Zarf Updates

Two articles have popped up in the wake of Cyan's fandom-rattling pitch reel for Anglerfish.

To recap from last week: Anglerfish was the Myst-universe project that Cyan started prototyping in 2024. They teased it as "PREFALL" because it was set in the golden age (and Age) of the cryptic D'ni civilization, centuries before Atrus and his family.

Cyan spent four months building a fully playable prototype of Anglerfish. They pitched it to publishers. They did not get funding. They shelved the game and laid off half the company. Phooey.

Last week, Wired published an article with more details. What we learn here is that Cyan pitched the game in early 2025, at DICE Summit and GDC.

Cyan hoped it would come away from the conferences with a funding agreement between $1 million and $10 million to finish building Anglerfish. But even though the demo was positively received by most publishers, Cyan went home empty-handed, put Anglerfish on ice, and soon laid off 12 people, roughly half of its staff.

-- from "No One Can Afford to Make Myst Games Anymore", Adam Morgan via Wired, 05-Aug-2026

August brings us Suspended, Michael Berlyn's cryogenic nightmare.

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

The rest of my 2026 Mysterium report. (See part 1 for the Cyan news.)

All the videos are currently available on Mysterium's Twitch channel. They will be archived on their Youtube channel pretty soon.

Another Mysterium has arrived and then faded silently away. Or, I suppose, faded away with its characteristic reverb-y "vrrrwww-WONK-wonk-wonk" noise.

This year's event was in Portland, Oregon. I did not attend in person; cross-country travel feels like too much of a stretch right now. (And I visited Portland just a couple of years ago for XOXO.) But of course I watched all the streamed talks and presentations. Now I bring you the annual report -- in two parts.

Part 1 is the stuff about Cyan itself and what they're doing. Part 2 will be fan activity and community contributions, including the Myst documentary.

All the videos are currently available on Mysterium's Twitch channel. They will be archived on their Youtube channel pretty soon.

EDIT-ADD: The State-of-Cyan video is now up on Cyan's Youtube channel.

I'm embarrassed about this one.

The Witness will be September's release for the Visible Zorker project, but it's already done for Patreon supporters. So I've scanned my Witness feelies for the app already. (You can see the high-res scans here at the Internet Archive.) It's a classic package. The 1938 newspaper is probably Infocom's high point for pure immersive scene-setting.

But the matchbook caught my attention.

Here's an interesting bit of game-historic preservation: someone has posted a browser-playable version of Cliff Johnson's epic (and epically-slow-to-release) 2012 puzzle game, The Fool and his Money. Here's the new web site: www.the-fool-and-his-money.com.

I dunno who did this. Cliff Johnson's original web site, www.thefoolandhismoney.com, stopped working a couple of years ago. I have no leads on what happpened to the man himself. I hope he's okay.

That's the announcement. I'm about to go into one of my rambles through game history, but I figured you'd want the hot link up front.

So, rambling. Way back in my college years, I played a Mac game called The Fool's Errand. It was awesome. Changed my life. (As you know if you played System's Twilight.)

What a wonderful time to be a puzzle fiend!

• The Incident at Galley House
• Dimhaven: The Lost Source

(Updated to add: I played a free review copy of Galley House.)

I tried to give this post an eye-catching title like "The Power of Indentation!" But my fingers wouldn't have it. Blame the fingers.

I don't know much about the text-editing tools used at Infocom. The Witness source directory includes a tantalizing mention of TECO, an editor used at MIT in the 1960s and 70s. Going back a couple of years, there's a map file in the 1978 MDL Zork repository which seems to about managing TECO keybindings.

TECO's editing macros later evolved into their own editor, naturally called "Emacs". Wikipedia notes:

By 1979, Emacs was the main editor used in MIT's AI lab and its Laboratory for Computer Science.

It seems certain that Infocom folks used Emacs at some point, but I don't have any evidence about when.

Whatever editor they used, we can ask: Did it auto-indent their ZIL code? The ZIL code we have is very consistently indented, so it seems like a good bet, but I don't know for sure. The only reference in the 1989 ZIL manual is:

Also note the spaces at the beginning of the TELLs in the DESCFCN. If your describers are of the indentation flavor, your DESCFCN must supply its own indentation.

"Describers" are explained as:

[...] a small package of programs which handle the descriptions for the player's environment: current room and visible objects.

...Which is interesting, not least for saying "programs" for what we (and ZIL itself!) call "routines". I think that "indentation flavor" is not about source code indentation, but rather the indented style of object listing:

Sitting on the kitchen table is: 
  A brown sack
  The brown sack contains:
    A glass bottle
    The glass bottle contains:
      A quantity of water
    A clove of garlic

Some Infocom games used a more sentence-like listing format, particular if they were less container-heavy.

But I digress. Let's go back to the source code.

Borneo, 1941: rich white Brits run the show for tobacco, pearls and the opium trade, while World War Two creeps up around the edges. Who is sneaking onto the Goodwill plantation and why?

The Red Pearls of Borneo (Bushmonkey Games) is an interesting take on the deductionizer format. It's patterned after Type Help; your challenge is to figure out which people were where and when. But it adds a layer of search mechanics to the logic. I don't think it's entirely successful, but it's an instructive try.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More readings on Starcross:

• The Digital Antiquarian
• Drew Cook
• Jason Dyer

And, as a bonus:

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

Upcoming work:

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

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

For the record, NarraScope in Albany went great.

See you next month!