Apple II Bits

The console gaming world is in a tizzy over this past week’s release of Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2), an open-world adventure game set in the Old West. To commemorate the occasion, Rhain Radford-Burns of OnlySP (Single Player) produced a historical chronicle, "The Origins of Virtual Gunslinging — History of Western Games (Part One: 1971–1994)" (a timeline that would exclude Lawless Legends). The hunting scenes in Oregon Trail earned a mention, of course — but so did another game I’d never heard of: Accolade’s Law of the West.

Law of the West (which can be played online in the Internet Archive) features four settings from a frontier town: the bank, the saloon, the Wells Fargo wagon, and the train depot, each populated by cowboys, teachers, deputies, desperadoes, and more. Each scene introduces a character who interacts with the sheriff and then departs. After eleven of these vignettes, the player is given a score based on community relations, crimes prevented, and romantic success.

Most notable is how the player engages with the townsfolk. While some gunslinging does occur, this action takes a backseat to dialogue. For each line a citizen delivers, the sheriff chooses from one of four responses, resulting in a branching dialogue tree. This plot device is common in modern adventure games — not only in indie titles developed in the Twine game engine such as Depression Quest, but also mainstream games from BioWare’s Mass Effect to Telltale’s The Walking Dead to Dontnod’s Life Is Strange.

But according to Wikipedia, this gameplay mechanic was unprecedented at the time (emphasis mine):

The actual gameplay mostly concerns the Sheriff discussing with the various characters via a selection menu similar to those in contemporary graphical adventures. For each line the other character says, the game offers a selection of four different responses, and the discussion progresses depending on the chosen response. Law of the West marks the first use of this now-common interaction style.

If true, then it’s fascinating to discover that such a well-known narrative device debuted in 1985 on the Apple II from a company that went defunct in 2000. To this day, the choice to engage with non-player characters instead of blindly shooting them is something players yearn for. In Chris Plante’s review of RDR2 for Polygon, he describes one scene:

A crowd watches a public hanging. After the execution, the crowd disperses, and I find the victim’s mother weeping in the mud. I want to console her, but for whatever reason, the game won’t let me "greet" or "antagonize" the distraught mother. The only option it gives me is to pull a gun on her.

Maybe someone at Rockstar should’ve studied their history and learned the Law of the West.

I’ve never been one for competitive sports. I enjoy heading to Fenway Park for a Red Sox game every few years, but I’ve never been to a Patriots, Celtics, or Bruins game. Perhaps this stems from an ancient schoolyard rivalry, where my geeky hobbies were never deemed good enough for the jocks. They always tried forcing their pastimes on me without being similarly open to my passions.

Decades later, maybe those barriers are finally starting to erode. The Portland Trail Blazers are an NBA team whose name shares a word with with classic Apple II edutainment title Oregon Trail. In the lead-up to the official start of basketball season last week, this Oregon team released a video portmanteau of their name and the game’s: Oregon Trail Blazers.

This reel consists primarily of traveling from one city to another; with the exception of a brief hunting scene, we don’t see any of the riveting decisions that are the hallmark of Oregon Trail. Should the team ford the river? Trade with locals? What happens if someone breaks an arm? We may never know!!

Though the video is simple, the pixel art and chiptune soundtrack showcase a sincere affinity for Oregon Trail. It’s great to see these two pastimes playing well together.

(Hat tip to Cat Morgan)

I’ve never been a particularly crafty person (except perhaps in the mwahaha sense). Knitting, crocheting, quilting, or even basic sewing are arts I’ve never taken the time to learn, let alone master. Even if I did grasp the basics, I doubt I would have the creativity to design anything terribly impressive — unless I had the right inspiration.

What inspires artist and iOS developer Glenda Adams is the Apple II. She’s taken the 8-bit computer and used it as a basis for a impressive variety of needlework. From Karateka to Ultima and more, she has painstakingly adapted these iconic images into her own miniature tapestries, currently on display in her home and on her Twitter.

Adams, a games developer since 1988, has a savvy and relevant social media feed, tweeting on the occasion of KansasFest and demonstrating a wicked sense of humor in line with Apple Inc.’s latest developments.

Through a very insider source, I have the scoop of #WWDC18, the unannounced session,"Xcode ][ – Modern Development Tools for the Apple II" pic.twitter.com/rgVfSvIZ2r

— Glenda Adams (@glenda_atom) May 30, 2018

Although her work is currently not for sale (nor is she accepting commissions), you can check out her #nerdstitch hashtag for more examples of her work, which expands beyond the Apple II to include Mac software and classic arcade games. Read more about her creative process at Cult of Mac.

Steve Wozniak has given many interviews about the old days of inventing the Apple II and working with Steve Jobs. But back when the old days weren’t yet old, Woz was interviewed by Michael Harrison, who hosted the Harrison’s Mic talk radio show on KMET in Los Angeles, 1975–1986. Harrison has since transitioned from radio to podcast, and he’s now re-aired this 1982 interview as an episode of his podcast, The Michael Harrison Interview. The episode is 33 minutes long, with the 1982 interview beginning at 4:49. It’s a fascinating opportunity to draw parallels between Woz’s observations and predictions, and the culture that eventually arose.

Woz wastes no time in sharing his insights into how the Apple II created a new generation of entrepreneurs:

It’s really amazing to find how many 16-year-olds in high school right now are making more money than even anybody’s parents in the schools are making… They’ve gone and written a program for a personal computer, like a game, a popular game, or a Rubik’s cube program, or a chess program, and they’ll market it through some of the companies that have sprung up to sell these programs, and good ones sell like hotcake… I don’t know a single one that’s as old as I. I’m 32. All the very popular names that are coming up, they’re almost all 16, 18.

This echoes Tim Enwall at Misty Robotics, who recently attributed the success of the Apple II to this third-party innovation:

Apple didn’t create or find VisiCalc. Based on the Apple II providing a relatively affordable, sufficiently powerful, and easily enough programmed platform, VisiCalc found it.

Woz also predicted the ubiquity of personal computers:

Harrison: Do you see that spreading to all of society in 10–20 years, where we’re all going to become electronics freaks?

Woz: Oh, no. No. Not at all… We all have TVs. We all have Hi-Fis. And we’re not TV freaks or Hi-Fi freaks or car freaks. But there’s going to be a lot more exposure to it. It’ll be commonplace.

This is the same thing Leigh Alexander meant during GamerGate when she wrote, "‘Gamers’ don’t have to be your audience. ‘Gamers’ are over." — not that an audience or culture was dead, but that it had become so pervasive as to be meaningless. We can all enjoy a good game, computer, or recipe without being a programmer, engineer, or chef; you don’t have to understand what’s happening under the hood to appreciate the results.

Speaking of electronic games, Woz expressed some concerns about this emerging medium:

It’s great when it’s fun and it’s a game, but you can get very intense into it, just like some people get into football very intensely and wind up hitting the TV set. When you take a game very seriously, it can be very addicting and result in a lot of negative behavior… We don’t have any evidence, but we know it. We know that it’s a problem.

I was surprised and disappointed to hear Woz take such a strong stance while admitting there’s no evidence to support it. We live in a society that often ignores or contradicts scientific evidence when it contradicts our "common sense". Of course, at the dawn of personal computing, there was little evidence one way or the other; nowadays, I hope any opinion Woz has now was arrived after reviewing the available resources.

Did you learn anything new in this interview? Was the Woz of 1982 much different from the Woz of today? Leave a comment with your reactions below!

(Hat tip to Talkers)

One of my favorite annual traditions is the Boston Festival of Indie Games, or BostonFIG. Currently in its seventh year, this one-day event held at MIT is an opportunity for independent game developers to exhibit their works in progress and new releases. I love the creativity on display, where game designers who are not beholden to major studios can demonstrate original game ideas and concepts, be they commercially viable or simply interesting.

Interactive fiction has made appearances at BostonFIG before, and this year’s festival was no exception. The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation is based out of Boston, and their booth this year showed off everything from Infocom games (perhaps not indie, but Boston-based!) to the more recent Hadean Lands (whose Kickstarter I supported way back in 2010!). The IFTF is such a staple of BostonFIG that I was chatting with its organizers for a minute before I realized something new right in front of me.

An Apple IIc… at BostonFIG!

I always thought it would be fun to bring an indie game like Lawless Legends to BostonFIG, but the IFTF beat me to it by using an Apple IIc to show off classic Infocom games. They were running off the original floppies, as opposed to 4am’s newer Pitch Dark GUI. The table was manned by Andrew Plotkin, who I interviewed for Juiced.GS‘s cover story about interactive fiction seven years ago; and the Apple IIc was provided by Nick Montfort, an MIT professor whose book, Twisty Little Passages, Juiced.GS reviewed nine years ago.

So as to not block the table from interested festival-goers who might not already have heard the good word of interactive fiction, I didn’t linger at the table. But I was very glad to see this precedent set, and I hope to see the Apple II at future BostonFIGs.