[10] Shiny Happy People

 On November 27, 1987, the number one song in the US was, appropriately, "(I've Had) The Time of My Life", the dance finale from Jerry Orbach's best acting work until Law & Order.  The day before, Scott Miller released the first in a series that basically started a game company.

The Kroz series of games was the result of Miller having written a couple of Infocom-inspired text adventures, and realizing how much more could be achieved on the computer instead, he upped the game.  His own words:

"After writing [two] Infocom-inspired text adventure games, Beyond the Titanic and Supernova, I decided it was time to step up my game and make something with graphics.  This was style four-color CGA days, and while 16-color EGA was making headway, the vast majority of PCs didn't have it.  So, I decided to try making a game with ASCII characters, using a lot of the high-end character, many of which worked quite well for games back then." - Scott Miller, from the release notes with the Kroz source code released in 2009.

I've already mentioned in my first post the game Castle Adventure, and this was likely also an inspiration to this and another game series we will discuss.  

Skipping to the end here

Kroz is Zork spelled backwards, and although that was an influence to Miller, a bigger impact was made on him with the game Rogue, a 1984 game that looks very similar, but has little AI and leaves more to random chance.

You are a little yellow guy that very closely resembles an emoji😊, but is one of the very first ASCII characters in the computer's set.  If you want to see for yourself, on a Windows PC click somewhere to type text (such as the address bar), hold down the ALT key, then press the number 2 on the numeric keypad, then release the ALT key.  Since we're not on a 80 column display, this little guy ☻won't look exactly the same, but you get the idea.

Replaying this game was very hard for me, for a few reasons.  First, I'm sure that my sight and reflexes are nowhere near where they were at age 10 or so.  Also, no matter how slow you set the emulator of your choice, such as DosBox, it runs really fast.  And in many of the seven installments, he blended a mix of levels to explore with simple blitz levels that you just had to find the exit as fast as humanly possible.  So I tried, and then resorted to using the built-in cheat codes to get past the evil blitz levels.

Of note is the distribution method of these games.  Scott Miller started Apogee by an uncommon, new form of shareware distribution.  You could get the first game in a series for free, but if you wanted numbers 2 and 3, you had to pay.  The grandfather, as it is, of the episodic game releases of today.  Kroz was the first -- he send out the first through shareware channels, such as the Big Blue Disk (I never saw that one, but later I had a subscription to UpTime.  Sadly, I can't find any disk images of the PC release of that disk magazine online, and I've really been looking.  So many of my favorite shareware games came from there.  I doubt we will cover it here, so here's a couple of them.  First, written by another Miller, is an implementation of the game Clue, also with our emoji warrior at the help.  Play Sleuth online here.  Another was a fantasy football of sorts, although American me didn't realize which sport was being played at the time.  All text for Wizard Game's The Soccer Game.

Pretty much the only time you'll ever see me willingly play football.

The distribution model worked so well, it became their primary method of sales for the next decade.  Just a few days before I started writing this, a former Apogee employee, Joe Siegler, wrote a massive history of Apogee online, just a few days before I started writing this entry.  I won't do it justice here, so I recommend this reading.

I'm very sure that I had come across this game and played it first.  Later on, maybe a year or so, I stumbled upon a game from Epic Megagames.

No, not this game

Before Epic Games became, well, epic, they also had some great shareware titles.  But while Jill of the Jungle was one of the earliest VGA games I played, I'm going a lot earlier today.  Their answer to Kroz was an artistically-similar game called ZZT.  As a kid, I remember enjoying Kroz more, but as I replay them now, I find ZZT a much better game.  ZZT has some elements of more professional graphic adventures, and doesn't rely on so many "blitz" levels that Kroz tortures the player with.

People were still mail-ordering the game into this decade

ZZT was published by Potomac Computer Systems, a company name used by Tim Sweeney.  After he sold thousands of copies of the ZZT games, he realized he needed a more impressive, game-related company name, so, since his nearest competitor was at the "peak" of the industry (Apogee), he overused superlatives in his own way, Epic MegaGames.  Like Apogee, and many other small "companies" of the era, it was a living room operation, in this case, one that would later grow to having multiple international offices.

Both of these games proved that, back in the days before HDMI and super-processors and wireless controllers and the like, that a game just had to be fun to make money, not have all the latest bells and whistles.  As time went on, my favorite genre was the animated adventure (see, for example, this previous entry) and while I enjoyed them very much, the genre suffered and started to die out because the costs to make the games with the same attention to detail in the most modern graphics and sounds made them unprofitable.  Both Kroz and ZZT were programmed by single designers, at a minimal cost, and are still enjoyable today, when the technological issues are overcome.

I guess that's why many of us are fascinated with the games of our childhood.  It's not just because we like what we have fond memories of, it's because we can't get the same warm, fuzzy feeling from as many newer games.  For every Thimbleweed Park there's a multi-year period around it where nothing even comes close.  (I know the opposing argument -- that we only like the old stuff because it was our own.  But I'd like to think I'm being unbiased when I disagree with that view.)

I think we'll be jumping around the timeline a little bit next time.  We'll land in the first week of 6th grade for me, in my middle school's cafeteria, with a new friend and an introduction to one of my favorite adventure games of all time, at least certainly one I can play be heart from start to finish for many years now.