IBC Bonus 17 The Lurking Horror

Tim looks at the very first Lovecraftian video game, The Lurking Horror, a 1987 text adventure by Infocom. Along with a look at the plot and development, Tim muses over such topics as loading games from cassette, MIT's Infinite Corridor, obscure adventure game puzzles, and the horror of 'feelies.'

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Greetings and salutations and welcome to a very special bonus mini episode of the Insmouth Book Club Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Mendys, and as you can see, I've brought you to the back room of the Yeolie Innsmouth Bookshop, where I've hooked up my CRT monitor once again, along with this time my Commodore 64. So sit down and bathe in the random flashing lights as it loads up from cassette, and we'll get into today's topic, which is the first ever, just by a couple of months, Lovecraftian video game. 1987's The Lurking Horror from Infocom. Now, if you're of a certain vintage, like myself, then you probably find yourself rolling your eyes when you read modern day reviews by people complaining about the graphics, and then you play the game, and it's it's almost photorealistic, right? But people are moaning about texture pop in and things like that, and you can't help thinking to yourself, you don't know how lucky you are, you little devils. Because back in the day you had to make do with sprites, and in this case, a wall of text. Yes, the Lurk in Horror is a text adventure, and I still think it's one of the most genuinely unnerving games ever made. And I think that's mainly be it's the same way a book is disturbing, right? It's because it it's the same kind of thing, it's interactive fiction at the end of the day, but it's your mind fills in the blanks, and your brain can conjure up anything more disturbing than pixels, right? Than some developer could do with sprites, you know what I mean? Right, so before we dive into the game itself, we're just gonna set the table a little bit. So yeah, as I mentioned, this game was released on the Commodore 64, the Amiga later on, that was an enhanced version, as was the Atari ST version, which actually had pictures. Uh it was also on the Amstrad CPC, Apple II, Atari 8-bit, and MS-DOS, which randomly MS-DOS version was just basic, but I think I think I'm right in saying that there is an enhanced version currently on Steam, and the last time I saw it, it was free to download, but you may have to pay for it now. That may have just been a timed exclusive. But either way, it's very well worth picking up. Now I had the Commodore 64 version back in the day on cassette, and yeah, it it was one of those games that I really enjoyed when I first played it, but I could never get the damn thing to load. I had real trouble getting it to load until I actually upgraded and got a disk drive. So I copied it onto a floppy and played it like that. But yeah, for some reason I could never get the tape to work. Like once in every five times it'd work, but there you go. So yeah, it was released on May the 6th, 1987. Just pipping the mystery of Arkham Manor to the post as first Lovecraftian video game. Uh, that's something that we'll probably get to at some point because that's a fun game. That's a side-scrolling adventure, more similar, I guess, to things like Secret of Monkey Island. But um, yeah, yeah, it's it's very obscure. There was also a Spanish language only adaptation of the Dumwitch Horror, um, which was, yeah. I had to we're currently writing a book on the crafty and video games, and I had to actually get somebody to translate it for me. So there we go. Yeah, because I am absolutely terrible at languages, um, I could barely speak English. So The Lurking Horror was developed by Infocom, who were an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They were founded on June 22nd, 1979, by staff and students of MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which we will get back to in a bit. Now, they were they were formed originally as a collaboration between faculty and alumni on the text adventure game Zork, which the development of that began in 1977. And Zork is one of those games that's gone down in legend as you know, well it's one of the one of the most revered games of all time because it was you know it was something really quite different. It was a it was a text adventure, and and yeah, and it's one of those that again there was a funny story about Zork that I remember. A mate of mine had it similar to the Hobbit text adventure. Now, and both of them were glitched copies. It shipped the beta of Zork shipped originally, and it was completely unwinnable. And the same thing happened with the Hobbit. In fact, my partner had the knackered version of the Hobbit Text Adventure on her dad's spectrum, and and yeah, they could can't get past the the the goblin bit where you have to hide in the barrels because it's glitched and you can't do it. I was lucky I had the I had the disc version on C64 and I won it. I did it, I didn't have the knackered version. So there we go. Smug person yet again. The Infocom Games actually developed their own programming language called ZIL, Zork implementation language. Itself was derived directly from MDL and compiled into bytecode, able to run on a standardized virtual machine called the Z Machine. Now it was the Z machine it's you know essentially a game engine, you know, that's what it would be if it was driving graphics anyway. And that is what is running the lurking horror. So Inficom was officially founded as a software company on June the 22nd, 1970, as I mentioned, by founding members Tim Anderson, Joel Berez, Mark Blank, Mike Bruce, Scott Cutler, Stu Galley, JCR Lick Leider, Chris Reeve, Alveza, and Dave Lebling. Now remember that name. By the end of the year, Zork was complete and Berez had been elected the company's president. So the studio looked for a professional publisher and ended up going with personal software after Microsoft turned them down. Yeah, that was an error, wasn't it? Because when Zork was released in 1980, it became a bestseller all the way through 1983 and into 1985. By 1986, the game had sold 380,000 copies. So yeah. It's safe to say that Microsoft missed out on a bit of a winner there. Infocom released several expansions and sequels. There's loads of different Zorks. I mean there's three, there's the original Zorc trilogy, then there's the Enchanter trilogy, and yeah yeah, yada. Then they did the Planetfall series, Deadline, Star Cross. They actually worked with Douglas Adams on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure in 1984, another game that I had and had completely forgotten about. They did Leather Goddesses of Phobos from 1986, yeah, that was an interesting one. And of course, The Lurking Horror. So you say I told you to remember a name. The Lurking Horror was written by Dave Lebling and inspired by the writings of HP Lovecraft. Uh specifically the wood the Cthulhu Mythos. It was Infocom's 26th game and their only horror game. The Lurking Horror is set at a university by the name of G UE Tech, which was a nod to Zort the Zort games, which are set in the Great Underground Empire. GUE Tech is an abbreviation for George Underwood Edwards Institute of Technology. Yes, interesting. There's a lot of in-jokes in this because, like as all of the people who were involved were ex-MIT, you know, they were all alumni. So, this game, the many features of GUE Tech, including the steam tunnels, are actually modelled after MIT. Specifically the Infinite Corridor, which is a central feature of the MIT campus. Yeah, it's quite an interesting thing, the Infinite Corridor MIT, just going off on a little tangent. It's a 251 meter hallway that runs through the main buildings of MIT, specifically parts of the building numbered 7, 3, 10, 4, and 8 from west to east. Twice a year in mid-November and in late January, the corridor lines up lengthwise with the position of the sun, causing sunlight to fill the entire corridor. How bizarre is that? That's cool, isn't it? I like I really quite like that. There's um isn't there a isn't there a railway tunnel somewhere, something to do with Brunel, that catches the sunrise on a certain day, on his birthday, I think it is. And yeah, it's a yeah, I I've definitely read about that somewhere. I'm just off the top of my head, can't really think about it. So the game starts with an unnamed protagonist, who is you, trying to finish a term paper. Now, he he's obviously a very diligent student, this guy, because it's snowing. There's a there's an actual blizzard outside on the campus and all the rest of it, and he's travelled to the computer lab to work on the report. And he get he basically the guy gets there and he logs into the computer and it's all gone screwy. He f his file has basically been overwritten by files from the Department of Alchemy. Now, a little amusing aside here, since the late 20th century, there's no idea about the actual date, but there is actually a door in MIT labelled Department of Alchemy after this game. How cool is that? That's very similar to them, you know, those um entries in libraries in Harvard for the Necronomicon, innit? You know, it's one of them. So, a bit miffed and wanting to get to his files, he enlists the help of a hacker who he finds lurking around the campus. And this guy, oh my god, I wanted to punch him in the face. Uh he gets you to go and do probably the most annoying bit of busy work in the history of video games. You've got to go and get him some food, which involves getting a cheeseburger and microwaving it. But you've got to f do it in the exact right order, or you screw it up and yeah. Oh my god. That took me so long to figure that one out. That took me longer than actually dispelling the ritual and escaping at the end of the game. Spoiler alert, there's a ritual. But I'm happy to say that is the only puzzle which is a pain in the backside. The rest of them are actually remarkably intuitive. It's not got a lot of the stupid hoops you often have to jump through in text adventures and ad graphic adventure games as well. I mean, Monkey Monkey Island is a great example. I mean, use Kippa with light, you know, that kind of ridiculousness. But they're all quite logical and quite nicely set out, which is quite refreshing because I went into it the first time I played it, having played other text adventures, expected to sort of have it to bash my brains out against the wall. There we go. So essentially, the game begins as a quest to salvage the turnpaper, but things quite quickly go skew with. It all gets very strange very, very quickly. And you basically you have to go all over campus, there's various different places you have to go. You spend a lot of it traversing the steam tunnels, and there's all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff going on. There's a story of a suicide on campus, which you've got to look into to progress. Um there's body parts buried somewhere on the campus. There's a slithery, slimy, slipping horror, uh the titular lurking horror, slithering around campus, devouring people in the snow. It's brilliant. Yeah, it goes quickly, very uncanny valley very quick when you get down into steam tunnels. And there's some dude with a with like a he's like janitor guy, and he's got one of those, you know, those floor polishy things, and he won't let you through. So you have to batter him with an axe, and then he and then he attacks you, and then you end up in some weird, like otherworldly you know, it but in Silent Hill it would be gone to the other world. So as you progress, the snow gets worse and worse and worse and turns into a massive blizzard at that time. Most of the campus is deserted and covered in snow drifts, which cuts down because i I mean you could be left with an enormous place to uh to explore via text commands, and that wouldn't be it very fun. So this does funnel you along to a degree, but it doesn't hold your hand. So for those people who who hate those kind of puzzle game adventure games, that it everything's clearly signposted, you know, the dreaded yellow paint where you're supposed to go, that kind of deal, there's none of that. Uh but it like I say, it is quite intuitive. So those of you looking for a very nice little Lovecraftian adventure, you could do a hell of a lot worse than this. So because of the impassibility of most of the campers, that's why you end up in the steam tunnels and in several buildings. As you go along, aside from the slithering, slimy, slippery tentacled thing that's slithering, slimming, and slipping around campus, there is other weird and wonderful things like zombies and demons and all kinds of stuff. I mean this is one of those games that could be pretty damn grim, and it is in places, but it does have a little bit of that humour to it. In fact, the fact that they work with Douglas Adams, um it doesn't surprise really. It's that kind of humour, that undergraduate humour. Very clever and very sort of sarcastic, and it's it's good. So as you would imagine by the you know, the made up department of alchemy, there is some kind of nefarious things going on. And I'm not gonna go into too much detail because I don't want to ruin the plot, because this is one game, you know, there is only the plot, right? So I'm giving you the broadest strokes possible. But somebody is attempting to summon a dark creature, and you are the intended sacrifice. That's essentially the gist of it. As you go through the game, you can die in several interesting ways, and it there's usually some kind of quip that encourages it. You know, there is a like post-death comment about wondering if it was a dream, but it has to be real because a creature is nibbling on one of your body parts. You know, little little touches like that that give it that sort of gallows humour, which is you know, it's always welcome in my opinion. So overall the gameplay is well worth getting into. If you if you can deal with text adventures, it means it's no different than a choose your own adventure book, really. And the commands are not as obscure as some games in this genre. I mean there are ones that are they're just mind-bendingly annoying because you've got to type in the right, you know, northwest by northeast kind of thing. It's not, it's a lot more basic than that, and it works. It just works, it's quite simple once you get your head around it, and the plot is well worth diving into because it is interesting and very, very much I mean it is incredibly Lovecraft. I would also say it is for some reason it kind of reminds me of some of like Brian Lumley's stuff. I'm not sure why, but it does. Now before we finish up very, very quickly, I just want to a little nod here to something which Infocom did, because they did something above and beyond most other video game publishers of the time. They like to give you things with the game, you know, you got them big old cardboard boxes, and inside you got a little cassette and a thing in a plastic, you know, they were in like a plastic place setting thing stuck in the middle, and you usually got a manual. Fair enough, right? I mean that's fair enough for a big box, but Infocom introduced for ever since the game deadline, which is uh 82, something like that, they included extra content in their game packages called feelies which I've always loved. Interestingly, the feelies often used as a copyright protection because there was be a code somewhere on one of them that the game would ask you for at so uh like when on start up to know you've bought an actual version. Yeah, there you go. But the feelies for the lurk in horror included a student ID card, a freshman guide for the school, G U E at a glance, which included maps of the campus, buildings, background information, and a rubber centipede-like creature reminiscent of one of the monsters in the game. Now that was not mentioned on the box, so one of the most terrifying moments of most people playing this game is when they got home and opened it up and this weird Lovecraftian centipede flew out at them. I love that. I mean I love that, that's absolutely brilliant. Uh it's a shame it's a shame because I I think I must have had a second hand copy. I didn't have the centipede, it's really annoying. But there you go. So yeah, personal disappointments aside. Now the uh GUE and a glance booklet contained a lot of jabs at things like MIT and Caltech. It was a lot of jokes, you know, in jokes and things like that. Which uh yeah, there you go. I mean, if you it I think it's one of those games that if you've ever been to a tech school or anything like that, then you'll probably appreciate the humour more than somebody who didn't. But I mean it is pretty universal, you know, the humour. So there we go. I hope this has inspired you to uh boot up an old school computer and arse about with a cassette deck and check out one of the most legendary Lovecraftian games in history, and indeed it is the first. So there we go. I just thought I'd quickly run that through you, and uh basically because I've decided in my infinite wisdom, as I've just got one of those Commodore 64 minis, I'm gonna play it. I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna boot it up and see see if I can still get on with it. I haven't played it since the like early 90s, so yeah, this will be this'll be interesting. This'll be a nice, interesting learning curve. So with that, I hope you've enjoyed our little look at one of get a bit of gaming history there, and uh, I'll see you next time. So, yeah, it's goodbye from me, Tim Mendys. See you later.