Zarf Updates

September is upon us, and with it that least regarded of the early Infocom games: The Witness.

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license. In addition, I've posted high-resolution scans of the original folio manual and feelies.

I wouldn't say The Witness is unfairly disregarded. It's Infocom's second mystery game, a followup to Deadline. Deadline was groundbreaking interactive narrative; it presented a huge New England mansion and a cast of dynamic characters with their own plans and schedules. (Until you, the detective, barge in to upend them.) The Witness was... more of the same, except with fewer characters, a smaller house, and a shallower mystery to solve.

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The Witness is mostly remembered in the IF community for three things:

First, it's the Infocom game which can be solved in the fewest commands. People got competitive about finding minimal paths to the winning outcome. (See this comment by eriktorbjorn, for example.)

Second, the 1938 period atmosphere. It's really the game's best quality. You start out schlumfing up those mean streets (or a mean driveway) on a chilly Los Angeles night with a storm moving in. Thunder crashes, Monica's grey eyes flash, and the language never lets up. The packaging and the text glitter with love for the noir era.

(Okay, not noir exactly. You're still a police detective rather than a down-at-heels private eye. Still, it's a scene you can get your teeth into.)

Third, the flip side: the weirdly toothless portrayal of Freeman Linder's weirdly Orientalist household. As Drew Cook points out, The Witness is a double period piece: 1930s California as depicted by 1980s Boston tech guys. The result is Phong the butler, described as "obviously Asian, but no definite nationality". Nor does he have a definite first name, or any definite motivation or personality other than sniffy resentment of his boss. The player is apparently expected to accept this and never inquire more deeply than Linder does.

At least Phong's dialogue is pointedly free of comedy Asian dialect. This is a step up from Deadline's panto Scots gardener and Black-unless-she-isn't housekeeper.

Actually, there's a bit more to note about Phong. The game never gives him another name, but we have an archived design document which refers to him as "Hui Phong". (Design doc is SPOILERS if you haven't yet solved the mystery!) Indeed the game accepts HUI as a synonym for PHONG.

But this raises a question. By the time I graduated college, "Phong" didn't come off as an ambiguously Asian name at all. It was immediately recognizable as the given name of Bùi Tường Phong, a Vietnamese scientist in the brand-new field of computer graphics. (I hope I copied the right diacriticals.) Anybody who studied CGI around 1990 would know what "Phong shading" was.

But would game developers in 1983 have known? Bùi Tường's paper was published in 1975, shortly before the man died of cancer. (Shockingly young, and very possibly as a consequence of US defoliants in the Vietnam war.) Had "Phong shading" made the rounds at MIT by 1983? Did the Infocom crew select "Phong" as a generically Eastern name, or was it intended to read as Vietnamese -- or a reference to a specific person -- to the knowledgeable eye?

I honestly have no idea. But I wanted to add that context to the discussion.

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One more quirk of the month. The Witness is the first Visible Zorker game I've tackled with no source code for a released version.

We have source code, yes. But it's not the source code for The Witness release 22, the version on the Masterpieces CD and the last official release of the game. The source code is for release 23 -- a dev version which was in progress (and apparently abandoned) in late 1984.

In fact, the source code doesn't even match release 23 perfectly. In a few places, the source code was clearly updated, but never recompiled. (There is no "r24".) The most obvious example is the game banner:

The WITNESS: An INTERLOGIC Mystery
Copyright (c) 1983 Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
WITNESS and INTERLOGIC are trademarks of Infocom, Inc.

The r23 and r22 game files have the same banner, as does every known earlier version. But if you look at the source file, it's quite different:

    <TELL
"The WITNESS
Infocom interactive fiction - a mystery story|
Copyright (c) 1983 by Infocom, Inc.  All rights reserved.|
">

Someone went through and rubbed out the "INTERLOGIC" trademark, which Infocom was discarding around 1984. They also commented out the TANDY bit check. Neither of these changes are visible in the playable r23 game file, nor in the intermediate compile stages verbs.zap or verbs.xzap.

This left me with a problem. I always prefer to use the Masterpieces release of each Infocom game for the Visible Zorker. That's the version which almost everybody sees these days, whether on an archive site, GOG, or a dusty CD off Ebay. But I had no r22 source to work from.

(I tried comparing r23 to r22 but the differences were too great to paper over. Mostly having to do with rearranged code, rather than changes to game behavior. Still: too much to account for.)

My only option was the r23 game file. Again, this is an in-development version and may have bugs. Okay, sure, every Infocom release has bugs. But this version may have bugs that would have been caught during QA! Keep an eye out.

Then there's the differences between the archived r23 source and the r23 game file. Fortunately, these were minor. The banner trademark and a couple of tweaked messages seem to be most of it. I have done my best to revert the source code to the exact state it was in when the r23 game file was generated. I may have missed a spot; I apologize if so.

More reading:

• The Digital Antiquarian
• Drew Cook

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On the scanning side, I have now completed my set of high-res scans of the folio era. Enchanter and Seastalker are new to my collection this month.

• Deadline
• Starcross (this is the C64 folio published through Commodore, not the flying saucer)
• Suspended
• The Witness
• Planetfall
• Enchanter
• Infidel
• Sorcerer
• Seastalker

I don't have any of the grey-box releases, and I don't feel the urge to start collecting them. See the MoCAGH collection (Archive.org mirror) if you want those. I'm probably done scanning Infocom stuff... unless interesting ephemera turn up.

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Upcoming work:

Visible Planetfall will be the next public release on October 1st. Enjoy your visit to Resida, land of foonetik speleeng.

Patreon supporters got access to Visible Planetfall a month ago, and Visible Enchanter 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.)

And finally, no September 1st IF post would be complete without a link to the Interactive Fiction Competition! It's not quite open, but it will pop sometime on Tuesday. Scores of newly-hatched IF games for you to play and (I hope) rate. Enjoy.