Okay, so clearly the retro TV project didn’t work out, and even with more than a year to think about it, I’m still not sure exactly why. What I do know is that I’m losing interest in television as a medium, so it’s time to pivot to something that I always have and still do find fascinating: video games!
I’m also going to narrow my scope further than “all award-winning TV ever,” but as always, I am enamored of dead media, so we’re going all the way back to the 1970s and we’re staying in the prehistoric days of video games for quite a bit, so get comfy. The other aspect to this project is something I thought about a lot while writing the article about The Untouchables–mysteries, another form of entertainment I find intrinsically fascinating. So here’s the new idea–capsule reviews of ancient games that smarter taxonomists than I have classified as “mysteries.” The goal isn’t to review these games as games per se—I’m more interested in the quality of the mystery.
So what does that mean? What ingredients go into a satisfying mystery? Ronald Knox famously took a crack at codifying some of these things, but because rules were meant to be broken, in the years since his list was written in 1929 there have been many hit mystery stories that subverted all of these “commandments.” And the rules will have to be completely rewritten for the world of video games, where the reader becomes the player who then becomes the detective.
Some of the things I’d like to look at while evaluating the quality of a video game mystery:
–Has an actual crime of some sort been committed? For the purposes of this project, I’m not really looking for existential mysteries.
–Does the victim have a name that we learn at least at some point in the story?
–Do we find out who committed the crime in the course of the story?
–Do we learn the means, motive and opportunity for the crime? Are there clues that can give us insight into all of these things or do we just get an infodump?
–Are there multiple suspects? Do they have names?
–Does the game require superhuman feats of intuition and mind-reading to solve the mystery?
None of this feels like too much to ask from a game purporting to be a “mystery,” and yet so many games labeled as “mysteries” contain nothing of the sort. So for a lot of the titles I’m covering, these will really be capsule reviews. Let’s gooooooooo!
1972, “Haunted House,” for the Magnavox Odyssey
This is from a compilation of three games, joined by “Cat and Mouse” and “Football,” which I’m sure are equally edifying. There’s no way I’m going to find a playable copy of this game, but thankfully MobyGames tells me everything I need to know: “The objective of the detective is to gather the most Clue cards and find the hidden treasure in the mansion, while the objective of the ghost is to slow the detective down.” Right out of the gate, the good people at Magnavox have lost my interest–“where is the hidden treasure” is a popular motif in these games, but not something I’d call a “mystery.”
1977, “Diamond Thief,” for mainframe computers running BASIC
There’s a limit to how sophisticated a game can get when you’re asking the player to type in all the code. Here’s a sample of what this game has to offer. The bold italics are responses from the player.
“SOMEONE STOLE THE DIAMOND!
QUESTION 1
SUSPECT? (1-5) 1
TIME? 12
SUSPECT 1 AT TIME 12:
I WAS IN ROOM 2
I WAS WITH 5
QUESTION 2
SUSPECT? (1-5)”
So we’re not really touching on the depths of the human experience here. Nobody was expecting that from their computer games in 1977, but they’d get there faster than they thought. More on that later.
1977, “Mystery Mansion,” another text adventure for mainstream computers.
Video games were expensive in the days of early computing, and when you adjust for inflation, some were even more expensive than a typical AAA release today. This meant that a game you could play again and again was seen as highly desirable, so it’s only natural that over the years many developers made games that featured randomly determined, procedurally generated stories and gameplay elements that were different every time you play. This is one of those, so it doesn’t really qualify either.
1979, “Inspector Clew-So”, Commodore
Well, this is just a brazen Clue rip-off–the first of many, no doubt, and of course there will also be many officially licensed Clue games coming down the pike. I will talk about some of them, though, because they didn’t all hew to the classic board game format.
1979, “Mystery Fun House”, TRS-80
Ah, Scott Adams. No, not the Dilbert maniac. This Scott Adams is a pioneer in computer gaming, publishing some of the very earliest commercially available text adventures. In fact, Wikipedia credits him with creating the very first “adventure”-style game for the personal computer. (The classic game that named the genre and spawned a legion of imitators only existed on mainframe computers at that time.) By the end of the 1980s, commercially viable text adventures were more or less dead, but between 1978 and 1984, Adams managed to publish 14 of what he dubbed simply as “Adventures.”
Only problem is, these games are extremely primitive, even for text adventures. I’ll let you in on something that will quickly become apparent–I love text adventures and we’ll be covering quite a lot of them, even the ones released independently online after people stopped buying them in stores. There’s nothing quite like disappearing into your imagination as you read lovingly crafted text describing your surroundings and the objects in your environment.
Then there’s Scott Adams games, which have descriptions like this: “I am in a sloping hallway. Some obvious exits are up and down.” In comparison, Jimmy Maher, the unquestioned king of PC gaming history, highlights a bit of prose from 1976’s “Colossal Cave Adventure,” the aforementioned cornerstone of the genre: “Far below you is an active volcano, from which great gouts of molten lava come surging out, cascading back down into the depths. The glowing rock fills the farthest reaches of the cavern with a blood-red glare, giving everything an eerie, macabre appearance.” Now, to be fair to Adams, he had extremely limited technology to work with that didn’t give him a lot of space for text, but it’s hard not to feel disappointed in his games when the competition is on the level of companies like Infocom, about whom a lot more later.
So what about Mystery Fun House? In her gameplay video, YouTuber Noriko Miyagami says that based on her research, it took Adams about a week to write this, and it shows. You’re dumped in front of the titular Fun House with no motivation whatsoever to explore or do anything other than quit the game, but if you do enter the Fun House you find a lot of abstract and boring puzzles, and absolutely no mysteries, despite the title. If you’re interested in checking out Adams’ work, try 1978’s “Adventureland” or 1979’s “The Count,” but there’s nothing special about Mystery Fun House.
And that’s it for the 1970s, so this seems like a good place to stop. Next time, I’ll be discussing two games that make serious attempts to entice players with an actual, good-old fashioned mystery—with middling success.
Oryx & Cake Boss 