Zarf Updates

As promised, the latest from the Visible Zorker project: Visible Starcross!

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license.

This was a fun one to work on. Infocom tackled the idea of epic sci-fi with verve, if not absolute originality. (Even at age 13, I thought "Huh, the author must have read Rendezvous with Rama.") The alien beings you discover are set-pieces, but each one is a cameo-sized micro-story within the spacecraft's long journey. An early example of we'd call "environmental storytelling" these days.

As it happens, I never owned a copy of Starcross. I bought a copy -- for a friend's bar mitzvah, with the shameless intention of immediately pirating it back for myself. (Don't worry, I traded him all my Zorks.) This means I do not have the treasured flying-saucer package, nor the wonderful mass detector chart (printed in un-Xeroxable purple and orange on silver paper).

But don't worry; I've redrawn that chart for your pleasure:

If you want to see photographs of the original map and packaging, visit the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History.

As for the in-game map display, I'll leave that as a surprise. Suffice it to say that the interior of a cylindrical space station was an entertaining mapping challenge.

By the way, this is the first known release of Starcross (release 15). Normally I prefer to use the Masterpieces release of each game for the Visible Zorker project. For Starcross that would be release 17. However, we don't have source code for r17, so I had to go back to r15 for this exhibit.

More readings on Starcross:

• The Digital Antiquarian
• Drew Cook
• Jason Dyer

And, as a bonus:

• Walkthrough by David Welbourn (just released this week!)

Upcoming work:

Visible Suspended will be the next public release on August 1st. Watch for robots!

Patreon supporters got access to Visible Suspended a month ago, and The Visible Witness today. Please remember that the Visible Zorker is a Patreon-supported project! Your donation is immensely appreciated. (And credited in each game's "About" page, of course.)

For the record, NarraScope in Albany went great.

See you next month!

I have no hot take, but I did post this last year:

Another Valve hardware announcement: the Steam Machine is back. I am immediately and predictably on board for it.

-- me, November 2025

So I owe you a followup post, which is, TLDR: "too rich for my blood."

Last month I saw a reference to the "You Cannot Play This TTRPG Jam":

This is a game jam for games that do not exist. They won't ever exist. They will never be playable. They will suggest a game, create a space in which it seems like a game could exist, but where there is none. It might make someone wish that it were an actual, real, game, and may even inspire them to create one, but will never itself be a game.

-- Jam overview, Michelle Jones

That sounds like fun! I thought. So I put together a quickie.

The Aeonic Nebular Character Generator (downloadable PDF file)

Prepare your character for sci-fi roleplaying!

In the Aeonic ruleset, it is not, strictly speaking, possible to die during character generation.

(And now you know what classic TTRPG I am riffing on. Well, one of them. The title is a nod to Æon, which I mentioned a few weeks ago.)

I hope it is amusing. And by all means take a look at the other 98 jam entries as well. People had lot of fun with this idea.

Not a Monty Python reference (unless you really want one), but rather: it's still spring (barely) and here's some games that surprised me. They popped up suddenly out of nowhere; I hadn't heard much about them; I enjoyed 'em.

(Okay, 7th Guest was announced a couple of months ago, and in fact has existed for three years in VR. Still, in the span of 1993 to now, that's sudden.)

Have some brief commentary, plus one design rumination.

• The Archives of Trevosa
• Hypogea
• The 7th Guest Remake (2023)

I posted a couple of weeks ago about Infocom tie-in novels, with a bit of a digression on the work of George Alec Effinger. It turns out that I have a response from Effinger to relay!

Not a response to my 2026 post, obviously. Effinger passed away in 2002. But his books were mentioned on Usenet in 1997. It was a thread about the "Groundhog Day" trope, which brought up Effinger's books The Nick of Time and The Bird of Time. (The first Effinger that I read, as it happens.)

Anyhow, someone made a rather dismissive comment to the effect of "...before Mr. Effinger ran out of ideas and was reduced to writing things like 'The Zork Chronicles'." And guess who showed up to riposte?

Welcome to June. The latest from the Visible Zorker project: Visible Deadline!

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license.

Deadline was Infocom's first non-Zork game, and they pulled out all the stops to make it feel like a new and different thing. Which made my job a lot more interesting!

A musical city, a record store, and a 90s soundtrack album! Okay, and a Lovecraftian adventure game.

• Phonopolis
• Wax Heads
• Mixtape
• Call of the Elder Gods

Now that I think about it, the Lovecraftian adventure has a puzzle where you control alien technology through musical resonance. See. It all fits.

Last week someone passed around a link to a post: "Classic Zork Novels, Now in E-book Format!"

That's right, it's another instalment of "Somehow, obscure Zork media returned"!

This time we're stepping out of the digital realm and into the world of official Zork (and Zork adjacent) prose. Presented here are four novels:

• The Lost City of Zork by Robin W Bailey
• The Zork Chronicles by George Alec Effinger
• Enchanter by Robin W Bailey
• Wishbringer by Craig Shaw Gardner

Thanks to the work of dedicated fans, these books have been available as scanned pages for many years in places like The Internet Archive. But with advances in OCR tools, it was now possible for me to convert these pages back into editable text with no compromise to accuracy.

-- PaulloDEC, May 13th

See the post for download links. PaulloDEC has now followed up with downloads of the four Zork-themed gamebooks.

So, this is convenient. These aren't rare books. As the post says, you can easily find scans of them (e.g. here). The used paperbacks are also not too hard to track down. I have Wishbringer and The Zork Chronicles on my shelves. But .epub files are easier to tote around.

The post got me looking at the books again, though. They're rather puzzling artifacts.

Titanium Court is a stylized match-3 battle game in which you are possibly kidnapped by fairies. I loved it and I didn't like it. I mean, I didn't like playing it. I loved the game.

It's doing two things. (Two big things. An infinite number of tiny things.)

One big thing is to build a narrative game on top of an RTS/autobattler on top of a match-3. All of these mechanics are coupled. Throupled? You arrange your battlefield by making groups of three tiles disappear; this also gains you resources, with which you buy units. Winning battles (or losing them) advances the storyline, as does exploration and dialogue; but you also occasionally take a shower, which is a match-3 grid of soap, water, and introspection.

The other big thing is to tell a story in you go to fairyland. I mean you, the person reading this review. Not "the protagonist" or "Wendy Darling" or "Alice". Not me -- I already went and came back. You.

"What is the first computer game that you played?" One of those social forum threads which is really about reader demographics rather than games. Still, I tried to remember.

No, my answer wasn't Adventure. I played Adventure in '79 or so -- but before that, I probably ran into Oregon Trail or Lemonade Stand or one of those other BASIC games on a school PET machine. And I definitely played one of the Star Trek variants on a neighbor's Apple 2 (not a II+, this was way early).

But there's also a game that I played at the Ontario Science Center in... man, I really don't remember when. Certainly 1980 or earlier. It might have been before or after my initiation into Adventure.

I will describe the game. You tried to contain a firest fire. The game was built in an arcade-like cabinet, but it was not a commercial arcade game. You had a graphical map of a forest, done in colored ASCII art. You had a cursor controlled by d-pad-style buttons. There was an info display showing wind speed and direction.

A fire got started. (One red square!) You had to control the spread. Your tools were water-bombs -- very limited supply -- and setting back-fires. Maybe you could drop firefighters as well; I don't remember.

I do remember that if you were fast and lucky, you could bang the cursor over to the initial spark and water-bomb it before it spread. That was the ideal outcome. Otherwise, things got out of control real fast. I didn't grasp the scenario well enough to use backfires effectively, but I understood the cheese-it solution.