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Mind Walker Action categoryPuzzle category

Title screen from Mind Walker

In Mind Walker, you go inside the human mind. The whole game is one big mishmash of symbolism about the subconscious, where a concept like “bad thoughts” will take on a physical form and attack you.

The game was designed by Bill Williams, who liked to create ambitious, complicated worlds that operate according to their own rules. Mind Walker is one of those ambitious worlds – the brain of a scientist, wracked by nihilism and paranoia. In a last-ditch attempt to save himself, the scientist enters his own psyche, trying to repair his sanity from the inside. While certainly interesting, the metaphor is so convoluted that the game loses track of it. » Read more about Mind Walker

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Introducing Obscuri-Tuesdays! Blog category

A modified screenshot from Delrina Daily Planner 3.0, a planner program for Windows 3.1. The planner page says "Obscuri-Tuesdays. New posts on Tuesday! For now! Begins on 8/25/20"

Modified screenshot from Delrina Daily Planner 3.0

Welcome back, and welcome to the start of something different for The Obscuritory!

For a long time, I’ve wanted to figure out a more stable writing schedule. One of the things I’ve always struggled with is working at a consistent pace. It’s been especially difficult this year, with new exciting sources of stress popping up every week. Part of the issue is that I tend to publish things as soon as I finish them, which leaves me on a constant treadmill to keep writing. At the same time, I recognize that as blog readers are waning in popularity and more people are going first to social media or YouTube, following a blog in 2020 is more difficult than it’s ever been, and it would help readers if I had a more reliable schedule.

So for the last couple weeks, I’ve been drafting a bunch of posts in advance instead! I have about a month’s worth of articles ready to go, which gives me a much longer runway to keep writing, or, if I need it, to take a break for a while. It also means I can set up a regular schedule, rather than just publishing posts as they’re completed.

From now on, new articles will be going up on Tuesday mornings! I’m calling this Obscuri-Tuesdays. (It was suggested that I do Thursdays instead so I could call it Obscursdays, but I like sharing them earlier in the week.) I hope that posting new articles at a regular time will make this blog a bit easier to follow!

This won’t be every week, but it will be on Tuesdays. I can’t promise that I’ll be able to keep up the pace of writing one article per week. Sometimes they take longer to write and research, or I’ll get sidetracked by other things in life. But I hope that taking a quick reset like this will help out in the long run. I’m proud to be able to do this blog on my own terms, and I’m excited about making it more consistent in a way that’ll be better for both me and you!

(On a side note, the fall is usually a slower period for this blog because I’m busy working on special events. Given that just about everything in the world has been canceled, I don’t think that’ll be an issue this year. Silver linings?)

The Obscuritory will continue tomorrow with an article about Mind Walker, a bizarre Amiga game by Bill Williams (Knights of the Crystallion) that takes place in the human brain. See you then – and see you on Tuesdays from here on out!

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Learn about multimedia adventure games at virtual Mysterium 2020! Blog category

Stambul City from Spaceship Warlock

Stambul City from Spaceship Warlock

It’s been a quiet month over here. I’ve been a little burned out recently – life is really hard right now! – so I’ve been taking a break again. I’ve also decided to try something new by writing articles in advance, rather than publishing everything as it’s finished, to give myself a longer runway of regularly scheduled posts. Hopefully this will help me write more consistently while this country’s health crisis keeps unfolding. Things should pick up again in a few weeks.

. . .

In the meantime, there’s a fun event next happening next week! I’m talking at this year’s virtual Mysterium, the annual Myst fan convention. Mysterium is one of my favorite events, and I’m excited to be presenting this year.

Like every event, Mysterium has been forced to move online, but that’s given them a chance to put together an incredible event program featuring a reunion with most of the major players in the Myst franchise, including Presto Studios’ Michel Kripalani and Phil Saunders, developers for Myst III: Exile and The Journeyman Project!

As part of Mysterium 2020, I’m giving a talk about multimedia CD-ROM games from the Myst era called “Ages Before Myst”! It’ll be a crash course for the Myst community on the games, software, and technology that led up to Myst, featuring games I’ve discussed on this blog including Hell Cab, Spaceship Warlock, Enchanted Scepters, and more. Myst was a milestone game, but it didn’t come out of nowhere, and it’ll be fun to share some of this historical context with the community.

My talk will be Saturday, August 8 at 6:30pm EDT on YouTube. For a full list of the events Mysterium has in store this year, check the official schedule. See you then!

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Obsidian Adventure category

Opening screen from Obsidian

If you wanted to cut to the chase, you could say Obsidian is a game where a computer goes rogue and tries to destroy the world. There’s lots of stories like that, and technically, that’s where Obsidian ends up too, but the path it takes to get there is mind-boggling.

The longer version is that Obsidian is a game where a computer learns how to imagine, where dreams take on dizzying, literal form, and the end of the world is just a chance to reinvent it. Adventure games have a history of packing complicated puzzles into strange places, and using that same format, Obsidian asks the question whether it’s a good idea to dream at all. » Read more about Obsidian

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Helious Action categoryPuzzle category

Title screen from Helious

The developer of Helious claimed he didn’t actually make the game himself. He got it from aliens.

In the introduction to Helious, designer Sean M. Puckett said he was visited by a UFO at his home in Florida on a stormy night in May 1993. A column of green light opened outside, and an alien stepped out who looked exactly like him. He fainted in shock, and when he regained consciousness, the game had mysteriously appeared on his computer. The instructions for the game are written like an archaeologist’s notes trying to decipher how it’s played. Puckett said he added an intro screen and audio effects, but otherwise, he claimed the game is presented as-is, with clashing, disorienting graphics and everything written in an indecipherable runic alien language.

It’s a pretty great story, and the game uses it to make itself more interesting. Helious is bizarre, but it’s a calculated sort of bizarre.

Screenshot from Helious

Extraterrestrial level design

Looking past the jarring visuals, it’s actually a fairly normal maze game. You control a ball that glides around by releasing air like a balloon. With a limited amount of air in the ball, you have move cautiously while collecting gems and avoiding traps. Some passages are too small to pass through until you’ve released enough air, which adds some order and strategy to how you move around the maze. It sounds simple because, surprisingly, it is simple.

The difference is that Helious tries to make it as unintuitive as possible. The game purposely underexplains itself, and it avoids a conventional user interface in favor of geometric icons with vague descriptions. The ultimate goal is to learn all the glyphs in an alien password, which would’ve been easy to remember if it was a human alphabet, but it’s much harder to memorize a bunch of weird symbols.

The game really does feel alien at first, but the effect quickly wears off once you realize what type of game it is. It’s a good example of the different ways something can be “weird.” There are games like Knights of the Crystallion or Eastern Mind that disorient the player by placing them in a completely different world with its own value system to learn. On the other hand, something like Helious is more like a weird overlay on top of a familiar concept.

You can imagine what the plain, non-alien version of Helious would be like, and it’s entirely possible it started out that way too. The weirdest thing about Helious – a game made to look like it was designed by aliens – might be how normal it is!

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A close look at SimRefinery Simulation category

"About SimRefinery" screen. The screen says "SimRefinery. Created for Chevron by the people at Maxis. This is a prototype game. Not all parts are complete."

Two nights ago, a reader on the tech news site Ars Technica named postbebop uploaded a copy of SimRefinery to the Internet Archive. This is incredibly exciting news, and it’s given us our first chance to take a closer look at the game. SimRefinery was not fully completed by Maxis, and we can learn a lot about the game from the state it was left in. Based on my research, I want to add some context and explain what some of the peculiarities the game might say about its development.

Additionally, science journalist Maddie Stone got in touch with another former Chevron engineer, who provided a copy of the game’s “Tour Book,” as well as a guide document by Maxis Business Simulations and an academic article from UC Davis and Chevron about the educational use of SimRefinery.

Between the game and these new documents, we have a lot more we can learn about SimRefinery! Let’s take a look. » Read more about A close look at SimRefinery

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SimRefinery recovered Simulation category

Title screen from SimRefinery

Never say never! Thanks to a reader on Ars Technica and an anonymous chemical engineer, a working copy of SimRefinery has been successfully recovered.

Two weeks ago, I published my long-in-the-works article about Maxis Business Simulations, a division of SimCity developer Maxis that made simulation games for businesses. It was the culmination of four years of research, and I’m very proud to share their story.

One of the games they produced was SimRefinery, an oil refinery simulation for Chevron. Very little was widely known about the game until now, and the article kicked off a wave of interest in SimRefinery that seems to have reached beyond gaming circles. Shortly after the article was published, it was picked up by the tech news site Ars Technica, where one reader, postbebop, reported that they knew a retired chemical engineer who worked at Chevron, who confirmed that he owned a copy of the game. postbebop walked the engineer through the process of reading the data from the original floppy disk, and he was able to create a digital copy.

They’ve uploaded the game to the Internet Archive; you can download and play it here. Huge thanks to postbebop for making this happen. (Note: By request from the uploader, the original copy of SimRefinery is currently offline. It’s been re-uploaded elsewhere on the Internet Archive already, but I’ll keep the original link here in case it’s restored in the future. Please be patient with the folks involved.)

Screenshot from SimRefinery

I haven’t had a chance to play SimRefinery yet besides grabbing the screenshots for the article, but I genuinely did not expect anyone would still have a copy of this game. I’ll write a post with a close-up look at SimRefinery soon.

(UPDATE: 6/6/2020: Here’s my full breakdown of SimRefinery.)

It’s so exciting to finally be able to play SimRefinery, and it’s worth remembering that this is one piece of a larger historical picture. It’s a big piece, for sure, but it means so much more when we have the historical context around it. Gaming history is more than just a collection of games; it’s about what they meant to the people who made them and played them. To learn more about Maxis Business Simulations and the people behind the company, please check out the full article!

With that said, this is cause for celebration. I am incredibly grateful and humbled that folks enjoyed the article enough that it gained enough traction for this to happen. Thank you to everyone who has supported me and The Obscuritory over the years and made this possible.

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When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery Essay categorySimulation category

Thumbnail of the title screen from SimRefinery

Thumbnail of the SimRefinery title screen.1

SimCity wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.

The game was inspired by research on real-world urban planning concepts,2,3 and although it was created as a way for players to experiment with running a city, the goal was to be fun rather than accurate. “I realized early on, because of chaos theory and a lot of other things,” said designer Will Wright, “that it’s kind of hopeless to approach simulations like that, as predictive endeavors. But we’ve kind of caricatured our systems. SimCity was always meant to be a caricature of the way a city works, not a realistic model of the way a city works.”4

“I think if we tried to make it realistic, we would be doing something that we wouldn’t want to do,” Wright said in an interview in 1999.5 But that didn’t stop companies from believing Maxis could design realistic simulations. Will Wright didn’t believe that was even possible. “Many people come to us and say, ‘You should do the professional version,'” he continued. “That really scares me because I know how pathetic the simulations are, really, compared to reality. The last thing I want people to come away with is that we’re on the verge of being able to simulate the way that a city really develops, because we’re not.”5

Maxis didn’t want to make professional simulation games. But for two brief, strange years, they did.

From 1992 to 1994, a division called Maxis Business Simulations was responsible for making serious professional simulations that looked and played like Maxis games. After Maxis cut the division loose, the company continued to operate independently, taking the simulation game genre in their own direction. Their games found their way into corporate training rooms and even went as far as the White House.

Almost nothing they developed was ever released to the public. But their software raises questions about the role we want games to play in society.

Over the past few years, I’ve spoken with employees from Maxis and the Business Simulations team to learn more about their company. For the first time, this is their story. » Read more about When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery

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Pirate’s Plunder Board category

Title screen from Pirate's Plunder

Pirate’s Plunder is a high-seas adventure for people who’d rather play Minesweeper. It fits a whole swashbuckling caper – buried treasure, ghost ships, desert islands, deadly whirlpools – into a bite-size digital board game you could play on your break at work. In fact, the developer called it a “coffee break game.”1

It belongs to a specific style of computer game development from the 90s, short-time-fillers, distributed for free as shareware, designed to be played on what were often, at the time, people’s work computers. Shareware games like these would be created by small teams, usually one or two people, and that was the case with Pirate’s Plunder as well. It was part of a collection of tiny treasure-hunting games by Dexterity Software called the Fortune Pack,2 and for Pirate’s Plunder designer Erin Pavlina, it was actually her first time designing a game. » Read more about Pirate’s Plunder

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Carnivores: Cityscape Shooter category

Title screen from Carnivores: Cityscape

In Carnivores: Cityscape, you can play as a human defending against a dinosaur outbreak, or you can play as a dinosaur. Obviously I picked the dinosaur.

Getting to play as a dinosaur was new for the Carnivores series. The first three Carnivores games, developed by Ukrainian studio Action Forms, were hunting games, set on a distant planet inhabited by dinosaurs that humans have turned into a game reserve. Cityscape is vastly different, more like a sci-fi action movie where the prey and the hunters stalk each other through jungles and cities.

According to the producers of Cityscape, this drastic change in direction was based on fan feedback. In an interview with the online gaming site HomeLAN, the producers said that fans of the Carnivores series had demanded two features: playable dinosaurs (who can blame them?) and multiplayer. Cityscape adds both those things, which explains why the game is closer to Predator than a hunting simulation. That also might explain why rampaging around as a dinosaur – the ultimate power fantasy – is so weirdly unsatisfying. » Read more about Carnivores: Cityscape

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