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!

Genre Hopping: Ultima VII: The Black Gate (1992)

Written by Andy Panthro

We talk often about what makes something an "Adventure Game", much like any genre this one was very loosely codified but I'm sure most of us would know one when they see one. Certainly we have already covered games that stray in some ways from accepted adventure gaming norms, most notably the Quest for Glory series which uses the classic Sierra graphical adventure gaming engine to deliver a fantastic RPG series.

The Ultima series was one of the earliest commercial RPG series, and one of the most popular through the 1980s and 90s. As Origin Systems developed this and other series, they were always wanting to be at the forefront of new technology and game design. The increased graphical fidelity of the Ultima series allowed them to increase the amount of unique characters, items, interactive elements and mechanics. The peak for this was surely Ultima 7, in which you can bake bread from flour and water, weave cloth from wool, and in the expansion pack even craft your own sword.

Infocom Marathon: Leather Goddesses of Phobos - Part Two

Written by Joe Pranevich

My six-year old has recently become very interested in space. In the way that six-year olds can pick odd topics to be obsessed with (er… that apple didn’t fall far from the tree), he’s talked so much about Phobos and Deimos lately that I could probably lecture a course on it. Phobos is the larger of Mars’s two moons with a diameter only of around 14 miles. Gravity on Phobos is incredibly weak and a human could take a flying leap of nearly a half mile without difficulty, although with that comes a low escape velocity. Athletic individuals could potentially jump into space! There’s also a good chance that Phobos could break apart in a few hundred years to give Mars a tiny ring of its own. I have learned so much! And yet, my son has never once mentioned the legendary Leather Goddesses of Phobos. This is probably for the best given that he is just six, but still a disappointment. I have half a mind to start a petition to name one of the many Phobos craters after Steve Meretzky, but I doubt that would go very far.

Where we left off last time, I narrated four of the game’s puzzles and collected four of the game’s eight key objects. We have four left and a ton of great puzzles so let’s get to it.

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.

Eric the Unready – Fair and Fowl – Request for Assistance

Written by TBD

Eric the Unready Journal Entry #4: I found myself in a fair near a fire-breathing dragon. And the dragon's protecting the Steak of Eternity. Seems simple enough - just need to cover myself from head to toe in fireproof armor and steal a hungry dragon's meal. I've got most of it covered but I still need one more item...

One final Monty Python reference left over from the previous mission