such a game, there’s just a player’s progress in exploring the cave and collecting the treasures. But after a while, adventure games started mutating into interactive fiction. I think of Steve Meretzky’s Planetfall as something of a watershed in this regard: it was the first adventure game I played that really tried to provide a believable setting and a story that’s revealed by that setting, rather than a premise that’s just an excuse to put the player through a bunch of puzzles, and a backstory which is brought up at the beginning and the end and otherwise ignored. Planetfall was released in 1983, after Time Zone, and while Time Zone isn’t a dungeon crawl, it’s also everything I’ve just said that Planetfall is not. It belongs to a period when the people creating adventures were branching out into other settings, but still treating them like dungeon crawls.

I’ve noted that Time Zone has a repeated puzzle type involving enemies, both human and animal, who will kill you one turn after you enter their rooms unless you first defeat them with some appropriate weapon. This is turning out to be the dominant type of puzzle in the game, not just because it’s used so often, but also because it takes so much longer to solve than other puzzles. It’s basically guesswork, and guessing wrong ends the game, making you restore a save, which involves swapping disks. It’s a terrible piece of design, and it’s repeated over and over. And it may well be the game’s most influential feature. In 1985, an adventure authoring tool called GAGS was created, incorporating foes governed by a slight variation on this mechanic (GAGS monsters don’t necessarily kill you after one turn, but they do prevent you from leaving the room). I may be mistaken when I attribute this to direct influence, but the resemblance is strong. GAGS games tended to use monsters of this sort a lot, because GAGS was a rather primitive system, capable of only a few predefined puzzle types (also including locked doors and darkness). GAGS later became the basis for a more advanced tool called AGT, which was the first really popular adventure engine available to the public. There are scores of freely-available AGT games on the net, many of them entries in an annual competition held on the Compuserve Gamers Forum. And a lot of them contain the monster mechanic that AGT inherited from GAGS, and which GAGS stole from Time Zone.

Without a doubt, the one game I know that was most influenced by Time Zone is Legend Entertainment’s Timequest, a 1991 graphic adventure by Infocom alumnus Bob Bates. Whether the influence is direct or indirect, I don’t know. But Time Zone and Timequest share an overall structure, based on a grid of location/time period combinations, as well as a few specific scenes: both games contain run-ins with Robin Hood, Cleopatra, and Julius Caesar. The encounter with Caesar in particular reminded me of Timequest: in both games, you get an audience with him through a victory in the arena. What you do with that audience differs, however. In Timequest you need to be on hand to prevent an assassination attempt — not because you want Caesar to live, but because history requires him to be assassinated later. Whereas in Time Zone, you need to borrow his ladder. ¹That is, steal it.

This is a common adventure game device: heroic efforts to obtain mundane household items. Timequest isn’t completely innocent of this particular crime against mimesis either. What makes it particularly absurd in this game is that you actually have the option of visiting your home in the present whenever you like. There, realistically, you would have easier ways to obtain a ladder (and a canteen, and a flashlight…) It’s just one of those adventure game things, stemming from the genre’s origins. In a cave crawl, it makes a certain amount of sense: if you’re trapped in the Dungeons of Doom, you have to make do with whatever tools you can find in situ, and a ladder could be a major find. Likewise for various other settings: desert islands, post-apocalyptic ruins, and in general the sort of isolated and solitary environments that adventures have always found most comfortable.

It’s a common enough syndrome that it really should have a name, but it doesn’t seem to have one. I suggest “dirt quest”: questing after something that is, or should be, as common as dirt in the game’s milieu.

One thing, more than anything else bar the graphics, establishes Time Zone as having been written early in the history of the form: although it’s a time-travel game, it lacks the usual time-travel tropes. There are basically two tropes, with sundry variations, pioneered by Infocom in the mid-80’s and almost obligatory since then:

• Avoiding changing the past. Taking care to clean up anachronisms and/or paradoxes, lest you rupture the space/time continuum. Sorcerer and Spellbreaker both had memorable scenes of this sort, and many time-travel games, including Timequest and Jigsaw, make it the player’s primary goal.
• Deliberately changing the past in order to affect the future: planting acorns so you can climb oak trees a century later and suchlike. Zork III may have been the first game to play with this, but Timequest and Day of the Tentacle are whole games organized around puzzles of this sort. And on the larger scale, changing history is the player character’s chief motivation in Trinity ¹Trinity is a peculiar case: by allowing time travel only to sites that are about to be destroyed in nuclear explosions, it manages to avoid the question of whether or not history is mutable until the very end (although there’s some foreshadowing). This narrative device prevents the game from using either trope on a scale smaller than the whole game. and Lost New York.

Time Zone doesn’t do any of that. The time periods are effectively islands, connected only by the fact that you can carry objects between them. And you often can’t even do that: anything that would be anachronistic in the era you’re going to (such as dynamite in 1000 AD, or any manufactured item in the age of reptiles) gets vaporized in transit. So you can’t alter history by leaving ahistorical technology lying around, accidentally or deliberately. More direct alterations, such as assassinating Christopher Columbus, are prevented by the poverty of the game engine: if you try it, you’ll just an error along the lines of “I don’t understand that”.

More broadly, the tropes I speak of (or at least the second one on the the smaller scale) are reliant on non-local effects. Internally, past and future are modelled as separate rooms. For the past to affect the future, you have to have a mechanism whereby an action in one room can affect the state of another. The engine used in the Sierra High-Res Adventures might not in fact have this capability. Judging by the way that some verbs are understood in some areas and not in others, it seems like different areas are in some way treated as separate programs. It seems a little incredible, but having tinkered with the various King’s Quest engines, I can attest that they did something similar, albeit with less noticeable side effects.

On the other hand, maybe it’s just that the author was used to thinking in terms of local effects, because that’s how early adventure games generally worked. The whole idea of non-local effects was a major leap in sophistication for adventure games, arguably more significant than the full-sentence parser. (See the T/SAL “Phoenix” games for examples of what can be done with a two-word parser and a sophisticated world model.)

At any rate, if it’s not doing time-travel puzzles, what is the game doing with all that space? To a large extent, it’s establishing its own tropes. There are certain puzzles that are repeated with different details all over the map:

• Dark tunnels that need a light source
• Dangerous people or animals that, when you enter their location, you have one turn to use the right object to keep them from killing you.
• Merchants and traders who will give you something you need in exchange for a specific other item. (In most cases, they’ll only accept one other item, but won’t tell you which.)
• Expanses of hazardous terrain (either desert or frozen wastes) that you can’t cross without some way of getting food/water/rest/warmth.

Notably, even when two places have identical problems, they’ll have different solutions. The vaporizing of anachronisms, which seemed cheap when I first encountered it, is important to making this work: it provides a general rationale for the solution in 2082 AD not working in 50 BC. I mean, it’s still cheap to bar objects from certain areas by permanently destroying them, rather than by, say, preventing the time machine from launching until you ditch them, or just automatically leaving them behind. But at least there’s some justification to barring them at all.

Several hours into Time Zone, I’m just starting to get past the initial exploration phase and start finding solutions to problems. In most adventures, the exploration phase includes a certain amount of experimental poking at objects and scenery. That hasn’t really been the case here, as there aren’t very many objects around, and those few have limited pokability. Exploration has been a matter of exploring the map, with its neat grid of hundreds of filler rooms, each of which pauses to stroke in its graphics whenever you enter. I should turn off my emulator’s governor.

Then there’s the instant-death areas. Since this game is both (a) old-school and (b) written by Roberta Williams, there are plenty of them. It’s easy to forget, in the post-Monkey Island age, about the ubiquity of death in the old days. The way that games would kill you for walking in the wrong direction, off a cliff or into a river, where newer games would stop you with a warning. And no “undo” feature. When you die, you have to start over, which means swapping back to disk 1, even if you’ll want to immediately restore a game on a different disk. Of course, since I’m running the game under emulation, there are no actual floppy disks involved. Swapping disks is a matter of selecting a disk image from a file-selection dialog. Still, this is a minor nuisance, and not something I want to do very often. Perhaps I should look for a better emulator, one that has its own snapshot quicksave/quickload interface, so I don’t have to rely on the in-game save/load system.

I really have to close this post, though — I’m running out of time until my self-imposed deadline, because I’ve been spending so much time playing the thing. I’ll try to have something more to say about the content next time, after I’ve seen some more of it.

Mission Asteroid was just an appetizer. Now for the main course. Time Zone, which uses the same engine as Mission Asteroid, originally shipped on twelve Apple II floppies (or possibly six double-sided floppies; my information is a little iffy here), making it easily the largest microcomputer game ever released at the time. I vaguely remember that Roberta Williams said it would take well over a year for anyone to complete it, and was disappointed when someone managed it within a week of its release. But this story may be apocryphal, or might be true of a different game entirely.

It’s a time-travel game featuring eight areas (seven continents plus one alien planet) in eight time periods, which makes for 64 possible combinations (65 if you include the “Home” setting), although apparently only 39 of them are actually visitable. I haven’t gotten very far in it yet. I’m still in the wandering-around phase, and will remain wandering around for some time. There are a great many filler rooms: mazes of featureless streets, King’s Quest-like grids of empty wilderness. This was released at a time when the size of an adventure game was often measured in rooms, an idea famously discredited by Level 9’s Snowball, with its thousands of useless algoritmically-generated locations. At least Time Zone gives each filler room a unique illustration, which accounts for most of the disk usage.

OK, let’s play something historical. Let’s get way on back. There are ten games in the Stack from before 1990. Three of them are Apple II games from Sierra, as re-released in the 1997 Roberta Williams Anthology. Today, I play the oldest: Mission Asteroid, Sierra’s “High-Res Adventure #0”. ¹Actually the third released in the series, after Mystery House and The Wizard and the Princess, both of which are already off the Stack.

The story of Mission Asteroid is basically the same story as Michael Bay’s Armageddon, but without the complexity. There’s an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, so you go up in a rocketship and blow it up with a bomb. That’s it. That’s pretty much the entire game right there. It was meant as a simple introductory adventure for beginners, and simple it is. Most of the game consists of following instructions and using things for their intended purpose. There’s one bit requiring a small leap of intuition at the very end, and I was briefly stuck on guessing the command to get through a door in the very beginning, but for the most part, the only serious obstacles are time limits: there’s an overall limit on the number of turns you can take before asteroid impact, and a smaller restriction on the air supply in your spacesuit.

Overall, it’s amateurish by today’s standards, more like what I’d expect from sample code for an adventure engine than a work you’d release on its own merits. It seems a little ungracious to pick on a game written under the technical limitations of the Apple II, but some games age better than others, and the ones that hold up the worst are those, like this one, based primarily on showing off new graphics technlogy. It’s clear that the authors spent most of their effort on creating the “high-res” 280×192 ²The dimensions of the screenshot thumbnailed above are twice this, because that’s how the Apple II emulator included in the Roberta Williams Anthology renders it. illustrations for each room, and the vector-based graphics engine that draws them, stroke by stroke, as you watch. The parser and world model are barely capable of supporting even the minimal story that the game tells, and on three separate occasions resort to special-case disambiguation questions where the two-word parser is inadequate. The same authors would go on to create King’s Quest, another triumph of technology over content.

I note with interest that, even at this early stage, Sierra provided the convenience of toggling graphics by hitting the ‘return’ key on an empty command line, a feature that other illustrated adventure engines would imitate. But here, you can’t turn the graphics off permanently: the graphics come back as soon as the illustration changes, whether because you’ve changed location, or dropped something, or just stood still while the view through the window of your orbiting craft changes.

Of course, no analysis of a work of asteroid-impact fiction would be complete without criticism of the physics involved. Blowing up an asteroid doesn’t make the matter disappear. It just breaks it into smaller pieces and starts them moving away from each other. If it’s mere hours away from Earth when blown up, as in this game, will the chunks be moving apart fast enough for most of them to miss the Earth entirely? Or will you just wind up “shooting yourself with a shotgun instead of a rifle”, as one astronomer put it? Mission Asteroid takes the pessimistic view here, and I can only assume it does so inadvertently. If you succeed in your mission, you get a “congratulations and thank you for playing” message, but the game doesn’t halt. You can keep on playing if you like, even though there’s nothing left to do. And if you do, the time limit is still active. A few turns after I won, the asteroid impact happened anyway.

It turns out that VST is just some unspecified new cyberspace/VR technology, but one with side effects that kill people after a few months. Genesis, under the direction of Hugh Martens (your employer), is still trying to eliminate the problem, but they’re doing this by testing it illegally on prison inmates. Martens, meanwhile, has gone cartoonishly wacko about covering the whole thing up, and has been killing people left and right. If nothing else, this clinches the loyalty thing. If you completed your original assignment and brought Martens the truthmongers, he’d just kill you for knowing too much. Not that the game gives you a choice in the matter.

The final act of the game takes place on the prison island of Rocas Perdida, where the experiments are taking place. And it is at the very beginning of that section that I got very badly stuck. For the first and last time in the game, I resorted to a walkthrough.

This is something I really try to avoid doing. Walkthroughs are a necessary evil at best. The whole point of an adventure game is the pleasure of figuring things out, and using hints robs you of that. Worse yet, to cheat at all is to acknowledge that you’ve lost your trust in the author, that you don’t expect that you’ll be able to solve the puzzle. This lack of trust damages your experience of the rest of the game afterwards; once you’ve started down that path, it’s easy to give up on puzzles too early. I’m not even going to get into the problem of badly-written walkthroughs that give away too much, as that didn’t happen this time.

The problem, and to some extent the saving grace, of Nightlong is that I had a solid notion of what kind of unfairness I expected from it. As I’ve noted before, this is a game prone to tiny, all-but-invisible hotspots. I’d been temporarily stuck in the game many times before this point, and with only one or two exceptions, it was always due to failing to notice a hotspot. At one point, I was actually able to work backward from the expected solution to a puzzle, figuring out what sort of item I’d need, and then where I’d be likely to find it. And sure enough, it was there, and nearly unfindable unless you were looking for it specifically. This was far more satisfying than finding it by waving the cursor around at random would have been. But that was an exception. For the most part, finding something clickable in this game is a surprise. So when I got as thoroughly stuck as I was, I was fairly certain that there was a tiny hotspot that I was missing, despite repeated searching of all available rooms.

It turned out that it wasn’t a tiny hotspot. There were two hotspots with the same name close together, and I had somehow managed to avoid using the right action on the right one, despite revisiting them repeatedly. I probably should have slept on it and come back fresh, but I sometimes find it hard to convince myself of that when I know I’m nearing the end.

When I do resort to hints, my reaction is pretty much always the same, regardless of what they reveal: “That was it? What a gyp!” Even if I don’t cheat again, it can take a while for this minor sense of resentment to fade. Solving tougher puzzles later in the game helps, re-establishing the “you throw ’em at me, I’ll solve ’em” dynamic. That happened here. There was a nice convoluted unrealistic adventure-game puzzle (illustrated in the screenshot above), and the final puzzle of the game was a tasty little cryptarithm — arguably soup cans, but it hit the spot.

Anyway, it’s off the stack now.

At the end of disc 2 comes the twist that we’ve been expecting all along: the “terrorists” are not really terrorists and my employer has been hiding the truth from me. To be specific, the alleged terrorists are cyberspace researchers who stumbled on something called the “VST project”. They don’t know much about it, except that it involves virtual reality, that its chief architect, one Dr. Moreau (!), was recently killed, and that the Genesis corporation (and consequently the government and police) will stop at nothing to keep it secret.

The player character makes sympathetic noises and is accepted by the group. So either I’ve switched sides or the infiltration is a success. Either way, I’m still trying to get at the truth, and that involves going into cyberspace to see what Genesis is so eager to keep secret. Cyberspace is of course treated differently by different games. Seldom is the treatment at all sensible, but usually it’s more abstract and stylized than meatspace, with everything made of light and vectors. Not so here. The moment you uplink, you wind up in Moreau’s VR horror theme park.

Being a future-tech fantasy of VR, it looks just like the game’s reality. The content is different from the main gameworld — fewer video monitors and flying cars, more floating castles and giant spiders — but the graphical presentation is the same. Even the player character’s cyberspace avatar is indistinguishable from the player character. Also, objects in the VR sim have the same physical and even chemical properties as the real objects they’re simulating: at one point, you mix up some simulated gunpowder out of simulated sulfur, simulated saltpeter, and simulated charcoal. (Which isn’t a surprise: the moment you see saltpeter in a game, you know that the gunpowder is inevitable. Just once, I’d like to see a game where you use it to make nitric acid or something. Not even Chemicus did that.)

Maybe there’s an good in-story reason why the sim is such a good representation of the real world. Maybe the VST project is about doing a brains-in-vats/locked-in-the-holodeck scenario, where people don’t know that their reality is virtual. But then again, maybe this is just a case of the writer deciding that virtual reality is essentially just a parallel universe, and should naturally follow the normal physical laws. Which is stupid, but not uncommon in potboiler sci-fi.

I’m well into the second of Nightlong‘s three discs. Infiltrating the terrorists seems to be mainly a matter of locating their hideout. Currently I’m exploring an abandoned zoo on the basis of the slenderest of leads. Well, it’s called a zoo, but it’s really sort of a cross between zoo and museum, with a few robotic animals still in their enclosures. And the leads are only slender in terms of the in-game plot; as a detective, I’d think I was going to too much effort with too little justification, but as a player, I know full well that you have to go where the puzzles are.

I’m also starting to hit errors in a big way. I wrote last time that I had figured out how to get the game to run without immediately exiting with a fatal error saying that it wasn’t installed properly. It turns out I was wrong. I still get the fatal error on startup sometimes, apparently at random. Also, I have now experienced the audio problem in cutscenes that other players described. Or a mild form of it, anyway: it’s just a half-second pause in the audio component every once in a while, which isn’t a terribly big deal, but it wasn’t happening before.

The one problem that worries me the most is descibed at ntcompatible.com as follows:

Game crashes on CD 2 once you go to the left of the entrance to the zoo. Setting compatibility mode for Win95 buys you a little more time, but still crashes. Read that there is a workaround for this, but you miss a chunk of the plot.

Now, I’ve experienced this crash in exactly the location described, and I’ve enabled Win95 compatibility mode, and I’ve gone back to the same location without crashing. It’s not clear how much “more time” this should “buy” me, but I didn’t experience any more problems until I actually quit the game, at which point it gave me a fatal error dialog. I hope I can get through the game without crashing, or at least past the “chunk of the plot” that the workaround skips.

It’s a delicate balance sometimes, timing when to play PC games. Generally speaking, you don’t want to play them with the hardware you have when they first come out. You want to play them with a machine that takes best advantage of the game’s capabilities. But if you put it off too long, you’ll wind up with a machine whose hardware or operating system is incompatible with it, or that’s more powerful than the programmers planned for. This has been less of a problem under Windows than it was in DOS days, but it still crops up sometimes. Of course, I do still have a number of DOS games on the stack, so we’ll be seeing all kinds of problems in the future.

Time for another adventure game! They’re the most numerous thing on the Stack, due to my tendency to put them aside when I get annoyed with them. Today’s selection is Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy, a cyberpunk point-and-click adventure from 1999. The subtitle always makes me think of Union City, New Jersey, but I don’t think that’s what the authors intended; the setting, a future megacity ruled by amoral corporations, could be in New Jersey, but isn’t really that specific. The player takes the role of a private detective assigned to infiltrate a terrorist organization that’s been attacking the Genesis Cryogenetic Enterprise. I fully expect that Genesis will turn out to be the real bad guys, because that’s how these stories go.

I didn’t get very far at all in this game when I last played it years ago, and I haven’t yet spent the time to get much farther. The chief obstacle here is hunting for minuscule hotspots, which in some cases are contained inside other minuscule hotspots. The first puzzle in the game involves an elevator with a panel containing a fuse. The crazy thing is that the game contains close-up graphics of the panel, which would make it easier to interact with its components if it let you, which it doesn’t. The close-up is shown briefly when you examine the panel, then taken away. You can only interact with the fuse in the normal full-room view, in which it’s a few pixels in size (at 640×480). The saving grace of this interface is that the game makes it really clear what the cursor is hovering over at any moment by displaying a name next to the cursor.

The graphics are actually pretty nice. It’s all sprites on a prerendered background, but the backgrounds have a very comfortable level of texture and detail, neither too coarse to be believable nor too fine to be discernable. The downside to this is that every detail is a potential hotspot, so I basically have to roll my mouse over the whole screen lest I miss something important.

When I first tried running the game, it terminated with a dialog box stating that it was installed incorrectly. I had to rerun the installer and tell it to install the bundled version of DirectX, even though it told me that I didn’t need it. While researching the problem, I found various websites reporting problems running this game under Windows XP, that the sound stutters in the cutscenes and suchlike. I haven’t had any stuttering, probably because I have better hardware than the people who were playing it closer to when it came out. The only problem I’ve had with the sound in the cutscenes is that the dialogue is dubbed badly from Italian. Most adventure games released in America in the last ten years or so have been European imports, presumably because most American companies take it for granted that adventures are dead.