INTERVIEW | Jimmy Maher: The King of Shreds and Patches
An interview with the Digital Antiquarian about his Infocom style game The King of Shreds and Patches.

Jimmy Maher is perhaps best known for his meticulously crafted chronicles at The Digital Antiquarian, a treasure trove of video game history where his thorough research sheds light on the intricate details and hidden connections of gaming’s early years. With each entry, Maher deftly uncovers the stories behind the games and the companies that birthed them, all while lacing his prose with occasional, delightfully wry humor. Beyond his role as a historian, Maher is also an esteemed author of historical works and a game designer in his own right—qualities that bring us to this captivating interview. His contributions to interactive fiction, most notably The King of Shreds and Patches, harken back to the golden age of Infocom’s text adventures, blending narrative depth with an evocative historical setting.
Stay Forever is Germany’s foremost retro gaming podcast.
The original audio of this interview is available for free on our Patreon page, where you can listen to the full conversation in its entirety.
Stay Forever: Hello and welcome to Stay Forever, I’m Gunnar Lott and I’m here with Jimmy Maher. Is that the right pronunciation?
Jimmy Maher: Yes, you actually said it right, most people don’t.
Stay Forever: I pronounced it German, to be safe.
Jimmy Maher: Yes, well it actually is quite close to the German pronunciation, so … Most English speakers tend to say either „Mayer“ or „Maar“, but it actually is two syllables „Ma-her“.
Stay Forever: Very good, I’m safe with that. So if you are a long-time follower of Stay Forever, you should know the name: He is the „Digital Antiquarian“ and runs a wonderful website dedicated to old games. He has a non-gaming side to him, he runs a site about history and he is deep into the interactive fiction community, if I get this right. Do you want to add anything to that very short intro?
Jimmy Maher: No, I don’t think so. I’m probably slightly less deep into the interactive fiction community than I was but we probably don’t need to go into that.
Stay Forever: But, you’ve written a book, and you’ve written a game, and you’ve written a utility, so you must have been pretty deep in for some time.
Jimmy Maher: Yeah, I was, for quite some time. Since I started The Digital Antiquarian I have been more engaged with the things that happened in the past because it’s a historical site so it it’s kind of behind when it comes to the day to day activities of the modern interactive fiction community. But I do of course still have a lot of friends there and I admire their work and so on.
Stay Forever: Thank god we are a retro game podcast and not the least interested in modern games.
Jimmy Maher: That’s good – I do not have time for modern games!
Stay Forever: So we are here to talk about The King of Shreds and Patches, a game that we have been playing for quite a while. As I told you, we ran a whole series of our format „Stay Forever Plays“ on it, it is gone to six episodes.
Jimmy Maher: Wow, okay.
Stay Forever: We talked in six hour-long episodes about your game – ah, it is too bad you cannot understand German because it is very kind of in-depth.
Jimmy Maher: That is probably the most anybody has ever talked or written about that game, so congratulations.

Stay Forever: So, let’s start at the very beginning of that project. How did you arrive upon the idea to do a game and to do a game like this?
Jimmy Maher: Well, I was very involved in interactive fiction for many years before I started writing this game. First I was just a player and then as you do, I got a little bit more involved with the community. I started writing some reviews and then I became the editor of a little newsletter that used to exist in the pre-Web 2.0 days, it was called „SPAG The Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games“. I was the editor for that for several years and I wrote my own interpreter because I was dissatisfied with the ones that existed. So I did my own, just for Windows computers.
And at some point I started thinking that the next step was to write my own game. Because I had a lot of opinions and I had talked about a lot of other people’s games and criticized, sometimes, a lot of other people’s games so I decided that I would like to do my own. But I was kind of at loose ends for quite some time trying to decide what kind of game I wanted to write, what the story and the themes should be. And my problem is, that although I believe I am a very good writer – it’s about the only thing that I am really good at in life – but I am a specific kind of good writer. And I am not good at creating plots and characters just out of thin air. I’m not a novelist or fiction writer in that sense. But if you give me a good story, either a historical story or a journalistic story or even something that somebody else has written in the world of fiction, then I am quite good at adapting that story and telling it in a very interesting way and making the setting and the characters and so on come to life.
So, for a long, long time I was not certain what I wanted to do but then I was doing some research on the early days of tabletop role playing. I was in a graduate program at the time and I was going to do a project, as part of my master’s thesis, was going to a interactive fiction game, I thought, if I could just find the correct theme. But then along the way I was also doing some historical writing on the history of interactive narrative in general. Not strictly text adventures but where it all came from and also some of the theory, because academics love theory about interactive narrative and what separates it from traditional forms of storytelling.

So I stumbled upon this early tabletop role playing game called Call of Cthulhu. Which as I, you, and I’m sure your listeners probably know is based on the works of a horror writer who died in the 1930s named H. P. Lovecraft. He’s much more prominent today than he was even at the time that Call of Cthulhu came out. Which was – I believe – 1981, the first release of that tabletop game. And as I was exploring this game which I find very interesting because it really inverts the power fantasy that is Dungeons & Dragons. So of course Dungeons & Dragons is a game where you start out very weak. You go out into a dungeon, you kill monsters, you get stronger, you level up, you get more weapons, more spells. And you become more capable all the time and eventually if you play it long enough you can become basically a god. Call of Cthulhu completely inverted that power fantasy. So, there are levels, in a sense, in the game, but you’re almost guaranteed to either go insane or die before your character gets very powerful. And in a lot of situations, when you encounter these monsters, they are so completely overpowered in relation to you that your only chance really is just to run away or to hide or escape somehow.
So, it’s a completely different approach. And in that sense it’s the first real example of horror in role playing. And you can also certainly say that it’s an early ancestor of the „survival horror games“ that would show up later on computers, things like Alone in the Dark and later the Resident Evil series. So, being in the midst of researching this game which I found so fascinating I stumbled upon an adventure published for the game that took place in Shakespearean London. In a sense it was a typical Call of Cthulhu investigation. But it took place in a time period I was really interested in. And it involved Shakespeare. And I am an absolute fanatic for Shakespeare. My wife says that my complete works of William Shakespeare is my version of the bible. And she’s kind of correct. That’s a book that I would never want to be without. That I just always have to have with me. Not necessarily on my person or anything but in my house. So this was really interesting to me. And then as I read the adventure module, I discovered more and more that this was by a person who really got it. Who got the historical context and who had that same appreciation for Shakespeare that I do. So I started thinking: „Well, maybe I could adapt this into an interactive fiction game“. And of course the immediate problem was: „Well, it’s not my work“. And so I have to get permission.
Luckily, the company that published Call of Cthulhu all these years ago – they’re called Chaosium – they are actually still around. So I wrote to them and I asked them for permission to make a free interactive fiction game based on this adventure. And I’m quite sure they had no idea what I was actually talking about, I’m not even sure if they knew what interactive fiction was on a computer. But they said „Yes, as long as you don’t charge any money for it, you can do this“. Later on, this became a little bit complicated because I did try to sell the game as a Kindle app and so I had to go back to Chaosium and work out a deal. But originally, that was our agreement.
And so I started writing the game and it took about two years to complete. So it was a big, big, extended project for me. I think I started it in 2007 and I published it in 2009 and got a fairly good reception and it’s fairly well thought off and well-remembered today, still, in the interactive fiction community.
I haven’t looked at it, personally, in years and I would probably cringe at some things if I did. Because one thing that we writers have is that when we look back on stuff that we wrote years earlier, we always say „Oh man, that’s awful, I could’ve done that better now.“ So I’m sure that there’s some of that that would go on if I looked at the game again. But overall at the time I was pleased with the reception and so I would say that I am still proud of it and I think it was pretty good work. It was an interesting two years of my life.
Stay Forever: I feel, from a writer’s standpoint, it’s like fifty-fifty: Fifty percent of the time I look back at old work and think „Oh, this is awful, hope nobody sees it“. And the other fifty percent I think „Oh wow, I did write that? That’s pretty good – I don’t know if I could do it today …“. So perhaps you should revisit it, it’s very well written in most parts.
Jimmy Maher: Yeah, I’m always afraid because if I go back and revisit something and it’s not good, then I want to fix it – and I don’t have time to fix it. And so I just have to learn to just let things be. But yeah, I have the same experience. There are times when I go back and I think „Ah, this is pretty good work“. And then there are times when I say „Oh, what was I thinking that week when I wrote that article?“.
Stay Forever: Were you already versed in the tools you needed to write it? Because of your interpreter and everything, and your former connection?

Jimmy Maher: At the time when I started writing it, the big new thing in interactive fiction was Inform 7. I believe Graham Nelson, who is the man behind the Inform programming language that a lot of interactive fiction is written in – I believe he released that in 2006. And so it was still quite new when I started working on The King of Shreds and Patches. And I should say that there is a huge difference between Inform 6, the previous version, and Inform 7 in that Inform 7 jumped from being a vaguely „C“-like object oriented programming language to being entirely based on natural language. So you actually write out your script for the game in what reads like English. Even if you’re not a programmer you can read the script for a game and you can understand fairly well what is going on there. But at the time that I started working on it, I had to of course learn Inform 7 first, which was not difficult because I already was a programmer and a writer as well, so Inform 7 was quite natural for me.
But the problem that I did run into was that it was very new. And The King of Shreds and Patches was the largest thing that anybody had done with it. And so late in development when the game had really turned into a monster I kept running into limits of the language, overflow errors and so on. Just because I was probing beyond what anybody had done with it before. I had to do a lot of kludges and workarounds, just to make it compile in the end. And that still makes me a little bit sad because I’ve had people ask me if I would release the source code and it’s not something that I’m really opposed to, but I know that there are all these kludges that even I don’t understand now. And so that would make it quite difficult to read and understand the logic of the game now and certainly to make changes to it. Now it’s kind of frozen in place, because now even the newer Inform 7 compilers, the language itself has changed, so they will no longer compile my game.
To even compile it now you would have to go back to that old 2007 vintage version of Inform 7. That was definitely the biggest technical challenge, was right at the end, when I started to run into these barriers. Inform 7 was designed to be a language that is easy to pick up and use and I definitely found it to be so.
Stay Forever: Did you work on your own, for the whole time? Or did you have help from the community? Did you go through testing and did people check your writing and everything?
Jimmy Maher: Oh, definitely, yeah. Testing is a religion with the interactive fiction community. And rightly so. If you release a game that’s buggy, that hasn’t been tested, you will get absolutely flamed to death for it. So I very much had that as part of my DNA by that point, having been in the community for so long.
There’s an event that happens every year in the interactive fiction community called the „IntroComp“. And that’s a place where people who are thinking about writing a really big game can just write maybe the first ten percent of the game, just kind of show what it will be like, and then submit it to this competition. And then people will play it and will give a vote – „Yes“ or „No“; „Do I want to see more of this game? – Yes.“ or „Do I not want to see more of this? – No.“ And then they will give a lot of feedback about „Yeah, you know this works, interesting theme, interesting premise but maybe you could take it in this direction, maybe you could do this, do that …“.
So I submitted that to the „IntroComp“, I think in the spring of 2007. I submitted a – I don’t even think it was ten percent of the finished game, I think it just got you from when you left your little office in the print shop in London to the point where you got into John Croft’s house and you started to poke around and find things there, and I think it ended right about the point where you left the house again. So I got a lot of good, positive feedback on that, a lot of „Yeses“ to that pivotal question of „Would you like to play more of this?“. So that started me going.
And then kind of my partner or my main source of feedback early on was my wife – she played a lot of the early versions and gave me a lot of feedback. She was in medical school at the time, now she’s a doctor. So she gave me also a lot of pointed advice on how to handle things like the dead bodies and said „Oh that’s not realistic, rigor mortis doesn’t set in that early bla bla bla …“. So she did a lot of fact-checking in that sense.
And then after it was completely written, it went out to two, maybe three rounds of testing. I think I had about a dozen testers in all. I remember that in 2009 my wife and I took a road trip, it was right before I moved – I was living in the United States still at that time – it was right before I moved to Denmark. And that last summer we were in the United States together we took a road trip. And it was right before that trip that I sent it out for the first time to all of the testers. So then every place we stopped, in the hotels, I would get on the WIFI and I would just get these, a dozen e-mails saying „This is wrong, this is wrong, can you fix this, here’s a typo …“.
And testers are really interesting because some just play the game like they would play any other game and give feedback on it and point out when they see a typo or when something doesn’t work properly. And then there are the others who just really go out of their way to break it. These are the people that will start licking the wainscoting on the walls and just doing all kinds of bizarre things, to try to get an inappropriate response and to try to break the game. In a way it’s great that there is so much variation because you need all of that – you need the edge cases being tested but you also want to have some people who just go through and play the game like anybody else.
I had them all send me their transcripts of their playthroughs and so it was really quite fascinating to sit there and have this huge story that I had created and then to watch and see what other people did in this world and how they reacted to the puzzles, which puzzles gave them more trouble, which puzzles they breezed through and so on. So then it went through, I want to say, three rounds of that. And each time of course it got a little bit tighter and a little bit better. And finally it arrived at the state that it is now.
Stay Forever: You are somebody I can relate to because you’re a journalist and you go from player to maker. And I believe if I were doing an interactive fiction game I would make my own fantasies come true, like I would never ever make a scene in an interactive fiction game were the player has only one word to type in and the parser will only accept this one thing. And I believe you come from the same mindset but yet in the game, there are some scenes that go very narrow and where you have to very sharply do exactly what the game wants. How did that come about? Did you want to try to make it harder in some part or is this based on feedback or just random chance?
Jimmy Maher: Yeah, I don’t remember specifically how that came about. As I said it’s been some time. I can tell you more generally that I was always surprised by all of the things that my testers tried to type. So a lot of my time after I would receive these testing reports, a lot of my development time went into just trying to make the parser understand as many possible variations as I could.
And it is true that when you make your first game after you’ve been a critic for a long time, you kind of want to show people „Oh, this is how it’s done!“. And so there was some of that going on and so I did try to specifically address all of the things that annoyed me about earlier text adventures. And so for example with the action scenes: I had played some games where you would have this very complex action scene and there was one correct response to advance one step. And then the situation would change a little bit and then there would be one more correct response to avoid getting killed at that point and to advance one more step and it would go on this way for six or seven turns, whatever. And that always bugged me that that was so unrealistic.
And so I really, really tried – obviously imperfectly – but I tried to make this game more responsive. For example particularly the big action scene at the end, there’s a lot going on, there’s a lot happening. Rather than have „Okay you have to figure out the one thing you have to do on this specific turn and if you don’t you’re going to die on the next turn“ I tried to make it in a way that if you do something reasonable, then the game will recognize what you did and react to that. So there are actually probably a dozen or more paths through the end game in particular because I wanted the action scenes, I would say, to have a more dynamic feel where it’s not just „What is the next thing I have to type?“ but where I have this unfolding scene going on around me, things are happening and I’m reacting to them and the world responds to what I do. Which is not of course to say that you can’t die in these scenes – you can. But it’s a little bit different approach.
I remember, I played a game quite recently before I started writing this one, called Heroine’s Mantle. It was a superhero game and so you are constantly getting into these big superhero fights. And then it would go exactly like I just described where there was just a specific path through and you would just sit there and die over and over and over again on each turn until you figured out „Okay, now I got one step further“. And that’s something I wanted to avoid.
Another thing that irritated me a lot was, I thought a lot about time management in these games. Because traditionally a lot of text adventure games were very static in the old days. So if you have a game, for example, like Zork, the dungeon is basically a static environment. And there really is no plot: You’re an explorer, you want to collect treasures, you go into the dungeon, you solve puzzles and you come out again and the whole world is at best reactive to what you’re doing but there’s nothing happening independently in the world. So if you look back at the history of Infocom in the 1980s when they first wanted to make games that had a real plot going on and other characters who might have agendas other than your own, the first one of this type was called Deadline and it was an interactive mystery.
Stay Forever: We played that quite the same way as yours.
Jimmy Maher: Okay.
Stay Forever: So our audience should know that very well.
Jimmy Maher: So if you remember that game, the only way to solve it was essentially to play it over and over and over again, figuring out what the correct sequence was.
Because if you just walked into the house and just started waiting over and over and over again, then the game would just run on without you and eventually you would lose. Because all of the other characters would be moving about the world doing their own thing. So you are constantly up against the clock. And that was a big problem for quite some time. How do you make a more dynamically plotted game that has things going on but doesn’t have that risk that it just runs away without the player, and then the player ends up in this walking dead scenario where „Oh, you didn’t do something back on turn five so now you can’t win the game“.
One solution that was arrived at was rather than having clock time in the game to have a sort of narrative time. So then the narrative advances when you do something to make the narrative advance. Ideally this is hidden from the player so the player doesn’t really think about it, the player just sees this world unfolding. Probably the classic example of this approach – which you may also have played these games – they would be the Gabriel Knight graphic adventures. For example the first game is played over ten days. You go around in New Orleans, things are happening but the game would never run without you because the day only ends when you have done everything that is necessary to satisfy the requirements of the plot for that day and then: „Ok, the day ends and day two begins“.
But the problem I always had with that was that you always ended up in the situation where you wanted the day to end but you didn’t know how. What the game wanted from you to make the day end. So there would be some little pixel you hadn’t clicked or some little conversation tree you hadn’t followed to the right point. And so you would just end up wandering around New Orleans clicking on everything, trying to figure out: „Ok, what does this game want from me now?“ And that’s incredibly frustrating and it just pulls you completely out of the fiction because it’s completely artificial. You know, you’re Gabriel Knight, wandering around New Orleans going: „How can I make this day end?“ Well, that’s not exactly deathless fiction, right? So, that’s the reason I put in – what’s probably the biggest innovation in King of Shreds and Patches – and that’s the little „think“-command. So you have this narratological time instead of clock time. So we know that the game is never going to run away without you. But then, if you’re in that situation where you don’t know what to do. You just „think“ and it gives you a little – in the voice of the character – you hear: „Ok, maybe I should work on this, maybe I should check on this“.
Stay Forever: It’s a quest log, essentially.
Jimmy Maher: Yeah. And then you get that little pointer: „Ok, this is what I need to do. This is what I need to be working on.“ And then you can go there and you can figure it out and life goes on. So I was a little bit proud.
Bob Bates who was one of the Infocom authors, he recently published a text adventure which he sold on steam. And he wrote to me and said: „I played your game and I really loved this „think“-command. Can I steal it?“ I said: „Yes, absolutely! Be my guest.“ So there are a lot of little things like that. When you’re writing a game you suddenly get a chance to make exactly the game that you want. And to fix all these little annoyances in the games that you played in the past. And, yeah, that’s at least a couple of examples there.
Stay Forever: The last game of that type we played before was Anchorhead.
Jimmy Maher: Yeah.
Stay Forever: That felt kind of similar in the way it handled the day structure. Because it was waiting for a certain action but only one big action. If I understand it right that’s the same in the The King of Shreds and Patches because you have like four actions in the „think“-command but only one will be the big thing that ends the day. Say, the visit to Dr. Dee that will end the day and the visit at Shakespeare, it’s a small thing.
Jimmy Maher: Yeah.
Stay Forever: And that’s very nice. But you introduced the „think“-command in order to make your narrative time more transparent. I always thought this was a way to cater to new players. Which in my mind was in line with the game having a tutorial, which is uncommon in interactive fiction because everything is aimed at the community and the community is very well-versed in that type of game. The „topics“-command was something else that was very player-friendly. And I thought: „Oh, this is the guy who wants to be played by people outside of the community“. Is that a wrong assumption on my part?
Jimmy Maher: I don’t think it’s a wrong assumption. It wasn’t written as a game that would necessarily be sort of „Your first text adventure“. Or, you know, a tutorial in the sense of introducing you to text adventures.
I wanted it to be meaty and to have serious puzzles in there. But I did want it to be accessible to everybody. And I was familiar enough with modern games of the non-text adventure-type that I knew that if you play even something like a new first-person shooter, there’s probably going to be a tutorial level there at the beginning which all of the experienced players – which is probably 95 percent of the people that play it – just going to skip over like „Whatever, we know how to do this“. But I think just to have a gesture there that you do have support for that new player, is a cool thing to have. And in everything I do I want to be welcoming and to be inclusive. So the tutorial was definitely part of that.
And as far as the „think“-command: I would not really say that was so much aimed at new players as it was just something that – again, for me personally as a player, wandering around, trying to figure out what the game wants from me – is not really entertaining for me. So that was something that I don’t really consider a part of the hint system per se and that’s just a convenience feature for everyone, just because people want to get on with the story. And certainly the culture of gaming is little bit different now, we all have a million entertainment options and nobody wants to sit there and beat their head against one stupid game for a year of their life or something trying to figure out how to end the day. And so that’s something I included just for everybody. Just, you know, move things along. I thought there was enough game there that I don’t need that kind of artificial frustration.
And the „topics“-command, that came from a conversation system that was written by another guy in the community named Eric Eve who’s done a lot of really good technical work on both Inform and TADS, which is the other big interactive fiction programming language. So that was kind of there, out of the box, I installed his extensions for conversation.
Of course the problem with traditional conversations in interactive fiction is that you can have a menu driven-conversation which can feel very artificial and very restrictive. Or you can have just the „ask about“-system. And the problem with that is you never know what the game understands. So then you’re sitting there hunting around for conversation topics, wondering if the one thing you want to ask about you’re simply using the wrong word for or if there’s something that you’re not thinking to ask about that you really, really, really need to know. So to me, the „topics“-system worked really well because it’s kind of pitched in between those two things. And you can know what are the important topics to ask about just by typing that „topics“-command. But it’s not like you just getting a menu and you’re typing a number from a menu which, I think, it’s quite unsatisfying. So you’re still in that command line-interface, you’re still typing a word and ask about whatever. And so it just felt like a better, more sophisticated approach. That was kind of a compromise between two approaches that don’t really work that well for me personally.
Stay Forever: The feature list for your game on the website advertises a rich story, presented through a sophisticated „Drama Management System“. [both laugh] Proper marketing?
Jimmy Maher: Yeah.
Stay Forever: Is that dialogue system, what you’re referring to with the „Drama Management System“ or what is that?
Jimmy Maher: Not so much. I would say it’s more the way that the days unfold. You can see a hint of that of course in the „think“-command. So the Inform 7 language has something called „scenes“. You can actually say: „Now the John Croft-scene is beginning“ and change things about the responses that the game will give to certain actions. It’s kind of a state management system. And so you might not think about how complicated this can get. But for example with all of those conversations, they have to be aware of where you are in the game, and what you’ve seen and what you know and what you don’t know – so that gets incredibly complex. And this was a huge challenge just to make all of the responses of the characters in harmony with the state of the game at the time. So you never see something from the characters that you don’t know about beforehand. Or, I should say, obviously you hear things from them that you don’t know about but you can’t ask them about things that you haven’t discovered to ask them about. And then there are even times where the text will say, when a character mentions something that you already know about then, I believe there’s a little mention in the text where it says something like:
„Oh you relate this back to what Shakespeare said to you earlier“ and so on. So there’s a lot of that going on. So in that sense it does tie into the conversation. But there’s no unique – to me – technology there. It’s using what is in the box of Inform 7 as well as I could use it at the time.
Stay Forever: That must have been a nightmare.
Jimmy Maher: Yeah, it was. Believe me, if you’re a detail oriented person you should write interactive fiction. Because you can meet for example Shakespeare at many different points in the game. Although there are certain things that have to happen each day, within the days it’s very non-linear and some events can happen on different days depending on how you approach it. So it has to keep track of all that and, again, that’s something that always pulls me out of a fiction, if I suddenly have an option to ask a character about something that I don’t know about yet. Of course you see that a lot in adventure games just because it’s so, so hard to do. And that’s something, again, that my testers were great to really look for that stuff.
Stay Forever: I very much liked the conversations because they felt natural and they, for the most part, did that what you said, so they took note of where you are in the game. I especially liked the conversations with William Shakespeare because I got a real feel of how you think Shakespeare was as a person. So he came across like a shrewd businessman and like sometimes funny and self-depreciation, that, I don’t know how to pronounce that. But you know what I mean.
Jimmy Maher: You pronounced it correctly.
Stay Forever: [Laughs] And sometimes he was outright funny. And sometimes he was like a bit self-aggrandizing as it befits the greatest poet of his time. That was quite nice.
I felt the „topics“-command was sometimes ahead of itself because sometimes it gave hints to me because it mentioned topics that I didn’t really know about.
Jimmy Maher: Ok.
Stay Forever: And I have one major quibble which I must address now, so I’m sorry for that. But when you meet Lucy she asks for your help explicitly and the game has given you this backstory of their past romance and gives you a motivation for the character, for Robert Fletcher, to accept this plea for help. But I as a player don’t want to do it.
Jimmy Maher: [Laughs]
Stay Forever: You know I’ve been wronged by this woman. I don’t want to do it. And then I type in: „No“. The game asks you specifically for „Yes“ and „No“. And when you type in „No“, the game doesn’t accept it. It doesn’t turn you around and says: „Yeah, you can’t answer no because Robert Fletcher is very much in love“. But it just doesn’t accept it. It’s just like the wrong command. And I was so vexed by that.
Jimmy Maher: So, what does it say exactly.
Stay Forever: It says „Be more specific“ or the standard answer when you don’t have the right word.
Jimmy Maher: Wow, ok.
Stay Forever: And if you type in „Yes“, all is well. [Laughs] Then the story goes on.
Jimmy Maher: Ok.
Stay Forever: I said: „Oh man!“
Jimmy Maher: Ok, maybe nobody ever typed „No“. [both laugh] Yeah, that’s not good. I would say that in the end you will have to say „Yes“ to advance the plot
Stay Forever: Yeah.
Jimmy Maher: You know, obviously there have to be restrictions and the story has to go a certain way. But it certainly should understand the command. The ideal approach would be, as ideal as it can be, would be that if you said „No“ that she would get hurt or something and then you would go away and then maybe there would show up something in your „think“-command like „Oh, you really regret the way you left things with Lucy“ and it would make it quite clear that you have to say „Yes“. But, yeah, that should not have happened. [Laughs] So sorry about that. That was not intentional.
Stay Forever: [Laughs] I felt it interesting that you asked players in this foreword not to break the game. And obviously my co-host who played the game with me did exactly that.
Jimmy Maher: [Laughs]
Stay Forever: And he found points where the game broke. One or two are interesting because I didn’t get why it was breakable at that point. I’m not talking about using the wrong commands and there’s a number of things where the game doesn’t work well on that level, those are very small things.
But the game has a currency: Pennies, you have five of them. I believe you need three of them at certain points in the game. They are necessary to advance the game but you can also spend them frivolously. You can spend them all on ale. And then you are in a dead end. You cannot regain them, you have no other way to get currency and then the game is essentially over – and that’s cruel. Or is this just a moral thing: „Don’t spend your money on ale!“
Jimmy Maher: I remember at the time that I struggled a little bit with the issue of dead ends. So, of course the first adventure game that made a big deal out of having no deaths and no dead ends was The Secret of Monkey Island, the graphic adventure in 1990. And that ethic kind of got transferred into interactive fiction in time.
By the 2000s there were a lot of games that would not let you screw up. I might answer this differently now, if I was writing the game today, but I remember at the time it struck me as „wrong“ somehow. If you wanted to do something blatantly stupid, then I would let you do it. Because my idea was that this was an interactive game. I want it to be responsive to what you were doing.
Probably the best example I can think of is, that you can go out in the streets of London and then just start dropping everything. And as soon as you drop something in the streets, I forget what the exact message was, but somebody carries it away or something. It’s just like how long would something be there if you dropped it in the streets of any busy modern city, right? So I didn’t want this thing where – which you see in a lot of text adventures – where you could drop something at some place where it was inevitable that somebody would come along and pick it up. And it would just remain there forever.
And so I remember very specifically writing a message where you would drop something and it would disappear, say a horse runs over it and destroys it or something. And it would go away from the game. But I do remember writing that message in a way that I tried to make it very clear that: „Ok, you should probably undo right now“. As far as the pennies, before talking to you I would have guessed that I handled that in a similar way where I said: „Ok, now you feel like you’ve spend way too much money on ale“
Stay Forever: Mmh, no.
Jimmy Maher: That’s of course my failure!
Stay Forever: [Laughs]
Jimmy Maher: That would be the way that I would remember having done it. Of course, memory makes things much better than they are sometimes – and this is obviously a case of that. So that’s something that I don’t know that I would be so hung up today and giving you the freedom to screw up to quite the extent that it does. And that’s just maybe a product of getting a little bit older and thinking about game design a little bit more. But, yeah, at the time I didn’t want the game to be easy for you to screw up and not know that you screwed up and continue through the game.
So, in the old days, of course, there were tons of text adventures that would trick you into using an object somewhere when you really needed to use it somewhere else. And they were really devious about it and quite evil in that sense. And there’s the old saying, Robb Sherwin came up with this – he’s another interactive fiction author, he’s written a lot of games – and he said: „Zork hates its player!“ And that’s really the impression you get when you play a lot of those old games. That they’re just doing everything in their power to make you screw up and to deceive you. And it really is an ethic of: „Ok, I – ‚the game‘ or the game’s author – want to show that I’m smarter than you – ‚the player‘. And I want to beat you in a zero-sum game sense“.
And of course now, in adventure game design we say we want to have fun with the player. And we want to let the player win but we want the player to be challenged along the way and to have a good time doing it. So, I knew very, very much, that I didn’t want to make a game that was out to „get“ the player. But at the same time I wanted to give the player that freedom to screw up if the player was really determined to do so. And it sounds like in the case of the pennies, that I got that balance wrong. So, mea culpa on that one.
Stay Forever: The problem, if I may say so, was that the game is so friendly most of the time …
Jimmy Maher: Yeah.
Stay Forever: … and nudges you along all the time. And it even limits you from doing stupid things. So, shortly before the end game you cannot even launch the boat to go to the tower if you don’t have the crystals, I believe.
Jimmy Maher: Yeah.
Stay Forever: So there’s strong gating where the game takes you by the hand and says: „Player, you’re not ready yet!“ So you cannot do this and you cannot do this. And you can still say stupid things, you can even say „No“ to Lucy. And then it lets you squander all the pennies, which is surprising. We couldn’t really believe it.
Jimmy Maher: Yeah, it probably is true that if a game is very friendly in most ways and then there’s a few places where it falls down, those places where it falls down stand out that much more.
The only thing I would say is that, if you’re a veteran text adventure player you would never squander the pennies in that way. [both laugh] So, not to put the blame on you or anything because the game should not have allowed you to do that, no. For me, even today, if I’m playing a text adventure and I have a limited quantity of something, and I use one of them, and I don’t get anything out of it, my immediate reaction is to type: „Undo“. Because I’m thinking: „Ok, I might going to need that somewhere else.“
Stay Forever: Yeah.
Jimmy Maher: And so it may be that I was still a little bit too much in that mindset. I’m just in my own head of how I would be as a player.
So, yeah, that’s totally a fair criticism.
Stay Forever: I feel the game is a very faithful adaption of the Call of Cthulhu adventure. #You lifted verbatim all the handouts. (50:10)# But you didn’t talk to the author of this thing, only to the company. Is that right?
Jimmy Maher: Yeah. I was very eager to talk to the author. He is a guy named Justin Tynes. So I wrote to Chaosium, because I could not find any trace of him on the internet or anything. So I wrote to the publisher and they said: „Well, we don’t know where he is either. He wrote a few adventures for us 30 years ago, 25 years ago, and we have no idea.“ So I never had any contact with him all through working on the game and publishing the game.
And then maybe a year or two after it came out he wrote to me, out of the blue. I’m not sure if he ever played it. But he just said that he heard about it, and I think he said that he had friends at Chaosium who had told him about it, or not at Chaosium but associated with Chaosium somehow. Chaosium has a very complicated corporate history, they changed ownership shortly after I published the game and some of the old folks who had founded the company and had been with the company in the early days came back in and bought the company and so suddenly, a lot changed there.
So basically he just wrote and said: „Hey, I’m really glad to hear that you revived it“ and he said it was completely fine with him, which was good to hear because, as I said, I had only had permission from Chaosium. And so we exchanged a few friendly emails, and that was about that. But it was good to hear from him and good to know that he knew that I had done this – and was cool with it, of course.
Stay Forever: I felt the adaption of the adventure was very faithful. I was wondering about your relationship with the source material. I have one thing where I found it overly faithful: the East Trade Company – the company of Joseph Barker. In the pen-and-paper adventure players can learn about the business and the manual states from the dungeon master, when the investigators go there they find nothing. So it’s a small distraction and it’s typical for this investigation structure of the Call of Cthulhu adventures where you try, perhaps in the course of an adventure you try dozens of such things.
But in the game this is faithfully adapted so the players go there and learn nothing, like in the adventure. But, in your game it is a little bit jarring because the game has taught us that every location is meaningful, in every location you learn something and that is tantamount to making progress. And as a result we assume that there must be something relevant we just didn’t see it. Was this because you wanted to stay very close to the original? Or you wanted to boost your location number or something? [both laugh]
Jimmy Maher: No, it wasn’t the second at all, I would say it was the former. What I would have thought in that situation was that the „think“-command was designed to be your friend, again. So if the „think“-command is not telling you that „Ok, there’s something else you have to do here“, then my thinking at the time would have been that you as the player ought to, would hopefully have be clued into that by using the „think“-command, that „Ok, there’s nothing to be done here“.
And yeah, so maybe it was overly faithful in that sense. I think just about everything that is in the Call of Cthulhu adventure is in the text adventure, if I recall correctly. I ended up having to add a lot to it, in a sense that, of course the conversations, as that would be described in paper-and-pencil module, would be just kind of outlines. And then the really important stuff might include actual verbatim text that the other character would say to the players. But of course that was written for a game master who is sitting there at a table with the other players and can improvise all of that stuff. Well, there’s no improvising going on in a computer game. You have to hard code everything. So I ended up having to write a lot of my own text and kind of embellish things. And I think there were a few points in the plot where I thought things weren’t really clear, or didn’t make sense or something. And I added my own interpretation of things. But I was really quite faithful to the module, that’s correct.
I would say the one area where I regret being faithful to the module is the depiction of John Croft and his relationship with Christopher Marlowe. And as I’ve gotten older and become a little bit more enlightened about certain things I realized that there are so many depictions in media of gay relationships and gay characters who are somehow damaged and often evil and then turned out to be the villains.
And I regret a little bit that I added to that mountain of storytelling that goes in that direction. Which is not to say of course that gay people can’t be good or bad or somewhere in between, just like all the rest of us. But, it’s not a kind of character that I’m hugely proud of having written. And I think that if I did it today, I would change that aspect of the story.
Stay Forever: We didn’t learn very much about the motivation of John Croft at all. He seems very much like a device to lure your character in. And I couldn’t get behind why he even contacted Robert Fletcher in the first place.
Jimmy Maher: Now you’re getting into specifics that I might have trouble answering. As I recall, and this could be incorrect, but as I recall, he wrote to you – the player character – completely innocently and just for the reasons that he stated in his letter. That he just wanted to get together and have a few drinks and talk about old times. And then he just happened to get killed between the time that he mailed the letter to the player and the player goes to visit him at the appointed time. And so then the player just stumbles upon his corpse and stumbles into this mystery and then things just go from there. That is the way I remember it. If there is something in the story that means that that is not possible, then again mea culpa. I just don’t remember beyond that.
Stay Forever: Ah, but I thought – and that might be my fault – I thought this was clearly a self-killing, maybe because of the madness and the overwhelming presence of the King in Yellow in his life. And I couldn’t connect that to the tone of the letter he wrote to Robert Fletcher. So I thought if you are few hours before you kill yourself in a bout of madness under the influence of this supernatural being then you write this cheery letter to your old friend.
Jimmy Maher: Yeah.
Stay Forever: Was he killed or did he kill himself? Do you still remember? I may have interpreted that wrongly.
Jimmy Maher: I want to say that it was engineered to look like a suicide. But again, I would certainly not bet any money on that [laughs]. It’s been a long, long time.
Stay Forever: I have to replay that part and look for clues that it was a killing. Mh, maybe it’s my fault, so I don’t know.
Jimmy Maher: Another possibility here, another chance for me to get out of jail free, is that this is almost a form of possession, as I recall. And so, perhaps when this evil was not filling his soul, so to speak, he could get up in the morning and look around and imagine that everything was going to be ok and tried to get on with his life and then of course the madness would come again. And so it may have been that it was almost kind of a schizophrenic situation. But that’s not an explanation that I can, again, bet any money on, I would have to look at the game again more closely.
Stay Forever: Yeah, that sounds like you made it up on the spot, to be honest. [laughs]
Jimmy Maher: Yeah, exactly.
Stay Forever: So, to stress this whole faithfulness-thing: I couldn’t really discern which parts of the writing were yours and which parts of the writing were directly from the adventure. So I felt this was a very expertly written game, one of the best written I’ve ever seen in interactive fiction.
Jimmy Maher: Thank you.
Stay Forever: Just wanted to get this out of my system before we end and I’ve already confronted you with all these little quibbles we had about the game. I have one thing to wrap it all up: So what would you say in the broadest of meta terms, what was your goal for this experience and did you achieve it?
Jimmy Maher: I would say that I wanted to combine a somewhat traditional interactive fiction experience with puzzles. But also to do that in the context of a really compelling and interesting story that you would feel that you wanted to solve the next puzzles, so that you could find out what the next piece of the mystery was. I really wanted for you as the player to feel like you were involved and solving the mystery. A lot of the time in games that purport to be mysteries, you don’t do any real investigation at all. You come to a location and you solve a sliding block puzzle, or something, and then the game gives you the next piece of the mystery. And so you’re not really engaged in that sense, you don’t feel like the detective. It’s just the game keeps throwing up artificial obstacles that you have to get past in order to get the next piece of the mystery novel that you’re reading.
So I really wanted to involve you as the player in the investigation. And to do that with puzzles but to have puzzles that felt relevant and felt naturalistic and felt like something that if you really were a detective in 17th century London, that this could really happen.
And there are exceptions to that, that I am well aware of, I was aware of even at the time. Probably the most obvious objection to naturalistic puzzles in the game is this printing that you have to do. So you’re a printer. And you presumably know how to do your job, but still there is a quite elaborate puzzle, probably the most complex in the whole game, where you have to print something. Well, of course if we’re hewing completely to fictional realism, you would know how to do that. And you would just type „Print“, whatever. And it would appear because your character – that’s what he does for a living. But instead you have to solve and figure out how to work this printer. So that’s one place where I was aware, even at that time, that „Ok, this doesn’t quite hold with the fiction“. But I had just been to the Gutenberg-Museum in Mainz, in Germany and I was quite excited about the technology of printing and I just wanted to put that in the game.
So, yeah, it’s an imperfect implementation of the idea. But Graham Nelson – again, you could almost call him the father of the modern interactive fiction community – he said that „Interactive fiction is a crossword at war with a narrative“. So you have the puzzles and the gaming aspect and then you have the story. Very often the two are really quite separate from one another, so probably my biggest goal was just to integrate those two to make the puzzles and the story all float together and to make solving the puzzles not external to the story but a part of the story and a part of your investigation.
I’m sure there are places where I’d be horrified if I played the game now, but I was satisfied at the time with it. I got a lot of good feedback from players. And I think every few years in the interactive fiction community they do their „Top 50 Games of All Time“ where people all vote on what is the kind of canon of interactive fiction, what are the best games. And King of Shreds and Patches has always made that list, so I’m quite proud of that. It was definitely a phase in my life and it was something that I would do differently now, probably – certainly, if I made the game today, but I feel like it’s good work. And I feel like it’s something that years back on my résumé that I can feel proud of.
Stay Forever: Thank you very much for taking the time to talk about this. We had great fun playing it. And one last note: I so enjoyed the Gutenberg Press-puzzle.
Jimmy Maher: Ok [laughs].
Stay Forever: I even googled a video on how these things are operated and immersed myself into that and compared the things in the video to the things in the game. So I liked it very much. But I believe you have to be of a certain mindset [laughs] in order to enjoy that.
Jimmy Maher: Yeah, it sounds like you are the same as me. I just really got interested in it and I still, here in my office, I still have a page that I printed at the Gutenberg-Museum. Yeah, that’s something I just couldn’t bear to leave out of the game. And that was a situation where I felt like it called for a big, meaty puzzle at that point. And that was just something that I couldn’t resist doing.
Stay Forever: I felt it was very nice but it required external knowledge because I believe it’s very hard to solve from the hints of the game itself.
Jimmy Maher: Yeah, I think it’s probably the hardest puzzle in the game.
Stay Forever: Ok, thank you very much and thanks for making the game, I very much enjoyed it.
Jimmy Maher: Well, thank you and thank you for your Patreon’s support.
This transcript was made possible by the hard work of our community members Cpt-Marve and Brotrinde.