Missed Classic 138: Winter Wonderland (1986)

Written by Michael

The holiday season is all about traditions.  I’m sure many of our readers have rituals involving putting up a tree, or a multi-generation dinner, or the exchange of gifts.  For my family, it’s gathering from all corners of the region to spend slightly too much time together, before we all tire of each other’s company.  But, of course, we enjoy it immensely.

The TAG family has a tradition as well, the yearly Christmas “Missed Classic” of questionable quality; the adventure game equivalent of an ugly Christmas sweater.  We are slightly messing with that tradition this year, because Joe wasn’t able to join us for this year’s installment, but I’m hoping I’ll be a passable substitute.

The title I chose is a bit longer than the ones Joe usually plays; heck, it’s a full-length title for the time, yet priced as a budget title at just £7.95 on cassette.  The title is 1986’s Winter Wonderland, a release from Incentive Software Ltd., a company from the United Kingdom with releases spread over nearly a decade. The game was created using their own home-grown Graphic Adventure Creator, an interpreter they sold and distributed.  Our title today was designed on an early, pre-release copy of the language by two designers, Simon Lipscomb and Tim Walsha.  

Missed Classic 136: Jingle Bells (1986)

Written by Joe Pranevich

Merry Christmas! When I first started reviewing Christmas adventure games, eleven years ago, I thought that I’d have a lark for a year or three and then we’d be done with Christmas games as a genre. This is our twelfth one! (We covered two games last year.) When the holidays come around, I excitedly open Santa’s bag of presents– our secret spreadsheet with every Christmas game that we know about– and pulled the next game on the list.

The first one was Juleadventurespil, a Danish holiday game written in 1983 and distributed as a type-in. It would be one of our earliest Christmas games, but has the downside that I don’t speak Danish. I may try it another year, but I elected to pass for now.

The second was Gremlins, a 1985 Adventure International game based on the film of the same name. This was a tougher choice. Gremlins, like Die Hard, has a reputation of being a non-Christmas film that is set at Christmas. A review of screenshots show relatively little Christmas content in the actual game and it didn’t seem to be what I want to play when I seek Christmas joy. Plus, I’d have to watch the movie, which I have been actively avoiding since I was a kid. Perhaps next year. 

That leaves us with my third pick: Jingle Bells: A Sleigh Ride with Father Christmas, written in 1986. This was a commercial release for the ill-fated BBC Micro, written by a company better known (if known at all) for its educational software. I failed to get an emulator working, but thankfully a BBC Micro enthusiast website had one working online! Apologies if the fonts don’t look exactly right. 

Let’s get to some Christmas joy!

Missed Classic 126 & 127: A Double Dose of “A Special Christmas Adventure” (1986 & 1987)

Written by Joe Pranevich

Merry Christmas! Another year has come and gone, but we’re still playing games here at “The Adventurer’s Guild”. I hope that you and your family are enjoying the holiday, taking some time off, and perhaps playing a classic adventure game or two. While I am off battling Christmas Tree Monsters in Beyond Zork (as of this writing, I still don’t know how to defeat them), it is our tradition to play and discuss a truly holiday themed adventure game for Christmas. This year, I am breaking that tradition by playing not one but TWO Christmas-themed text adventures for the ZX Spectrum. They happen to share the same name, but we’ll cross that holiday-themed bridge when we come to it. 

I don’t want to set expectations too high, but this is how my holiday posts tend to work:

1. I find an obscure Christmas-related title, often that few have ever heard of, and play it. 
2. Using my decade of contacts and detective skills, I track down the original authors. They are amazed and mystified that anyone cares about their old game and are glad to discuss it with me. 
3. I compose a half-decent story about that adventure game.
4. Somehow, despite being a title that you never heard of or cared about before, you enjoy the story and stick with us for another year of adventuring! (Also, Santa has personally threatened to cancel the blog if I ever stop doing this. Seriously.)

This year didn’t quite go to plan. Not only because I’m looking at two games at once, but also because I haven’t been able to track down the author or even be sure who they are. We do have some fun history and detective work… and possibly even a murder. I’m generally not a fan of murder, especially over the holidays. 

Onward then to A Special Christmas Adventure! Both of them. 

Missed Classic: Zombi - Summary and Rating

Written by Morpheus Kitami


After last time, I slowly but surely uncovered more of the game with each playthrough. With each playthrough it became clear why nobody brings this up these days. Zombi just doesn't respect your time, and to be honest this was the wrong month to play a game that doesn't respect my time. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Missed Classic 90 - Zombi (1986) - Introduction

 Written by Morpheus Kitami

Yuletide greetings readers, it is I, your faithful Christmas reviewer, Morpheus. This is most definitely a review of a Christmas game and you have nothing to be afraid of. Would I lie to you? Have I been known to lie to you? Does this picture of noted Christmas film actor Vincent Price not put you into the Christmas spirit? When have you ever known such a face to be a precursor to violence and lies? You can trust me. I would never lie to you. Let me tell you a story of what happened one Christmas in 1978...and again in 1986...1988...1990...and now 2020.

Behold, ordinary Christmas shoppers. There's nothing suspicious about these shoppers. So they look a little stiff, like you've never looked like that when you were shopping. And groaned. Tried to bite other shoppers. Haven't we all been there? Just wouldn't go down without a bullet to the brain. Wait a minute, those aren't Christmas shoppers, they're zombies. Don't you hate it when you make that mistake? Mind you, its the kind of mistake you only make once. Because you'll be dead. If you're lucky, and death is not something you want to be the lucky part.

 Look, Christmas, Dawn of the Dead is a Christmas film

In case you don't own a copy of a surprisingly popular out of print film, this is Dawn of the Dead. A film about four people trapped in a mall during a zombie apocalypse. Not to be confused with the remake, in which a group of people decide to flee a zombie apocalypse in Milwaukee...by taking a boat to Chicago or something. So, why is this a Christmas film? Well, the word Christmas appears in the film. Its like Nightmare Before Christmas or Black Christmas. Good, clean family friendly fare. In seriousness, I was going to do this around Halloween. Because I like spooky things. I didn't get spooky things. I don't want to talk about why that didn't happen. Christmas is about getting what you want, when you think about it.

Also having my big think, Night of the Living Dead takes place on the day that daylight savings time ends. That means the zombie apocalypse went over two months before society collapsed. They had Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's going on while the hordes gradually grew larger. You know, assuming Night actually takes place in the same universe as Dawn. I am like Socrates, I know that I know nothing. And like Socrates, I'm not going to find out.

Missed Classic: Labyrinth - And I Walk Along Darkened Corridors

Written by Joe Pranevich

If you love old genre TV shows such as Doctor Who or Star Trek, you have a pretty good idea what a gravel quarry looks like. These shows are often equally famous for their corridor scenes, short segments of hallway that can be tweaked to look like whatever part of the ship they need to show. Using and reusing set pieces like these helped ensure that episodes could be shot quickly at a minimum of cost. While Labyrinth the film takes great pains to make every scene unique, Labyrinth the game seems to have been made with this type of cost-cutting in mind. Over and over again, I had to explore long segments of nearly-identical corridors to make sure I wasn’t missing an item or an event. (Spoiler: I missed one.) While the environments became more dynamic as I neared the end, the vast majority of the playtime in this game is just running down halls and checking doors, mentally marking off distances and landmarks to distinguish one near-identical segment from the other. While computer games do not have to pay for sets, it costs money to design interesting environments. It’s a shame this game didn’t make that investment. To augment the somewhat boring screenshots, I will augment my coverage this time out with pictures from the film. Labyrinth is beautiful and beyond what the 8-bit graphics of the Commodore 64 could manage.

Last time, we started our exploration by solving a simple text adventure before getting sucked into the “movie”. We have only thirteen hours to find the center of the maze before we become David Bowie’s slave forever. I can think of worse things than being circa-1986 David Bowie’s personal slave, but the game takes it as a given that it is a Bad Thing. Once in the labyrinth, we discovered (but did nothing with) Hoggle the dwarf and solved the first puzzle by walking through graffiti spelling out the word “door”. What type of mysteries will the game throw at us today? Let’s play!

Missed Classic 88: Labyrinth (1986) - Introduction

Written by Joe Pranevich

In 1984, Infocom struck gold with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The game rocketed up the sales charts and within months was their second best-selling game ever, surpassed only by the original Zork. Best of all, their deal with Douglas Adams promised five sequels. If they performed even a fraction as well as the first, this yearly infusion of British comedy might be just what was needed to keep the company afloat. But only a short time later, Adams completed the fourth book in the series and was burned out. He needed to work on something else, anything else. Infocom put the Hitchhiker’s Guide sequels on hold, but that was okay because Adams pitched a fresh idea: a game based on a poor experience he once had with a change of address form, Bureaucracy. At least, having the name “Douglas Adams” on the box would help the game fly off the shelf, right? Development was slow and difficult, blamed in large part on Adams’s procrastination and residual stress. Despite pushing for this project, his interest waned quickly. If only Infocom could pin him down for a few days to finish the game, maybe they could strike gold again.

It was in this spirit that Douglas Adams found himself sitting at a conference table in January 1986. Next to him were a cohort of developers and writers that would take his ideas and transform them into the next hit computer adventure. Unfortunately for Infocom, it wasn’t their conference table. Instead, Adams had signed on to consult for Lucasfilm’s Labyrinth game, a tie-in to the 1986 film starring David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly, and the imagination of Jim Henson. After a productive week, the Lucasfilm team left with notebooks filled with ideas and jokes. As Bureaucracy slipped further, Labyrinth wrapped up and released in time for the film. Adams’s second game had become his third.

It might have seemed to Adams and the others at that table that Labyrinth was “just” a movie tie-in, barely more than an overgrown advertisement for the film. And yet, unknown to everyone around that conference table, a torch was passed. Infocom was no longer the innovator. Lucasfilm Games, soon to become LucasArts, would soon become one of the behemoths of our genre. Without Labyrinth, there may have been no Maniac Mansion or Monkey Island. Labyrinth is the beginning of the LucasArts story.

Missed Classic: Moonmist - Unfinished Business

Written by Joe Pranevich

Moonmist is an almost-unique experiment in the Infocom canon, a “replayable” game that featured four different mysteries to solve in one convenient package. As we have seen, the end result didn’t quite live up to the promise and it is presently the lowest-rated game so far in this marathon. We could compare Moonmist’s approach with Cutthroats, for example-- the former placed more puzzles in the same space, while the latter provided separate areas to explore in its variants-- but neither approach was completely satisfying.

Although we played through the four cases, I have since discovered that Moonmist aspired to much more. In 2019, the source code for most of the Infocom adventures was leaked online. That has been a treasure trove of information for the last few entries in this series, especially Trinity where I was able to look at original design documents and trace the development of the game from concept to execution. In Moonmist’s case, these sources reveal that not only were two additional cases nearly completed (“violet” and “orange” variants), but also that the game was to feature gendered variations in all six scavenger hunts. Moonmist was intended to be twelve games in one, not just four!

I’d like to wrap up Moonmist (and 1986) by looking at the game that might have been, if Lawrence and Galley just had a bit more time-- or a bit more RAM. I’ll look at the two new cases first before taking a look at the changes planned for the four that we already played. Who else was a murderer?

Missed Classic: Moonmist - Second Verse, Same as the First (with Final Rating)

Written by Joe Pranevich

Moonmist is an oddity. Instead of telling a single story from beginning to end, we have seen two very different mysteries play out with the same cast of characters and setting. In both cases, we try to save our friend Tamara from a vengeful ghost, the “White Lady”. Also in both, we are sent on a scavenger hunt by the late Lord Lionel to search for a hidden treasure somewhere on the castle grounds. The details however are quite different. In the “red” variant, Lord Jack attempted to murder his ex-girlfriend Deirdre but she survived a fall down a well and came back to “haunt” him (and prove his guilt) by masquerading as the White Lady. The goal of the scavenger hunt was to locate a Zulu royal war club disguised as a walking stick. In the “blue” variant, Deirdre may have committed suicide due to her torn loyalties between Lord Jack and Vivien, her lesbian lover. Vivien haunted the castle to seek revenge for her lost love. In that case, the scavenger hunt revealed a fossil skull hidden inside of a bell.

This week, we will wrap up the final two variations, “green” and “yellow”. Will the final two cases be fun? Or is the game starting to show its seams now that we have beaten it twice? There is only one way to find out.

Missed Classic: Moonmist - Representation Blues

Written by Joe Pranevich

I intended to wrap up Moonmist this week by closing out on the three remaining cases then moving quickly to the final rating. I did not make it. When playing and reviewing, I try to come to these games as unspoiled as I can. I learn what I need to discuss the history and place the game in context, but I avoid spoiling the plots and puzzles as much as I can. Usually that works, but in this case I missed one of the things that Moonmist is most remembered for: it is (supposedly) the first computer game to feature LGBT characters. I disagree with that assessment, but we’ll get there soon enough. It seems poor form for me to review this game, in Pride Month of all times, without giving space to discuss this important aspect of gaming history.

This week, I’m looking at the “blue” variant of Moonmist, the second one listed in the manual. (I finished “red” last week.) To the best of my knowledge, this is the only version that includes a LGBT-related plotline, but I have not played the others yet. I will take a quick look at LGBT representation in media more broadly into the 1980s and then dive into whether or not this game deserves its spot as the “first”. Of course, I’ll also be playing and solving the mystery itself! I hope that the final two variations don’t have more surprises that lead to hours of research and introspection. Read on for more.

Missed Classic: Moonmist - Getting a Clue (Won! Once!)

Written by Joe Pranevich

Welcome back to Moonmist, the Nancy Drew mystery with a bit less Nancy Drew and a bit more Clue. The more I think about it, the more likely it seems that Galley and Lawrence were inspired by the 1985 film starring Tim Curry and based on the board game. (Our international readers may know both by their foreign titles, Cluedo.) Both the game and the film relish in mystery tropes including the all-important “dinner scene”, but the genius of the Clue film comes in its multiple endings. When you went to the theater, you were randomly selected to get one of several possible endings with different murderers and motives. The whole film had to be set up to support the multiple endings and, for my money, it is one of the great comedic twists in film. Moonmist’s multiple endings, plucked from a seemingly-random question of color at the beginning of the game, might not really be based on Clue but I cannot help but think there is a connection. Later releases of Clue included all of the endings, one after the other, at the conclusion of the film. We will return to Moonmist after we beat it once to see how the other threads play out.

We left off last week just after the critical dinner scene. The pre-recorded voice of the late Lord Lionel Tresyllian invited the assembled guests to participate in a scavenger hunt for a missing piece of his fortune. Lord Jack, Lionel’s nephew and the new owner of the castle, is a prime suspect in his uncle’s death due to his inheriting the estate. His ex-girlfriend, Deirdre, also recently died in mysterious circumstances. (She fell down a well!) Meanwhile, our friend Tamara believes that someone is trying to kill her and the mysterious “White Lady” ghost has resumed haunting the halls. How are all of these details connected? We just have to solve the mystery to find out.

Missed Classic 86: Moonmist (1986) - Introduction

Written by Joe Pranevich

As we close on Infocom’s final release of 1986, we turn the page on a new era. As best as I have been able to determine, Moonmist is the final game that was deep under development prior to the purchase by Activision, or at least the last game to not have their fingerprints. Released only a month after Leather Goddesses of Phobos, it took the coveted holiday gift slot which was generally (but not exclusively) the home of the yearly Zork games. 1987 would bring changes, not the least of which will be a rapidly sped-up development process to allow Infocom/Activision to bring eight games to market in twelve months. We’ll take a look in future posts as to how successful those games will be. The industry was changing and Infocom would work hard over the next three years to keep up with it while maintaining their unique games and identity.

Moonmist is also the final game released by the pairing of Stu Galley and Jim Lawrence, and the final game from either of them overall. Galley had been a long-time champion of Interactive Fiction at Infocom, but he was better at refining others’ concepts than launching his own. Ironically, this was also precisely Jim Lawrence’s oeuvre as well. Mr. Lawrence had made his career writing stories based on others’ characters from Hardy Boys to Tom Swift, Nancy Drew to the Bobbsey Twins. He was undoubtedly great at it-- the handful of his books that I read prior to playing these games were not bad at all-- but they were not his characters. So it is perhaps no surprise that in his first outing he created a clone of Tom Swift and here, in his second one, a clone of Nancy Drew. I do not mean that disparagingly, but I cannot help but to think in retrospect that they were not playing to each others’ strengths.

Mr. Galley produced one of Infocom’s greatest mystery games in The Witness, and this game (despite its “introductory” designation), was written and classified as a sequel to the turn-based mysteries that Infocom pioneered. I have nothing but excitement for a game that swaps the police procedural aspects of the Deadline series and replaces it with a plucky young investigator. I also absolutely love that this is the second game in a row where you can choose your gender; it’s a small thing, but a sign that Infocom was expanding their markets and their minds. Whether because of how great it is or something else, Moonmist was also selected as one of the few games to be updated with graphics and translated to Japanese. That bodes well for this game being a lost classic.

I love a good mystery!

Infocom Marathon: Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986) - Part One

Written by Joe Pranevich

Sex sells, but few things market a product better than controversy. Throughout much of the 20th century, it was an adage that a book or a play “Banned in Boston” was guaranteed to sell well elsewhere. Oscar Wilde once said that, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” Barbara Streisand discovered that the fastest way to get a lot of people interested in taking photos of her house was telling them that they could not. So it was in that spirit that Steve Meretzky penned A Mind Forever Voyaging as a controversy-magnet, guaranteed to get the conservative pundits wagging their tongues about his leftist pollution of young minds. The controversy never materialized and that game flopped. Unperturbed, he pushed for yet another game that could “go viral”, but this time he aimed to incite the ire of the pundits (and the libido of the players) by embracing sex. Could an assault on decency succeed where AMFV failed?

Whether it was the sex, the return to traditional puzzle-based gameplay, or something else, Leather Goddesses of Phobos garnered enough attention that it became Infocom’s final true “hit”. TBD reviewed the game in 2017 and so I will look at this game through a different lens. Instead of a sequential playthrough and review, I am going to focus on the game’s puzzles. This game is rightly credited as having some of Meretzky’s most clever mind-benders, but does he put them together in a satisfying way? I will also place LGoP in the context of Infocom’s broader story as we progress towards the end of 1986.

My original plan had been for this to come out as a single post, but it turns out that I have more to say about his puzzles than I thought. Rather than cut it down, I’ve decided to split the work into two. Today, we’ll cover the introduction and collect the first four key items. Next week, we’ll conclude with the final puzzles and some thoughts on how the game comes together as a whole.

Missed Classic: Trinity - When Soviet Time-Traveling Robot Armadillos Attack

Written by Joe Pranevich

In Trinity, we traveled to the dawn of the nuclear age and attempted to change history. We failed and became trapped in a time loop with our mischievous roadrunner friend. I suppose there are worse ways to go. In the words of one famous time traveler, “Great Scott!”

But what if the game didn’t end that way? Unlike most of the games we played, this is not just a rhetorical question. Infocom has always had a special place in the hearts of digital archeologists and a level of attention that arguably exceeds their real contribution to computer game history. This is in part thanks to Infocom’s own newsletters, but also the preservation of memos and documents from the company itself. That gives us a view on just about everything from sales performance to standings within the local softball leagues. As recently as 2019, source code was placed online for most of the classic Infocom games. This would be fun all by itself, but in Trinity’s case we are fortunate to have preserved notes on three separate versions of the game, starting from something akin to “Time Police” and ending with the version that we explored together. I had hoped to include this material with the Final Rating, but that post was long enough. Let’s close out our coverage of Trinity with a look at three versions of the game that might have been.

Missed Classic: Trinity - Won! (And Final Rating)

Written by Joe Pranevich

We finally made it to the end of Trinity, but the ending was a lot longer than I expected. The trip through New Mexico is the longest sequence in the game and it’s a lot of fun, even if I bit off more than I could chew for one week. As such, this post is more-than-double-length but even that seems insufficient: this game rewards exploration and introspection in a way that few games have. A few years ago, I stumbled on the term “first-person thinker (in contrast with “third-person shooter”) to describe adventure games. That label doesn’t fit many games as well as it fits Trinity; I have spent many sleepless nights recently thinking about this game and what it means. That is high praise!

I am getting ahead of myself. Where we left off last time, I explored six of the seven mushroom realms spread across our sundial “wabe”. This included an amazing magnet-assisted trip through space in a soap bubble, as well as a less-than-spectacular bout of trial and error where I killed a lizard in a number of incorrect ways. Last week ended with my discovery that the two gems (the ruby from the beginning of the game and an emerald from the end) could be used to create a pair of magical speed boots. With those, I am finally able to explore the Trinity site in the desert, the last of the seven realms at the dawn of the nuclear age. Something has caused the “primitive” first atom bomb to vaporize New Mexico. I need to find out what it is.

Missed Classic: Trinity - Fly Me to the Moon

Written by Joe Pranevich

Trinity continues to impress and depress me. Last time out, we witnessed the unexpected destruction of New Mexico thanks to a more powerful than expected nuclear test at the Trinity site. My guess was that we had finally found the “plot” of this game: to find out what interfered with the original test and put it right again. Do we have a time-traveling saboteur? Could he be related to that voice that keeps whispering bad “gnomon” puns in my ear? I have no idea, but it feels good to finally be discovering the plot after so much semi-random exploration.

At this point, I am most of the way through. I’ve solved (perhaps) four of the seven areas including Kensington Gardens, the South Pacific atoll, the Siberian steppe, and Nagasaki. Still to be conquered are an outer space segment, an unknown area, and the Trinity test site itself. I also know that I need to find a lizard for a magic potion, recover a magnetic meteorite from an impact crater, and maybe even deal with an injured wight. When we do these “Missed Classics”, we aim to close out games in three posts. I hope I am not disappointing too many people when I say that we will have this one and at least one more, depending on how writing about the endgame goes.

Missed Classic: Trinity - Is This the 50s? Or 1999?

Written by Joe Pranevich

Welcome back! Last time out, I explored the strange mushroom forest that I was dropped into after the end of the world. This “wabe”, as I think it is called, is a strange place set in the shadow of a gigantic sundial and includes giant bees, an impossible flower garden, a cottage with game design notes, and a half-dozen mushrooms with little doors. But this isn’t The Smurfs: each mushroom appears to have been created by a nuclear detonation. As I closed out last time, I finally worked out how to control the movement of the “sun” overhead to drop shadows on each of the doors. I opened the first door and was dropped back into reality, somewhere and somewhen.

This game remains difficult to write about. My usual style is a bit flippant and just not appropriate for the subject matter, but I also cannot help to be quippy. I’ll try to keep the tone light as much as I can, but this is a difficult game with difficult themes and some of the scenes in this session are disturbing. I had to step away from the game at one point for a few days. Fair warning, but on with the show.

Missed Classic: Trinity - Gyre and Gimble in the Wabe

Written by Joe Pranevich

Welcome back! It was a bit slower going than I had hoped to get here, but we got here nonetheless. Last time around, we jumped into Trinity and an exploration of a near-future Kensington Gardens followed by total nuclear annihilation. Fortunately, we escaped just in the nick of time into a magic door in the middle of a pond and now we are somewhere else. What are we doing there? What is the point of the game? I have no idea, but that lack of knowledge is exciting… also potentially depressing, but I’m going to favor “exciting” for now. If you are confused, just read the previous post and you’ll at least be caught up to where I am because getting this far was quite a ride.

This has been a difficult post to write for several reasons. First and foremost, I struggle to get into the right headspace for this game. The themes are heavy but the puzzles are whimsical; it’s discordant and wonderful. But talking about nuclear annihilation, even when couched in a “fun” adventure game, is difficult to do. I have to force myself to play and then I have to force myself to write about it afterwards because this is a place my head does not want to go. I can only imagine how screwed up Mr. Moriarty must have been having been deep in this game for a year or more, at a time when its terrors seemed even more real than they do today. Add to that my own inadequacy in discussing this game, so beautiful and well-written that my ham-fisted prose seems inadequate. I feel like I am penning a Readers Digest edition of Macbeth. All of our contributors have a tendency to fill in the gaps as we describe our games, to describe how they play in our heads as much as on our screens. With Trinity, it is a very different problem of trying to convey a great game through my own experience. I hope I do it justice.

All that said, this is the first game I have played in forever that has given me nightmares. Is that worth a bonus point in our rating system, or not?

Missed Classic 82: Trinity (1986) - Introduction

Written by Joe Pranevich

I should be at the beach and instead I am playing a game that is equal parts charming and deeply disturbing: Moriarty’s Trinity, a “fantasy” adventure game about inevitable nuclear armageddon. Much like A Mind Forever Voyaging, this is a game with a narrative purpose and a political bent, but also a product of its time. The Cold War had nearly boiled over and Moriarty’s message about the risks of nuclear proliferation was timely, even if I am uncertain how much anyone wanted to play a game about it. As I am writing this now, I’m not sure I want to play a game about it. At a time when nationalism is on the rise worldwide and new walls are being built, when Russia announces new “hyper sonic” missiles that are designed to pierce existing defense systems, and when North Korea promised a “Christmas present” that would let their own stockpile of nuclear weapons reach American shores, it’s hard to enjoy a game about it. We are still far from the brinkmanship of the Cold War when Russia and America played chicken with our lives, but it feels like the world is moving in the wrong direction.

I have been waiting to play this game for months. I had intended to rush it between Batman Returns and Consulting Detective II, but I pushed off after being warned that I would want to savor it. Beyond that, I don’t know all that much about the game itself. It was distributed on the second Lost Treasures set, so I owned it but never started it even once, nestled as it was in a submenu next to Sherlock Holmes and Wishbringer. I have since learned that it is considered one of Infocom’s finest works, but that is a reputation I was unaware of then and which I look forward to discovering the truth of now.

Missed Classic: The Price of Magik - Won! (With Final Rating)

By Ilmari

Underground

Last time, I had just explored a house from top to bottom and defeated a giant slug with some salt. Beyond the slug opened up a completely new playing field. It seemed the game was funneling me towards some direction, since there were so many one-way connections between rooms (in truth, there was always a route I could backtrack to the house).

I love the decoration