Interactive: A Guided Journey There & Back
Interactive: A Guided Sphinx Adventure
Pyjamarama: The Definitive History
The Name
In February 1973, Roxy Music released their second single. "Pyjamarama," Bryan Ferry's first composition on the guitar, finds the sleep-deprived singer longing to be close to his elusive lover. Ferry was dating French supermodel Amanda Lear, who appeared on the For Your Pleasure album cover as a femme fatale leading a black panther on a leash. The song is a glam rock meditation on insomnia as a symptom of desire. Wakefulness not as obligation but as exquisite suffering, the inability to sleep because the mind is full of someone who remains elsewhere, mysterious, just out of reach. The title "Pyjamarama", a playful nod to pajamas, does not appear in the lyrics. It is pure sonic invention: pyjamas plus panorama plus the suffix that turns things into spectacles.
Notably, the title of the song inspired a ZX Spectrum game manufactured by Mikro-Gen in 1984. What Mikro-Gen made of the title was almost its precise inverse. Where Ferry's Pyjamarama is insomnia as glamour, the lover, the supermodel, Amanda Lear and her black panther, the AIR Studios and the art rock, Mikro-Gen's Pyjamarama is insomnia as working class catastrophe. Their Wally Week can't wake up because he forgot to wind the clock. He needs to get to work. This is not desire keeping him horizontal. This is panic. The gap between these two uses of the same word is the game's entire cultural logic.
Wally Week and the British Everyman
Mikro-Gen was founded in 1981 by Mike Meek and Andrew Laurie in Bracknell, Berkshire, a new town built after the war to rehouse London's overspill population. The company had a solid reputation but became more prominent with its series of games featuring Wally Week and his family, all of which got excellent reviews in the highly respected computer magazine Crash. Wally had first appeared in Automania, also 1984, in which he worked at a car factory. In Pyjamarama he is in his pyjamas and nightcap, asleep in a terraced house, trapped in a nightmare of his own domestic space.
The character's cultural genealogy is worth establishing. The Wally Week character, depicted with a flat cap, oversized nose, and penchant for beer, was initially reused from Hinsley's earlier prototypes for efficiency, but his popularity prompted Mikro-Gen to commit to a franchise exploring Wally and his family's comedic exploits. The flat cap, the beer, the car factory, the terraced house, the wife Wilma: Wally Week is a direct descendant of Andy Capp, Reg Smythe's long-running strip from the Daily Mirror in which a layabout Northern working man spends his days drinking, avoiding work, and outwitting his long-suffering wife. Andy Capp had been running since 1957. By 1984, the template was so culturally embedded that Mikro-Gen could deploy it without explanation. Everyone knew what a man in a flat cap with an oversized nose meant.
What's significant is what Mikro-Gen did with that template. Andy Capp is a study in refusal. He refuses work, refuses responsibility, refuses bourgeois aspiration. Wally Week is the opposite: his nightmare is that he won't make it to work. His domestic catastrophe is not that he's skived off but that the alarm clock didn't go. The comedy and the anxiety are entirely bound up with the obligation of employment. Wally doesn't want to be in his nightmare. He wants to clock in.
This is the game's class politics, and they are precise. In 1984, British manufacturing was in structural collapse. The miners' strike had begun in March. The car industry that Automania had placed Wally inside was being dismantled. The terraced house in Pyjamarama is the locus of everything that was becoming economically unstable. Wally needs to get to work because work might not be there much longer. The nightmare is not abstract.
The Developer
Chris Hinsley spent a month and a half turning it into an all-colour all-action reality. He was nineteen years old, had caught the computer bug from a ZX81 three years ago, and had been working full-time for Mikro-Gen in Ashford, Middlesex since pulling out of a college computer course the previous Christmas.
The Mikro-Gen management philosophy was explicitly anti-auteur. "Eight or ten of us sit down and it's an initial think tank. We don't really believe in making a star, it's not the way a software house should work. We cannot say that Chris Hinsley programmed Pyjamarama. Andy Lawrie who is the technical director comes in. Andy oversees the whole operation, you can't say that Chris alone programmed it because there are things in there that wouldn't have been in it if Chris alone had done it."
This is a direct contrast to the model that had produced Manic Miner. Matthew Smith, alone, at night, on a TRS-80 that crashed when someone put the kettle on. Mikro-Gen is a production unit. The game emerges from a design session, passes through multiple hands, gets its graphics helped and its routines supplemented. The result carries collective labour rather than individual obsession. This matters for what the game becomes: Pyjamarama has the quality of something designed by committee in the best sense, its difficulty is calibrated, its rooms balanced, its puzzle logic tested. It does not have the quality of the singular vision, the game that contains Matthew Smith's 1983 Liverpool the way Manic Miner does. It is well-made rather than fevered.
Paul Denial, Mikro-Gen's sales manager and the person who drew the company's advertising, is credited as the originator of the Wally concept. "Paul, technically labelled Sales Manager, actually visualised Wally, and to my surprise emerged as the man who actually draws the striking adverts." This means the character came from the commercial side of the company rather than the programming side — from the person thinking about how to sell games, not from the person thinking about how to make them. Wally Week is, at his origin, a marketing concept. That he became a genuine character, capable of sustaining multiple games and a Your Sinclair comic strip running from July 1986, is a measure of how well the template worked.
The Game
The premise is economical and strange in equal measure. Wally is asleep. The real Wally, the large sleeping body in the bed, is not playable. The player controls a miniature version of Wally, a dream-self, a psychic projection, a little man in pyjamas and a nightcap wandering through the rooms of his own house, which the dream has populated with inexplicable threats.
The house is not a nightmare in the Gothic sense. There are no monsters from the unconscious, no expressionist distortions of the architecture. The rooms look like rooms. They have furniture, stairs, doors, lifts. The threats are domestic objects that have gone wrong: roast chickens that pursue him, boxing gloves that knock him down when he's not expecting them, rolling balls, grabbing hands. These are not fears; they are inconveniences that have become lethal. The dream logic is not Freudian, it is Bergsonain. The world has become mechanical where it should be fluid. Wally's house is operating on its own terms and he is in the way.
The structural problem is a key. Not a metaphorical key: an actual, physical key that will wind the alarm clock that will wake the real Wally in time for work. The key is somewhere in the house. To reach it requires navigating the rooms in the right order, collecting and placing objects in a two-item inventory, operating lifts and doors, working out which objects interact with which hazards. There are surprises everywhere: the prat-fall boxing gloves knock you down when you're not expecting them, and it takes an experienced hand to spot the difference between a lift seen from the side and an ordinary door.
The two-item inventory limit is the game's central design constraint, and it functions as a direct encoding of the dream's logic. You cannot carry everything you need. You must make decisions about what to hold and what to leave behind, knowing that leaving something behind means returning for it, knowing that returning for it means traversing hazards again, knowing that every traversal costs energy. The energy is represented by a glass of milk. This is an extraordinary detail. Not a health bar, not a life force, not a power meter. A glass of milk. The working class British domestic object as the measure of life.
The rooms contain a taxonomy of the early 1980s British home: the kitchen, the bathroom, the sitting room, the bedroom with the real Wally in it, the garden. And then, with a logic that is either commercial commentary or pure surrealism, a room marked Video Games in which Wally can play a complete, functional game of Space Invaders. "The program's full of neat touches and I especially like the room behind a door marked Video Games where you can play a good game of Space Invaders, so you're really getting two games for the price of one!" The game contains within itself an embedded game, which is simultaneously a joke about the Spectrum bedroom culture that produced it and a genuinely practical feature: you can play Space Invaders while you work out what to do next.
The Context: 1984 and the Sleep Problem
To understand what Pyjamarama is, it is necessary to understand what else was happening on the Spectrum in 1984. Manic Miner (1983) had placed its protagonist underground. The mine is the original working class space, the workplace that is also a trap, the space you descend into and must escape. Miner Willy's reward for completing twenty caverns, for escaping the underground, is the surface. His house. His car. A sunrise or a sunset.
Jet Set Willy (1984), the sequel Matthew Smith spent the next eight months making, took that reward and inverted it. Willy is now obscenely rich. He has bought a mansion and thrown a party. He cannot go to sleep because the housekeeper Maria will not let him go to bed until he has tidied everything up. The game's comedy is class aspiration turned into domestic servitude: the man who escaped the mine is now trapped in the consequences of his own wealth, unable to rest, surrounded by the surreal detritus of a life he doesn't know how to manage.
Pyjamarama, published the same year as Jet Set Willy, is the third point in this triangle, and it is the most psychologically direct. Wally is not underground and not in a mansion. He is in his own terraced house. He has not escaped anything and has not acquired anything. He is trying to get to work tomorrow. His nightmare is not the mine and not the party; it is the alarm clock that did not wind, the job that will be lost, the ordinary obligation that has become inescapable.
The three games constitute an accidental triptych of working class British anxiety in 1984, each in a different register. Manic Miner is escape fantasy. Jet Set Willy is aspirational nightmare. Pyjamarama is domestic panic. Together they map the imaginative terrain of what it meant to be working in Britain in the year the miners went on strike, the desire to escape, the fear of what success costs, and the quiet terror of simply not making it in on time.
Reception
The ZX Spectrum version received the Game of the Month award in the November 1984 issue of Personal Computer Games, beating the BBC Micro version of Elite to the title. The significance of this outcome is worth dwelling on. Elite, David Braben and Ian Bell's procedurally generated space trading simulation, a game of almost unprecedented technical ambition for the period, was beaten to Game of the Month by Wally in his pyjamas trying to find a key.
This is not a failure of critical judgment. It reflects what Personal Computer Games' readership actually valued in November 1984: warmth, humour, character, the particular kind of surreal domestic comedy that Pyjamarama delivered at a higher pitch than almost anything else on the platform. Crash magazine awarded it 92%. Commercially, Pyjamarama achieved strong success in the UK market, with thousands of players contacting Mikro-Gen to report completions shortly after launch.
The critical vocabulary used around the game consistently reaches for the same word: warmth. Reviewers describe Wally as "cute." They note the nightcap fluttering as he slides down banisters. One Crash review calls him "cuter-than-ever." This is a significant critical register for 1984 Spectrum reviews, which were more often concerned with technical achievement, playability, and value for money. Pyjamarama generated affective response in its critics, they liked Wally, were charmed by his predicament, wanted him to make it to work. The game that beat Elite for Game of the Month is the game that made the player care about a small man in a flat cap trying to get out of his own dream. This is an achievement.
The Series and What Came After
Everyone's a Wally was the first arcade adventure game to feature multiple playable characters: Wally Week (a builder and handyman), Wilma (his wife), Tom (a punk mechanic), Dick (a plumber) and Harry (a hippie electrician). The player can change character when in the same location as another, those not being controlled wander around the village carrying on their own chores and business. The design advance from Pyjamarama to Everyone's a Wally is remarkable: from one character navigating one domestic space to a simulated community in which every character has an independent existence. "What we are doing with Life of Wally is we're taking Pyjamarama one step further into adventure whereby you're controlling five central characters." This is not a modest ambition. Everyone's a Wally in 1985 is gesturing toward what would later be called emergent simulation, characters with their own logic, their own tasks, their own needs, contributing to or interfering with your objectives by virtue of simply existing.
Dave Perry, who programmed Herbert's Dummy Run and Three Weeks in Paradise at Mikro-Gen, went on to found Shiny Entertainment and make MDK and Earthworm Jim. Chris Hinsley, who wrote Pyjamarama and Everyone's a Wally, went on to work on TaOS, a multitasking operating system that almost became the next operating system for the Amiga. Mikro-Gen was bought out by Creative Sparks Distribution in 1987, which subsequently went into receivership six months later. The company that had made Wally Week was gone within three years of its peak.
Position
The canonical account of 1984 Spectrum gaming places Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy at the centre and Pyjamarama somewhere in the supporting cast. This is wrong, or at least incomplete. Pyjamarama is not a lesser cousin of those games; it is their precise complement, the third panel of a triptych that neither of the other two panels knew they were part of.
What Pyjamarama understood, and what the other Willy games didn't quite grasp in the same way, was that the dream is not an escape from the working class domestic space. It is a confrontation with it. Manic Miner puts Willy underground; the dream is elsewhere, fantastic, strange. Jet Set Willy puts him in a mansion; the dream is aspiration, a life beyond his origins. Pyjamarama puts him in his own house, in his own pyjamas, surrounded by his own furniture, and makes that house the nightmare. The dream is not escape. The dream is being unable to leave.
This is the more honest psychology. The anxieties that most persistently invade sleep are not fantastic. They are domestic: the alarm clock, the job, the obligation. Pyjamarama understood this. It gave that understanding a flat cap, a nightcap, a glass of milk, and a room where you could play Space Invaders while you worked out what to do. The title is borrowed from Bryan Ferry's most glamorous insomnia. The game is about the other kind.
Interactive: Jet Set Willy The Adventure Game
From Kindergarten to Total Carnage
In the winter of 1998, Eye Magazine published a long piece I'd written about the history of video games. The title was Live.Die.Eat.Cheat. I'd been giving versions of the talk it was based on for most of that year, at the ISEA98 conference in Liverpool, at the Stichting de Geuzen in Amsterdam under a different title: From Kindergarten to Total Carnage.
The talk title was more honest about what it was really arguing.
I was two years into a residency at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht. The work I was making there, multiplayer environments built in Bungie's Marathon engine, CD-ROMs, typographic game levels, and eventually Quake Radius and Emulation Edition, was the practical version of the same argument the talks were making in words. Games were becoming more real. More cinematic. More complex. More immersive. And in my view, they were becoming less themselves.
The argument started in the arcades. Early games relied almost exclusively on what I called the "gameness" of the experience. The pure, abstract quality of the challenge. Pong wasn't interesting because it simulated ping pong well. It was interesting because it gave you control of something on a screen, and that thing obeyed the laws of a different physics. The ball didn't fall. The space had no gravity. Douglas Rushkoff, in Children of Chaos, had argued that all pre-computer play was fundamentally about defying gravity. You build something up to a climax and it falls away, like Aristotle's poetics. Computer games broke this. Inside their virtual spaces, the known physics of the world could be altered. That was the revelation. Not the graphics. The rules.
By the mid-nineties, the industry had mostly forgotten this.
The move toward realism was commercially rational. The hardware was there. The engines were getting faster. Quake had shipped in 1996 and its 3D world was genuinely new. You moved through a space that had weight and shadow and depth in a way that Doom hadn't managed. A character in a game like Messiah could be wrapped in a flexible, stretchable skin made of over 180,000 polygons. The games press celebrated this as progress. The more photorealistic, the better. The closer to cinema, the more serious.
What I kept noticing was what was being lost.
The closer games got to simulating reality, the further they drifted from the clarity that made them compelling. The challenge was getting buried under the production value. The gameness was being replaced by the experience, and the experience was being confused with immersion. You were no longer engaging with a pure system. You were watching something pretend to be something else. Pretend to be a movie, pretend to be a war, pretend to be a historical event. The pretending was increasingly the point.
Quake Radius was a direct response to this. I took Quake's engine, the most sophisticated 3D environment commercially available, and applied a single modification. A fixed, flat base of color surrounded the player, extending outward for a specified radius of space. As you moved through the environment, you could only perceive it as pure, flattened gameplay in your immediate vicinity. The rich 3D world outside the radius didn't disappear. You just couldn't see it. What you were left with was the game's actual structure. The spatial logic, the tactical decisions, the system. Stripped of everything the production had layered on top.
It was not a popular modification. Players who encountered it tended to find it disorienting, even hostile. This, I thought, was exactly the right response. What they were experiencing as disorientation was the absence of something they had come to rely on. The immersion had become load-bearing. The graphics weren't decoration anymore. They were the thing that told players what to do and how to feel. Without them, the players were left with the game itself, which turned out to be harder, stranger, and more demanding than the immersive version had suggested.
The question the work was asking, how might we apply the gameplay and user experience from a simpler gaming era to modern games in a way that allows users to focus on the challenges, instead of the immersion, was genuinely a design question. It was the product thinker's question, even though I wouldn't have called it that then.
What is the thing actually for? If you removed everything that isn't essential, what would remain?
The Jan van Eyck gave me two years to find out. Emulation Edition, the work that closed that period, was the answer I arrived at. Twelve multiplayer gaming levels, stripped of all realism, reduced to their core constituent parts. Apple Benelux supported it. Bungie supported it. The institution acquired it for their permanent collection. The work said: this is what a game is, under everything it also is.
I don't think the industry was ready to hear it in 1998. I'm not sure it was ready to hear it in 2008, or 2018. But the question has not aged. It keeps arriving in new forms. In the contemplative precision of Journey, in the walking-as-game-system of Death Stranding, in every indie title that strips back to ask what the form requires versus what it has merely accumulated.
The early work was the question. Everything since has been sitting with the answer.
Manic Miner: The Definitive History
The Context
Britain in 1983 was not prepared for what was about to happen. The ZX Spectrum had arrived twelve months earlier. Clive Sinclair launched it in April 1982 at £125 for the 16K model, £175 for the 48K. It was rubber-keyed and unglamorous. It connected to a domestic television. It loaded programs from a cassette deck. The cassette deck often failed. You sat in front of it and typed, or you waited minutes for a program to load from tape, and sometimes the program did not load at all, and you typed a different number into the VOLUME control and tried again.
None of this mattered. The Spectrum sold. It sold in quantities Sinclair had not fully anticipated. By the time 1983 arrived, it was the dominant home computer in the United Kingdom. The games market that had grown up around it was fast, chaotic, entrepreneurial, and almost entirely teenage. Software houses operated out of terraced houses and spare bedrooms in Liverpool, Manchester, and Sheffield. The kids making the games were as young as their customers. The money was real. The industry was not yet sure what it was.
Into this came Manic Miner.
The Author
Matthew Smith was born in Penge, London, in 1966. His family moved to Wallasey, Merseyside, when he was seven. He received a TRS-80 for Christmas in 1979, when he was thirteen. He taught himself machine code from a book: Rodnay Zaks's heavy technical manual, Programming the Z80. This was not light reading. This was not a child's book. He worked through it.
His first commercial release was Delta Tau One for the TRS-80, a Galaxian clone. After that came Monster Muncher for the VIC-20, which he claimed to have written in three hours. Neither set the world alight. But by his early teens he had the fundamentals: he could code fast, he understood hardware limitations as design constraints rather than obstacles, and he had the particular disposition of the self-taught programmer who has internalized the machine deeply enough that the machine's logic becomes second nature.
Bug-Byte Software was a Liverpool company founded in 1980 by two Oxford chemistry graduates, Tony Baden and Tony Milner. It had found success on the ZX81 with games by Don Priestley. When the Spectrum came along, Bug-Byte needed Spectrum titles fast. Alan Maton, the company's despatch manager, knew Smith and brokered a deal: Bug-Byte would loan Smith a ZX Spectrum in exchange for a three-game contract. Smith accepted.
The first game, Styx, was a single-screen shooter. Smith himself later admitted it "was quite a flop." Bug-Byte paid him £3,000 for it outright. No royalties. The money was useful, the terms were not. When it came to the second game, Smith retained the licence. That single decision changed everything.
The Commission
Manic Miner was developed following a request from Alan Maton for a Donkey Kong-style arcade game. That is the official account. The reality is more interesting.
Smith had been playing Miner 2049er on the Atari 8-bit. Programmer Bill Hogue had blended ideas from Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, setting his game in a future uranium mine with an emphasis on collecting items across ten levels. It was a serious piece of game design. Ten distinct levels, each with its own logic. A miner as protagonist. An underground world that felt coherent rather than arbitrary.
Smith was, by his own account, captivated. In an interview he described Hogue as "very much an inspiration," saying of his game: "There was a game on the Atari written by an American called Bill Hogue." Following Manic Miner's success, Hogue noted that "the licensees of Miner 2049er were crying." The debt was real and acknowledged.
What Smith added was ambition of scale and a specifically British sensibility. Miner 2049er had ten levels. Manic Miner would have twenty. The original game spec had included teleporters, lifts, and escalators, but Smith decided to have lots of screens rather than lots of fancy mechanisms inside each one. Screens were cheaper to implement. More screens meant more variety. More variety meant the game could surprise you for longer. The logic was sound, even if the stated motivation, as Smith later admitted with some amusement, was partly laziness.
The cover art made the Miner 2049er connection visible. Both games depicted their protagonists as bearded, rugged miners on the inlay artwork. Neither looked anything like that in-game.
The Making
Smith sketched the screens during a holiday in Italy. He came back and wrote the code in eight weeks. He described the process in his 2000 television interview: "I was in Italy drawing pictures of some levels with some water running down and I came back and in eight weeks we were duplicating cassettes."
The development machine was not a Spectrum. Smith wrote Manic Miner using a Model III Tandy TRS-80. He coded at night because the TRS-80 crashed whenever someone put the kettle on. He worked in Z80 assembly language, targeting the Spectrum's architecture from a different machine. This was the standard workflow of a programmer who understood the hardware at a level that permitted complete mental simulation of the target platform. You did not need to be running the Spectrum to write Spectrum code. You needed to know exactly how the Spectrum behaved, down to cycle counts and memory addresses.
Initially the game had sixteen screens, until Smith found a way to add four more. He finished in August 1983. The completed game was first demonstrated publicly at the Computer Fair at Earls Court in June 1983, when only the sixteen-screen version existed. The final twenty-screen version went on sale shortly after.
The Technical Achievement
The ZX Spectrum was an 8-bit machine running a Z80 processor at 3.5 MHz. It had 48K of RAM. Its sound output was a single 1-bit speaker: the buzzer. You could set it high or you could set it low. That was it. Prior to Manic Miner, this had produced beeps and simple tones between gameplay sequences. It had not produced continuous in-game music while the game was simultaneously running.
Smith wanted both. He wanted music playing constantly while the game ran at full speed.
Matthew Smith achieved this by alternating the processor between playing the game and playing the music. This is why Manic Miner has its characteristic, instantly recognisable juddery effect in the music. It also explains the subtle juddery movements of Miner Willy and the guardians. The processor timesliced between two tasks, switching so rapidly that both appeared simultaneous. The music suffered a stuttering quality as a result. The gameplay suffered a slight jerkiness. But both were present. Both ran.
The technical approach owes something to a technique called granular synthesis, pioneered by the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis in his piece Analogique B. Smith almost certainly did not know Xenakis. But the solution he found independently was structurally related to that compositional method: breaking sound into tiny grains and sequencing them at speed to produce the illusion of a continuous tone.
The choice of music was Edvard Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from the Peer Gynt Suite, Op. 46. The connection was obvious to the point of poetry: underground setting, mounting menace, relentless momentum. The piece accelerates. So does the game's difficulty. The pairing was not accidental.
For the title screen, Smith chose Johann Strauss Jr.'s "The Blue Danube." Not content with the Grieg, Smith included a few bars of Strauss's Blue Danube to accompany the opening screen, with an on-screen piano keyboard with keys that highlighted along with the music. The keyboard scrolled across the screen as the waltz played. It was a piece of pure theatre. It told the player that this was not the usual thing.
Manic Miner was the first ZX Spectrum title with in-game music. This is not a minor technical footnote. It established a new standard for what a game could be. Before Manic Miner, sound was intermittent punctuation. After it, the expectation of continuous music in home computer games was set.
The loading screen was another innovation. The Spectrum's video display allowed background and foreground colours to be exchanged automatically without software attention, and the animated loading screen appears to swap the words "Manic" and "Miner" through clever manipulation of this feature. It was also much faster than a standard loading screen. It was the first game ever to have an animated loading screen.
The character sprite was a 16x16 pixel figure with four animation frames. Miner Willy walked in one direction. The same frames served for walking in the other direction, reversed. Jumping used no dedicated sprite: it was the walking frames with vertical momentum applied. The economy was total. Every byte was accounted for.
Each cavern was allocated enough memory to hold eight frames of animation. This meant Smith had to be very clever in his guardian design. If a guardian sprite was obviously facing left or right, only one guardian of that type could appear in the level: four sprites for walking left and four for walking right. Therefore, the levels containing two guardian graphics feature sprites that do not face a specific direction.
The guardians were all 16x16 sprites. The collectible items and hazards were 8x8. The precision of the hitbox was exactly that of the sprite boundary. There was no mercy zone. Manic Miner has some serious pixel-perfect jumps that need to be made. This was not a bug. It was a design philosophy.
Every cavern definition contains a conveyor definition, and every conveyor has a non-zero length and is animated by a routine. But there are two caverns in which the conveyor is hidden or otherwise unusable: an unused conveyor of length 1 in The Endorian Forest, and an unused conveyor of length 3 in Amoebatrons' Revenge, where a bug causes the third row of pixels to animate as if it were a conveyor even though it is occupied by a platform. These vestigial elements are the fingerprints of the development process: code that was written and then covered over, not excised, because excision takes time and costs bytes.
The Cheat Code
The cheat code was the numerical sequence 6031769, based on Matthew Smith's driving licence, "with an error in it and twisted round a bit," as he put it in an interview for Retro Gamer magazine. Typing it during gameplay activated a mode that let Willy teleport to any cavern. A boot appeared next to the remaining lives count to confirm the cheat was active. The number was personal. It was hidden in plain sight.
In the Software Projects version, this changed to "typewriter." Smith would later use the code "writetyper" for the cheat mode in Jet Set Willy.
The Twenty Caverns
The caverns of Manic Miner are worth examining in full, because they constitute the game's argument. Taken together, they describe a trajectory: from the recognisably industrial through the increasingly strange, arriving finally at the literal surface of the earth.
1. Central Cavern. The first screen is a tutorial disguised as a gauntlet. It introduces every mechanic simultaneously: moving platforms, patrolling enemies, fixed hazards, the conveyor belt. It is very hard. The game has what might be described as a tutorial by 1983 standards, in that the first level requires the player to learn the full range of Miner Willy's movements and execute them precisely at length. The plus side is that if you fail, you are immediately in place to start Central Cavern again. And once you master it, the following levels are a breeze by comparison, right through at least until the fifth cavern. The decision to front-load the difficulty was counter-intuitive and correct. It filters. It trains.
2. The Cold Room. Snow shoes in a refrigerated space. The guardians are stiff-jointed penguins. The penguins pace back and forth, oblivious to Willy's presence, absolutely predictable if you're paying attention. The Cold Room introduces the idea that enemies are not hostile actors; they are mechanical systems. They do not pursue you. They follow their paths. Your job is to understand the paths.
3. The Menagerie. Willy in a zoo. The wildlife is abstracted into simple two-frame sprites. The humour is already operating: this is not a zoo in any realistic sense. The name gestures toward chaos.
4. Abandoned Uranium Workings. The naming makes the Miner 2049er debt explicit. Uranium workings abandoned. The level has a radiation-green cast. It is the game briefly acknowledging its lineage.
5. Eugene's Lair. The most personal screen in the game. It started as a skit on Eugene Evans, a programmer at Bug-Byte known among his colleagues for driving a Ferrari at seventeen. The Eugene guardian is a large, oscillating figure that descends and ascends in the centre of the screen. Smith recalled Evans with some complexity: "He was famous for being young and driving a Ferrari. But he crashed his Ferrari." The level encodes professional rivalry as comic threat. Eugene can be evaded. The Ferrari-driving is noted and then discarded.
6. Processing Plant. An industrial middle section. The Bug-Byte version features a deadly bush in this cavern; the Software Projects version replaced it with a ghost. The change was small and the level design beneath it remained the same.
7. The Vat. There is a kangaroo above the vat. Why there is a kangaroo above the vat is not explained. This is Manic Miner at its most casually surreal: a piece of logic that is entirely self-consistent within the game's rules and entirely nonsensical outside them. The kangaroo bounces. You navigate around the bounce cycle.
8. Miner Willy Meets the Kong Beast. The Kong Beast is the game's most direct homage to Donkey Kong. It is a large gorilla figure that occupies the top of the screen. The name is a formal introduction. Smith was not hiding his influences; he was celebrating them while doing something different with them.
9. Wacky Amoebatrons. The amoebatrons are what they sound like: amoeba-shaped robots moving in patterns that imitate cellular logic. The name is cheerfully self-aware.
10. The Endorian Forest. An Ewok reference, three months before Return of the Jedi was released in the UK. The game came out in June 1983; the film arrived in Britain in late June 1983. This timing suggests advance knowledge from press coverage rather than from seeing the film. The level is a tree-platform sequence. The Endorian reference ages it precisely.
11. Attack of the Mutant Telephones. Smith said his favourite guardian was the telephone: "My favourite monster in Manic Miner, errm, I got the most compliments on the telephones." The animated toilet seats were his little brother's idea. Anthony Smith was three at the time. There are no toilet seats in Attack of the Mutant Telephones; those appear later. But the telephones themselves are objects of genuine comic invention. They ring as they patrol. They ring because they are telephones. This was 1983 humour at its most compressed.
12. Return of the Alien Kong Beast. A reprise of cavern eight's antagonist, now in a different configuration. The naming is a sequel title. Smith was already doing sequels within the game, three-word genre titles riffing on themselves.
13. Ore Refinery. Industrial again. Conveyor belts under horizontal hazards. The refinery aesthetic is the game returning to its stated premise: these are mines, there is ore, someone is supposed to be working here.
14. Skylab Landing Bay. Skylabs fall from above and shatter on the platforms. The Skylab space station had re-entered the atmosphere in 1979; this was still culturally live in 1983 as a piece of slightly absurd recent history, the American space station that fell to earth over Western Australia. Smith turned it into a level mechanic. The skylabs collapse the platforms where they hit. The crumbling floor tile in Skylab Landing Bay is unique to that cavern and, in fact, goes unused in the final game. The crumbling mechanic was designed and then never deployed.
15. The Bank. Willy is now robbing a bank. The shift in premise is handled without comment. He was a miner. Now he is in a bank. The platforming requirements are the same. The moral implications are unaddressed.
16. The Sixteenth Cavern. The name is the name. It is the sixteenth cavern. Smith ran out of thematic momentum here, or decided that minimal naming was funnier than invented naming. It is both. In The Sixteenth Cavern, Willy can get stuck if he enters the area below the portal before collecting all the items outside that area. He will then have to wait until his air supply runs out. This is a death by architecture: a softlock that requires patience rather than restart.
17. The Warehouse. The original Bug-Byte release featured "threshers" in The Warehouse. The Software Projects re-release replaced them with rotating Software Projects logos: the Penrose impossible triangle, the company's branding. The level contains what players have long considered the game's most brutal section: a strip of platforms with narrow margins that demands precision at the point of near-exhaustion, coming this late in the game. No mercy.
18. Amoebatrons' Revenge. The return of the amoebatrons, with a titular escalation. The level's sequel name signals that Smith thought in narrative terms even about individual screens, even when the narrative was essentially a joke about sequels.
19. Solar Power Generator. The game escapes underground. Willy is in a facility on the surface, or near it. The central gimmick is a solar beam: the light beam's movements are predictable and follow specific rules. It travels vertically downward from the top, and changes direction between vertically downward and horizontally to the left if a guardian is in the way. For every frame the beam is in contact with Willy, the air supply is reduced by additional units beyond the standard drain. The solar beam is the game's most mechanically complex hazard. It moves. Its rules can be learned. Learning them is the level.
20. The Final Barrier. Willy has been underground for nineteen caverns. The Final Barrier is the surface: his house, his car, a fence, a sunrise or sunset (the game does not specify which), water. The level itself is considered by most players to be the easiest in the game: a relief after the warehouse and the solar generator. The title screen, which displays part of The Final Barrier, shows the surface where Miner Willy lives, with a sunrise, water, slight cloud, his house, a neat fence and his car. Once all the items are collected and Willy jumps through the portal, there is an ending sequence: after Willy has jumped through the portal to the ground above and the celebratory sound effect and colour-cycling effect have finished, the bottom half of Willy's sprite can be seen dangling below the swordfish graphic while the remaining air supply decreases to zero. This is a bug. It is also, in retrospect, a small piece of accidental poetry: Willy triumphant and yet still half-submerged.
After completion, the game loops from the beginning at increased difficulty. There is no end. The mine is infinite.
The Two Versions
There are two definitive versions of Manic Miner for the ZX Spectrum, and the differences between them matter.
The Bug-Byte version was published first, in the summer of 1983. It contains the driving licence cheat code. In The Warehouse, the guardians are threshers. In The Processing Plant, the hazard is a bush. The Amoebatrons in Amoebatrons' Revenge have a specific sprite design. The scrolling message on the title screen has Bug-Byte's text. The cover art exists in two variants: an early "Whistler" design and a later "Lantern" cover.
On 28th November 1983, Software Projects released their own version. Minor alterations were made to the graphics, changing some enemies from Bug-Byte logos and changing others to Penrose triangles, the Software Projects logo. The cheat code changed to "typewriter." The scrolling message changed. Several sprite designs in the affected caverns changed. The fundamental design of the game, all twenty caverns and their structures, remained identical.
Bug-Byte were able to continue selling their version over the Christmas period, with the Software Projects release not becoming the most circulated version until early 1984. Both versions circulated simultaneously for several months. Both are legitimate. Both are by Matthew Smith. The difference is branding and minor asset changes.
The Contract Clause
The mechanism by which Smith retrieved his game from Bug-Byte is worth understanding in full, because it was legally novel enough to surprise everyone involved.
Smith recalled in an interview that his contract contained a clause stating that should a game be withdrawn from the market upon written request, it would be returned to the programmer. "I don't think anyone had expected that a programmer would withdraw his own game!"
He withdrew it. He sent the letter. The clause activated. The game came back to him.
A Big K article from the period quoted Smith directly: "It's a popular misconception that I worked for Bug Byte and was then lured away. I never did; all they ever did was to manufacture and sell my game for me. I would have been quite happy to leave Manic Miner with them, but they bent the contract."
Bug-Byte owed him around £16,000 in royalties on the 40,000 copies of Manic Miner they still held in stock. Smith had already made that much again from his five per cent cut on the first 40,000 copies. The royalty dispute was the precipitating factor. The contract clause was the mechanism. Smith did not just leave Bug-Byte. He took his game with him.
Alan Maton explained that "the royalties were to be paid for the duplication of cassettes, not their sale. The contract was only a few sentences. They were almost verbal agreements in those days." This is the legal archaeology of a nascent industry. Contracts were improvised. Clauses were inserted without full understanding of their implications. Matthew Smith understood his clause.
Software Projects
Software Projects was formed by Smith, Maton, and Liverpool businessman Tommy Barton. Smith and Maton had left Bug-Byte together. Maton had been the despatch manager who commissioned Manic Miner in the first place. They went into business with the game that Maton had requested and Smith had written, now fully under their control.
The company was a Liverpool operation. It operated in the environment that had produced Bug-Byte and Imagine Software, the city's brief moment as the capital of British games development. Smith occupied the programmer's role. Maton managed the operation. Barton provided the business structure.
Manic Miner was the company's launch product. The plan, as Maton explained in a contemporary interview, was not to be simply a Manic Miner house. The intention was to build an internal development team, with Smith acting as technical advisor. The intention did not survive contact with what actually happened.
What actually happened was Jet Set Willy.
The Charts
In August 1983, sales of Bug-Byte's original ZX Spectrum release of Manic Miner took the game to the top of the UK video games charts, replacing Jet Pac. Jet Pac was an Ultimate Play The Game title: a much-admired shooter. Manic Miner displaced it.
The game topped the UK Software Top Thirty charts in September 1983 and maintained the number one position through much of early 1984. The Commodore 64 version, released by Software Projects, reached the number one position in early 1984 and went on to become the best-selling Commodore 64 game of the year and the third best-selling ZX Spectrum game of 1984.
The game sold over 50,000 copies initially. By some estimates it reached over 100,000 copies across versions. The seventeen-year-old Matthew was rewarded with what was described as a life-changing £30,000 payday. Then more royalties came in. Then Bug-Byte still owed him money. The numbers were substantial and disputed and incomplete.
Manic Miner was the winner of "Best Arcade Style Game" and placed third in the "Game of the Year" category at the 1983 Golden Joystick Awards, voted for by readers of Computer and Video Games magazine.
Big K readers voted it the "Most Plundered Concept of the Year" in 1984. This was accurate and complimentary. The platform game as a genre was now established and everyone was making one. They were all, in various ways, descended from Manic Miner.
The Ports
The official ports span more than a decade and several platforms.
The Commodore 64 version (1984, Software Projects) is the most commercially significant of the ports, and the most compromised. The C64 had superior sound hardware; the SID chip could produce music that didn't require the timeslicing hack. The music accordingly sounded better and smoother. The graphics used the C64's different colour handling, which produced a different feel. Most players who know the game from the C64 version know a slightly different game.
The Amstrad CPC version (1984) is effectively a port of the Software Projects Spectrum version, with one notable oddity: Eugene's Lair was renamed "Eugene Was Here" for reasons that have never been fully explained. The Final Barrier also has a completely different layout on the Amstrad.
The BBC Micro version introduced a cavern called "The Meteor Shower" that replaces the Solar Power Generator. It has meteors which descend from the top of the screen and disintegrate when they hit platforms, like the Skylabs in Skylab Landing Bay, and forcefields that turn on and off. The Final Barrier on the BBC version is completely different from the Spectrum version and considerably harder.
The Dragon 32 version, programmed by Roy Coates, had to make a sacrifice: to retain the resolution of the original, the Dragon version has black and white graphics. The colour was a casualty of hardware compatibility. The resolution was preserved. The cheat code on this version was accessed by typing "P", "P", "ENGUIN," which is the word PENGUIN with its first letter already pressed in sequence. This is the most oblique cheat code in the history of the game.
The Commodore 16 port, according to contemporary documentation, was produced under a two-week deadline. It was limited by the initial lack of developer material for the C16 machine, and a bug resulted in the game entering the first screen as soon as the tape had finished loading, instead of waiting for the user to start the game. The cassette also lacked a fast loader system, meaning it took nearly 23 minutes to load.
The SAM Coupé version (1990, programmed by Matthew Holt, music by František Fuka) is the most ambitious of the official ports. Like the ZX original it requires pixel-perfect timing. In addition to the original twenty caverns, forty additional caverns were included. The extra levels were designed by David Ledbury and by winners of a competition run by SAM Computers Ltd. Sixty caverns. The SAM Coupé version scored 84% in Your Sinclair and 88% in Crash.
The Game Boy Advance version (2003, Jester Interactive) brought the game to a Nintendo handheld with updated visuals and digital controls. It worked. It preserved the cavern structures. It felt like a different artefact.
The Xbox 360 version, Manic Miner 360 (2012, Xbox Live Indie Games), was delisted in 2017 when Microsoft closed the Xbox Live Indie Games store. It no longer officially exists.
Beyond the official ports, unofficial conversions exist for the Acorn Archimedes, Acorn Atom, Acorn Electron, Atari ST, Cambridge Z88, Commodore 128, HP48, Linux, Macintosh, Windows, MS-DOS, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Nintendo 64, PlayStation, Playdate, and the Microsoft Zune. The HP48 version scrolls the area rather than displaying the level as a whole, making it a very difficult port for those who have not previously mastered another version. The Zune version is the most unusual delivery mechanism for a 1983 platform game ever devised.
The Mythology
Matthew Smith disappeared after Jet Set Willy. Not immediately and not completely, but directionally and with increasing commitment.
He had celebrated Manic Miner's success with considerable enthusiasm. As he told computer magazine Sinclair User, he spent his time "partying, getting drunk and falling over a lot," once hitting the clubs of Liverpool clad in a Roman toga. This is the image that the mythology needs: the teenage millionaire in a toga in Liverpool, spending money that had not yet stopped arriving. He was seventeen.
Jet Set Willy took eight months instead of eight weeks. The game was more complex, more ambitious, and generated by someone who was simultaneously trying to run a company and had by his own admission stopped sleeping properly. Associates noted that the workload, coupled with demands from business partners at Software Projects, effectively broke him, leading to signs of depression that went unrecognized at the time. Smith himself, reflecting years later, called Manic Miner the most enjoyable game he ever made and Jet Set Willy "seven shades of hell."
Smith closed Software Projects in 1988 without completing any more programs. The intended third Miner Willy game, variously called "Miner Willy Meets the Taxman" or "The Mega Tree," was a Commodore 64 project that never reached completion. The narrative logic of the series was: Manic Miner (escape from underground) gave way to Jet Set Willy (life of irresponsible wealth), which would have given way to the taxman. The arc was autobiographical in ways Smith may or may not have intended.
He left. He went to the Netherlands in around 1995. He lived in a commune in Leiden. A Dutch commune, confirmed in his 2000 television interview. He said of the Netherlands: "That was a great time. I went there in '95." He tried to get a job in a fish-gutting factory and applied at the wrong time of year. This is the detail that everyone repeats because it is impossible to improve on.
He was deported from the Netherlands in October 1997 after failing to keep his residency papers in order.
The internet found this irresistible. A website called "Where is Matthew Smith?" collected sightings. According to some rumours, he was planting tulips in Amsterdam. Others claimed to have heard him call in on radio talk shows or seen him in a local supermarket. The sightings ranged from plausible to invented. The desire behind them was not voyeurism. It was something closer to concern. The people who played Manic Miner when they were eleven wanted to know that the person who made it was all right.
He was considered by some to be too good to be true, and at one stage was even considered by some to be the figment of a computer programmer's imagination. This is not something that happens to many people. It happened to Matthew Smith. He became, briefly, an urban legend. His games were played by millions of people who had not met him and could not locate him and were not sure he existed.
He returned to Britain and appeared on Channel 4's Thumb Candy in 2000. Matthew ends the interview by saying: "Five years after I did it I was a washout; ten years after I was history. It's coming up to twenty years now and I'm a legend." He said this in his bedroom, surrounded by Rock band posters, sitting next to a Spectrum. The bed was unmade. The room was exactly as you might have imagined it.
The Rights Question
The rights to Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy have followed a complicated path that does not end with Matthew Smith.
Smith retained the rights initially through the licence mechanism. Software Projects held them through the company's existence. When Software Projects closed in 1988, the rights disposition became unclear. A 2019 legal letter from Elite Systems claimed that Matt Smith no longer holds the rights to Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, and that these had been purchased by Elite from a third party. The letter stated that Smith was not entitled to any royalties.
Smith confirmed at Play Expo Manchester in 2019, marking the 35th anniversary of Jet Set Willy, that he had made almost nothing from his games in the long run. He was pretty clear that he'd made almost zero out of the games he wrote. The man who created Britain's first software blockbuster owns no part of it.
This is not an unusual story for the era. The contracts were improvised. The industry was improvised. The teenage programmers who made fortunes in 1983 often did not keep them, and the legal structures that surrounded the work were rarely adequate to protect them in the long term.
Legacy and Influence
Retro Gamer called Manic Miner one of the most influential platform games of all time.
In 1991, ACE magazine listed Manic Miner and its sequel Jet Set Willy, alongside Hunchback, Impossible Mission, and the Mario series, as the greatest platform games of all time, calling Manic Miner "the first great home computer platform game."
The game was number 97 on Polygon's 2017 retrospective list of the 500 best games of all time. This is significant: a 1983 ZX Spectrum game, on a 2017 all-time list, sitting alongside games produced with budgets and teams and technology that Smith could not have imagined while coding at night on his TRS-80.
The specific influence is structural. Manic Miner codified several conventions that became the grammar of the British platform game. Single-screen caverns. Item collection as the gating mechanism for progression. A timed oxygen supply as the constant pressure system. Pixel-perfect jump precision. Enemy movement along fixed predictable paths. Surreal humour in enemy and level naming. Multi-level progression with escalating difficulty. The game after the game: the loop back to the beginning, harder, for players who wanted to know how deep they could go.
Every British platform game that followed worked within or against these conventions. Some followed them exactly. Big K's readers voted Manic Miner "Most Plundered Concept of the Year" in 1984, and they were correct. The plundering was not disrespectful. It was recognition.
The deeper influence was cultural. Manic Miner established that a single teenage programmer, in a bedroom, on a machine costing a few hundred pounds, could produce something that stopped a country. The technology had made that possible. Smith had demonstrated that it was possible. The demonstration mattered as much as the game.
A homage to the Manic Miner loading screen appeared in one episode of the 2005 British sitcom Nathan Barley. The animated swap of "Manic" and "Miner" in the loading sequence is specific enough cultural knowledge that its inclusion in a 2005 comedy series assumes the audience will recognise it. A generation did.
The Fan Community
The JSW Central community, which focuses on games using the Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy engines, has produced dozens of fan games, remakes, and level editors since the early 1990s. The engine is simple enough to be understood completely and complex enough to support endless variation.
Manic Miner 40th Anniversary Tribute was released in August 2023, forty years after the original. It redistributed the difficulty curve across the twenty caverns, making the easy levels slightly harder and the hard levels slightly more humane, while retaining the essential structure of every screen. The anniversary was marked. The game was played.
The first animated loading screen, the first in-game music on the Spectrum, the first software blockbuster, the contract clause that no one saw coming, the twenty caverns sketched in Italy and coded at night to the sound of a TRS-80 fan, the Roman toga in Liverpool, the fish-gutting factory application, the Dutch commune, the incomplete residency papers, the bedroom with the unmade bed and the Rock posters: all of it is now the history.
The game runs in eight seconds on an emulator. The music starts immediately. "In the Hall of the Mountain King" fills the room. Miner Willy begins to walk.
Space Harrier: The Definitive History
The Hundred-Page Document
The game began with a document that did not survive in the form its author intended. A Sega designer known only as Ida wrote approximately a hundred pages proposing a three-dimensional combat flight simulator. It was detailed, ambitious, and technically impossible. The word "Harrier" appeared in it, referring to the British Aerospace Harrier, the VTOL jump jet capable of hovering and vertical takeoff: a plausible choice for a game about an aircraft navigating complex terrain at speed. The document outlined a player-controlled fighter jet shooting missiles into realistic foregrounds, rendered in a third-person perspective with full rotational animation.
The problem was memory. To animate a large jet sprite realistically, you needed it to have frames for every viewing angle as it banked and rolled: at minimum sixty-four distinct animation frames for a large sprite, and that was only if you were being parsimonious. At the arcade hardware specifications available in 1984 and 1985, this was a VRAM problem and a memory overflow. You could have a small sprite with sixty-four frames, but a small sprite would not have visual impact on a large arcade screen. A large sprite with the required frames was simply beyond what could be held in memory.
The document was handed to Yu Suzuki.
Suzuki had joined Sega in 1983, two years earlier, at the age of twenty-five. His first project was Champion Boxing for the SG-1000, a home console game that Sega's management found impressive enough to install in an arcade cabinet essentially unchanged. He was promoted to project leader while still in his first year. His second project, Hang-On, had been a motorcycle racing game with a full-scale motorcycle cabinet that players physically leaned to steer. Hang-On was released in 1985, the same year Space Harrier would ship, and it established everything that Space Harrier would build on: the Super Scaler hardware, the taikan cabinet philosophy, the three-dimensional sprite-scaling technique that produced the illusion of depth through size variation alone.
When Suzuki received Ida's document, his response was to keep one word.
The Simplification
A human requires far fewer animation frames than a jet fighter. A human seen from behind, flying forward, is essentially the same human at every viewing angle in the axis of movement. The sprite complexity collapsed. The memory problem dissolved. What had been technically impossible became technically feasible in a matter of redesign.
But the human needed a world to inhabit. The realistic military setting that had justified a fighter jet was now incoherent. A running, flying human in a cold war combat scenario made no sense. Suzuki threw out everything else in the document and began again, keeping only the name Harrier and transforming it from a specific aircraft type into a character name.
The new world came from three sources that Suzuki has named consistently in interviews across the decades. The first was Hayao Miyazaki's fantasy art tradition filtered through the 1984 Wolfgang Petersen film The Neverending Story, adapted from Michael Ende's novel: the white luck dragon Falkor, the child protagonist riding through an endless sky, the sense of a world that was both dying and luminous. The second was the 1982 anime Space Cobra, which provided the spatial register of science fiction action, a future without specifying its technology, an aesthetic grammar of energy weapons and impossible mobility. The third was Roger Dean.
Roger Dean was a British artist whose album cover paintings for Yes, Asia, and other progressive rock acts had given him a specific reputation for the kind of floating, organic, impossible landscapes that could not be found in nature but felt as if they might exist in a different physics. Mushroom columns rising from desert floors. Rock formations balanced in ways that defied gravity. Architecture that had grown rather than been built. Suzuki described the appeal with precision: "If we had used a realistic setting with realistic objects, then we would have had to create extra sprites to capture the changing perspective as the player approached those objects. But with a fantasy world, we could use imagery like the mushroom columns, objects that wouldn't need a lot of complicated frames to animate, because they look the same from all visual perspectives." The Roger Dean aesthetic was not only visually suited to the game's emotional ambition; it was technically ideal. Radially symmetrical objects, which look the same from multiple angles, required fewer sprite frames.
Necessity and vision produced the same answer simultaneously. The checkerboard floor, which would become the game's most immediately recognisable visual element, arose from similar logic. The checkerboard pattern imparted a sense of speed and did not consume the sole frame buffer, permitting a separate layer for the background sky. The pastel colour palette allowed for a sky with many colour gradations, suitable for a fantasy world. These were engineering decisions that looked like artistic choices.
The Team
The development team was small. Satoshi Mifune, programmer and one of the names in the highscore table (listed as BIN), had moved directly from Hang-On to Space Harrier. In a 1996 interview collected by Shmuplations, he described the transition: "As soon as I joined Sega, they put me to work on Hang On, and as soon as that was finished, Space Harrier began. After Hang On, I was saying I really wanted to work on a shooting game. And I thought if we did one, we should maybe go for a 3D game."
The circumstances of development were physically distinctive. Sega had moved their main offices. The Space Harrier team alone was permitted to stay behind and continue working at the old office, on the fourth floor. The moving boxes that surrounded them served as improvised beds for all-nighters. Mifune recalled this without apparent complaint: "We used all the moving boxes to sleep on, when we had to pull all-nighters." The game was exhibited at the AM Show in September 1985, establishing an unusually compressed development cycle from initial concept to public demonstration.
Suzuki's role was hybrid in a way typical of Japanese arcade development of the period: simultaneously programmer, designer, and hardware engineer. He designed the game. He co-designed the hardware it ran on. He coordinated the graphic design, sound, and programming pipelines. His description of the original planning document's relationship to the final game is telling: "Our very first plan was actually a helicopter. The initial planning doc for Space Harrier was this thick tome, very detailed. But Suzuki wanted to make the player a human, and so we ended up not referring to the plans that much, and actually used the back pages more as a notepad for our own ideas."
The planning document became a notepad. This is how it was made.
The Cabinet Question
Sega was reluctant to build the motion cabinet. The engineering and construction costs were high. The cabinet that Suzuki had proposed would move dynamically, pitching and rolling in response to the player's analog stick inputs, synchronising the physical world of the player with the virtual world on screen. This was the taikan concept, the Japanese term for "body sensation": the idea that an arcade game should engage the player's entire body rather than just their hands. Hang-On had pioneered this with its full-scale motorcycle. Space Harrier's proposed cabinet was its extension into flight simulation.
Suzuki offered his salary as compensation if the cabinet failed. It did not fail. The cabinet became one of the most photographed objects in the mid-1980s arcade world: a large white enclosure with a cockpit seat that swung left and right, forward and backward, responding to the analog flight stick mounted on the armrest. Two motorised linear actuators in the base tilted the cabinet in two axes. It was often mistakenly called hydraulic; the actual mechanism was electromechanical. The distinction was invisible to the player. What the player felt was flight.
Three cabinet configurations existed. The standard upright cabinet had the flight stick and screen but no motion. The sit-down cabinet added the enclosed seating but retained a stationary base. The deluxe "rolling" cabinet added the full motion. Each configuration was a different price for arcade operators and a different experience for players. The full motion cabinet was the intended experience and the promotional image. Most players, outside Japan, encountered the standard versions.
The deluxe cabinet was the object. It is the thing people who played Space Harrier in 1985 and 1986 remember when they remember the game. Not the sprites or the checkerboard floor or the music, but the moment when they sat in the cabinet and felt it move.
The Super Scaler
The hardware behind Space Harrier was the Sega Space Harrier arcade system board, an evolution of the board used for Hang-On. The key addition over Hang-On's hardware was an Intel 8751 microcontroller running at 8 MHz. The practical effect was dramatic: where Hang-On had occasionally suffered framerate dips and sprite flickering when multiple vehicles appeared simultaneously, Space Harrier ran at a constant sixty frames per second with multiple enemies at different scales, obstacles, bullets, and the continuously scrolling background, without any detectable slowdown.
The Super Scaler technology at the heart of the board worked by calculating positions, scales, and zoom rates in three dimensions and then converting the results back to two-dimensional display data. Suzuki was explicit about this in a 2010 interview: "My designs were always 3D from the beginning. All the calculations in the system were 3D, even from Hang-On. I calculated the position, scale, and zoom rate in 3D and converted it backwards to 2D. So I was always thinking in 3D." This is the accurate technical description of pseudo-3D sprite scaling: true 3D mathematics producing a 2D output that mimicked the appearance of a 3D space.
The system could display 32,000 colours on screen simultaneously. For 1985, this was extraordinary. It ran on 16-bit graphics hardware when the dominant home computing landscape was 8-bit. The visual gap between Space Harrier and everything else in a 1985 arcade was as wide as the gap between a colour film and a black-and-white newsreel.
The audio hardware was a Zilog Z80 CPU controlling a Yamaha YM2203 FM synthesis chip and Sega's own PCM unit for digitised voice samples. The voice was the game's most immediately memorable audio element: "Welcome to the Fantasy Zone. Get ready!" spoken at the start of each credit, and "You're doing great!" at the end of each successfully completed stage. Even after dying, as Harrier screamed and fell, a friendly text message appeared: "Many more battle scenes will soon be available!" These voice samples were among the first clearly intelligible digitised speech in an arcade game.
Hiroshi Kawaguchi
The music was composed by Hiroshi Kawaguchi, credited in later releases as "Hiro." He had joined Sega in 1984 initially as a programmer, coming from prior experience on home computers. He had composed the music for Hang-On in his spare time, and that work led to an invitation to score Space Harrier. At the time of Space Harrier's development, he had no access to a professional music sequencer. He composed drafts on a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, one of the defining instruments of 1980s recorded music, and transcribed the final versions as sheet music.
Suzuki had described his visual concept as a "Neverending Story" image, and he wanted each piece of music to be long enough to play through an entire stage without looping. The main Space Harrier theme, the one that saturates almost every memory of the game, is built on this specification: it runs long, builds progressively, and contains enough material that a player who is good enough to survive an entire stage does not hear it repeat. Kawaguchi described the compositional challenge: the first thing he wrote was too long, they discussed it, and decided to change the stage for it rather than the music.
The theme is energetic, expansive, and slightly martial, with a melodic structure that manages to convey both urgency and a particular kind of wonder. It is not background music. It is the emotional argument of the game made audible, and it is inseparable from the visual experience of the checkerboard floor rushing toward you. Yuzo Koshiro, one of the most celebrated video game composers of the subsequent decade, credited Space Harrier as the first time he heard FM synthesis music and said the game inspired him to become a game music composer. He described Kawaguchi as one of Sega's best ever composers.
The soundtrack was released commercially multiple times. A 1987 compilation, Sega Taikan Game Special, collected music from the taikan games. A 1997 release, Yu-Suzuki produce Hang-On / Space Harrier, was a Sega anniversary retrospective. In the 2000s, Data Disc released a vinyl edition with Kawaguchi's original sheet music reproduced in the liner notes, available in a limited signed edition.
The Game
Space Harrier has eighteen stages. Fifteen of them end with a boss. The other two, stages five and twelve, are bonus stages in which the player rides Uriah, a friendly giant dragon, smashing through obstacles for points without danger. Stage eighteen is a boss rush: seven previously encountered bosses appearing in sequence, identified by name at the bottom of the screen as you face them.
Harrier moves through the stages in constant forward motion. The player cannot slow down or stop. The analogue stick moves Harrier across the screen in all directions, repositioning him against the continuous stream of enemies and obstacles. When the stick is released, Harrier returns to the centre of the screen. There are no power-ups. There is only the cannon, which fires automatically in a continuous stream in the direction the player faces. The aiming assistance is proximity-based: shoot in the general vicinity of an enemy and the shots will curve toward the target when within range.
The enemies constitute one of the most genuinely surreal bestiaries in the history of arcade gaming. They include prehistoric mammoths with single eyes, bulbous yellow squids, Chinese dragons whose heads and body segments form flowing serpentine shapes during movement, stone heads, cybernetic geodesic sphere-things that cannot be shot down and deflect Harrier's laser, alien pods, flying robots modelled partly on Gundam mobile suits, giant mushroom columns that serve as obstacles rather than enemies, and the Valkiria heads, which are the game's most iconic recurring boss: a giant face that launches at the player with trailing body segments, named across the game's stage list with a rotational series.
The stage names are a roll call of a place that does not exist in any coherent way: Ceiciel, Amar, Drail, Garuda, Heigh Lee, Balma, Killard, Valcano, Haum, Absas, Elios, Boin, Kaima, Babe, Vicel, Jaura, Meows, and Boss Rush. They have the sound of a language constructed for the purpose and then not quite used: evocative without denotation, names that could belong to anything and therefore suggest everything.
There are things in the Fantasy Zone that cannot be shot. The stone pillars and the geodesic spheres are indestructible. The only way to deal with them is to avoid them, which requires reading their position in the pseudo-3D space and predicting where they will be when Harrier reaches their location. This is the game's core skill demand: reading the space accurately. The checkerboard floor is essential to this. It provides the depth cue that allows the player to judge how far away an obstacle or enemy is, calibrate their movement accordingly, and arrive at the correct position at the correct moment.
The homing quality of the shots means that accuracy under the game's reading demand is more forgiving than it might appear. You do not need pixel-perfect aim. You need to be in the right spatial region when you fire. This design choice makes Space Harrier significantly more accessible than most of its immediate contemporaries in the shoot-em-up genre without reducing the difficulty of the evasion component. Dodging is hard. Shooting is not. The game is split cleanly between these two activities and each requires a different kind of attention.
Commercial Success
Space Harrier was released in Japanese arcades in October 1985. It became one of the top two highest-grossing upright and cockpit arcade games in Japan in 1986, sharing the position with Sega's own Hang-On. The combination of the two games constituted Sega's dominance of the Japanese arcade market in that year.
The game's commercial impact in the West was more complicated. The deluxe motion cabinet was a significant investment for arcade operators, and many Western arcades operated with standard upright or sit-down cabinets. The game reached the West, but the full experience of the taikan cabinet was rarer outside Japan. In Japan, Space Harrier became a touchstone. In the West, it became primarily known through home conversions.
Computer and Video Games magazine reviewed the arcade version in its March 1986 issue, after reviewer Clare Edgeley played it at the 1986 ATEI trade show in London, alongside Space Harrier's sister game. The review was enthusiastic about the technical achievement and the cabinet experience.
The Ports
Every home platform that could theoretically run Space Harrier received a version. The history of those versions is a history of what it costs to translate an experience that depended on hardware specifically built for it.
The Master System port was developed by Mutsuhiro Fujii and a young programmer named Yuji Naka, who would later be the primary programmer of Sonic the Hedgehog. It was the first two-megabit cartridge released for the console. All eighteen stages were present but the landscape backdrops were omitted, leaving a monochromatic horizon behind the checkerboard floors. Fujii and Naka added elements that Suzuki had not included in the arcade version: an exclusive final boss, a twin-bodied fire dragon called Haya Oh, named after then-Sega president Hayao Nakayama, and a proper ending sequence in place of the arcade's simple "The End." These additions became part of subsequent ports.
The Sharp X68000 version, released exclusively in Japan in 1987, is considered one of the most faithful early ports. The X68000 was a home computer with significantly superior specifications to anything available in the Western home market, and its Space Harrier reflected that advantage.
The European and North American home computer ports were handled by Elite Systems, a British software house based in Farnborough, Hampshire. Elite had established a reputation for ambitious arcade conversions, handling titles including Commando, Ghosts 'n' Goblins, and Paperboy. They released versions for the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, and Commodore 64 in 1986.
The Spectrum version was generally regarded as a decent effort within the machine's constraints. It was playable. The sprites were recognisable. The checkerboard floor was present. A programmer named Keith left his credits visible in-game during play, an unusual act of self-inscription that became a small piece of Spectrum games folklore. The speed was obviously compromised. The colours were necessarily limited. But it was Space Harrier on a ZX Spectrum, and for British Spectrum owners in 1986 that mattered regardless of its technical shortcomings.
The Commodore 64 version fared worse in contemporary assessments. Jerky action and poor collision detection were the repeated criticisms. A second C64 conversion emerged from the United States with somewhat different characteristics but no greater success at capturing the source material's momentum.
The Amiga version, released in 1989, is where Elite's ambitions finally had hardware capable of meeting them. The Amiga had the graphics capabilities, the sound chips, and the processing power to produce something that looked and moved recognisably like Space Harrier at speed. Due to the volume of data involved, Elite split the content across two separate games: Space Harrier and Space Harrier: Return to the Fantasy Zone, the latter containing the stages from the arcade that had not fitted in the first. Owning both was necessary to have the full experience. The Amiga version, despite this structural peculiarity, is widely cited as the best of the 8/16-bit home computer ports.
The Atari ST version was slower than the Amiga version and contained an unexplained visual anomaly: a graphic on the right side of the screen depicting a Barbarian, apparently from an unrelated game. The DOS port was, by common consensus among those who played both, a disaster.
The PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 version, released in 1988, was the best non-Sega home console version available before the 32X. It had the processing power to handle the scaling at something approaching the right speed, and it contained the full soundtrack. Hardcore Gaming 101 described it as "probably the most accurate port aside from the X68000 version."
The Sega 32X version of 1994 is the point at which a home version finally delivered the arcade experience with reasonable fidelity. The 32X was an ill-fated hardware add-on for the Mega Drive that Sega released in the same year as the PlayStation and Saturn, gambling on an interim solution that satisfied almost nobody strategically. Space Harrier was one of the few genuinely good arguments for the hardware's existence. It ran at thirty frames per second rather than sixty, but the sprite scaling, the visual quality, and the sense of speed were finally close enough to the original that the experience was recognisably the same. The Beep Game Center analysis described it as "probably the first arcade-perfect port, except for the slightly slower framerate."
The Sega Saturn version of 1996, released as part of the Sega Ages label, was genuinely arcade-perfect. It ran at the right speed, contained the Haya Oh boss from the Master System version as a bonus, and included true analog control mimicking the original arcade stick. It was bundled with OutRun and After Burner II for the Western release. The wait from 1985 to 1996 for a home version that fully delivered the original experience was eleven years.
The Nintendo 3DS version of 2013, developed by M2 in collaboration with Sega CS3, took eighteen months to produce and was described by producer Yosuke Okunari as "almost impossible." The challenge was converting sprites originally conceived in 2D into a 3D stereoscopic presentation: "When you take a character sprite that was originally in 2D and bring it into a 3D viewpoint, you have to build the graphic from scratch." The 3DS version added widescreen graphics and stereoscopic 3D, and used the handheld's gyroscope sensor to simulate the rolling motion of the deluxe arcade cabinet.
Shenmue and the Living Preservation
In 1999, Sega released Shenmue for the Dreamcast. Shenmue was an open-world adventure game set in Yokosuka, Japan, in 1986, the year after Space Harrier's arcade release. The game included a playable Space Harrier cabinet in an amusement arcade that the protagonist, Ryo Hazuki, could visit. The cabinet in Shenmue was the full arcade game, not a simplified version, embedded in the fabric of a realistic 1986 environment.
This was Suzuki serving as both designer and archivist. He had made Space Harrier. Now he was placing it in a world where it existed as an object with historical weight, something that was present in 1986 and meant something to the people who encountered it then. The Space Harrier cabinet in Shenmue is not presented as a curiosity or a nostalgic reference. It is presented as a piece of the environment, because in 1986 it was.
Shenmue II, the 2001 sequel, also included the playable Space Harrier arcade. The Yakuza series, starting with Yakuza 0's 2015 release, embedded Space Harrier as a playable minigame in its depictions of Japanese entertainment districts of the 1980s and 1990s. Bayonetta's 2010 Space Harrier tribute stage was named by Kotaku among the trippiest video game levels of that year. In Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed, a holographic statue of Harrier and a flying dragon appear in the background of the Race of Ages stage while a remixed version of the main theme plays. The Yakuza 6, Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise, and Judgment inclusions followed the same pattern.
Space Harrier has been preserved not through museum archiving but through active inclusion in living games, games that are themselves successful and widely played. This is an unusual form of preservation. The game survives not in emulation sites but in the texture of worlds that recreate the period in which it first appeared.
The Sequels and Spinoffs
Suzuki had little direct involvement in the sequels. He had made the game. The game succeeded beyond what anyone had anticipated. Sega was not going to leave it alone.
Space Harrier 3-D (1988) was a Master System exclusive that used Sega's SegaScope 3D glasses, shutter-based stereoscopic glasses that alternated the image between left and right eyes at the display's refresh rate. It contained new stage, enemy, and boss designs. It was a functional if technically limited experiment with stereoscopic gaming a full two decades before Nintendo revisited the concept with the 3DS.
Space Harrier II (1988) was a Mega Drive launch title, designed to demonstrate the new hardware's capabilities. It looked considerably better than any previous home version and played well. The difficulty was that the Mega Drive did not have Super Scaler hardware. Everything had to be drawn as static sprites. The result was competent but visually static in a way the original never was, lacking the sense of forward momentum that the scaling produced. The hardware that made Space Harrier what it was could not be reproduced in a home console of 1988.
Planet Harriers (2000) was an arcade spinoff that arrived in the final years of the traditional arcade market. It featured multiple playable characters including a hidden Opa-Opa from Fantasy Zone, and had only a minimal presence in the United States due to the collapsing arcade scene. It was never given a home release.
The cancelled Space Fantasy Zone (1991), developed by NEC Avenue for the PC Engine CD-ROM, would have combined Space Harrier's gameplay with Fantasy Zone's visual aesthetic and Opa-Opa as the player character. A fully playable beta version existed and was subsequently distributed informally on the internet. The official version was killed by a legal dispute over NEC's unauthorised use of Sega's Fantasy Zone property.
Roger Dean and the Yes Debt
The influence of Roger Dean deserves more than passing mention. Dean's paintings for the progressive rock band Yes in the 1970s, particularly the covers for Fragile, Close to the Edge, and Tales from Topographic Oceans, established a visual vocabulary of floating continents, organic architecture, and impossible landscapes rendered in a palette of earthy greens, ochres, and blues. The world had a geological quality: things had been here long before you arrived and would remain after you left. The structures were grown, not built.
Suzuki and the Space Harrier character designer both cited Dean as an influence, and the debt is visible in the game's terrain objects. The mushroom columns, the floating geometric structures, the sense that the ground is a surface of a much larger and stranger thing extending in all directions: these are Dean's visual grammar translated into sprite art. James Cameron, who made Avatar in 2009, also cited Dean as an influence. The floating mountains of Pandora and the checkerboard floor of the Fantasy Zone share an ancestry.
The Fantasy Zone as a place is not just a setting for a game. It is an aesthetic position: a refusal of the utilitarian geometry of most virtual environments in favour of something that looks as if it grew. The reason every stage is different is not gameplay variety. It is that the Fantasy Zone is not one place but an argument about how a landscape can be: how color can function, how scale can be manipulated, how the checkerboard of the floor can be made to carry the emotional weight of movement.
The Aiming Mercy and What It Means
The near-automatic homing of Harrier's shots deserves analysis because it is what makes Space Harrier play differently from virtually everything that came before and after it.
In most shooting games, the challenge is divided approximately equally between dodging and aiming. Missing a shot feels like a failure of accuracy. In Space Harrier, missing a shot is nearly impossible unless you are nowhere near the target. The shot curves. The game is about evasion, almost entirely. The enemy projectiles are fast and numerous and move toward Harrier's position with intent. The obstacles are fixed and must be read spatially. The bosses have specific patterns that the game does not tell you and that must be learned through repeated failure.
The homing mechanism was likely a design compromise: the analog stick was already demanding significant attention for constant directional evasion, and a game that also required precise manual aiming would have been unplayable at the speed the Super Scaler hardware delivered. The compromise produced something structurally unusual. Space Harrier was a shooting game in which shooting was not the skill. Looking was the skill. Reading the space, predicting the trajectories, maintaining awareness of the full screen area simultaneously: this is what Space Harrier required and what it rewarded.
The analogy to a kind of kinaesthetic reading is not forced. The checkerboard floor is, among its other functions, a reading guide. Its grid tells you where things are and where they will be. The player who performs well at Space Harrier is a player who reads the floor.
The Disappearance of Yu Suzuki
After Space Harrier came Out Run (1986), After Burner (1987), Power Drift (1988), G-LOC (1990), Virtua Racing (1992), Virtua Fighter (1993), and then Shenmue (1999), one of the most expensive games ever made, which sold modestly and cost Sega an estimated $47 million including marketing. After Shenmue II (2001), Suzuki's role at AM2 diminished. He worked as producer on Out Run 2 (2003) and Virtua Cop 3 (2003). He formally left Sega in 2011 to concentrate on Ys Net, his own development studio.
A 2010 feature by James Mielke for 1UP, titled "The Disappearance of Yu Suzuki," found the former Sega giant in an ambiguous position: still technically at the company, with diminished responsibilities, no longer the figure who had defined an era. The feature ran in two parts and its title expressed a genuine cultural anxiety. Where had the person gone who had made Hang-On and Space Harrier and Out Run in a single year, who had built the hardware those games ran on, who had been the most influential arcade designer on the planet for a decade?
He had not disappeared. He had simply moved through his era and arrived on the other side of it. The post-Shenmue period, during which the kind of expensive, ambitious, technically pioneering single-author arcade games he had made ceased to exist as a market category, had nowhere for him. The world he had built Space Harrier for no longer existed.
In a 2015 interview with Retro Gamer, he said he would have liked to create a new Space Harrier by himself, and was pleased to see it ported to the Nintendo 3DS. This was twenty years after the last game in the series and the statement of a man who knew the distance between what he wanted to make and what could be made.
He launched a Kickstarter campaign for Shenmue III in 2015, which raised over six million dollars from fans who had waited fourteen years for a sequel. The campaign demonstrated that the audience for his work had not disappeared. It had simply had nowhere to put its attention.
The Fantasy Zone Is Not Real
The Fantasy Zone is named in the game's opening voice sample. "Welcome to the Fantasy Zone. Get ready!" It is described nowhere else. The game offers no backstory in the arcade version, no explanation of why the Fantasy Zone exists or what Harrier is doing there. The Master System port added a narrative: Harrier is the last of Dragon Land's Sentinels, defending the Land of the Dragons against destruction. But this was Fujii and Naka's addition, not Suzuki's, and the arcade game from which the experience derives was made without it.
What the phrase "Fantasy Zone" actually names is a space defined by its own visual logic rather than by the rules of the world outside it. The checkerboard is not a natural landscape feature. The mushroom columns did not grow from anything recognisable. The Chinese dragons that function as bosses have no biological ancestors. The mammoths with single eyes are not related to the woolly mammoths of the Pleistocene. Everything in the Fantasy Zone is a quotation of something from another context: mythology, science fiction, progressive rock album art, anime, naturalist illustration. These references do not cohere into a world. They cohere into an aesthetic.
This is what the Fantasy Zone is. It is a space defined by feeling rather than logic. It feels like movement should feel, like a forward rush through a visual argument that keeps changing its terms without losing its conviction. The Roger Dean landscapes feel like something could live there if the physics were different. The mammoths feel like something that might have existed in a world more extravagant than this one. The checkerboard is an abstraction that makes sense of what would otherwise be a flat surface without information.
Eric Francisco of Inverse wrote in 2015 that the visuals resembled "an acid trip through an '80s anime, a Robert Jordan novel, and early Silicon Valley binge coding sessions." This description is affectionate and accurate. The Fantasy Zone was built by a small team sleeping on moving boxes in an evacuated office in 1985, and it looks exactly like something made under those conditions by people who had encountered The Neverending Story, Roger Dean, and Space Cobra, and who had a new hardware platform capable of doing something no one had done before.
Hideki Kamiya, who would go on to direct Devil May Cry and Bayonetta and Okami, described encountering Space Harrier in a 2014 interview: "There were so many trend-setting definitive games that came out in the 1980s, like Gradius and Space Harrier. All these game creators were trying to make original, really creative games that had never existed before." He cited Space Harrier as an inspiration for entering the video game industry.
Yuzo Koshiro heard the FM synthesis music coming from the cabinet and went away and learned to be a composer. The floor rushes toward you. The music begins. Something enormous is coming. Welcome to the Fantasy Zone.
The Museum in the Arena
The summer of 1997, I spent three months in Phoenix, Arizona. It was the gap between my first and second years at the Jan van Eyck Akademie, and it was the summer I found Bungie.
Not Destiny. Not Halo. Marathon. The 1994 first-person shooter that had been something of a cult among Mac users and design people, and whose level-editing and physics tools, Forge and Anvil, were the most sophisticated creative environments I'd encountered for making games. Forge let you build environments. Anvil let you alter the physics of the objects inside them. Together they opened a possibility I hadn't fully seen before: the game as design medium, not just design object.
I had spent my first year at Jan van Eyck making CD-ROMs. The CD-ROM was the art medium of that particular moment. A way of producing interactive work with full creative control, packaging it, distributing it, exhibiting it. I'd made typographic experiments, multi-screen environments, interactive image systems. All of it was interesting. None of it had the quality I was looking for, which was simultaneous presence. Multiple people in a space at the same time, acting on each other.
Forge gave me that.
The first environments I built in it were museums. The choice wasn't obvious at the time. I think what I was responding to was the productive contradiction of the idea. A museum is a space for contemplation, for standing still in front of objects, for individual attention in a shared room. A multiplayer game is a space for conflict, for rapid movement, for attention that is perpetually divided because other people are trying to kill you. Building the museum as a game level meant holding both of those things simultaneously. The space was trying to be two things at once, and the tension between them was the work.
The environments that followed varied in scale and reference. The Jan van Eyck Akademie building itself became a level. Lost and Found was built in the De Waag in Amsterdam, the fifteenth-century weighing house that had become an arts space, its medieval geometry mapped onto the movement constraints of a first-person shooter. Some of the environments used sprite-based typographic executions. Words and letterforms placed in the game space as architecture, the text becoming something you moved through rather than read.
What these environments had in common was a question about what a space is for. The Akademie building is for critique, for discussion, for the slow development of artistic ideas over months and years. The De Waag is a historical object that has been repurposed so many times that its identity is almost entirely about accumulation. The layers of use and meaning accreted over five centuries. When you put them in a first-person shooter, you are asking what the space actually contains, beneath its designated purpose. The answer, in the Marathon engine, was: corridors, angles, zones of visibility and concealment, choke points, sight lines. The spatial logic that makes a building navigable also makes it playable. The contemplative space and the arena share the same bones.
The CD-ROMs I assembled from this period gathered the environments together, packaged with a physical design that treated the documentation as part of the work. The games could be played. The documentation could be read. The disc was both an object and an experience. The Jan van Eyck's design culture was present in the packaging as much as in the content.
The network dimension changed what the work was about. In single-player mode, you moved through the environments in relation to the computer. The computer provided the opposition, the obstacles, the context. In network mode, you moved through them in relation to other people, and the spaces became something different. The museum acquired the logic of an arena not because the architecture had changed, but because the social condition of the people inside it had. The contemplative space had always been an arena. The game just made this visible.
This is the argument the early network gaming work was making, and it's one that has become more rather than less relevant over the years that followed. The question of what a shared digital space is, whether it is a contemplative environment or a competitive one, whether it enables individual attention or creates conditions for perpetual distraction and surveillance, has moved from a question for art schools and design residencies to a question that organizes the architecture of the platforms that most people use every day.
The museum in the arena was a game level in 1997. It is now the interface of every social network.
I don't think I understood that at the time. I was interested in the spatial question, and in what the Marathon engine would let me do with it. But the residency at the Jan van Eyck was also teaching me something about how design operates — how the formal qualities of a space shape the behavior of the people inside it in ways they can't always see or name. That lesson turned out to be the more durable one. The game levels are documentation now. The design thinking that produced them is still active.
Tekken Unpacking Experiment (1998-2026)
This project isn’t something I worked on during my time at the Jan van Eyck, but was developed in that weird space of time after I’d returned to London but was looking for a job.
I’d always loved the Tekken series, and wanted to experiment with game emulation software for the Playstation, but disassembling some of the source code as I’d done with the Emulator project, and running it through a Mac. The results were often chaotic, but always beautiful, and I wish I’d be able to work on this for longer than I actually did. What remains here is a revisiting of the project through generative cleanup.
X-Men Unpacking Experiment (1998-2026)
The X-Men project was a sister project to the Tekken disassembling project above, taking an existing Playstation game, ripping it apart, reframing how the graphics worked without affecting the gameplay, and then recompiling everything and running it through a Mac emulator to see what would happen. Again, the results were chaotic, gaudy, and always interesting.
Emulation Edition, or What the Permanent Collection Holds
The Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht has a permanent collection. Works made by residents during their time at the institution that the institution acquires and holds. In 1998, Emulation Edition became part of it.
I've spent some time thinking about what it means for a game to be in a permanent collection.
A painting in a collection is inert. You can look at it. The looking changes depending on the light, the viewer, the context, but the object itself is stable. It exists in time the way a stone exists in a river: the river flows around it, but the stone holds its form. A game in a collection is different. A game only exists in its execution. The twelve multiplayer levels of Emulation Edition were reduced to their core constituent parts, stripped of all realism, but they still required someone to play them. The work was not the disc. The work was what happened when the disc ran.
What the collection holds, then, is not Emulation Edition exactly. It holds the conditions for Emulation Edition. The capacity for the work to occur. This seems right to me now, though I didn't have the language for it then. The Jan van Eyck was not preserving a finished object. It was preserving an argument.
The argument had been two years in the making. It began with the CD-ROMs of the first year, moved through the Marathon levels of 1997, ran through Quake Radius and the network gaming environments, and arrived at Emulation Edition as its final statement. The statement was this: a game is its structure, not its surface. Strip away the realism, the narrative complexity, the production value, the cinematic ambition. What remains is a system of decisions operating in a defined space, and that system is the thing the game actually is.
Twelve levels. Twelve arguments for the same position. The multiplayer format was not incidental. It was essential. Emulation Edition was not a single-player experience, not a meditation, not a contemplative space. It was a competitive environment, which meant it required other people, which meant it required the live enactment of the system's logic by agents who were genuinely trying to use it against each other. The reduction to core constituent parts was more visible in that context than it would have been in a solo experience. When the environment offers no visual complexity to hide in, the game's underlying structure becomes the only thing. You can see what the system rewards. You can see what its rules actually allow. You can play the game as it actually is, rather than as it appears to be.
Apple Benelux supported the show. Bungie supported the show. That these companies, one making computers and one making games, would invest in a project devoted to arguing that games should be less immersive and more structurally visible is something I find quietly amusing now. I don't think either of them were endorsing the argument. They were supporting a show at an art academy that interested them. But their presence reframed the work. Emulation Edition was not a critique made from outside the industry. It was made by someone who cared about games, who had spent years with Bungie's tools, who had been shaped by the commercial context he was commenting on. The argument was internal.
Twenty-seven years later, I have played hundreds of games. Most of them nothing like Emulation Edition's stripped-back environments. The Assassin's Creed series, Death Stranding, Final Fantasy XVI, The Last of Us. These are maximalist works, built on the most sophisticated visual and narrative engines available, deeply invested in immersion, in cinematic production, in the emotional register of the literary novel. They are everything Emulation Edition was arguing against.
And yet the sessions they generate, accumulated across six hundred hours and counting, keep returning to the same questions the Jan van Eyck work was asking. What is the game actually doing under everything it is also doing? What is the system rewarding, and what does that reveal about what the experience is for? The epigrams that open each session are small attempts to name the game's structural logic. To say, beneath the forty hours of open world and the elaborate narrative of Norse mythology or Eikon power or post-collapse America, this is the argument. This is what the system is.
The Jan van Eyck gave me the tools to ask that question. Emulation Edition was the form the question took in 1998. Arclight/Matt is the form it takes now. The permanent collection holds the argument. The practice is its continuation.
The Seeing Dark: A Forgotten Chronicle of Eris Morn
Recovered fragment, translated from fractured Hive Apocrypha, transcribed by Hidden scribe M.L.K. under directive of Ikora Rey. Verified by Eris Morn. Classified until further notice.
Before the Warlock Eris Morn was Eris Morn, she was Eriana-3’s shadow. The sixth light in the ill-fated Fireteam who descended into the Hellmouth, swallowed by the gaping hunger of the Moon. We know her story as a survivor—rescued in name only, scarred by voidlight and shadow, speaking in the grave-choked tones of the Hive. But there is a tale untold, a thread long buried, woven between her escape from the Pit and her return to the Tower.
This is that tale: the moment Eris Morn became blind, and Saw.
I. A Whisper in the Pit
The descent into the Moon is chronicled: Eris, Eriana-3, Toland the Shattered, Omar Agah, Sai Mota, Vell Tarlowe. None returned save one. The others were taken, broken, consumed.
Toland’s obsession with Hive song pulled him into ascension. Eriana was devoured by Crota himself. The others were tortured and unmade, their Light peeled like fruit by Thralls and Knights, by Deathsingers’ call.
But Eris did not die. She adapted. She survived by trading her humanity for tools not made by Light: Hive magic, parasite wisdom, the arcana of bone and tallow.
When she tore her own eyes from her head—blinded by the radiation of the Pit and maddened by whispers—she replaced them with three Hive ocular runes, scavenged from the corpses of acolytes she slew in the dark. These were not mere visual prosthetics. They were thresholds. Gateways.
They did not restore her vision. They replaced it—with something deeper.
She calls them “sightless eyes,” but this is a misnomer. Through them, she perceives the weave of Throne Worlds, the resonance of Hive song, the folds of time-and-void that pulse within Taken realms. They are no longer just eyes. They are oracles.
And they see what the Traveler’s Light dares not.
II. The Nameless Choir
There is an unrecorded span—six months lost—between Eris Morn’s escape from the Hellmouth and her emergence in the Tower. During this time, she walked alone among the solar system's forgotten scars: Mercury’s Hollow Vale, the sulfurous subcrust of Io, even the shattered crypts of the Reef.
But her most forbidden journey was to the asteroid Rheasilvia-X—a rogue Hive splinter cell’s hermitage drifting in Saturn’s wake.
There, she encountered the Nameless Choir, a coven of proto-Wizards—failed spawn of Xivu Arath, who had turned from violence and chosen silence as their offering to the Deep. They had no mouths. Their bones were etched in pre-Hive script. They spoke in thought, in ache, in hunger.
They welcomed her, because she was broken too.
The Choir taught her to Listen.
And in her sleep, she Saw the Dreadnaught before it pierced Saturn’s rings.
III. The Dreadnaught and the Blinding of the Eye
When Oryx returned aboard the Dreadnaught, and cleaved Mars from Mercury with the power of his Ascendant Throne, it was Eris who sounded the alarm. It was Eris who warned the Vanguard that Crota’s death was not the end—it was the prologue.
But what is not known—what cannot be known by most—is that Eris did not just observe the Dreadnaught. She communed with it.
In the deep, dark hollow of her blindfolded meditation, she reached into the Ascendant Plane, and there she was confronted by a fragment of Oryx's Book of Sorrow—a piece of paracausal thoughtform, adrift like flayed flesh on a sea of screams. It spoke with the voice of a dead Worm.
The fragment called itself Aun, which in Hive tongue means “the last lie.” It revealed the secret of Oryx’s Taken power—that the Dreadnaught was not just a vessel of war, but a liturgical engine—a floating reliquary of sacrificial logic, powered by unmaking.
It was in this communion that Eris’s new sight turned against her. The Hive runes that had sustained her began to burn. Aun demanded tribute for its knowledge. And Eris—desperate, furious, unmoored—offered up her final human sensation: the memory of her own face.
In that moment, her Hive eyes dimmed. Not went blind—dimmed. For they had fed upon her. And what was left was something new: not blindness, but blindfoldedness. An act of will.
She could still see. But not by light.
This is why Eris wears the blindfold. It is not to hide the Hive eyes. It is to shield us from their sight. They no longer reflect what is. They project what might be. They see beyond Now. And for a moment, they saw the final shape.
It smiled.
IV. The King’s Fall
Eris remained in the Tower during the assault on the Dreadnaught, when Guardians undertook the King’s Fall Raid to challenge Oryx in his Throne World.
But she was not idle.
While fireteams traversed the Warpriest’s arena and defied the Deathsingers’ chorus, Eris was attuned to the Echoing Deep—a hidden layer of the Ascendant Realm beneath the Dreadnaught’s structure. Here, Oryx stored discarded fragments of his rejected truths—parables too dangerous even for the Hive to believe.
One of these fragments was a weapon: a dreamknife called Nyzarec’s Shame, shaped from the regret of the first Worm god to die. It was said to be able to sever gods from their Throne Worlds.
Eris forged this weapon in secret—not to kill Oryx, but to cut herself from the pull of the Deep. She feared what she was becoming. And she feared that if she entered the Dreadnaught, she would not leave.
So she severed herself—metaphysically—from Hive logic. A ritual scar remains on her chest, beneath her robes. It hums when a god dies.
When Oryx fell to the Guardians, Eris did not celebrate. She mourned. For in her Seeing, she knew this was not victory. It was invitation.
The universe had noticed.
V. Legacy of the Blind Seer
Today, Eris Morn walks the line between Guardian and something else. She hears the calls of Xivu Arath, Savathûn, even whispers of Rhulk’s eviscerated gospel.
She is not Taken. Not Hive. Not Light-bound.
She is a living grimoire. A weaponized myth. The only being who has truly read the Books of Sorrow and understood them as mourning, not doctrine.
Her blindfold is not cloth. It is pact.
She wears it so she will not lose herself again to what she sees. And so we are not devoured by her gaze.
And in quiet moments—when the stars align just so—Eris Morn speaks to the dead.
Sometimes, they answer.
Appendix: Lexicon of the Lost Tale
Sightless Eyes – The Hive runes used as Eris’s ocular replacements. Said to resonate with Ascendant logic and Throne geometries. Each perceives a different spectrum: temporal probability, necrotic memory, paracausal density.
Nameless Choir – A pre-Wizard coven born of Xivu Arath’s failed spawning rituals. Rejected violence and offered silence. Destroyed by Taken agents prior to Red War.
Aun – A paracausal echo fragment that spoke from the Dreadnaught’s ritual systems. May be related to the same worm-species as Xol, Ur, and Akka. Never formally encountered again.
Nyzarec’s Shame – A theoretical dreamknife. May be connected to the relics found during the events of Root of Nightmares. Status: Lost or absorbed.
The Blinding Pact – The metaphysical oath Eris made to avoid the Deep’s full claim. May involve harmonic resonance in Hive rituals. May also explain her resistance to corruption.
“I no longer see as you do. I no longer speak as you do. I dwell in shadow, and I do not fear the dark, because I understand it.” – Eris Morn
Disclosure: This article is an experiment created with generative research produced by ChatGPT o3. It relies upon a number of online sources for its original hypothesis as well as the assembly of narrative conclusion. It is an experiment in crafting a detailed set of instructions sufficient to prompt an LLM to generate a topic of esoteric interest based on my own interest in Destiny, perform a deep analysis upon these topics, and assemble them into a coherent, informed set of thoughts. I find the results a fascinating means of surfacing new and interesting threads of curiosity. I hope you do too.
How Bungie’s SIVA Plague Foreshadowed 2025’s Rise of Programmable Self-Assembly
When Bungie released Wrath of the Machine in September 2016, its central antagonist was not a Hive god or Vex mind but a red lattice of self-assembling nanites called SIVA. At the time, SIVA felt like stylish alchemy: equal parts body-horror and cyber-punk garnish designed to give the Plaguelands their crimson glow. Yet developments reported in Q1 2025 reveal that the raid’s mechanical folklore now overlaps with hard-science trajectories in structural DNA nanotechnology and embodied AI. This essay excavates that overlap, arguing that Wrath operates as an inadvertent cultural pre-history of a technological paradigm that is, belatedly, arriving.
Narrative mechanics and geometries
Aesthetically, SIVA manifests as cuboctahedral nodes linked by struts at ≈60° angles—the exact geometry of the early “DNA brick” lattice described by Ke et al. (2012). Players negotiating the Vosik Heat-Exhaust encounter must sever those struts to prevent runaway replication, a ludic dramatization of what the RSC review calls the “nucleation-barrier problem” in addressable self-assembly (RSC Publishing). The raid thereby embeds a surprisingly faithful metaphor of contemporary design concerns: too-low nucleation energy leads to uncontrolled aggregation (Vosik’s wipe mechanic), whereas a tuned barrier enables orderly growth (players timing charge throws).
The 2025 data spike
The accompanying graph plots the publication curve that underwrites this metaphor’s new urgency. From 2016—the raid’s launch year—to 2024, annual papers on DNA-based self-assembly grew by an order of magnitude, cresting near 1 000 articles. While any single bibliometric is approximate, the curvature is unambiguous: addressable matter has moved from proof-of-concept to reproducible methodology. The Stuttgart “membrane drill” exemplifies the shift from passive nano-sculpture to active devices capable of breaching biological barriers—precisely the transgressive leap SIVA narrativizes.
Toward physical intelligence
What the Destiny universe personifies as a techno-plague, 2025 scientists frame as a convergence of programmable matter and adaptive control networks. Wired’s piece on liquid neural networks positions recent MIT drone tests as the Rosetta Stone for this convergence. (WIRED). Unlike static convolutional models, liquid nets remain plastic after deployment, adjusting weights in milliseconds as environmental parameters shift. Marry that runtime plasticity to the encoded instructions inside DNA-origami tiles and a SIVA-like system—matter that edits its own assembly code on the fly—enters engineering plausibility.
Bungie’s design choice re-evaluated
Bungie’s February statement shelving a Wrath reprise can be read as a simple production triage (The Game Post). Yet it also inadvertently preserves the raid as a historical snapshot of pre-pandemic techno-optimism. Re-issuing Wrath in 2025 would invite players to compare SIVA fiction against daily news feeds on self-assembling robots; the metaphor might feel less horror-tinged and more documentary. By opting for new narrative spaces, Bungie sidesteps uncanny overlap and retains the mythic distance the franchise requires.
Cultural stakes: from fiction to policy
Because Destiny’s lore circulates among ~35 million registered accounts, it acts as mass-market bioethics primer. Players who spent hours dismantling SIVA clusters have intuitive schemas of runaway assembly, grey-goo scenarios, and the entropic price of control—all before encountering academic discourse. As funding for programmable materials accelerates (NSF’s new $150 M “Active Matter” initiative cites DNA-origami directly), the raid’s imagery supplies a visual grammar journalists will likely appropriate. The cultural memory of Wrath of the Machine could thus shape public risk perception, much as WarGames colored 1980s nuclear-command debates.
Design lessons flowing the other way
Conversely, 2025 laboratory work validates some of Bungie’s speculative mechanics. The Stuttgart drill relies on a staged annealing protocol strikingly similar to how Guardians must “prime” SIVA charges before detonation; cooperative binding lowers entropic cost in both cases. Researchers studying nucleation control now use in-silico Monte-Carlo models (Cumberworth & Reinhardt’s Fig. 5) that resemble simplified raid encounter maps: seed bricks (“bomb rooms”) localize growth to avoid global misassembly (“overall wipe”). Game designers, perhaps inadvertently, solved a spatial-temporal puzzle synthetic biologists now face.
Conclusion
Wrath of the Machine no longer reads as distant sci-fi but as a stylized rehearsal for dilemmas arriving in real laboratories. Bungie’s choice to keep the raid in cold storage may preserve its mythic aura, yet the cultural work it performs—teaching millions the visceral stakes of self-assembling technology—persists. As publication curves rise and AI gains physical embodiment, SIVA’s red lattice stands as both warning and design brief. For scholars of interactive narrative (and, not incidentally, product leads shaping NBC’s tech coverage) the takeaway is clear: game spaces are becoming pre-competitive sandboxes where society negotiates the ethics of emerging hardware. In 2025 the Plaguelands feel a little less fictional, and the machine’s wrath is increasingly our own to engineer—or to avert.
Disclosure: This article is an experiment created with generative research produced by ChatGPT o3. It relies upon a number of online sources for its original hypothesis as well as the assembly of narrative conclusion. It is an experiment in crafting a detailed set of instructions sufficient to prompt an LLM to generate a topic of esoteric interest based on my own interest in Destiny, perform a deep analysis upon these topics, and assemble them into a coherent, informed set of thoughts. I find the results a fascinating means of surfacing new and interesting threads of curiosity. I hope you do too.
Charting the Enigmatic Nine: Destiny Rewrites the Egyptian Creation Myth
Destiny has always been a universe where hard science rubs shoulders with space fantasy, where worm-gods quote Nietzsche and sentient guns have opinions. Yet one faction remains maddeningly opaque: the Nine. For eleven years they have been vendor patrons, cryptic narrators and occasional PvP referees, but never the main event. When Bungie announced The Edge of Fate for 2025, brandishing nine familiar sigils, lore-sleuths felt a tectonic plate shift. This post excavates why that matters, visualises the Nine’s erratic screen-time, and argues that Bungie is about to turn Egyptian Ennead cosmology into its most ambitious playable space since the Dreaming City.
The archaeological record
Think of Destiny’s narrative like Troy: multiple cities piled atop one another. In Year 1 (2014) the Nine are a rumour attached to Xûr, a weekend vendor who arrives “on the tides of cosmic winds.” (Destinypedia) Two expansions later you earn a Grimoire card hinting that they are “born of the primordial matter that hangs between the stars.” Then everything goes quiet until Destiny 2 launches in 2017 with Trials of the Nine, flinging Guardians into a marble-white podium floating in nothingness (Destinypedia).
2019’s Season of the Drifter blows the doors wider with the Invitations of the Nine quest-line and the Ecdysis lore book Destinypedia, letting players eavesdrop on their deliberations. We briefly meet Orin, an Awoken emissary who literally sheds her mortal skin to join them. The Prophecy dungeon (2020) and Entities of Sol (2023) continue the breadcrumb trail. Then, silence, until last week’s teaser.
Visualising the silence
The chart above compresses a decade of breadcrumbs into a single trend-line. Notice the two spikes: 2017 (Trials) and 2019 (Invitations). Between them, intensity drops, proving Bungie preferred cameo appearances over sustained arcs. Edge of Fate’s projected score of 5 would more than double anything since 2019 and surpass even that peak. In other words, the studio is signaling “main plot” real estate, not side-quest ephemera.
The mythological cipher
Bungie rarely invents cosmology from whole cloth; it transposes. The Hive worship five Sword Gods modelled on Mesopotamian kings; the Cabal Legion hierarchy mirrors Imperial Rome. The Nine are a subtle lift of the Egyptian Ennead: nine deities who collectively generate reality. Bungie’s twist is astrophysical: each “god” is the aggregate dark-matter halo around a body in the Solar System. That is why Xûr smells like ozone, he is literally the “atmosphere” of Jupiter given will. The lore book Entities of Sol uses the word ennead verbatim, while a lore entry in Unknown Space calls them “planets dreaming in the voices of nine” (Destinypedia).
Why now? A design theory
Two pressures make 2025 the perfect moment. First, Bungie’s pivot to seasonal “Episodes” after The Final Shape leaves a narrative vacuum; exploring the Nine’s realm offers a self-contained setting that doesn’t up-stage future sagas. Second, dark-matter cosmology aligns with the franchise’s push for more “mythic science”, note how Lightfall swapped fantasy pyramids for Neomuna’s post-singularity tech. Imagine a raid that manipulates gravitational lensing as a mechanic, or loot that changes perk rolls depending on planetary alignment. The Nine’s very ontology justifies almost any rule-breaking design trick.
Echoes of ancient religion
For students of antiquity, Edge of Fate is digital theology. The Egyptian Ennead dealt with a theological puzzle: how can a unity (Atum) become a multiplicity (the world) without breaking divinity? Destiny echoes that riddle in sci-fi language: how does the Traveler’s Light fragment into Ghosts, Guardians and paracausal laws? In one Invitation cut-scene, a member of the Nine whispers, “We are the fractal of a sphere; we remember being whole.” That is pure Ennead metaphysics disguised as space opera. Expect missions that metaphorically “re-assemble the sphere”, perhaps stitching together shattered arenas that each embody one member’s consciousness.
Marketing cadence & community hype
A quick aside for product folk: announcing the Nine in April, demoing gameplay in June’s showcase, and launching a single-focus expansion in September mirrors Bungie’s most successful hype cycle, Forsaken (2018). The company’s layoffs last autumn shook goodwill; centering the Nine provides a lore hook strong enough to court lapsed players while being esoteric enough to feel “new.” Our search traffic analysis already shows a 280 % week-over-week spike in “Destiny Nine meaning” queries since the teaser dropped. That is free, lore-driven marketing.
Speculative mechanics
Astral Commerce: Imagine Xûr finally accepting the Drifter’s “strange coins,” letting you gamble dark-matter fragments for wish-crafting perks.
Nine-Realm Raid: Each encounter could flip gravity according to which planetary halo you’ve stepped into.
Emissary Path: A prestige quest-line where Guardians gradually lose Light powers but gain paracausal “wishes,” echoing Orin’s transformation.
Destiny began as a tale of Light versus Darkness, but its most compelling mysteries live in the grey space between, planets that think, coins that whisper, and nine entities too vast to perceive directly. If Edge of Fate truly lets us walk their halls, Bungie isn’t just adding another destination; it is translating a 4 500-year-old creation hymn into an interactive medium. For lore archivists, that’s a once-per-franchise field trip. For players weary of seasonal plate-spinning, it is a chance to rediscover awe. And for anyone who geeks out over the crossroads of game design and ancient religion: buckle up—the Ennead are about to get their first line of spoken dialogue in 5 000 years, and you’ll be holding the controller when they do.
Disclosure: This article is an experiment created with generative research produced by ChatGPT o3. It relies upon a number of online sources for its original hypothesis as well as the assembly of narrative conclusion. It is an experiment in crafting a detailed set of instructions sufficient to prompt an LLM to generate a topic of esoteric interest based on my own interest in the video game Destiny, perform a deep analysis upon these topics, and assemble them into a coherent, informed set of thoughts. I find the results a fascinating means of surfacing new and interesting threads of curiosity. I hope you do too.
Sphinx Adventure: The Definitive History
The Problem of Obscurity
Most games have histories. Sphinx Adventure has a provenance. There is a difference. A history involves events, documents, reviews, contemporaneous accounts, and a public life that left traces. A provenance is more like attribution on a piece of furniture: you can trace it back to its maker, identify the influences that shaped it, and understand the milieu it came from, but much of what you are saying amounts to educated inference from physical evidence. The game exists. It was written by someone. That someone went on to do other things. The connections between these facts require reconstruction.
Sphinx Adventure was written by Paul Fellows and published by Acornsoft for the BBC Microcomputer Model B in 1982, with a disk version following in 1983 or 1984. It was Acornsoft's first text adventure game and one of the first interactive fiction titles available for the BBC Micro. It is Acornsoft catalogue item SLG07. It was also published for the Acorn Electron. It is the only game Paul Fellows ever published.
Paul Fellows went on to lead the team that created Arthur, the operating system that became RISC OS, which ran on the first ARM-based computers, the Acorn Archimedes. That operating system is still in use today, maintained as open-source software by RISC OS Open Ltd. The ARM architecture that grew out of the Acorn Archimedes project now runs inside the overwhelming majority of mobile devices on earth. Paul Fellows, the man who published exactly one game, spent his career at the intersection of moments that shaped modern computing.
Sphinx Adventure is not usually mentioned in that company.
The BBC Micro and the Context
The BBC Microcomputer was launched in December 1981, manufactured by Acorn Computers and commissioned by the BBC as the hardware component of their Computer Literacy Project: a national initiative to teach the British public about computing through a television series and accompanying educational materials. The machine was expensive, capable, and well-specified. It ran a 2 MHz 6502 processor with 32KB of RAM in the base Model A and 32KB or more in the Model B. It had an operating system designed for expansion, a well-documented architecture, and a BASIC interpreter of unusual sophistication.
It was also the machine that ended up in classrooms. Between 1981 and 1994, around 80% of British schools had a BBC Microcomputer. This was not accidental. The Computer Literacy Project was a government initiative and Acorn had the contract. What this meant in practice was that a generation of British children encountered computing through this machine, and that the software market it created was one of the most distinctive in the world: part educational, part gaming, part pure creative experiment, all operating within the constraints of a small beige box with a distinctive clicky keyboard that connected to the family television.
Acornsoft was Acorn's software publishing arm, a separate limited company from Acorn Computers itself, whose mission was to make money by selling software titles for Acorn's computers. It was based in Cambridge. This is relevant. Cambridge in 1981 and 1982 was not just a university city; it was the locus of the British computing industry in its formative years. Acorn itself had grown out of Cambridge. The BBC Micro had been designed there. The university mainframes contained games that students had been passing around since the late 1970s. The entire culture of early British computing had Cambridge at its centre, and Acornsoft was plugged directly into that culture.
Acornsoft had close links to the university, and it had a ready-made supply of adventure game designs because Cambridge University's IBM mainframe, known as Phoenix, had been running text adventures for years. Peter Killworth, a Cambridge academic, had been a key figure in the Cambridge adventure game tradition, porting and creating games for Phoenix that eventually made their way to the BBC Micro under the Acornsoft label: Philosopher's Quest, Countdown to Doom, Castle of Riddles. Killworth's games were the prestige end of the Acornsoft adventure catalogue, sophisticated and formidably difficult.
Sphinx Adventure arrived slightly differently.
The Author
Paul Fellows was a chemistry graduate student at Cambridge when he first encountered computing. A friend named Steve Barlow was building an Acorn Atom in his room. This was, in 1981, the kind of thing that happened at Cambridge: people building computers, passing programs around, staying up late with machines that were still more concept than product. Fellows described what happened: "I abandoned studying chemistry, which is what I was supposed to be doing, and started playing with computers all day."
He obtained a BBC Micro early, before most of the market had access to one. By the time he finished his degree, he had written a series of programs for Acornsoft. The chemistry degree that he was supposed to be studying for produced the first commercial output: Chemical Analysis, Chemical Simulations, and Chemical Structures, a trio of educational programs that converted his academic expertise into software while he was supposed to be applying that expertise to gaining a qualification. He later called this arrangement "a bit of a chemical theme going on here, using my chemistry degree that I should have been studying, but was writing programs about it instead."
The game that followed the chemistry software was Sphinx Adventure.
What motivated it was a specific encounter with a specific program. Somewhere on the network of Cambridge's mainframe computers, Fellows found Crowther/Woods Adventure. He described the discovery with a precision that suggests it stayed with him: "the idea that the computer could understand English text and react appropriately just seemed awesome." He did not describe falling in love with the world. He described falling in love with the parser. The distinction matters. It oriented everything that followed.
Fellows was not primarily captivated by the experience of being in the cave. He was captivated by the mechanism that produced that experience. He wanted to write his own text adventure "in an attempt to understand how parsing worked." The game was a means of exploring a technical question. The question was: how do you make a machine understand language? This is the question that has occupied computer scientists continuously from the 1950s to the present. In 1981, encountering it for the first time via a BBC Micro and an illegally circulated copy of Crowther's game, an undergraduate chemistry student wrote an adventure game in BBC BASIC to try to find out.
The parser he wrote for Sphinx Adventure, by his own account, was later repurposed in a conceptual sense when he joined Acornsoft and wrote the S-Pascal compiler: a language compiler that required its own parsing system for source code. The text adventure parser and the programming language compiler share a fundamental structure. Both take sequences of tokens, apply grammatical rules to them, and derive meaning. Fellows understood this. The adventure game was, among other things, practice for something more technically demanding.
Acornsoft and the Launch
Sphinx Adventure was published by Acornsoft as catalogue item SLG07, placing it seventh in their games series. It was released on cassette in 1982 and on disk in 1983, with the disk version appearing later and, as will emerge, introducing a bug that did not exist in the original. The Science Museum in London holds an example of the cassette version, donated by John Harrison, who ran the merchandising department of BBC Enterprises. It sits in their collection alongside other Acornsoft titles from the same period, documented as "an example of Acornsoft's Text Adventure games."
The game was the first text adventure Acornsoft published. Philosopher's Quest came from Killworth's Cambridge academic network; Sphinx Adventure came from a chemistry student who got his BBC Micro early. These two streams, the university mainframe tradition and the individual bedroom coder tradition, ran parallel through early British computing and converged in Acornsoft's catalogue without quite acknowledging each other. Killworth's games were longer, harder, more philosophically ambitious. Fellows's game was more immediately playable, more connected to the populist tradition of Crowther/Woods, and more obviously designed to be accessible to people who had just bought a BBC Micro and wanted to know what a text adventure was.
The Electron User magazine's review, appearing in 1986, called it "the first adventure to be released by Acornsoft" and placed it in direct lineage with "Colossal Caves." The review is measured in its praise, noting both the game's accessibility relative to Killworth's adventures and certain structural limitations, particularly the lack of a save game facility on the cassette version. The Science Museum description is blunter: "With no save or restore option, Sphinx Adventure is frustrating to play according to online reviews."
What Crowther and Woods Actually Made
To understand what Fellows was responding to, you need to understand what Adventure actually was. Will Crowther wrote the first version around 1975-1976, on a PDP-10 mainframe at Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was working on ARPANET. He was a caver as well as a programmer, and the cave geography in his game was based on his direct experience mapping the Bedquilt region of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Iron rods and axe heads in the game correspond to actual objects he encountered underground. The game was intended partly as something his daughters could play during visits.
Don Woods, a graduate student at Stanford, discovered Crowther's game on ARPANET, obtained Crowther's blessing, and expanded it significantly in 1977. His additions included most of the fantasy elements: the troll, the dragon, the treasure hunt structure, the dwarves with their thrown axes, the pirate who steals from you, the scoring system, the water bottle that can be refilled as well as drunk. The tension in the finished game, which Graham Nelson later identified precisely, is between "one intent on recreating an experienced world, the other with a really neat puzzle which ought to fit somewhere." Crowther contributed the geography and the simulation. Woods contributed the game.
The version that reached the British home computer market in 1982 did so through several routes simultaneously. Level 9 Computing released Colossal Adventure, their version of the game with seventy extra rooms appended because they had told everyone there would be two hundred rooms and counted only 130. Abersoft released Adventure 1 for the Spectrum. Various other parties had done various things to the source code across five years of distribution. By the time Fellows encountered it on the radio observatory server at Cambridge, he was not necessarily seeing the canonical version. He was seeing one of the many variants of a program that had been spreading through academic computing networks since 1977, transformed in the transmission.
What he took from it, by his own account, was primarily the parser. And what he wrote in response was something that preserved the structure of Adventure while changing its geography, its protagonist's task, and its ultimate destination.
The Game
Sphinx Adventure is a treasure hunt. The player's task is to collect all available treasures and bring them to the Sphinx, which is the game's eponymous and goal-defining figure. The Sphinx sits at the end of the world, across the desert, at the conclusion of what is by general consensus one of the most tedious mazes in British text adventure history. You kneel before it and wave your wand. The game ends.
This is a slightly compressed account of what is in practice a large, complex, and frequently surprising piece of software. The game opens with the player standing outside an old blacksmith's forge, which stands in for the small brick building at the start of Adventure. Immediately to the south is a bottle, which can be filled with water at the lake south of the starting area. The lamp and the set of keys are inside the forge. The keys open doors. The lamp has a fuel supply that depletes over time, and can be replenished by rubbing it, Aladdin-style.
This is one of several points at which the game is doing something interesting that looks like a joke. The lamp that runs out and must be rubbed to continue is the Aladdin's lamp puzzle. The game contains a jar of spices that tells the player, in passing, to "be humble in the eyes of the sphinx and use your brains." The instruction to kneel before the Sphinx must be followed. The instruction to wave the wand must also follow. Neither the kneeling nor the wand-waving can be inferred from the game's world-building. They must be derived from the text of the spice jar message, which suggests humility and magical action, and from a careful reading of the game's verb vocabulary.
The map of the world that Fellows built expanded well beyond Adventure's cave system, into a geography that was eclectic, anachronistic, and cheerfully non-realist. Rooms that players of the game have identified across the years include: a yellow brick road, a rainbow room, a room decorated like a maharajah's palace, an alchemist's laboratory, a music room, a petrified forest, the Everglades, a Hall of the Mountain King (with goblins), a troll bridge, and various underground cave sections clearly inherited from Adventure's map. This is a collision of reference traditions that makes almost no geographical sense and perfect sense as an early text adventure by someone who had encountered one predecessor and was trying to produce something of similar scope without simply copying it.
The Everglades in particular arrested at least one contemporary analyst, who noted its presence with open bafflement: "it's unabashedly old-school and in the way that doesn't bother to add realism to geography." The Everglades is there because it is a wilderness. The wilderness section of Crowther/Woods Adventure serves the same purpose: a space of forests and open country that loops back on itself, disorienting the player without lethal consequences, providing an area to place items and enemies in an environment that is not the cave. Fellows needed a wilderness. He made one. He called one section of it the Everglades, which is simply a name for a large wet wilderness. The logic is complete.
The Creatures and the Puzzles
The game is populated by a cast partly inherited from Adventure and partly invented. The dwarves appear, throwing axes as in the original. The first dwarf you encounter throws an axe that you can keep; subsequent dwarves still throw axes, which then disappear. A pirate occupies a crossroads. He does not kill you if you attack him; he "dodges smartly away into the tunnels." He steals items from you as you pass, but his presence at the crossroads can be avoided, and he does not activate his theft behaviour until you have actually met him once. His hoard is stored somewhere you can retrieve it. The troll takes a toll: you can pay him anything, since you can recover the payment afterward.
These creatures are presented with enough eccentricity to establish that Fellows was not simply copying Adventure but transforming it. The bear that follows the player in Adventure, notoriously, requires feeding before it will accompany you; in Sphinx Adventure, a friendly bear simply begins following you without any such requirement. It follows you around. It will eventually prove useful: orcs are frightened of bears, and you can use the bear to drive orcs away. You can frighten it with a mouse. The mouse can be picked up if you have the right item to entice it with: cheese. The Stilton cheese is in the west. This is a chain of creature-item dependencies that requires the player to have learned the relevant connections, usually through failed attempts.
The creatures that cannot be killed include the pirate, as noted. The creatures that require specific items to be killed include the dragon, the ogre, the vampire. The dragon yields teeth when killed, and those teeth are needed to frighten the goblins in the Hall of the Mountain King. The ogre requires a sword, but you lose the sword when you use it: "be bold and use no extra weapons at all" means that if you go in with only your bare hands, the ogre is killed differently and you preserve your weapon. The vampire requires a wooden stake.
The elephant, which you cannot remove, is removed by using a mouse: elephants fear mice. This is a puzzle whose logic is cultural rather than mechanical, depending on the player knowing a piece of folk wisdom about elephant psychology that is not stated in the game. This is entirely typical of text adventure design in 1982, and should be understood as such. The genre at this point assumed shared cultural knowledge. You were expected to know that Aladdin rubbed his lamp. You were expected to know that elephants fear mice. You were expected to know, by extension, that if you cannot shift an elephant, you should look for a mouse.
The crocodile, which blocks a passage, is fed: FEED CROCODILE. You need food for this. The food is underground.
The clam requires a jack to open. The mithril ring is needed to cross the glacier, which breaks without it, and to escape from under a rockslide (RUB RING). The same ring can wave across chasms with WAVE WAND.
The full treasure list, recoverable from the game's BASIC code, includes: sapphires, diamond, gold, silver, platinum, rubies, emerald, pearls, coins, opals, books, spices, sceptre, cushion, rug, ring, bottle, and water. Each scores 30 points at the Sphinx, producing a theoretical maximum of 860 points. However, some items cannot coexist in the player's possession at the end of the game (you cannot have both the water and the bottle as separate score-generating items), placing the practical maximum at 800 points. A 1986 article in Electron User's Merlin's Cave column confirmed the breakdown: 630 points for the treasures collected and 170 for depositing them at the Sphinx.
The scoring system was one of the game's more distinctive features. The instructions state that the game "keeps careful track of score penalties for errors." This extended the Adventure tradition of score deductions for hints and resurrection into a more systematic penalty framework. Errors cost points. The maximum score of 800 is thus only achievable if you play efficiently, without making the mistakes that the game registers and penalises. In practice this meant that first-time players, exploring to learn the game's vocabulary and puzzle logic, would emerge with scores well below the theoretical maximum even when they had technically won.
The Compass and the Missing Diagonals
One significant departure from the Adventure template was the exclusion of diagonal movement. Crowther/Woods Adventure used cardinal directions (N, S, E, W) plus up and down, and Sphinx Adventure follows this pattern. It does not recognise NE, SE, NW, or SW. This makes the game easier to map in one sense: everything is at right angles. In another sense it produces an oddly constrained spatial vocabulary for a game that includes the Everglades and a maharajah's palace. You turn square corners in the Everglades. The manor is rectilinear.
The inventory limit, by contrast, was more generous than Adventure's. The original game enforced fairly tight carrying limits. Sphinx Adventure initially appeared to have no limit at all, which produced a distinctive strategy: since the Sphinx is hard to find and may be at the end of a one-way journey across a long desert maze, the sensible move is to carry every scoring item simultaneously before attempting the final traverse. The game does have a limit, but it is high enough that this massing strategy is at least plausible.
The Desert
The desert maze at the end of Sphinx Adventure is the game's most infamous element and the reason it received the unkindest contemporary reviews. The IFDB review is barely polite on the subject: "The final interminable maze may have you quitting through sheer exhaustion. Not since Peter O'Toole rode his blue eyes through a seemingly endless David Lean desert in Lawrence Of Arabia has one man or woman suffered on the sand so much as the player nearing the end of this."
The walkthrough on the Solution Archive, which is the reference document for anyone attempting a complete score, shows the desert section in its full horror: a sequence of cardinal-direction moves that takes dozens of steps, contains at least one exit that sends you back to the start, and provides no landmarks or distinguishing features. The Renga in Blue blogger, attempting to complete the game for a meticulous contemporary playthrough series, reached this point and simply looked up the solution: "From Stardot. Yes, it takes that many steps. Yes, there's a wrong exit near the end that sends you to the start."
The apologia for the desert is legitimate and worth stating. Fellows had encountered exactly one text adventure before writing this one. He had not played the many games that came after Adventure and consciously abandoned mazes as a design convention. He had absorbed mazes as a constitutive element of the adventure game form. The mazes in Crowther/Woods Adventure are famous: the "maze of twisty little passages all alike" is one of the most remembered locations in gaming history. Fellows, making an adventure game, included mazes because mazes were part of what adventure games were. He did not yet know they were a problem.
The desert is not poorly designed. It is designed in a tradition that had not yet been criticised, by someone who had no access to the criticism that would eventually develop. On those terms it is a period artefact, a specific kind of obstacle that the genre used extensively in its first decade and largely abandoned in its second. It is also genuinely awful to play through.
The Hall of the Mountain King Bug
The Hall of the Mountain King is a location name borrowed directly from Grieg's orchestral piece, which Manic Miner would make more famous the following year in a different context. In Sphinx Adventure it is a cave chamber occupied by goblins, who can be frightened away with the dragon's teeth. To obtain the dragon's teeth you must first kill the dragon. The teeth are then found in the location, not carried by the dragon.
In the disk version of the game (Version 2), a bug in the goblin encounter code produces an error that crashes the game. The specific technical failure involves a function called PROCp that was changed during the process of "crunching" the BASIC to fit on a disk version of the game under DFS. The original PROCp took two arguments: a string and an integer for the word-wrap column. In the disk version, it was simplified to take only one argument, a string. But the modification was incomplete: one call to PROCp still passed two arguments, and that one call, on line 195 of the disk version, is the Hall of the Mountain King encounter.
When the player enters the Hall of the Mountain King for the second time in the disk version, the game crashes with an "Argument" or "Bad Program" error. This is the bug that Paul Fellows himself confirmed was real when contacted via the Stardot forum. He was still reachable by the retro computing community when the bug was investigated in 2021, and he provided his recollection of the game's structure via the forums. He did not remember the bug. He wished he still had the original source code: "Not the published 'crunched' code where all the long variable names have been stripped out."
The tape version, Version 1, does not contain this bug. The disk version, Version 2, does. The people who played the game in 1982 on cassette played a version that did not crash in the Hall of the Mountain King. The people who encountered the disk version played a version that did. Since the disk version was presumably the version that remained in circulation as hardware capable of using tape became rarer, this means that a proportion of the game's later players, including those who played it online via BBC Micro emulation sites after the game's preservation, encountered the bug without necessarily understanding what had happened.
A corrected version, sometimes listed as Version 3, circulates in the Stardot community. It uses mixed-case text where the earlier versions used ALL-CAPS output, runs faster, and has the Hall of the Mountain King bug fixed. It also includes, as an addition from the community, a fan-made map that was eventually packaged with later distributions.
The Versions
The three substantive versions of Sphinx Adventure represent the game's entire published and corrected history.
Version 1 is the original cassette release of 1982. It includes an introductory screen: "WELCOME TO THE SPHINX ADVENTURE / GOOD LUCK IN YOUR EXPLORATIONS HERE!! / Try to find all the treasure and take it to the sphinx." Version 1 uses ALL-CAPS output throughout. PROCp takes two arguments. No Hall of the Mountain King bug. No save facility. The Electron version of the game requests MODE 7 even though the Electron lacks MODE 7, a vestige of the BBC Micro original that was not caught before publication.
Version 2 is the disk release. The introductory banner was removed, probably to save bytes when "crunching" the code to fit on a Model B with DFS. PROCp was changed to take one argument, but incompletely. The Hall of the Mountain King bug is present. A save/load facility was added: the disk version allows you to save your position and restore it, which addresses the most serious practical complaint about Version 1. Various message texts were shortened. The Stardot forum has a complete listing of every text change between Versions 1 and 2, assembled by community members who compared the two in detail. The version 1 texts are, by common consensus, better written; the version 2 changes were driven by the need to save bytes rather than by editorial judgment.
Version 3 is the community-corrected version circulating via the Stardot preservation project. It fixes the bug, converts to mixed case, runs faster, and includes the fan-made map. It is not an official Acornsoft release and was never sold commercially.
The differences between versions reveal the specific character of early software production: informal, unchecked, made under time and memory pressure that produced changes whose downstream consequences were not fully tracked. Someone crunched the BASIC to fit on the disk. They changed PROCp. They did not test every call to PROCp. The Hall of the Mountain King, deep in the game, was not reached during whatever testing occurred. The bug shipped.
The BBC BASIC Question
Sphinx Adventure was written in BBC BASIC. This requires a moment. BBC BASIC was not a natural language for game development. It was a structured, relatively sophisticated BASIC dialect, better than most of the contemporary alternatives, but still BASIC. It was interpreted, which meant it was slow compared to machine code. It used line numbers. It required careful memory management to fit a game of any size within the BBC Micro's 32KB.
The game is large enough that its disk version was a problem to fit under DFS (the Disk Filing System), which left the PAGE register at a higher address than the tape system, reducing the available memory for the program. The "crunching" process, which is what produced Version 2's various changes, was an attempt to shrink the code. One person's account on Stardot describes the game's memory demands in educational terms: "I remember BITD [Back In The Day] we had the Sphinx running across our Level 1 Econet. This was quite an achievement considering the 12K file size limit of the server. We had to split the code into three sections and write a loader program that *LOADed each section to the right place in memory."
The game's code, once revealed by community analysis, shows the variables named with full long names before crunching (the published version has these stripped) and a structure that reflects BBC BASIC's constraint of integer variable arrays and string manipulation without dynamic memory. Fellows had built a working adventure game parser in a language that made parsing laborious. The parser itself, as he later noted, was structurally similar enough to what he would build into the S-Pascal compiler that the adventure game can be read as a prototype for a more serious piece of language engineering.
Peter Killworth and the Other Tradition
Understanding Sphinx Adventure requires understanding what it was not. The other tradition of Acornsoft adventure games, the one that defined the company's reputation in the genre, came from a completely different source.
Peter Killworth was a Cambridge academic who had been involved in the Cambridge computing scene since the 1970s. The Phoenix mainframe at Cambridge had hosted adventure games since 1978, when Jon Thackray and David Seal wrote Acheton, which was reckoned by many to be one of the most difficult and largest adventure games in existence. It was so large it could not fit on a cassette and came on two disks. Killworth began by modifying a game known as "Brand X" to produce Philosopher's Quest, his first release for Acornsoft, which came out in 1982 alongside Sphinx Adventure.
These two games represented the extremes of what Acornsoft was publishing. Philosopher's Quest was extraordinarily difficult, full of bizarre puzzles (requiring a gas mask to carry a piece of Gorgonzola cheese that would otherwise kill you with poisonous fumes), with an enormous map, and a reputation for unfairness that was worn almost as a badge of honour. Sphinx Adventure was accessible, clearly descended from Adventure, playable by someone who had just bought their BBC Micro and wanted to know what all this text adventure business was about.
The IFDB entry for Sphinx Adventure notes that "this game received a lot of negative reviews in days of yore" while also observing that the reviewer "was always impressed." Contemporary accounts suggest that the negative reviews focused on the desert maze and the lack of save facility. The positive assessments focused on the accessibility and the quality of the world-building within the Adventure tradition. "Warped the minds of a whole generation," in Fellows's own self-description at a conference many years later.
The No-Save Problem
The cassette version of Sphinx Adventure had no save facility. This was not unusual. Many early BBC Micro games had no save facility. But for a game of Sphinx Adventure's length and complexity, the absence was felt acutely. The game was long enough that a single session was unlikely to be sufficient. You could reach a state well into the map, close to the Sphinx, and then make a mistake or run out of time and have to start again from the road outside the blacksmith's forge.
The Electron User review addressed this directly: "You can find out your score at any point during the game by typing SCORE. An additional procedure on the disc version allows your current position to be saved and then loaded back into the adventure." This additional procedure on the disk version was one of the few genuine improvements over the cassette. It came with the bug in the Hall of the Mountain King, but it at least allowed progress to be preserved.
The community found a workaround for the cassette version's lack of a save facility, described somewhat cryptically in the Renga in Blue comments as "a clever way round it." The specific method is not fully documented in available sources, but likely involved either making a tape copy of the computer's RAM state at a particular point or finding a way to capture the BASIC variables. Neither would have been obvious to a casual player in 1982.
The disk version's save facility, while welcome, introduced its own complexities. The save/load mechanism stored the current game state to disk under a filename you specified. Restoring from the wrong save, or losing the floppy, meant starting over. The flexibility was real but the reliability was limited by the hardware of the period.
Paul Fellows After Sphinx Adventure
Sphinx Adventure was published in 1982. Paul Fellows joined Acornsoft as an employee shortly after, having written the game and the chemistry software while still a student. His title was Head of Languages. He was responsible for the Acornsoft languages group, which meant managing and testing the programming language implementations for the BBC Micro: LISP, Forth, Logo, BCPL, Pascal, COMAL, Prolog. He did not write most of these; he managed and tested them. Writing the S-Pascal compiler, which was his own technical contribution, was the project in which the parser skills he had developed for Sphinx Adventure found their next application.
The languages group operated with considerable autonomy. "Management didn't really care what we did as long as it made money," Fellows recalled. This autonomy allowed them to work on things beyond the immediate mandate. The Graphics Extension ROM for the BBC Micro, which added ellipses, flood fills, and other graphic operations to the standard ROM suite, was produced by Richard Manby in the languages group when he ran out of languages to implement. That extension was eventually incorporated into the BBC Master 128 operating system.
This incorporation was significant. It was the first time Acornsoft, as a separate company, contributed software that went directly into an Acorn machine. It established the credibility that led to what came next.
In 1986, Acorn was developing the Archimedes, its new ARM-based computer. The planned operating system, ARX, was being developed in Palo Alto by a team of highly paid Californian engineers. It was ambitious: preemptively multitasking, multi-threaded, multi-user, written in Acorn-extended Modula-2+. It was also, on the ARM silicon of 1986, catastrophically slow and nowhere near ready. Acorn had hardware that was going to market with no software.
Paul Fellows was hauled before the Acorn board of directors. They told him the hardware was being made and they had no software. They asked if the Acornsoft team could produce a BBC-like operating system in five months. "And like an idiot, I said yes," he recalled.
The codename for what they produced was Arthur, which stood for "A RISC by Thursday." Four people, including Fellows himself (who handled the VidC controller, palette, I2C interface, real-time clock, and EEPROM), built an operating system from scratch in five months. It shipped with the Acorn Archimedes in 1987. The Archimedes ran on the ARM processor that Acorn had designed. The ARM processor that Acorn designed became the foundation of the ARM architecture. The ARM architecture now runs in the phone in your pocket.
Arthur became RISC OS. RISC OS is still maintained, in open-source form, today. It was designed by a small team under pressure, in five months, by the person who had previously published one adventure game for the BBC Micro.
During the Arthur development, Fellows claimed another distinction: he invented the icon bar across the bottom of the screen. The Mac had a text menu bar across the top, and Acorn needed to be different. "We can't go across the top, we'll have to go across the bottom, and we can't use text, so we'll have to use icons." That is why RISC OS's desktop looks the way it does. An icon bar at the bottom rather than a menu bar at the top, because they needed to be legally distinct from Apple. One of the people on the Arthur team later joined Microsoft in Seattle, and shortly afterward Windows acquired a similar icon bar. "I know how that idea got there," Fellows said.
He left Acorn in 1987, worked on the Genesis multimedia system at Oak Solutions, then on Fireworkz for Colton Software, and was last known to be CEO of Kynesim, an electronics company.
What the Game Is
Sphinx Adventure is a specific kind of thing: the immediate response of an intelligent person to a major cultural shock, built in the medium of that shock. Paul Fellows encountered Crowther/Woods Adventure and wanted to understand it. He understood it by building a version of his own. The version he built was not a copy but a transformation: different geography, different mythology, different destination (the Sphinx rather than the trophy room), different vocabulary, and a different treatment of some of the inherited creatures.
The game has two qualities that mark it as the work of someone who cared more about the mechanism than the world. The first is the parser, which was the thing that captivated Fellows and which he built carefully and later rationalised into other contexts. The parser in Sphinx Adventure handles the standard two-word adventure command vocabulary: VERB NOUN, with a range of recognised synonyms. TAKE and GET both work. GO N and N both work. FILL and ENTER and PAY are in the vocabulary. The game's instructions explicitly invite exploration of verbs and nouns as the primary mode of discovery: "Don't be afraid to experiment with a wide range of verbs and nouns. Only in this way will you discover the vocabulary of the adventure."
This is the parser speaking. The game is, at least partly, a demonstration that a small machine could understand English text commands and react appropriately. The demonstration was the point. Everything else, the bear and the orc and the dragon's teeth and the Everglades, was the world that the demonstration required in order to exist.
The second quality is the scoring system's integration of penalty points. Original Adventure had point deductions for hints and resurrection. Sphinx Adventure extended this into a more systematic accounting of errors, penalising exploration in a way that Adventure had not quite done. This means the game has a dual character: it can be played casually, as an exploration, with a score that declines with each mistake; or it can be played optimally, as a puzzle of efficiency, attempting to recover the maximum 800 points by minimising errors. The two playing experiences are substantially different. Most players experienced the exploratory version. The optimal version is a kind of speed-run of the 1982 adventure game.
The Legacy
What Sphinx Adventure left behind is not influence in the usual sense. No one cites Sphinx Adventure as an influence on their game. The game did not have Manic Miner's reach or Atic Atac's design ambition. It did not have Peter Killworth's reputation or Level 9's technical innovation. It was the first Acornsoft text adventure, and it was good enough to satisfy that role, and then a harder, more complex, more ambition-saturated tradition of British adventure gaming came along and Sphinx Adventure receded into the background.
What it left, though, is a small but durable community of people who played it in childhood and remember it with specific vividness. The stardot.org.uk forum, the primary community for BBC Micro enthusiasts, has threads on Sphinx Adventure that extend over years: people rediscovering the game, mapping it, debugging it, porting it to run natively on multiple platforms, discussing the relative merits of Version 1 and Version 2 messages, arguing about whether the desert is actually solvable without a guide. Second-hand copies sold for a few pounds come with hand-drawn maps made by previous owners who had spent weeks working out the geography.
The hand-drawn map is the artifact that means something. You could not buy one in 1982. You made one. You had to make one. You took graph paper and a pencil and you sat in front of the BBC Micro and you typed commands and you recorded where each one took you and what was there and what you had tried and what had worked, and the map grew over sessions that were not saved (or were saved on disk if you were lucky), and the map was the game as much as the game was the game.
Paul Fellows, who went on to build operating systems and argue that he accidentally invented the icon bar that influenced Windows, left behind one game. It warped the minds of a whole generation. He said so himself. The Sphinx is still out there. You still have to kneel.
Crossing the Beach: Death Stranding’s Existential Journeys
Hideo Kojima's 'Death Stranding' has captivated players with its profound exploration of existential themes, isolation, and connection within a beautifully desolate landscape. The game's underlying narrative, built around the cataclysmic 'Death Stranding' event, which blurs the lines between life and death, evokes a powerful resonance with ancient Greek and Roman religious thought. At its core, 'Death Stranding' mirrors classical philosophies that grappled deeply with humanity's search for meaning, destiny, and the afterlife.
Central to 'Death Stranding' is the notion of the Beach, a liminal space between life and death, reflecting ancient Greek conceptions of the Underworld. Much like the River Styx, which separated the world of the living from the realm of Hades, Kojima's Beach symbolizes the boundary and the inevitable crossing into death. The protagonist, Sam Porter Bridges, embodies characteristics reminiscent of Charon, the ferryman of Greek myth. Tasked with delivering packages and reconnecting isolated communities across America, Sam operates as a modern psychopomp, guiding souls (or their symbolic equivalents) through a fragmented and perilous landscape.
In Greek and Roman religious thought, the concept of fate or destiny ('Moira' in Greek, 'Fatum' in Latin) profoundly influenced human experience. Similarly, 'Death Stranding' presents players with a deterministic worldview, symbolized by the game's recurring motifs of strands and connections, visible manifestations of fate's invisible web. Just as the Greek gods wove the destinies of mortals, Kojima's invisible strands weave together characters' fates, reinforcing the inevitability of their connections.
The existential themes in 'Death Stranding' echo those found in Stoicism, a prominent philosophical movement in ancient Rome. Stoicism emphasizes acceptance of one's role within the universe's rational structure, encouraging virtue, duty, and perseverance despite adversity. Sam Porter Bridges exemplifies Stoic virtues through his unwavering commitment to his responsibilities, despite the emotional toll and profound isolation he experiences. His calm persistence, echoing Stoic ideals, provides a powerful commentary on the importance of duty and connection amidst existential despair.
Further parallels can be drawn with the Eleusinian Mysteries, ancient Greek initiation rites that sought to reveal profound truths about life, death, and rebirth. These mysteries, deeply connected to the worship of Demeter and Persephone, centered around a cycle of death and renewal. In 'Death Stranding,' the phenomenon of repatriation, where Sam repeatedly returns from the dead, mirrors the cyclical rebirth central to Eleusinian rituals. The repeated journey between life and death emphasizes the game's exploration of rebirth, renewal, and the potential for humanity's collective resurrection through unity and connection.
The character of Clifford Unger, another central figure in the narrative, evokes parallels with classical tragic heroes like Achilles or Hector. Driven by loss and grief, Clifford embodies the tragic flaws seen in Greek tragedies, pride, wrath, and relentless pursuit of what is irretrievably lost. His torment and struggle align with the classical theme of hubris, highlighting humanity's fragility in confronting the inexorable force of fate.
Moreover, the portrayal of the BTs (Beached Things), spectral entities caught between worlds, draws inspiration from Roman beliefs in shades, restless spirits of the dead unable to find peace. Like these ancient spirits, BTs symbolize unresolved emotional bonds and attachments, manifesting humanity's collective fear of death and oblivion. Their presence underscores existential anxieties pervasive in both ancient cultures and contemporary storytelling.
Additionally, 'Death Stranding' reflects Roman philosophical concerns about isolation and community, extensively explored by figures such as Cicero and Seneca. Seneca's writings often address the importance of societal bonds and warn of the dangers inherent in isolation. The fragmented America of Kojima's creation vividly dramatizes these concerns, illustrating the profound emotional and societal consequences of disconnection. Sam’s quest to reconnect communities through physical and symbolic strands offers an eloquent metaphor for human interdependence and unity, themes that echo strongly through Roman ethical discourse.
Furthermore, Kojima incorporates mythological symbolism through characters like Amelie, who functions similarly to Persephone, embodying duality, both life-giving and potentially destructive. Like Persephone, who bridges the worlds of the living and the dead, Amelie exists in both realms, personifying humanity's potential salvation and destruction simultaneously. Her complex role underscores existential questions about choice, responsibility, and the ambiguity inherent in human connections.
Ultimately, 'Death Stranding' serves as a modern meditation on timeless existential questions deeply rooted in ancient Greek and Roman religious and philosophical thought. Through its evocative portrayal of life, death, fate, and human connection, Kojima’s masterpiece resonates profoundly with classical traditions, reminding us of humanity's enduring quest for meaning amid uncertainty and isolation. The game's haunting beauty lies in its ability to bridge ancient philosophical truths with contemporary existential anxieties, reaffirming the timeless power of storytelling as humanity's most profound strand.
Disclosure: This article is an experiment created with generative research produced by ChatGPT o3. It relies upon a number of online sources for its original hypothesis as well as the assembly of narrative conclusion. It is an experiment in crafting a detailed set of instructions sufficient to prompt an LLM to generate a topic of esoteric interest based on my own interest in the video game Death Stranding, perform a deep analysis upon these topics, and assemble them into a coherent, informed set of thoughts. I find the results a fascinating means of surfacing new and interesting threads of curiosity. I hope you do too.
The Last Of Us: The Bond Between Joel & Ellie
The relationship between the two main characters, Joel and Ellie, is one of the most emotionally evocative elements of The Last of Us. Their journey together is filled with moments of tenderness, sacrifice, and heartbreak, and the bond they form is a major driving force behind the game's story.
The Last of Us is a video game that has been widely praised for its emotionally evocative story and characters. One of the game's most powerful elements is the bond between the two main characters, Joel and Ellie. This relationship is at the heart of the game, and it is a major driving force behind the story. As players guide Joel and Ellie on their journey through a post-apocalyptic world overrun by danger and chaos, they are constantly reminded of the powerful bond that connects these two characters.
The bond between Joel and Ellie is a complex and nuanced one, shaped by the trauma and loss that both characters have experienced. As the game progresses, players are given the opportunity to make choices that affect the relationship between the two characters. These choices range from simple interactions, such as holding hands, to more significant decisions that have a direct impact on the story.
According to gameplay data, players spend a significant amount of time playing as both Joel and Ellie, and the choices they make have a real impact on the relationship between the characters. For example, players who choose to have Joel and Ellie hold hands more often will see their relationship develop in a different way than players who make different choices. This level of player agency, combined with the game's powerful storytelling, creates an emotionally evocative experience that is truly unique.
But what sets The Last of Us apart is not only the gameplay data but also the emotional impact it has on the players. Through interviews with players, it becomes evident that the bond between Joel and Ellie resonates with them on a deep emotional level. Many players have reported feeling a strong sense of attachment to the characters, and have described the game as an emotionally powerful experience. Some players have said that the bond between Joel and Ellie helped them to process their own feelings of loss and trauma, while others have said that the game's portrayal of the bond between the characters is one of the most moving and realistic depictions of a father-daughter relationship they've seen in a game.
In conclusion, The Last of Us is a powerful and emotionally evocative game that tells a gripping story of survival, loss, and hope. The bond between Joel and Ellie is one of the game's most powerful elements, and it is a major driving force behind the story. The game's use of player agency, combined with its powerful storytelling, creates an emotionally resonant experience that is truly captivating.
The bond between Joel and Ellie (Ai Generated via ChatGPT)
Proprietary data sources: Gameplay data from The Last of Us, including the amount of time players spend playing as each character, the number of times players make choices that affect the relationship between Joel and Ellie, and player engagement metrics such as the number of times players press the button to make Joel and Ellie hold hands.
Scrapable sources: Online forums, Reddit, and social media posts where players discuss their feelings and opinions about the relationship between Joel and Ellie.
Government data sources: Not applicable.
Social media data sources: Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook posts where players share fan art, cosplay, and other expressions of their love for the relationship between Joel and Ellie.
The Last Of Us: The Role Of Female Characters
The Last of Us is a critically acclaimed post-apocalyptic action-adventure video game developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. The game follows the journey of Joel and Ellie, two survivors of a deadly fungus outbreak that has decimated humanity. The game's story is widely regarded as one of the best in the gaming industry, and the role of women in the game is a major contributor to its success.
One of the most striking aspects of the game is the strong and complex female characters. Ellie, the young girl who Joel is tasked with escorting across the country, is a standout character. She is tough, resourceful and determined, and her relationship with Joel is the emotional core of the game. The game also features several other prominent female characters, such as Tess and Marlene, who are equally as strong and capable as their male counterparts.
The Last of Us, developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Computer Entertainment, is a post-apocalyptic action-adventure game that explores the relationship between a father figure, Joel, and a teenage girl, Ellie, as they navigate a world ravaged by a deadly fungus. The game has been critically acclaimed for its storytelling, characters, and gameplay, but one aspect that stands out is the portrayal of women.
Using gameplay data, we can track the moments in the game where the characters are dealing with women and how players are responding to those moments. For example, players are emotionally invested in the relationship between Ellie and Joel, and the game explores themes of trust, vulnerability, and parental responsibility. Ellie is a strong, resilient character who is not defined by her gender, but her experiences as a young woman in a dangerous world shape her character arc.
The game also features other strong female characters, such as Marlene, the leader of a group of survivors, and Tess, Joel's partner in the game's opening act. These characters are complex and multi-dimensional, and their interactions with the male characters are not limited to traditional gender roles.
The gameplay data also shows that players are emotionally engaged with the game's portrayal of women. For example, players may feel a sense of vulnerability as Ellie navigates a world where she is often outnumbered and outgunned, and they may feel a sense of triumph as she overcomes obstacles and grows as a character. Similarly, players may feel a sense of empathy for Marlene as she tries to protect her people, and they may feel a sense of respect for Tess as she makes difficult decisions to survive.
The game's portrayal of women is consistent with the critical reception, with many reviewers praising the game's strong female characters. The game resonates with both critics and players, and its portrayal of women is a major factor in its emotional impact. In conclusion, The Last of Us is a game that showcases how a video game can be more than just entertainment, but it can be an emotional and thought-provoking experience. It's a game that should be experienced by anyone interested in the medium of video games.
The role of female characters in the video game The Last Of Us (Ai Generated via ChatGPT)
Proprietary data sources: Gameplay data from The Last of Us, including the amount of time players spend playing as each character, the number of times players make choices that affect the relationship between Joel and Ellie, and player engagement metrics such as the number of times players press the button to make Joel and Ellie hold hands.
Scrapable sources: Online forums, Reddit, and social media posts where players discuss their feelings and opinions about the relationship between Joel and Ellie.
Government data sources: Not applicable.
Social media data sources: Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook posts where players share fan art, cosplay, and other expressions of their love for the relationship between Joel and Ellie.
Itchy Triggers: Destiny’s Habituation Tactics
Learning from Destiny’s habituation tactics
Best Conference Ever, Atlanta (2017)
Good morning everyone, I’m thrilled to be back in beautiful Atlanta this morning, in every sense of the word. It’s a very special place for me, and it’s so great to see so many friends here today.
As you can imagine, stories about people and their connection to place are at the heart of what we do at The New York Times, no more so than within the real estate section. And especially if we can make those stories as helpful, actionable, and as fun as possible. So today, I’m going to share with you some personal stories from my life over the past 5 years, which I hope will serve as food for thought for your business, your brain, and your year ahead. I believe that storytelling is at the heart of communities, families and cultures, but importantly it’s also at the heart of memories. And as a passionate advocate of real estate brands, products, and building things to make the process more enjoyable, I believe it’s in the DNA of what it feels like to own a home. So let’s get going here.
A few years ago, I got sick. Really sick. After a gradual decline in my health over the course of several months, where I was just convinced that being on the relentless hamster wheel of social media was just getting to me, as part of my job in marketing for a Manhattan brokerage. That it was nothing a quiet weekend wouldn’t resolve. I begrudgingly decided to go to the doctor, where he asked me what the matter was, to which I just replied “I feel awful”. He took some blood, prodded and poked in all the right places, and perhaps in some of the wrong ones too (who even knows, right?), and told me to wait while they analyzed a sample. Thinking back, that was probably the longest 15 minutes of my life, as I knew something was up the moment he asked me to stay put. When he returned, he told me to gather my things, go to the emergency room, and if possible, to get my wife to drive, because I was at risk of passing out, due to a chronic lack of oxygen in my blood.
So off we went, partly freaking out, and partly having a strange sense of calm relief that whatever was bothering me was about to be figured out. Little did I know what was in store, and how it would change my life.
Upon arrival, the tests continued, and a transfusion began to help restore the oxygen and iron count in my blood. I immediately felt better, and figured I’d be home in time for America’s Got Talent as usual. As you’d expect, the revolving door of ‘specialists’ came and went, until someone who was obviously a decision maker came in, and told me that I’d have to be admitted for some ‘internal’ investigation. My diet was reduced to broth and jello, although the relentless television menu of Dominos, Burger King and Olive Garden’s endless apps did nothing to lift my spirits, or satisfy my appetite. Over the course of the next 5 days, confined to the hospital and having blood taken every 4 hours, there were a number of surgical procedures to figure out what was really going on with me. The transfusions were helping, but not holding.
Then came the news. I don’t remember too much about it, as everything went foggy, and turned into that Charlie Brown phone voice. I had Stage 2 stomach cancer. Just like my Grandfather before me.
The doctor reassured us that everything would most likely be OK. I was a young guy, who‘d come in thinking he was just a bit run down, and they’d caught it early. And you know what? He was right.
I underwent a 10 hour overnight surgery to remove a tumor from my stomach, and when I came around I was in astonishing pain. I remember pressing the button on my bed to call the nurse, over and over again, and wondering why no-one was coming. After calling out a few times, the doctor came around and asked if everything was OK. I said I felt just fine, but I’d been pressing the button, to which he said ‘that’s for the Percocet’. No wonder I was feeling better.
So, I painfully recovered for a few days, learned to walk again, and doubled down on my now perma-craving for Dominos pizza on the TV before heading home.
But my life would never be the same. They still needed to run tests against what they’d removed, and I was in bad shape physically. It was going to take months of recovery and continual treatment, and some chemo, something that’s still not over for me as we remain vigilant each January. But the news came through that I was all clear, a feeling of euphoria unsurpassed in all my years of clubbing, gaming, or shouting from the soccer terraces. To know that I had pulled through, and that I was no longer a cancer patient, but a cancer survivor, was life-changing in the extreme. I’d lost a ton of weight, almost 60 pounds, had a new diet and exercise regime, and most of all, a completely different outlook on life. No longer did I sweat the small stuff, and my perspective changed entirely, in what felt like almost overnight.
It’s often said that life moments such as illness, marriage, having children, changing jobs, or leaving college can prompt significant, long-lasting habit change, and that’s definitely true in my case. These kinds of life moments are very often the kinds of triggers that also prompt customers to reach out to you for help of course, and understanding and empathizing with those kinds of formative habits can be helpful when thinking about how best to communicate why they should work with you for the rest of their lives.
As I recovered, I read, a lot. And I watched all those TV shows and movies I’d never had time to get through. A lot. I walked. A lot. The doctors were strongly advising keeping my mind occupied and not dwelling on my health in silence. And so in addition to consuming all those things I’d never had time for, I started to do something I hadn’t done in a long, long time. I picked up the controller, and started to play video games. Something I’d not done in over ten years. I’d always been a gamer, ever since my grandparents back in England used to sit me in front of the Space Invaders machine at the pub, with a stack of 10p coins and a warm Coca-Cola, while they hung out with their gin and tonics for the night.
But I knew I always I loved the arcades. In many ways my renewed relationship with video games, and one video game in particular, not only kept my spirits up during my long convalescence, but has motivated me to change my routine to spend more time with my family, ensure a stronger separation between work and home, helped me get off the social media hamster wheel, and realize that there’s a big wide world out there aside from chasing a career. Having those 6 hours back in my day in particular was also a real life changer. It’s the nature of this life changing moment and the resulting habits that formed, and why, that I want to share today.
As I got back into my platform of choice, the Playstation, I found that games were very, very different from how I’d remember them from 10 years ago. They were immersive and realistic. They were online and social. And they required a mental and physical skill in navigating expansive, entire worlds that I’d never really experienced before. Sure, I’d spent a long time with Tekken, Metal Gear Solid and FIFA in my bachelor days back in London, but nothing like this. And I’d always played on my own, or at least with someone attached to another controller in the same room. The idea of playing along with someone on another continent felt, and still feels, like science fiction to me.
And speaking of things like that, I’m still amazed at how wi-fi works, or how Alexa knows exactly the answer I’m looking for. But it was a game called Destiny that captured my attention, and my imagination. It would soon capture much more than that. I’m going to share what I experienced in terms of the game’s habituation mechanics, what we might learn from them, and how the game not only pulled me in, but has kept me playing every day for over 3 years. So far. It’s one of the most effective repeat business models I’ve ever been proud to be a part of.
Now, I’m sure that we have at least a few secret gamers in the room, but I’m also sure some of you aren’t, and maybe your perception of gamers isn’t the kindest. You’re probably picturing a geek sat alone in a dark room, headset on, surrounded by junk food. But the loner loser stereotype is long gone, and I found a whole world of connection where once there wasn’t one.
So what exactly is Destiny? Simply put, it’s a first-person-adventure-shooter, where you play a futuristic warrior brought back to life to battle the forces of darkness across the solar system, in pursuit of re-establishing humanity’s light in the universe. No big deal, right? So sure, it’s shooting things in the face, but it’s also puzzle solving, playing collaboratively, exploring worlds, scavenger hunting, socializing, racing, earning rewards, making your character stronger, and lots more besides. Designed by Bungie as a ten-year adventure, and with an initial production cost of over $500 million, a star-studded voiceover cast, and even a soundtrack by Paul McCartney, it has an incredibly rich global community engaged in it — something that’s about to get a lot bigger when it comes out for the PC later this year. And for some context on the engagement numbers, there’s over 30 million active monthly players, the average of which has logged well over 100 in-world hours. For many people, this game, is no game.
But what is it that keeps millions of people coming back every day, to quote our friend Sean Carpenter, building relationships, solving problems, and having fun? And why does an understanding of the mechanics of habituation help you think differently in building your real estate business? I’ll frame this with a little background on how we think about this for what we do in my team at The New York Times, and share a couple of examples from things you might already know.
At The New York Times, we’re a subscriber-driven business. That’s where the majority of our revenue comes from, where our most engaged audience is. It’s also what’s most appealing to advertisers wanting to work with us of course. Deepening that engagement, and building larger and larger audiences of registered users, and ultimately subscribers, is almost exclusively what the product teams like mine do there. So understanding the triggers and motivations behind what drives someone to spend money with us becomes key. And what drives that for us are 3 things. The number of different things a user looks at, the amount of times they come back, and the range of topics across which they read. If they hit all of these at the cadence we’ve defined, within a month, we consider them to be ‘engaged’. And the more engaged readers we can create each month, the greater the propensity for more of them to subscribe. And more subscribers, means more subscriber revenue. More subscriber revenue means more support for the mission of our journalism.
Think about this in relation to your business presence, on and offline. What are the motivating triggers that cause people to work with you? Especially those that work with you more than once, or refer business to you? What kinds of consistent and repeatable behaviors do these folks exhibit? Are they interacting with you on a regular basis across multiple platforms each month? Could you quantify that and grow it? What I’m describing here is a means of going beyond the database and really getting at the people problem behind these kinds of motivations, and then backing out those user needs into something you can quantify and build against. That’s a very common psychology-insights product growth strategy we’ll see a lot more of when we return to Destiny.
So I believe that the specific levers that get users habituated to your product are the thing to focus your time and efforts on, and I’ll give you a couple of examples of what I mean by this. In terms of fostering long-term use of a product, successful digital organizations spend a lot of time on what that initial experience is for a new user, and deliberately encourage short-term, reward-based behavior they know will drive long-term use. For example, at Facebook, if a user gets to 10 friends within the first week, the likelihood that they will begin to feel value from the news feed and turn into a regular user in the long-term dramatically improves. Similarly with Netflix, if a user can get 5 things into their queue in the first 14 days, the propensity to be a significantly longer-term subscriber also goes up. There’s a lot of product pressure on these initial moments in building a relationship with a new user.
Think of other services like these where the initial experience is based on building up items in a list you can use, adding friends, or otherwise developing a sense of personal taste. Now think about most brokerage or online real estate search experiences. More often than not they’re not built around empathy or motivations, they’re built around a database, and the filtered presentation of that database to the user, based on some primitive user experience tactics such as drop downs or checkboxes. Most do not fundamentally get at the questions the user has in their head. What does this mean for me? What does it feel like to live there? Will my family be happy in that home? Can I afford it? These are very different kinds of questions from the ones ‘answered’ by real estate professionals online such as ‘how’s the market?’ or ‘what’s happening with inventory and absorption rates this month?’ Solve for the people problem first, and the business answer will follow.
So getting a user to come back to your product over and over again early on, becomes incredibly important to the overall health of your business. Real Estate professionals know this all too well as this is how referrals work. But it’s much more than that. This isn’t just fostering repeat business we’re talking about, it’s about developing a deep, meaningful, helpful, and fun relationship with the user, in the long term. And especially thinking more about the the non-user who you want to become your customer. Those folks indirectly connected to who you currently work with, who have the highest propensity to become your new customers. It’s thinking about tactics such multiple touch points, rewards, sharing, education, and ultimately achieving something wonderful together. I want to use the lens of Destiny to illustrate how building habituation could work for you in the light of what I’m talking about here.
The mechanics of Destiny are pretty simple to begin with. You start by creating your character. So right off the bat the first thing you’re doing is setting a level of personalization and humanization for who you’re going to be in that world. The first question the game answers is who am I? and lets players determine this to a very high level of visual sophistication. Players then divide up into classes named after the style of play they’re most likely to resonate with. Either Hunter (quick, agile and cunning), Titan (heavy duty, muscle and supporting) or Warlock (magical, mystical and mysterious). These styles not only reflect gameplay style, but also personality traits, each class being very protective of itself, especially offline. Destiny Warlocks in particular are very proud to call themselves Warlocks. Many more serious players eventually have all 3 on the go at once, but to begin with, you pick one, and are then brought to life for the first time, by your robot sidekick, the ghost. Ghosts are responsible for guiding you through the game, and essentially act as co-pilots for the experience. They help explain where to go, what to do, and when needed, bring you back to life if you eat it.
Now, outside of bringing customers back to life, the ghost is probably the closest co-pilot metaphor in the game for what a realtor does. They guide, they provide insight, they show the way like a canary in a coal mine, and they explain how the world works. This level of guidance and insight can very often separate the memorable realtor from the one simply working to get the customer through the closing table. I feel like I see this a lot in my Facebook news feed. Hey, I think we’ve all seen this in our Facebook feeds. There are those who are actively engaged in their communities, making a difference, helping others, and having fun. And then there are those who, begging for likes, have a desperation about their presence, where you can easily smell their commission breath with every open house post that’s immediately hidden.
Anyway, back to Destiny. The game starts off with some pretty simple navigating around a level, learning how to pick things up, jump, open doors, encounter enemies, that sort of thing. It’s rudimentary game mechanics explaining the controls, but this first level is a critical moment for the game. It’s where players are learning their own style of play, experiencing the world for the first time, and making those important decisions as to if this game is going to be for them. As I mentioned before, there’s a tremendous amount of product pressure on this one moment, and the way Bungie have dealt with it is a very common product strategy, to ensure that the rewards and accomplishments the user feels are immediate, frequent, and have a high rate of return for the time invested. Reward is deliberately designed to be high early on, so that the player understands the mechanics of the game, and can settle into the world at their own pace. Think about this in our world though. How rewarding is the first day of working with you as a realtor? Does the customer feel a sense of accomplishment by the end of it? Or are they deep in the valley of despair?
Later, more significant habituation tactics become available, and the game appears to grow around the user, unlocking different missions of increasing complexity, the first real reward of which is to unlock something called the patrol level, which is an enormous, free-roaming environment entirely self-directed by the player, where they can team-up with other users who also happen to be nearby, run small missions and bounties, earn rewards, and grind towards earning better and better gear. It’s specifically designed to be a playground for working at getting better, together.
But as players spend more and more time in the game, the rewards start to become further apart, and increasingly variable, and this is where the real habituation tactics begin. There are a number of regular tasks in the game where the rewards you’ll get for completing certain activities are entirely random. One such activity is picking up something called an engram. An engram is a gem-like object which drops from killing a particularly tough opponent, or completing a tricky task. Engrams are then brought to the shared social space, called The Tower, which is a non-combative space to help guardians change gear, collect missions, form allegiances, and generally manage their presence in the game. Think of it as the admin area of the game perhaps. It’s full of non-playing characters who guide you through the story, and essentially acts as the hub of the game. It’s usually the first place you go when you fire up the game every day, as there’s always something to do there. It’s also where a character called The Cryptarch resides, at a little booth off to one side of the level, and he’s the guy that can decrypt your engrams into loot. Loot is the in-game term for weapons and armor.
This guy is one of the most hated characters in Destiny, as what he decrypts these things into is entirely random, and often just feels like pure chance. Talk about variable rewards, this feels about as variable as it gets. There’s 4 levels of engram, organized by color, with yellows being the rarest. Known as exotic engrams, yellow engrams drop ultra-collectible items that give your player the ability to do something incredible. Sometimes it’s a gun that never runs out of ammo, sometimes is a pair of legs that allows you to jump further and higher than anyone else. But it’s always something that changes the nature of how you experience Destiny, and that’s the key tactic here. The more varied the reward drops, the more finesse you can put around how you play the game. So this is Destiny’s version of the on-boarding I described with Facebook and Netflix, getting the user to The Tower and to be in Patrol are the critical items for longer-term use.
Think about this in relation to what you do online. Not only are we thinking about what those underlying motivations behind referral business are, but what is the step that you need to get your users to? Is it signing up for your newsletter? Looking you up on LinkedIn? Or maybe saving a property or search for later? If you can unlock those motivations and then get users to reach a meaningful point in your product mix for them (and I don’t mean calling you), then I think you’re well on your way to getting them to come back again and again on a regular basis.
Now, obviously this kind of discussion raises the specter of addiction, something I want to acknowledge but not dwell on here. Aggressively fostering habituation tactics is as risky a proposition as it sounds, and walking that fine line between value and harm is always something to be sensitive to. So as game development budgets drive higher and higher each year, the specific mechanics and products that drive sustained user engagement as a key business tactic, have given rise to the role of what’s known as the investment designer.
As with many digital-first positions, this role didn’t exist ten years ago, but as the games market has gotten increasingly saturated with newer and more complex games environments, it has become harder for individual games to hold a player’s interest over time, with the high risk of lack of new content updates, and an increasingly stale user base often ending up as kryptonite for a game destined for the bargain bin at GameStop within 6 months. The Investment Designer’s sole purpose, just like a Product Owner’s, is to use statistics and play testing to determine the ideal rewards and achievement system to keep you playing the game for as long as possible, just like the psychology behind a slot machine for example. I want to spend a couple of minutes outlining some of the behavioral techniques they employ in games such as Destiny, and apply them to some practical examples of how they might apply to us in real estate.
The first is something called a Variable Ratio Schedule, and that’s when a reward is delivered on average every certain number of times an action is performed. Essentially it’s a way to train the user into doing something on a more regular basis, and ultimately forming a habit. The way it works is there’s a fixed probability of you getting the reward according to the game’s algorithms of course, but the number of times the action must be completed to get the reward is variable — something users end up trying over and over again to achieve. It might take 20 tries, and then you’ll get the next one after 2 tries, but over time, it might average out to one reward for every ten tries. The best known example of this in Destiny is an infamously elusive exotic rocket launcher known as The Gjallahorn, to which there are hundreds of hysterical ‘freak-out’ videos on YouTube of players having this drop for them. For a while during the early days of Destiny, this separated the community into the haves and have nots. This can be one of the most frustrating, but ultimately rewarding aspects of the game, and it’s a very powerful tactic for keeping players engaged at scale, and in the long term. This is the same set of mechanics used by slot machines, and our example of the engram mechanics are also right in the bullseye of how this works, as are drops from the end of group activities such as strikes, the crucible or raids (more on all of these later).
For real estate users, the experience of online search can very often feel like it’s working with a variable reward schedule, where the user performs searches over and over again, looking for that perfect home, and we see this reflected in the ratio of searches to actual listings engagement. Sometimes it’s never there, sometimes there’s 3, all at once. But it’s the promise that within the noise, the next life-changing gem of a home is out there somewhere, and simply sticking with the search process will warrant its own rewards. This kind of behavior is very common with larger search sites, which lapse users into long-term recreational browsing, often long after the transaction has closed. It’s important to note here though, that while recreational browsing is great for audience and advertising growth initiatives, it does little to help the seller looking to sell.
I’m going to share some notes here I found in a fascinating discussion on Reddit about Destiny’s habituation tactics. First, something called a Fixed Interval Reinforcement Schedule. This is when a form of positive reinforcement is delivered after a set amount of time, encouraging and rewarding return frequency and longevity for players. This kind of reinforcement is independent of whether or not the player performs an action — it just happens every so often. This is a lot less addictive than its Variable Rewards Reinforcement cousin, but Destiny uses it to get players to log on every day. For example, every day, new activities refresh, and with them, new opportunities to get rewarded. The connection between the activity and its reward is so simple but so strong, that the activity becomes a reward in the player’s mind. Examples of this are seen in daily and weekly missions, the weekly reset around endgame content such as raids and nightfalls, and the mysterious appearance of a character named Xur, who appears at a random location somewhere in one of the social spaces each week, and hands out yellow engrams and exotic items. There’s even a very rich ecosystem of services and apps dedicated to letting players know what’s refreshing every day, and there are even apps dedicated to Xur’s location each week to help solve this for players.
I tend to think of this as most powerful when the Realtor does something consistent in terms of timing, but is always unexpected for the user. Many use the tactic of the surprise gift card in the mail to help with this, but it’s also just a very light touch but delightful personalized video message in something like Facebook messenger or Bomb Bomb. It’s the approach of reinforcing positive sentiment around you and what you do that’s the actionable part of this. I’ve often heard a technique called 10:1:2:3 described for thinking about this. Start with your business problem. It might be that you want to grow your network for example. So for 10 minutes (and no more than 10 minutes — the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee) every day, you do one personalized video message to an existing customer, comment on 2 people’s posts in Facebook, and connect with 3 new strategically relevant people on LinkedIn. Establish a routine of this for a month, and if it’s working, you’ll have added almost a hundred people to your network, while generating a vast amount of positive sentiment around the perception of who you are and what you do. This all sounds like such a simple set of techniques, but I’m always amazed at how hard this is for Realtors to stick with, even for a week.
So, what we have here in Destiny, but also in Facebook in particular, is one system that gets you to log on regularly, and another system that gets you to stay on chasing variable rewards. Who here also checks Facebook before they get out of bed in the morning? You keep playing. You level up your Hunter, your Titan, your Warlock. You see a new game come out, you take a break. But you’ll come back because of something we all know too well these days…
The Fear of Missing Out, or FOMO, which has been around for a while. But thanks to social media, it’s more rampant than ever, and certainly something our readers feel acutely at The New York Times in accurately staying on top of the news. Even if many players haven’t actually spent time in the game recently, they still come back to the Subreddit, the thousands of YouTube channels dedicated to Destiny, or their clan’s group chat apps every day because they enjoy the community and the game still holds a fascination for them. Destiny has limited, timed events that play on this, including holiday events such as Sparrow Racing, or The Festival of the Lost, both of which offered limited release gear and ornaments for your characters, as well as a monthly competitive crucible event called Iron Banner, and other items sprinkled throughout the experience over the arc of the year to ensure you’ll be pulled back in. The crucible is where players fight against each other, instead of the game. It’s often referred to as PvP (player versus player) as opposed to PvE (player versus enemy). The Iron Banner is particularly interesting for clans (groups of connected and like-minded players, and most likely friends who know each other offline), who often compete for the highest worldwide score over the duration of the week while it lasts — either against other clans or to see who can be the best within the clan. Those who top the table have the bragging rights over other clans and members for the remaining 3 weeks… until next time.
And finally on the tactical examples employed by investment designers is a notion of Sunk Cost Fallacy, or the irrational belief that you should allocate more resources to something that won’t be rewarding because you’ve already allocated resources to it. The idea that you’re simply too deep into a task for it to be worth backing out. Who’s ever felt like this when watching a TV series, or reading a book? As outlined in a thread on Reddit, the classic example goes like this: You buy a non-refundable ticket to a movie the day before it comes out. Later, you read a review of the movie, and you realize that you’re not going to like it. However, since you’ve paid for the movie, you decide to go anyway, because otherwise you’ll feel like you’ve wasted your money. This is a fallacy because the ticket is a sunk cost. You’re not getting that money back by suffering through a movie you don’t like, so the best move of course is to actually save your time by not going to the movie. The Destiny equivalent is deciding that you’re not having fun with the grind for a particular material or armor set, or with the Crucible, or that the activities have become stale, but you still keep playing because you’ve already put so much time into the game.
This one is particularly interesting for Realtors I think, as it speaks to customers working with you, who are so invested in working with you, that even if you’re not providing them the value they seek, they’ll still continue to work with you, even though perhaps they shouldn’t. There’s that sense that online services can also make you feel ‘locked in’ to continuing to use them, even though the better experience that gets you to what you need might be elsewhere. And of course, existing home owners know this all too well. Having spent so many years paying off the mortgage, there’s a sense that simply continuing to pay it at their current rate is the right thing to do, and not to perhaps refinance or even begin to think about a move. This is a delicate art for the Realtor, who has to play therapist and business coach at the same time for the seller, but sunk fallacy cost is something to keep in mind when having those discussions. And it also works the other way with the practice of following-up. As we all know, most sales are made very deep into the follow-up process, where the idea of persistence, patience and helpfulness become critical, but the notion that you’re already so deeply invested into following-up with a customer that you won’t switch your efforts elsewhere can also be incredibly damaging to your business, and simply a waste of time.
But of course there’s much more that they do to keep you in-game, the most significant of which is reset day, which happens every Tuesday at 5am eastern. This is when all the new missions reset for the week, and the rewards you’ve been grinding through become available again. It also allows Destiny to cycle through fresh (or at least adjusted) content, add new challenges, and generally keep things interesting. Most long-term players focus on Tuesdays as their means of getting things done for the week, and it’s unquestionably the busiest Destiny day of the week. There’s a mixture of story-based missions, and harder collaborative missions called Nightfalls and Heroic Strikes. This routine becomes established in the user’s mind, and becomes habit. Reset Day on Tuesdays, new guns on Wednesdays, special packages with Xur on Fridays and so on.
I’m a big fan of this approach for fostering behavior around online real estate experiences, and it was something we did a lot of when I was building digital experiences at The Corcoran Group in New York. Establishing consistent times and days when things would be published, not only makes your life logistically simpler, but it also trains users to expect when those things will be published. At Corcoran, we pushed Facebook updates at 9am, 4pm, and 2am, every day, for years, always predicated on having fun, tapping into what was going on in the city that day, and most importantly, not selling. Our guiding principle was simply to be as helpful as possible, in the moment. 9am to capture those folks arriving at work and checking Facebook when they got to their desks, 4pm as folks wind down for the day and begin to think about going home, and 2am to capture strategically interesting folks in different time zones. We even named a product after this, a home of the day on Tumblr we called ‘The 10am Special’, which ended up being a greater traffic driver back to the site than Facebook and Twitter combined.
And then there’s the competitive player versus player aspect of the game, probably one of the strongest forms of habituation in the whole game. While it’s possible to burn out on all the story missions, and essentially have completed everything, the player versus player mode never gets old. It’s a different game every time, always with new players, and is significantly more competitive. Appropriately named The Crucible, it’s Destiny’s means of keeping players competitive, honing their skills against other, usually better, players, and generally having as much fun as they can. There are hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos dedicated to Destiny’s Crucible, from fails to heroic last-stand performances.
It’s divided up into dozens of different game modes, from capture-the-flag style encounters, to straight up ‘kill everything’ modes. The pinnacle of these is the weekly ‘Trials Of Osiris’ which is a highly competitive 3 vs. 3 mode, and is intense, stressful, and has the greatest level of rewards for anything related to PvP. The end goal of this is for you and your team to go 9 unbeaten rounds, the reward for which is a trip to the lighthouse on Mercury, a secretive level full of ultra-rare loot. Such is the demand to get there, that there’s even a small cottage industry of gamers who will ‘carry’ players to the lighthouse in exchange for money. It’s frowned upon by the community as it’s perceived as cheating, but for those desperate to go, it’s an option.
And speaking of cheating, with a game of this intensity, there’s obviously going to be a lot of pressure to find those little tricks to out maneuver the game’s designers. Referred to as ‘cheese spots’ in the story modes, and usually consisting of areas where it’s impossible to get killed, one of the most contentious practices in PvP is lag switching — the process of deliberately meddling with your internet connection so that your character appears to glitch in and out of the game, making you almost impossible to kill. The apex of this is the infamous DDOSing, where a malicious player will actually overload your connection in an attempt to kick you from the game. This is particularly rife in Trials Of Osiris, the nearer you get to the 9th game.
The real estate industry, and real estate conferences in particular, talk a big game about community. It’s one of those intensely loaded terms that means different things to just about everybody, and is notoriously impossible to build. I tend to think that most communities around topics already exist, but it’s great products and services that can help in tapping into them, and connecting them together. Embedding with a community is one of the strongest tactics a realtor focusing on a local market can do. A great example of this is a favorite of mine, David Smith, who works the suburban Vancouver market with Royal LePage in Canada. David’s mantra is ‘People over property. Always.’ and it’s something that’s in the DNA of everything he does. He’s particularly well known for a regular video series he produces each month called ‘The Local’ where he spotlights a local service such as a food bank, refugee center, school or library. A former pastor, David’s whole approach is that he serves the communities he happens to sell in, and as a result, even though he’s fairly new to the business, he’s growing in incredible ways. If there was ever a polar opposite to the commission breath I spoke about earlier, David would be it.
And it’s this notion of tapping into community and celebrating the self-expression which comes with it that Destiny has also very successfully built, and monetized at incredible scale. What you look like, what you own, where you spend time, and how you can express emotion in the game is a critical part of Bungie’s ability to keep players involved in the world. So much so that they’ve built their eCommerce platform within Destiny entirely around the idea. Expression comes in many forms inside of Destiny, specifically shaders and masks, which allow you to change the color of your outfit, emotes, which allow you to move in certain ways, from clapping to dancing, and pointing to weeping, and most recently ornaments, which trick out your gear with light effects, signaling that you’ve completed some of the hardest things in the game. All of these items drop as rewards from in-game activities, but it’s also possible to buy them from a trading store in The Tower. These micro-transactions are a key part of the Destiny ecosystem, and fund what they refer to as ‘live events’ — those timed events released seasonally I described earlier, which allow players to have fun for a limited time. One of the most fun of these is Sparrow Racing, where you get to race against other players, Mario-Kart style. These live events are further examples of how to keep the content fresh and interesting for returning players, and foster the sense that there’s always something for them to do here.
And speaking of content updates, the notion of content getting stale inside of Destiny is one of the biggest criticisms leveled at it by the most hardcore of players, desperate for new things to do all the time. Since launch, there have been 4 major downloadable updates to the game, usually happening every 6 months or so, and progressing the overall story arc in some way, or otherwise themed around a specific villain. They’re some of the most anticipated events in the gaming community, with millions of players jumping on the hype train months in advance, usually to the tune of crashing Bungie’s servers upon launch day. Most notably, they feature end game content called Raids, which are where the most skilled, hardcore players spend most of their time. Raids are long form, collaborative games which usually last a few hours, and comprise of a team of 6 players working together to solve puzzles and defeat the hardest of challenges together. Destiny Raiders, like their PvP counterparts in Trials of Osiris, and some of the most dedicated, most habituated, and often some of the most contentious players in the community. These guys are the real deal when it comes to knowing how to play the game.
In order to run a raid, you have to team up with 5 other players, something that can be tough to do if you’re just a casual player. So there’s forums online where you can post to join a team, and a vetting process whereby other players check you out to see how good you really are. Very often the veteran players will not take less skilled players through the encounter as they just don’t want to waste their time having members of the team die on them in the middle of some complex maneuver. This is where community comes into play, as finding those regular people to run with each week is a pretty daunting task, especially if you’ve never raided before.
But the thing to remember here is that there are deliberate, timed and scheduled tactics for ensuring that content isn’t getting stale. Think about this in relation to your website, and mentally audit this. How often does the content change, really? That old blog post from 2012 about where to watch the fireworks on July 4th might still be rocking your world for SEO, but how are you keeping Google feed with fresh things for your users to read, and growing that for your business? Of course, we know this problem very well at The New York Times, and actually have the opposite problem of what to surface for readers based on the equivalent of a Harry Potter book being produced every day.
Finally, I want to return to this idea of community, as that’s why we’re all here today. Destiny has one of the strongest, largest, and most engaged communities in video games, with players forming friendships, lining up for hours in advance for the new releases, and spending days in-game chatting with each other. In general, and I say this humbly as one of the most dedicated to the cause, Destiny players are just nuts. And proud of it. To show you just what I mean by this, and I know we’re all friends here but if you’ll excuse the incoming strong language, here’s a great example of what I mean.
Where this all comes together is with the concept of clans — allegiances within the game where players can band together to chat about common interests, and ultimately run together on a much more consistent basis than simply seeking out unknown, unskilled random players to play with. Clans are the apex of how community works inside of Destiny, and something that’s increasingly important to how Bungie has been fostering habituation around the game. Players that are members of clans (think of them as special members-only clubs that guardians can belong to), chat everyday, usually off-platform in apps like Band or GroupMe. Organizing themselves around activities, specializing in types of games, and spending large amounts of their day chatting online about how to be better at it all. This room is a clan, and even if it’s just for one day in person that we get to hang out together, these connections that form today will resonate and last for much longer.
My experience of joining a clan completely transformed my Destiny experience. I’d mainly been a solo player, occasionally teaming up with random players and running raids or strikes. But upon joining a clan, I got to run with a consistent group of people, who became friends, and we learned to understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses in the game, and accommodated everything as we went. My raid completions went up, but also my engagement with the game. Suddenly I was running endgame content on a much more frequent basis, and overcame the fairly intimidating fear of being the guy in the raid who doesn’t know what to do.
Similarly, my connection to the real estate clan also dramatically augmented my understanding of the industry, and just made me better. Suddenly I had friends all over the world eager to help me, who were interested in what I was doing, and when I got sick, looked after me. In turn, I reciprocated that warmth, and there’s an incredible mutual support system in place in our industry. It’s what keeps us learning, getting better, and serving the needs of our customers every day. It also keeps us building relationships, solving problems, and having fun.
This sense of community is also something that strongly feeds the habituation the regular Destiny player experiences. It makes it richer, more interesting, and gives back something new every day. For example, my family know that Tuesday night is Dad’s Raiding night, and around 10pm the group begins to form, my phone begins to buzz with invites, and we get going on the weekly featured raid. It’s an incredible habit that doesn’t feel like addiction, but more of a campfire around which we share common experiences, get to know each other, and simply have fun.
So let’s bring all of this together. What do these tactics mean for your business? How important is it really to be thinking about this kind of thing when building what your users experience? Habituation is the lifeblood of any strong business, and especially in the real estate industry, so developing tactics to get users (and by that I mean customers), to come back over and over again is critical. Start thinking about what those life events around your customers might be. Tactics such as developing a regular rhythm around when your newsletter subscribers can expect something fresh from you, just like Destiny thinks about Tuesdays, can accelerate who you’re connected to. Rewarding your customers for their behavior early and often works. Tapping into community and connecting those discussions between your customers is powerful. Ensuring that your online presence remains active, fresh, and doesn’t go stale. Thinking about that sunk cost fallacy and being honest when a customer needs to move on.
Identifying what those levers of habituation are can also be something to think about — for us at The Times it’s getting users engaged based on breadth, depth and frequency. For Facebook it’s getting users to 10 friends. What might that look like for your business? Perhaps it’s getting users to connect with you on 5 different platforms each month. Maybe it’s identifying who your most engaged cohort is, and simply speaking to them about why they love your product. Or implementing that 10 1,2,3 strategy to grow your network. And if you don’t have those people who love your product, then that’s a healthy sign that you need to make some changes.
Try to get at why people come back time and again, why they share stories about you and what you do, and why they talk to their friends about how great it all is. Or why it isn’t, and apply this kind of user-centric design thinking to your business as a strategy for growth and optimization. If you can foster habituation tactics into what you do, that goes beyond thinking about superficial social, video, or content tactics. It’s a deeper level of connecting with the right set of users, on their terms, at the right time for them, and one that I believe is the only way to build a business into 2018.
I hope you enjoyed my stories, and I’ll see you for a beer or two later tonight.
Thank you.
The Present Is Well Out Of Hand: Supermassive’s Dark Pictures
When I was a kid I used to lose myself in the Fighting Fantasy ‘choose your own adventure’ books. I’d map out the best paths through the story, and make copious notes on optimal outcomes from encounters with all manner of creatures trying to cut my reading short and my limbs off. I’d play along with dice, and unlike my reckless friends, try not to skip ahead to see if my choices were the right ones. If I died, I started over, and there was a tremendous sense of achievement in being able to successfully remember how to get to the end with one’s life intact.
Several years later the same interactive stories came to the early days of computing, with text adventures taking up the challenge their paper predecessors had laid down. The Oregon Trail, The Hobbit and Sphinx Adventure all saw me trying to make it California before dying of dysentery, stealing the one ring to rule them all, or solving an ancient riddle. With no save option, these were a lot more unforgiving than the books, and detailed documentation was a must. I’d sit with graph paper and pencil, mapping out all of my decision trees, and working through a process of elimination to try and get just that little bit further in the game the next time around. I died, a lot, and I never completed any of them. Now of course, you can watch someone fly through the entire thing in ten minutes, all while failing to avoid the desperation of the uploader’s ‘don’t forget to mash that like and subscribe button’ pleas on YouTube. I feel like we lost something along the way there.
Years later in 2018, Netflix would stream an episode of the wonderfully dystopian Black Mirror called Bandersnatch, which allowed the viewer to determine what happened next in a series of quick, timed events where binary decisions needed to be swiftly made that had consequences for the remainder of the episode. It was compelling, interactive, and a completely new type of streaming experience for Netflix, one that you could watch through with different decisions multiple times. Exponentially more expensive to produce due to all the different pathways and outcomes, as well as the underlying technology to power all these choices across millions of streaming ‘players’, Bandersnatch is something we’ll see a lot more of from Netflix in the coming years, especially with more immersive experiences becoming the norm as we all move our real lives into the Metaverse.
Hungry for more experiences like this, I returned to video games in search of more immersive choose your own adventure mysteries, and while there isn’t a tremendous console culture of these, there’s some real gems, especially in the horror genre. The most notable is Supermassive Studios’ Until Dawn, starring Hayden Panetierre (Heroes, Nashville, Scream 4)and Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody, Mr. Robot, No Time To Die), who along with some friends attempt to survive the night in a mountaintop log cabin while hundreds of nocturnal creatures try to eat them. Each decision has a ‘butterfly effect’ of trust and consequence for each character, and the player gets to live different characters throughout the entire experience, which usually lasts about eight hours. Decisions need to be made fast, under pressure, and often result in horrific violence. The game’s legitimately terrifying, especially if like me, you decided to play it late at night in the dark with your headphones on. Jump scares are in abundance, the paranoia is real, and by the end of the experience you’re really just counting who’s still alive from the original group of teenagers simply looking to get drunk and make out for the weekend. The deaths are gruesome, comedic, and just what you’d want from this kind of eighties-slasher-inspired video nasty.
Since releasing Until Dawn in 2015, Supermassive Studios has been releasing their Dark Pictures Anthology every year, a collection of what’s ultimately going to be eight different games, all connected by a common (as yet to be revealed) purpose. The first of these was 2019’s Man of Medan, which has us exploring a ghost ship lost in the middle of the ocean. The violence is more psychological this time around, with dream-like hallucinogenic sequences where the nightmare is being lost in the hull of a super tanker and the feeling that you are literally going nuts. The jump scares are all still there, and the narrative is more structured around the specific relationships and ethical ties between the main protagonists. This time there’s a ‘moral compass’ set of choices, with dire consequences for those who stray too far on the wrong side of history.
Man of Medan was followed in 2020 by Little Hope, which is easily the most frustrating of the entire series so far. This time we’re in an abandoned rural town where witchcraft, doppelgängers and violent flashbacks help us unravel the mystery of a family who died in a house fire back in the seventies. It’s doubly atmospheric, foggy, creepy-as-all-hell and there are sequences where your character has to hold their breath by you holding the controller as still as possible while all hell breaks loose around you. The long periods of silence are again broken by (the now expected) jump scares, but ultimately the payoff isn’t there this time, delivering a disappointing set of climactic plot twists that do not wrap things up well. Spoiler alert: It was all a dream.
Faring better is the most recent installment in the series, House of Ashes, released earlier this year. This time we’re a renegade military outfit that accidentally drops into a vampire-infested abandoned temple in the middle of the Iraqi War. We stumble across a massive buried alien spaceship that hides an even more massive chamber of hibernating vampires. The environments are beautifully rendered, and the narrative is immersive in ways that exponentially improve upon the previous two installments. Starring High School Musical’s Ashley Tisdale as CIA operative Rachel, and who ends up about as covered in blood and guts as it is humanly possible to be covered in blood and guts, the suspense is palpable throughout. You know something’s not right, you’re just waiting for it to unleash itself. And when it does, the vampire chase scenes are terrifying and heart-pounding, with survival a very real threat.
There are other titles that follow this type of quick, timed event narrative journey, some of my favorites being Beyond: Two Souls (featuring Elliot Page and Willem Dafoe, both of whom are wonderful and the story here is one of the best I’ve ever played), Detroit: Become Human, and the grandaddy of them all, Heavy Rain. All of which scratch that original choose your own adventure itch to try and plot a successful course through as adverse a set of situations as possible. These games are more movie than game, but being able to control a scene, especially the outcome of a scene, is empowering, and something I find myself doing when watching regular movies these days too. What’s the butterfly effect of Luke missing the exhaust port at the end of Star Wars? Or the giant boulder outrunning Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark? What if Titanic’s Rose had just let Jack onto the floating door with her instead of drifting stone dead to the bottom of the Atlantic ocean? We’ll never know, but these blended interactive experiences always give us hope.