Retronauts - 536: Below the Root

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

Diamond Feit and Jared Petty open their shubas and set sail for the early 1980s in this look at edutainment pioneer Spinnaker Software and their adventure game adaptation of Below the Root. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This Week in Retronauts, you dumb bastard, that's not a spinnaker. It's a sailboat. Welcome to Retronauts, everybody. Episode 537, according to my listings, and today we're talking about some old software. I know, I know, very against type for us. But we're talking about some old software. We're talking about some old hardware. We're doing double barrels today, hardware and software. Specifically, we're talking about some Spinnaker software.

And Spinnaker, in fact, is not a sailboat. It is a sail. I looked this up to make sure. But when I was a kid, I thought it was a sailboat. So, you know, a kid. Kids are silly. That's the whole point of that introduction. I'm not alone, by the way. First of all, you know what? I'm going to have myself again. This is Diamond Fight. I should send my name because maybe this is your first retronauts. And if that's true, welcome. But not alone today. Who is joining me today from the United States?

I am Jared Petty, and I am deeply confused by the reference to Mulrats. that I just, the last thing, it is about 9 a.m. on a Sunday. And the last thing in the world I expected in the Year of Our Lord, 2023, is a mall rats joke when we're about to talk about Spinnaker software. So we are off to the races. You know, it was, it was the first, it was the first connection I made when I, when I looked at Spinnaker's. I remember the old games, they actually had an animation where a little sailboat would move across the screen. So that's why I thought it was the boat. But in fact, it's the sail.

That's what the Spinnaker is. That's what I've learned in my research. I never knew what a spinnaker was, so I'm very impressed. I just thought it was some guy's name. I had no idea that a spinnaker was a part of the boat. Look at that. How about that? Five minutes this episode, and we are already educating the people and the children.

This is, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say it. This is going to be one of the best retronauts I've ever recorded. Oh, that's great. Well, I'll tell you, I'm just going to add this to my vocabulary. I fell and I bumped my spinnaker. Oh, damaged it. You know? But before I proceed, I do want to give a shout up, because this episode can,

came at the request of one of our Patreon supporters. Patreon, Ben Hamilton, was very generous in supporting the show and asked us to do a show about Spinnaker Software and one of their more celebrated titles. So thank you, Ben, Hamilton. We are here for you. Indeed, Ben, thank you for giving us this excuse to talk about obscure publishers from the early 1980s. This is something I relish.

I relish, I say. So I do want to talk very briefly because while Spinnaker did, in fact, make video games for many different platforms. A lot of their software was very closely associated with the Commodore 64. That's how I knew them. And I just want to really quick get into the Commodore 64, because this is a platform that we haven't spoken a lot about here on Retronauts, but it's one that meant a lot to me when I was a kid. Because if you do the math, Commodore 64 launched, I want to say summer of 82. I probably had one. If not that summer, then probably the next summer. Oh, that early. Wow.

I think so because, and if you read this stuff here, I think it makes sense because Commodore was very aggressive. They were very competitively priced. They were going very low. And you had publishers like Spinnaker who were very aggressively promoting their software to non-traditional audiences. They were advertising in, you know, magazines like Newsweek and good housekeeping. Like, those are magazines my household definitely had. So, you know, my parents might have seen these ads like, hey, our kids. kid likes games? What if we get our kid this computer thing? You know? And I think that what I think

that was the expectation. I think they got this computer. It's like, oh, here you go. Here's, here's something you can play with that I'll actually teach you something. And I did the educational software. And I know we had a word processing program, but I also know it didn't work very well. So most of my time on the Comptus 64 was spent playing video games. And I feel like that really did teach me a lot, because here I am. I'm a podcaster. Like what, what greater skill could have taught me than, you know, teaching me to talk about video games 40 years later. Like, that's the biggest blessing. Yeah, you mentioned good housekeeping.

I mean, that was one of Commodore's great innovations. They're almost forgotten now, Diamond. But Commodore was really the first computer developer to figure out that they could put their products in Kmart. They did that the year before with the VIC-20, around 81. I feel like, what if we sold this thing in just stores? At that time, if you wanted to buy a computer, you went to a computer store. store. That was a thing that existed in the world. And that's where you bought

your hardware, that's where you bought most of your software. And Commodore was like, what if we make computers really cheap, gave them a pretty good keyboard, and put them places that parents buy stuff for their kids. And in 81, they did it with the VIC-20, which was an extremely primitive little computer. And they sold a million of them.

Wow. And they're like, oh, okay. And so they created a much more capable computer, only a year later in the C-64, that by some stories was designed really in about six weeks out of spare parts that Commodore had laying around, which I think is just incredible. It was, you know, it's 6502 based, like the Apple 2, like the NES, like so many of those, the Atari 800, some of those early video game systems and computers, that wonderful MOS microprocessor, which was very cheap and yet reasonably powerful. You could get the job done. Ram prices were coming down. They had a really

nice little 16 color graphics processor. They built it very capable and it turned out very extendable three channel sound chip and they had all the stuff and they put it together and like, hey, we've got a great little computer for your home and by the way, we're going to put a cartridge slot

in it. And by the way, we're also going to make a really cheap floppy drive for it. And if you're in Europe, a really cheap, but reasonably reliable tape drive for it. And it's just, I really think at the beginning, they thought what they had

was a hybrid productivity and game machine. But the floppy drive was slow. There was a hardware flaw. They screwed something up and they just went ahead and shipped it anyway. And there was a flaw with it. So it made the floppy drive fairly slow, which made

it really not great. If you wanted to load and save documents, you're actually trying to get work done. But for games, when a kid doesn't mind waiting three minutes for something to load so that they can play, it was just so they can play. That combined with, by the way, I will rant all day down it. So please just be like, Jared, stop talking. It's okay. This is all viable information. All right. But the other

bit to think about is that this little thing, you talked about the price, right? Okay, so you bought 182 maybe. They were $600 U.S. then. Only a year later, they were $300 U.S. Commodore being an aggressive price war issue, as you mentioned. They were trying to outpriced Texas instruments. There's a weird business story behind that. The owner of Commodore had good reason to hate Texas instruments from something that happened about a decade before. And it was all about calculators. And he was trying to drive them out of the market. And he was competing with Atari, who at that time were a home computer company par excellence. He was competing with Apple. But Apple was kind of the educational higher in price of the market at that point. And so he was really

just trying to knock out these low-end competitors, the Colico Adams, some others that were popping up everywhere. And the solution was to just knock the computer's price down to buy Christmas of 83, there are stories that people were getting Commodores and disc drives together.

Because you bought the computer separate. I much that $600 to $300 to figure. That the computer in some places you could get for like $200, $250 or let and the floppy drive for about $200. And back then getting a $400, $450, $500, $500, computer was unheard of. It was, it was, it was as if the price of computers had decreased by

two thirds in a year. And that's what the C-64 did. And it played great. Games great. And people were just like, well, I'm going to buy that for my kids this Christmas. Also, Commodore owned their own manufacturing chain and nobody else did. And that Christmas, they built enough units and no one else did. And after 83, they just dominated the market for several years. Okay, I'll stop talking for a little while. No, it's, I wanted to segue from that because, yeah, it's almost like it was, it was kind of like the perfect graduation from the 2,600, because we, we definitely had one of those when I was very small, and I absolutely, like, I was too small to ask for it, so my parents must have just gotten it. And the counter 64, it straight up, the ports were compatible with Atari joysticks. Yep, totally. So I know that once, you know, once we got the counter 64 and I saw how much cooler the games were, I just unplugged my Atari joystick and brought it upstairs to,

where the computer was and plugged it right? And I was like, this is amazing. I thought that was just how computers were going to work, you know? Little that I know that, you know, a few years later, every single console would have their own joysticks and their own little things. And it just, it wouldn't work that way for a very, very long time until USB came back. But, you know, at the time, it made, it was the most perfect sense to my child brain. It's like, okay, this is what joysticks are. And every machine I have is going to have a joystick hole and it fits this joystick perfectly and the joystick only has one button because how many how many buttons would you need? You just be one button. That's it. You know? If you lived in

Europe, you got to keep living that fantasy on into the mid-90s because Commodore also made the Amiga and used the same damn port in that too. Wow. Yeah, you could, Atari joystick on the Amiga as well would work perfectly. So really they did actually within house. They kept it, it actually hurt them a little bit later on, I think. Just that one button interface really limited the games you could play on the 16-bet platforms, and they'd have probably done better if they had, but maybe not. I mean, business sense-wise, like I said, they knew the kids had the joysticks around, and, you know, European players, I've teased some of my friends from Europe about, you know, pushing up to jump, but it's just like, dude, if you do it your whole life,

it just comes naturally. Don't, don't laugh at us, you know. And I was like, okay, that's fair. So, like, you know, which is better? Up or button, which one is closer to jump? And they do have a point. But, yeah, it is red. It came with those two ports, and it came, you know, it wasn't just, you know, the Apple was color. That was Waz's great innovation. The trash 80 was dirt cheap. That was its great innovation. The pet made by Commodore before the Victorian 64 was really reliable and had a built-in display, and several of that was their innovation.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure we had a pet at my school, like in certain classrooms. I think we had, I think we had a pet computer, like in just in a regular class. So that was probably one of the earliest computers I saw. But then once I got to third grade, we had an entire computer lab. And that lab was full of Apple II, I want to say. But I definitely remember the pet. I remember seeing the VIC-20 at a friend's house, and I'm pretty sure I saw a pet at school. And then we had a Commodore at home.

And that became my regular computer. And the school computer was like special when we went to school, you know? Well, it was such a great thing to play games. Because 64K of RAM back then, if you used machine language well, you really could make some pretty solid games with that much memory. And if you had the floppy drive, you had the ability to have some pretty large games. I think that European C-64 players and some of them were going to yell at me now, and there's a lot more of them.

A lot of them played off tape because that was the popular interface there. The tape games had the advantage of being much less expensive, the cassette tape games, I mean. But the downside was that they had to be smaller or you had to load more between them and loading was really slow. So some of those smaller tape games are not always as impressive in terms of their scope.

It's fine for arcade games, but it doesn't work very well for like RPGs or adventures, which I think is why this games may have been less popular in some parts of Europe. But when you had the diskrive and the C-64,

you had plenty of memory, you had a decent process. It was slow. It was when megahertz. It had to do a lot of recycle. And you had built-in sprites and a great way of using graphical versions of background tiles,

of the way the screen was broken down. It was fairly easy to draw with the background to do tricks. You look at a game like Gauntlet, for example, on the C-64, and they're doing this amazing thing with the tiles to simulate the movement of many more enemies than the C-64 can handle sprites on screen. People came up with all kinds of clever stuff to do with it. If you look at some late C-64 games,

stuff from like the early 90s, some of it you would be like, oh, is this a TurboGraphics game? Like, is this a PC engine game? I mean, they're really beautiful, even though they're only 16 colors. It was a ridiculously capable, although idiosyncratic

little computer. And I have a lot of love for it because, like you said, everybody spinnick around, but the rest of the world, when those things sold, they saw who won the war and the software support for the C-64 was like nothing anyone seen since the

Apple 2. The difference was, is the Apple 2 really was not an intrinsically great action game machine, and the C-64 was. And so what you could do with it was just so much better. And there's a lot of love for it. And again, I'm saying this as an Apple 2 partisan. I love the Apple 2 deeply with all my heart, but the C-64 is intrinsically better at stuff like an arcade or action game. It's just got better tools for building them. Thank you. Yeah, and so, also, just back to what you said about the tape versus disk. I know we had both, and I think one of the interesting things about it is that the Commodore 64, when you boot it up, if someone hasn't seen this yet, it boots up to like a text prompt, you know, and you type in what you want to do.

And it's funny how the computer defaults to load, if you type, if you tell it to load a program, it defaults to loading from the tape drive. It's like, if you want to load from the disk drive, you have to specifically tell it to load from the disk drive, which I always thought was funny because after a few years, everyone got used to disks. what do you mean tape? Oh, a disc? Oh, okay. So it's kind of like, before I knew what a disc was, I was used to tapes. And it's so funny how it evolved past that. And, you know, now, of course, my kids, they wouldn't know what a disc was. Like what, they've never touched one of their lives at disc. What is that, you know? But I think they're probably listeners that are surprised that video games came on cassette tapes at one point, audio cassette tapes, which is hilarious. And yeah, that's how I, that's how my first home computer had a tape drive. My first home computer was

an abomination and monstrosity and a threat to God and man. But it did have a tape drive. It was a Calico Adam, Jeremy Parrish, the Retronauts founder and I had the same computer growing up. Our parents were not wise enough to choose the C-64 first. I only got mine later. And although, ironically, as we get around to it eventually, the atom was my bridge to Speniker software. But it was a strange computer, and at the time they made it, they thought tapes were still going to be the thing in the States. It was Commodore that changed that, and they did it by accident. I don't think they understood how much demand there was going to be better at that floppy drive. Before the C-64, floppy drives and computers ranged from about $5 to $600 each.

And this is in like $1980-something. Oh, Lord. Right. car right exactly after the c64 they were much like very quickly the c64 one launched at 450 which was like the lowest any had ever been and very quickly dropped down to like two hundred dollars so people looked at it and it was like less than half of what you'd ever paid for a floppy drive before and a lot of people were just like in like a year and people were like oh well i'm going to buy that and that that again opened the door a lot of software houses kind of wanted to push

disc and really that push along with the fact that the Apple 2 which never by the way they didn't low the price of their hard drive or their floppy drive for some time but the Apple 2 was getting into schools and schools wanted something more reliable too so they were shipping with you know the Apple 2 had had a good floppy drive since 1978

it just always spent about $550 and schools would pay that homes wouldn't and so that was what Commodore is able to do with that but yeah you had and it did have a cartridge port, which got used a little bit the first year. It also had a couple of other advantages. I mean, there's no reams, volumes, podcasts could be made about the C-64. But it had

a couple other advantages. They got this idea with the Vic where they're like, what if we made a really cheap printer? And again, printers were ridiculously expensive then. And they worked together with a Japanese company to design a slow but fairly reliable. little home printer that was very minimal, little dot matrix. They cut every corner they possibly can, including, like, they didn't give it to senders, which means, like, if you did a

lowercase J, it didn't go down below the line, like the dot where it would drop down below all the other letters, or lowercase Q wasn't there. They would just, like, raise the letter instead, so it looked a little weird. But again, the price of this little printer very quickly,

the little 15, 15, 15, 15, 25, the Commodore MPS 801, These little printers were like half of what home printers had cost before. And so people at home were like, well, wait, I just bought my computer. I'm thinking about buying a computer. That's a lot of money to spend for a game machine. But, you know, if I do my word processing at home and my checkbook and they could justify it, parents would talk themselves into it because I look, the printer is so cheap too.

Plus my kid can use it for school and they'll be in on the computer revolution. And then the motherfucking print shop came out. And suddenly people had a thing to do with their home computer printer. And that was a, I cannot underestimate how big a deal. Or pardon me, I kind of overstate how big a deal. Broder Bun's print shop was for home computers and educational computers. It was a way to make greeting cards and signs and banners. And it turned your computer.

from a toy into something that made things. And that was mind-blowing. And for Apple and Commodore, the print shop was a godsend. So many printers got sold in 84 and 85 because people were like, oh, my gosh, I got to get in on that. All right. Again, I'm ranting. Sorry.

No, I absolutely remember print shop. And it's funny, I don't think we ever got it at home, but I didn't remember using it at school, and suddenly everything we made at school was on print shop. Like, we put out banners for anything, everything. We'd print out, you know, special reports for things. I definitely remember folding little cards that made, you know, greeting cards or whatever. I spent so much time. A friend of mine, we went to a chess club when we were in elementary school, and he got some level in the chess club.

I don't know what level was. I forget it was. But, you know, this was like 86. And until he moved out, you know, he was. in his late 20s, that print shop, you know, diploma, if you will, was hanging in his room. So I saw that thing well into the 21st century, just hanging on the wall of his room. It's like, so that image is burned in my brain, like amongst all those things he had, like that thing, that sign. And it was definitely, you know, the print shop, the same font, those little flowery things around the edges.

Like, it's, it's something I'll never forget. Oh, those, they were so distinctive. They were a lot of fun to make. It was a powerful little program. And again, now it seems, you know, ridiculous. But at the time, the idea that you could, like, print a little cheap dot matrix greeting card and send it to grandma, that was, like, a novelty. Like, it wasn't like, oh, this is cute. Like, grandma would be like, what?

You did this on the computer? Are you from space? Like, that was the attitude people had about computers still. Yeah. I think that's hard to recapture. So you take that and, okay, so, like, the C64 was so popular by 85 when, when I think, I think it was 85. the print shop got ported to C-64 because it started on an Apple, I think, in 84.

By 85, the Commodore version of Print Shop has two versions in the box. It has one, if you have like an ordinary Epson, like the good printers of the day. And then there's a second custom version of the print shop just if you own the shitty Commodore printers.

I don't know that. That they wrote, yes, that they wrote a second version of it just for Commodore so that it will do lower-res printout. on those printers because they are not capable of making as pretty a picture. So they actually had to customize what you could do with it. But it was so popular.

Again, nobody cared. It was like, I think it was, again, Jeremy, who does the podcast talk before about, you know, Nintendo being really good at being good enough. Yes. The C-64 was that embodied. And we haven't even started on, geez, the music. To this day, the thing is an instrument. if you put it in the hands of the right people. That three-channel sound chip is so tweakable and so deeply controllable at a machine level

that you can make it do almost anything. And, Diamond, are you familiar with a lot of C-6-4 music? Do you enjoy it? It's funny. I'm struggling to think of specific examples, but I definitely, I remember playing a lot of games on the Comptus 64, and I do remember, again, for my, from my perspective, I kept compared to the Atari, of course, it was, you know, light year of difference. But a lot, yeah, a lot of the games definitely had great music.

I know I played a lot of, um, epics had, had summer games on the Comptus 64 that we played a lot of, and they, and every, you know, all the nations in that sort of pseudo-Olympics had a very nice rendition of the, of their national anthem, done in, you know, the sound chip, which I always thought was very nice. And I ended up playing Ultima 4 on the Commodore 64. So that's a game that has some very nice music in it, and it's very atmospheric, and it's just, I think I really enjoy it all the time I have with, you know, the Commer 64, and I think music, there was a total package, really.

Everything about it just felt and sounded great. So even these Spinnaker games, which we'll see, you know, are a little primitive in some aspects, I still think they made the best of what they could do. And, you know, if they're going to play just a little tune of music, you know, a little few seconds of music to signify something important happen, you know, it's nice, a nice few seconds. Yeah, I think you can tell with any developer in the period. If you look at the computers, and again, I'm talking from the American ADM here, right? But if you look at the computers that were popular at that time here, you know, the trash 80 was fading out, even though it was extremely popular for a while. The Apple 2, which persisted in popularity for all through the 80s, thanks to a lot of smart late updates that certain people in that company pushed for. The Atari 800 line, which, God bless them, they built such a great computer and it never had a chance. The destroyed computers like the Calico Adam and the TRS 80, the TimeX and Clear 100. If you ported something to the C-64 and you put a little bit of work in,

that was always the best version on a home computer. Really, the IBM PC was the only thing that could give it a run for its money and then only in terms of the fact the PC had a huge RAM design benefit. Unless you had an EGA adapter, the games are still uglier. It had higher resolution,

but it just wasn't as good to draw in pictures for a while. So those versions of Spinnaker games very often look really nice on the C620. along with other companies games. You mentioned Ultima. Origin, often I think, their C-S64 games were usually the second version. But they didn't always make them as pretty as they could have. They did, however, mind-blowingly.

The thing was still so popular, even by the late 80s, there were enough of them out there, that they've actually bothered to port Ultima 6 to that thing. Do you remember Ultima 6, the open-world one? Yeah, yeah, a little bit. The one where you're on the real-time map walking around in the old. They ported that to the C-64. It is incomprehensible. It's also ridiculously impressive.

I mean, there's so many disc switches that it's practically unplayable. Like, there's only 64K of RAM for a game that's made to run in 640. So, like, there's a lot of swapping. But in terms of what they accomplished, if you have the patience, it's like, well, holy crap. that's Ultima 6 on an 8-bit computer, who knew? All right, well, anyway, that's not a spinnaker game. Even Ultima 4, I remember, had four discs, and I think you had to swap something every time you went from the, you know,

overworld into a town or something. So I can't imagine, yeah, any kind of, any even, an even bigger world with more stuff, geez, I can't even imagine how many disks that would have been. Especially since Ultima 6's, like, selling point on the PC was that it was seamless. Like, it was like, no, nothing ever stops. And then you played on C-64, and you're like, nothing ever stop stopping.

Oh, okay. But still, you know, they took the horses out. That made me sad. But, yeah, and again, we barely talked about games, but it was software makes a computer. And it was a very popular place for ports. You mentioned, you know, Ultima 4, which started on Apple. A lot of early C-64 games were. Apple or Atari ports, or they were arcade conversions, or they were, but gradually as time

passed, things started getting targeted more and more and more on its own, and you got some just really awesome original stuff as well. But it was, first and foremost, I think, it was the closest maybe we got until the early 90s DOS revolution of like a one-platform gaming university. just a place where almost any game you wanted was going to be on the C-64 eventually. So if you had that, you were in pretty great shape. So if you had a DOS PC in 93, any computer game was going to end up there eventually, whether it was on Amiga or Mac or, but in the C-64 kind of took that same role.

So let's talk about some software, specifically Spinnaker software. The company was founded in April, 1982, and a kind of remarkable story. So, you know, the company starts in April. They know they have to get their stuff, you know, in stores by Christmas. So they set themselves a date, a deadline of October 1st. Like, whatever we do, we need to get something done by October 1st so we can ship it out. And they did it. They started a company April and they got games on the shelves, you know, by October, which is, you know, even at the time, that's pretty impressive.

They had to really rush that out there. That's extremely impressive. I think, you know, people forget sometimes that back then development was kind of a wild west. Certain really important, you know, really important pieces of software were sometimes written only in like three months. but the effort it took by 82 where software had become a real business, and the late 70s you get away with that. That was not common in the early 1980s. I don't know how they pulled it off.

I also want to press the button on this fact that the Spinnaker software is here, and they're an educational software company, and that that meant something different than that it does now. I think we're going to put people in the time machine. Yeah. But 1982, learning about computers was a thing unto itself. That is not really a thing that's true anymore the way that we're talking about it here. Now when we talk about learning about computers, we're probably about talking about learning programming languages or learning a computer tool that allows us to do a different job, like a CAD program or something like that.

Just knowing how to operate a computer, sit in front of it and feel comfortable with it was a skill. that most people did not have in 1982. Like, they didn't know where the on button was. They didn't know what to do with it once they flipped the on button. And the idea behind educational software was threefold. First, it was to sell you things, which is what Spinekro was interested in. And selling things to children in particular, or the parents of children, and making them feel good. oh, hey, if you, you know, if you buy this for a kid, then thing number two will happen.

Thing number two is it was designed to, educational software was designed to make children comfortable with computers. There was this idea that the old folks, you know, they were going to come along in the office if they had to, but there was a whole market out there. And not just children, but schools, schools with funding. And so if you could just say to the school, you know, If you buy a computer lab from us, all your children are going to be computer literate. You can tell your parents about it. And the third thing about it, besides just trying to sell products and trying to get children indoctrinated, the third bit about educational software was that it was, in the eyes of some people, actually a benevolent pursuit.

It had a certain virtue to it that we don't have. Now, people were scared of computers. and some people that designed educational software or that taught it, they were kind of evangelists. They were people who loved these weird new machines. And computer teachers, some of them, wanted to help people. They wanted to spread the gospel of fun and creativity and the future in these. And I remember some of these people.

I met some of these people. Yes, some of the computer teachers were just like people that, you know, that were supposed to be teaching math and got stuck with it. But there are also people that really were just passionate about it. My understanding is, like, for a while, Steve Woznik, just taught computer classes because he loved it. And that's an amazing thing. And that doesn't really exist anymore, the demystification of computers. And that's the world that Spinnaker was born into, and it was a huge, huge business.

There was so much money in it. And that's why these little games we're going to talk about, about running around mazes doing alphabets or building faces, would seem like, what do you learn from that? The point was not that you were learning the alphabet, the point was that you were learning the computer. Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, I just wanted to get that in there before we kept going, because I do think that's...

It's a very important perspective to sort of remind everyone about this. You know, I think that, I mean, computers are, you know, obviously computers are in a very different place in our lives today than they were 40 years ago, but I think it's hard, I think it's hard for people to even recognize how alien it was and how quickly, but how quickly it became, oh, this is important. Like, it went from, what the hell is this thing to, oh, my God, we need this thing.

And we need the children to know what this thing is because it's going to define their future. You know, I just, it was just expected, you know, of all of us that we need to learn. And I think that's why, you know, to this day, I'm not going to set any land speed records, but I'm a pretty good typist because, you know, in elementary school, they made us practice typing. And I look at my children right now, and, you know, they're growing up in a very digital, you know, digital future, but they're not great typers, you know, they're used to, they're probably always on touchscreens versus me, but it's like, I'm probably, you know, let's, I'm going to flex a little bit because everyone else in the house sleeping. I'm probably the best typer in this entire household.

I'm going to call it. You know, okay, so I'm impressed. I'm impressed. I stand impressed by you. This seems a good time for confession. So computers and computer literacy in school are the reason that I'm a bad typist to this day. I'm a professional writer. I'm a terrible typist.

But it's about school and computers. We had typing classes in my middle school, but they insisted on us learning on typewriters, which I thought was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard. I'd had a computer at home since I was five. And I was like, what is this? But, but, but, that typing test, because the teacher didn't want to watch over your shoulder, was on an Apple 2, and it was automated. So you practice on the typewriter, and you do your heart.

homework every day in the typewriter, then you had to walk over to the Apple II and do the speed test. So because I'm fundamentally lazy and also because computers are interesting and fun, it was an Apple II and the speed test programs they had gotten from somewhere was written in Apple Basic. Well, here's the fun thing about Apple Basic. If you've got an Apple, and you know what you're doing, it's not hard to look at Apple Basic code for a program that's running. So you can do the typing test. Or you can hack the typing test so that you always pass. And I thought the Kobayashi and Maru solution there was the more elegant. So I'm going to confess to that after all these years later.

I never learned to type, but I did learn a little bit of AppleSoft Basic. So there we go. There's my confession. Oh, my God. Did you just roll in there with an apple in your mouth, too? Like, yep, yep, pass test. That's right. Just like James Kirk just kind of pop in. No, I'm not that cool. But that's my, that's my Kobayashi-Maru moment. That's so funny. But I never did learn to type. Yeah. You never face death. You never face the typing program. Never face the typing program.

I'm going to be able to be. All right, at least in by, according to an InfoWorld cover story in 1984, they believed Spinnaker Software was the number one home educational software company, which placed it as the 16th largest computer software company, like, of all companies? No, it's like, okay, granted, there weren't that many computer software companies in the early 80s because it was the early 80s, but still, the idea that this tiny little outfit, you know, somewhere in suburban Massachusetts would be like top 20 of all software companies. that's pretty kind of hard to wrap your head around, you know? Yeah, I had no idea. I had no idea before you looked this up that this was true. I was shocked. Yeah.

So some of the key people I want to just name Raptop Bat, so we got Chairman Bill Bowman. Speaking of mind-blowing numbers, so in this 1984 corporate sort of, you know, behind-the-scenes story, he has seven kids. But in a recent interview, he said he has nine kids. So it's like, can you imagine, you know, two parents, nine kids, that's a soccer team. You, come on. Well, okay, Bill, Bill Bowman's got game. Yes. Bill Bowman has game.

Yeah, he's got, that's like, man, D&D at his house, no one even ever going to turn. Wow, that is amazing. That is a family right there. It had practical applications for him because, you know, guess what? If you're an educational company, educational software company, what happened was every Friday, his wife would bring the kids to the office, and they would sort of have an office party with food and snacks and drinks. and the kids would go to town on these computers. So here were all these adults who had been working very hard to get computers to Freddie, but here are actual children, and they got to watch the kids mess around with the computers,

and they would talk them, okay, wow, look at how the kid does this. Oh, look, the kid loves to press this key a lot. We better make sure that key doesn't, you know, turn the computer off because so. Oh, that's so great. They had this sort of free focus testing, basically, in the Bowman family. And let's be honest, his kids ran the gamut from, you know, baby to, to, you know, middle school at that point. So, like, he had this, he had this small army.

It was just, you know, what an amazing resource to have if you're a small company. Man, and it's been a long time now. So, like, how many children have they had? How many Bowmans are running around now? Like, if they each had nine, there'd be 81 of them plus Bill. Oh, gosh. It's like a battalion. It's amazing.

I hope they all meet up somewhere and they all have just the best, the best barbecues. It's a Bowman, a Bowman barbecue somewhere. I don't know. They must, in the Javitt Center. They fill the entire convention center. Bowman Khan. And they're all playing, they're all playing Spinnaker games together. Yeah, I was talking with a connect developer, like, or a former connect developer the other day. And they're talking about how the greatest joy of working on connect games was bringing all the staff's kids into the office. Because, like, they'd be working on their connect game. And, you know, it was what it was. And then, you know, there'd be 20 kids screaming and running and giggling. and flipping on the carpet for six hours with endless kid energy.

And they're like, oh, okay, we did good work. You know, and I thought that was, that made me really happy. That's just a little anecdote. So thinking about kids' playtesting games, I imagine how wonderful it was just to be there and to be a part of the creation process as a child. Oh, I'm so jealous. Now, I also wanted to highlight two people who, I would say,

didn't necessarily have notable roles at Spinnaker, but they went on to make very famous things after they left Spinnaker. and one of them is very relative to a recent episode of Retronauts, at least recent end of this recording. So Seth Godin was part of the Spinnaker team. He left in 86 to start his own business. Seth Godin also enjoyed writing. He wrote a series of books.

And Seth Godin is the man who created the Worlds of Power series of video game novelizations that Nadi Oxford just had a whole Retronauts episode about. That was the same guy. That guy used to be at Spinnaker, and then he became Worlds of Power guy. Like that's... Is he the immortal FX-9? That's him. That's that goal.

Yeah. That's awesome. Oh, my goodness. I spent way too much time reading that stupid Ninja guide novel over and over. And Chris Deering, Chris Deering was a part of the Spinnaker. He left to join Columbia Pictures. So then in the late 80s, this was a big deal at the time. Sony bought Columbia Pictures.

This was, you know, right in the time when everyone was scared that the Japanese were going to take over the United States. So it was a really big. big deal. But they bought Columbia, so he got to work for Sony. So a couple of years later, he ends up becoming the president of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. And he was there for about a decade, 95 to 2005. After Sony, he joined codemasters. And all our European listers know codemasters. And I think some of our American listers do too. So here are two guys who went on to have very long, very sizable game-related careers. And they were probably just stuffing envelopes or, you know, working on circuit boards somewhere in Spinnaker.

Okay. I love this. I had no idea. Chris Deering was there either. This pleases me immensely. I also love that you just kind of slipped in back when America thought Japan was going to take over. You talk about like, speaking of retronauts. I mean, man, we should just do a whole episode on the coming war with Japan. Do you remember that? That stupid book? Oh, gosh. You're recording from Japan right now, right, David? Yes, I am. And I guess, I don't know, me being here, is that a sign that we won or that they lost because I came over here? I definitely think Japan won because they have health care. I think that that's the, that's the answer. Japan wins because health care. But that's my take. It's certainly affordable. And Mario. I wish it was free, but it's affordable. I'll take affordable over, you know, unaffordable. Yeah, yeah. It's like, I can go to the doctor and not do that. And they have Mario. And, I mean, that's a lot. I mean, I don't know, what's the thing from Ricky Bobby? What does America have? Democracy, Existentialism. No, no, no, wait, that's France. All right, you know what, this is a rant. Let's move on, Doug West Minnaker. Sorry. You stump me there. I was like, Ricky, oh, that movie, that movie. I didn't know the quote. I forgot the quote. It's okay. We'll work in some more, you know, comedy movie quotes later in this episode. So let's talk about some. Spinnaker also, as far as their approach, because, you know, I think for most people, when they think of computer programs in stores, you probably think of cardboard boxes. You know, if you're from a certain area, you think of, like, crazy big boxes or weird shaped, like, you know, rhomboid boxes. But Spinnaker's approach was, let's, I think they took probably, you know, I don't know if this is contemporary or not, whenever you think of, like children's VHS tapes, that's what Spinnaker games looked like. They had basically, you know, I think what we'd call a clamshell today. these really big, bulky, brightly colored.

I remember them being very bright white, but they had, like, you know, colors painted on them. And they had, you know, very, very friendly cartoon art with some, you know, lovely cartoon caricatures on there. And it was just, it was very appealing and very eye-catching. And Bowman admitted interview, it wasn't very environmental friendly. So I think if you bought those packages in probably 82, 83, they're probably still in great shape unless you, you know,

parked your car on them. because there's... Oh, yeah. I remember them, and they were... Like, if you built a house out of them then, it's still standing. They were sturdy. They were horribly, horribly environmentally and friendly, but you were correct. Like, I remember them very well.

They stood out. At a time when packaging for software was still very much in evolving science, they nailed it. Those Spinnaker Software Games, they had a great logo. They had that white packaging, but they also had these wonderful... use of rich hues, especially oranges in those early packages and stripes, and they just kind of drew you in. Kind of like

it's sort of the same appeal as an Activision Box on the 2600. Oh, yeah. But more like, hey, that's a game and this is something like, it made a statement that's like, this is a little more serious, but also friendly,

approachable. And it was really well designed. That was whoever did their, their marketing for their boxes, whoever designed those was really, really on top of it. And that was their, that was really in their early days, I think very, very much a part

of their success. You saw that and you wanted to pick it up and at least flip it over to the back and look at it. Absolutely. And, you know, speaking of, you know, marketing and branding, that sort of became the Spinnaker ethos, because what Bowman, Bowman's opinion was, as long as we get our stuff into stores, like, that's, that's the most important thing. So what they just started doing is they started creating new brands. So much like, you know, at the end of the 80s, if you think about Konami and all,

ultra games to get more games on the shelf. That's what Spinnaker was doing in the early 80s. One of the quotes from Bobin was he wanted to become the general motors of software. So they were putting games out in all sorts of packages. They had Spinnaker brand. They got a license from Fisher Price so they could make Fisher Price video games. There was Nova brand, which was science. There was Trillium, which was science fiction adventure games.

There was Wyndham Classics, which is what we're going to talk about a little later. There were Better Living, which is like home management, like economical software stuff. Awesome. So one company kind of putting out all these games in, you know, different facets. So in theory, you can have a whole shelf of all the different kind of software, different genres, but it's all Spinnaker. Yeah, until... And you don't know until you open it up. So I think, okay, so Shadowkeep, just absolute, like, really, really knock out of the part game by Trillium.

I had no idea until researching this podcast that Trillium was part of Spinnaker. Like, that was just, they were that separate, like, in terms of the presentation. Trillium's box couldn't look any more box art couldn't look any farther from Spinnaker. It's like an entirely different brand, and yet it worked. It's still great design. So that's awesome. And well done General Motors. I mean, they seem to have succeeded for a while there.

So let's start talking about the software in Spinnaker Software. Some of these early games, because it sounds like you and I both have memories of different Spinnaker software games. So I wanted to highlight, so one of their first games, like, period, because it came out in 80, too. So this was one of their initial launch software. There were two games under the brand Snooper Troops. I wrote Super Troopers instantly, but no, it's Snooper Troops. And these were sort of investigation mystery games where you start up with a crime and you have to solve this crime. And these, I've got to say, these games really went for it. They give you a manual. They give you a list of suspects. You're supposed to just do all the legwork and figure

all this stuff out and then write it down in your book. You're supposed to figure out who these people are, where do they live? When are they home? When are they not home? Because the game runs on the sort of like a little in-game little cycle of like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. So if you go to someone's house, they're not there, you can't question them. However,

you might be able to sneak into their house and look around their house without them knowing, which is good for you if you're trying to find out, you know, who stole the dolphin or whatever. And these games, if you watch them now, you know, you can look at some YouTube videos. It's pretty amazing how much the game expects you to handle like you you need to drive around the neighborhood you need to find people's

houses you need to find out there you know what street they're on you need to sneak into the house if you get caught in their house you can get kicked out and you know there's a time limit to house how long you how many days you have to solve the crime uh you know for me as a kid this was way too hard for me as an adult I think it's way too hard I don't know where the sweet I don't know where the sweet spots is honestly I was baffled trying to trying to make sense this to you know to prep for this podcast I was like what am I supposed to do? What's going on here? A stolen dolphin, I started about Ace Ventura again.

Like, what's going on here? L.A. Noir has nothing on Snooper Troops. But apparently these games were huge hits. Like, this is, you know, these were the early, early Spinnaker games, and they must have done great. Because, I mean, they made two of them. That alone is the sign that, you know, they must have done, you know, gangbusters. Well, it was still a pretty novel concept. It was that, you know, spraying at the wall, you know, early 80s, 81, 82, 83.

on home computers are such a weird time for games. It's really when video games transitioned from what we've almost forgotten, the beyond super primitive world of just trying to find a way to make anything entertaining happen on a screen, mostly text, to actually having interactive interfaces on home computers. Yes, our Atari's were doing it, but our home computers were just now catching up. We're still in 82. You know, I think load runners not till like the next year, right? I think 83.

Yeah. So Snooper Troops was among, just, just its scope alone, I think was impressive then. I think that's a lot of it. It's just like, whoa, this isn't Ultima, but it's Ultima for finding dolphins. And that was a pretty neat idea at the time, even if it's absolutely impossible. That's where I think a lot of the appeal came from was that these games largely are very, very aspirational. That seems to be kind of a kind of a hallmark of the stuff Spinnaker picked up. They really

liked to buy software or license software that tried really hard. So what's there some spinnish software that you recall from this era? Okay, well a really simple spinnaker game that I – the first Spinnaker game I ever owned was Alphabet Zoo. Okay. And that was, of all things, that was on my Calico Adam originally. That was the first Spinnaker I had. I had the – that's where I my first spinach or clam shell.

And at the time, that was appropriate because I was very small when I got it. I got my Apple one, or probably my Adam, when I was five. And did I say Apple II or my Adam? Anyway, I got it on my Adam. An Alphabet Zoo was a very simple maze game with an impressive feature. You were a little guy running around a maze, and the maze was full of letters, kind of Pac-Man style. Instead of dot, you had letters you could pick up. And in the center of the screen, a very large for the time, you know, now it's probably like a 64 by 64 image.

But a 64 by 64-ish color image would draw slowly in the center of the screen. You actually see it draw color by color, probably because the processor couldn't handle laying out something like a bitmap that quickly. And you would get this bright picture of, you know, a lion or a sailboat. Spinnaker, as it were, you know, or something like that. And then you'd have to run around within a time limit and spell the word. Oh, yeah. And it wasn't bad for really early edutainment. And, yeah, she got bored with it after a while, but it was always cool to see what the next picture was going to be.

Because they were very striking and colorful. And very few games at the time on home computers had graphics that striking and multicolored. So it was really good to keep a kid's eyes. It wasn't going to keep them playing for too long, but I really did play a lot of it when I was younger. It probably taught me to spell a few words, too. Of course, I think one of Spinnaker's most iconic games is when I played in school, and that was Facemaker, which was ported to everything under the sun.

Facemaker is the stupidest fucking game. It is not really a game. It's just Mr. Potato Head. on a computer. This is one of those programs that could only be popular at the dawn of computing. There are some very craftily driven.

The art is good, especially on the more powerful platforms. But there's facial shapes and facial like features and you just make faces from this huge combination of eyes and noses and mouths and other things.

You're just like trying to make different faces, either under instruction or in a kind of a creative mode. And that's the game. Wow. And I don't know why, but every school I've ever been to had a damn copy of Facemaker laying around. I don't know if they gave them away or if it was just that popular for a while.

I think it saw in one old magazine and then it sold really well. But again, this is one of those like, what's the point? What is the kid learning for making faces? The kid is learning computer. That's what they're learning for making faces. Shut up and let the kid make faces. That's the idea. And facemaker.

And then Spinnaker wasn't the first company to publish this, but it's an extremely important game, and they did publish it on and off through the course of their history, and that's Sargon 2, which is really the first popular, strong chess engine, strong relative, compared to the engines that came only a couple years later, no. But there was microchests, which was very early and incredibly, incredibly brilliant because it played chess, something resembling competently. And then there was Sargon, which came along and stomped it and also beat, like, mainframe computers at competitions. And people are like, wow, that's a really good chess engine. How did you teach the computer to think so good? Sargon 2 came along in the early 7, or probably the late 70s. Sargon 2 very quickly followed. It would just fix some bugs and tighten it up a little bit.

But like on an Apple 2, for 24K, or on a trash 80, at 16K, you had a chess engine that could play a game against you that would at least give the idea that you were playing against a halfway competent opponent. And Sargon 3, likewise. These became very important in, you know, the thing about chess and computers is that they have an intrinsic. relationship to AI and they have since the early in the same lab at at MIT the same guys that were working on AI were also the folks that were designing chess programs because they were mad that people said nobody could beat chess programs or that no chess programs couldn't beat people pardon me so it's a really important program Sargon 2 and also at the time it added a certain

adult repute to computers that that might not otherwise have exist chess was a game that people thought of as something smart people play. Chess problems were in the newspaper at this point. Oh, yeah. Remember that. Right. Yeah, I remember that? Chess had a different place in our society than it does now.

And so Sargonne was really more important, I think, than we give it credit for now. So that's, that's a bit. Those are the ones that I have the clearest memories of playing when I was younger. There's other stuff, you know, coming along later. I mentioned Shadowkeep earlier by Trillium. And, I mean, that's just mind-blowing. This is not Shadow Gate. This is Shadow Keep.

Although, if you look at the screenshots for the two, you're not going to be, I'm not going to think wrongly of you for confusing them. But it's a very different, this Shadow Keep is much more of a kind of a full role-playing game. And interestingly, got turned into a novel eventually, which now has kind of become a little thing that happens with video games every now and then. But back then, not so common. So why don't we move on to the main event, if it were,

the game called Below the Root, which came out in 1984. And this game was based on, well, it's The title comes from a novel in 1975, but the game itself is actually a sequel to this trilogy of three books, which are all called the Green Sky Trilogy, because that's where the game takes, that's where this whole world takes place. It's on a planet called Green Sky. So it's a Green Sky trilogy. Also most unusual in this situation is that the original author of these books, Zilpha Keity Snyder, Keith Lee Snyder, excuse me, she was approached by the developer. because apparently they just lived in the same general region. And he showed her what he could do with the computer, and she was very interested in this. So she was part of the development process. She wrote stuff.

She helped design the map for this game. So they not only went back and did this almost 10-year-old novel at this point, they had the author there, and they were working with the author to make this stuff. So a lot of people who are big fans of this series, and including the author, they consider this video game. game adaptation to be sort of like a canon sequel or epilogue, if you will, to these novels that, you know, meant a lot to them as, as children. So I feel that's, that's a really unusual situation. Like, the only other situation I can think of is like, when, uh, when those guys

decided to make, I have, I have no mouth and cannot scream and they actually got to work with Harrel Nelson making his short story into the game and he was there and then he got to like voice the computer. Like, most people adapt something. They just adapt it and the author is, you know, If they're lucky, they get to, you know, see the finished product before it's done. Like, this is actually working closely with the author to make everything connected. I think that's very admirable. Yeah. Oh, you just touched my heart.

First off, okay, this game, yeah, I have a copy of, I have no mouth that on my screen that belonged to Harlan Ellison on my shelf. The game, the game version that belonged to him, which just kills me. But, yeah, it's, I love with his voice there. Just just, uh, okay, but yeah, below the root, holy crap, uh, after, after playing this, I see why it's canon. Like, there is, you can, you know, you play a video game and you're just like, sometimes you're like,

well, this was a project. And then every now when you play the video game, you're like, oh my God, somebody loved this. Somebody loved this to death. And this game screams, with that. It is, rarely do I play an early video game

and especially an early PC game that just dances with this kind of obvious affection for the source material. I was blown away by below the root. So what you said about it being considered canonical to the story seems appropriate.

I cannot pretend to be a fan of the Green Sky trilogy. I can absolutely state that I am like floored by below the route in its 1984 context. And it's like, wow, no wonder

people thought this was incredible when they played it. It's a hell of a game in a lot of ways way ahead of its time. I completely agree. I also want to credit, so the developing and programming is credit to a man named Dale Disheroon,

but he's also credited in other things as Dessaron. I'm not going to have the spelling them out. You can look this up later. Apparently, he literally just changed his name one point because his wife thought his name sounded too harsh, so he just changed his name. I mean, okay, if that's satisfying to you, go ahead. And the artwork was credited to a Bill Gritzinger.

There's an O-E in there, so I don't know how to pronounce that. But Dale had a lot of computer stuff. You know, he worked in a lot of the computer stuff and unfortunately passed away in 2008. The original author also was passed away, but I think that was more just, you know, old age. I don't know what happened to Bill, because Bill doesn't seem to have any credits after 1989. So I don't know if anyone who made this game is actively still hard. around. But I think if anyone, it might be Bill. But I couldn't find much appreciation about him online, so I'm not sure. And thus begins the search for Bill. But in any case, this was sold

under the Wyndham Classic line because of the novel tie-in, I guess. And what's interesting is, so this game essentially is an open-world adventure game in that you, this whole story takes place in this basically a giant tree. It's like this massive tree world. And And someone did the math here. Hang on, I've written down. The game world consists of 512 screens at 32 by 16 Matrix. Yeah. That is, I mean, how big is the original Zelda? Oh, it's much, much bigger than Zelda.

Yeah, Zelda was like 16, 16, right? I think. Yeah. It's, I think Zelda's total is 250 scripts total, or pardon me, 250 screens, including the dungeon, I think. Like, if you put all the dungeon tiles and the overworld together, I think it's 256 screens, which is half the size of this. Wow. That's just, I can't even, I can't even imagine a world that big at that time. Yeah, I think it's, I think the overall is 16 by 8, and I think the underworld is something

similar. So it's something like that. It's been a while. But yeah, it's, it's absolutely mind-blowing. It's unfathomably huge. Please continue. I'm sorry. I just got excited.

No, it's fine. So the gimmick is you get to choose from five different characters. So the goal of the game doesn't change, and indeed the win conditions don't really change either. You still have to do the same stuff and get the same places. So really, what it comes down to is how hard or easy do you want this to be? Because all the characters have different stats, and they also have different homes, which, you know, I'm sure it's, I'm sure it makes sense in the sense of the novel. Like, it's a fiction, it's a fantasy world. But, you know, looking back on this game from the modern day, it's a little silly how everything has to have its own special name.

Like, you don't have a, your starting place is your home, but it's also called your nid place. And I'm just like, you just call it your home. It's okay. Just call it a home. I don't, I don't know what a nid is, team. Please. Yeah. Okay, so we'll just call it a game. At home, it's your house. Yes. But anyway, each character has their own nid place starting point, and they all start in different places on the map. They'll have different stats. So basically the two characters, the character of two different kinds of stats. There's a stamina, which is pretty much we expect, you know, more stamina means you can jump farther, you can carry more stuff. If you, you don't need to eat as much because you get more energy from food, resting, you know, you have. have to rest as often because you can just do more, whereas spirit, uh, spirit limit is basically like MP because you cast all these spells. Um, right. But what's really interesting about below the route in general is that whatever you're doing here, you're not really fighting anything. No. You know what I mean? This is all, this is all in the name of like exploration and investigation and

communication. You don't get any weapons. There's no fighting. There's only a few things that can hurt you, and it's more just like spiders and snakes. It's like, so don't touch them, you know? Instead of, right, it's like, just don't touch them. And they won't hurt you. Yeah, exactly. Stay away from those. And if they do, like, you're just going to wake up at home anyway at a respawn point.

You know, it's not particularly, like, punishing for you in general if you screw up. And you're doing all this with a joystick, you know, that's amazing. That's one of the things that blew my mind about the game is that you can control this entire thing, despite the fact that it's menu driven. You walk left to right with a joystick, you jump with a joystick, and you can press a button, bring up a menu, and start moving around, and you have like 25 commands. It's like somebody invented Maniac Mansion three years earlier, but also gave it kind of this, like, it reminds me a lot of early, like, flip screen adventures like Conan on home computers, gave it like that kind of control scheme, but also like menu-driven adventure game stuff. It gets selectable characters. I really do want to grab Ron Gilbert somebody just be like,

how much did you play this game? Like five different characters, point and click menus, you know, very few fail states. Like, it reminds me of Maniac Mansion in a whole lot of ways, but three years earlier. And it is definitely more obdurate. It's not as focused as Mennick Mansion. It's not as funny.

But this is a game that a child could play. a kid really could play this game and at least understand you know they didn't have to type in anything complicated they could just move around and bring up a menu thing and as long as they have basic reading comprehension they have some idea what's going on you know it's also interesting to me is that you can use the keyboard to control the game and because again because it's so early in the life of computer games there are two different control schemes depending if you're left-handed or right-handed Like, which four keys do you want to press in lieu of the joystick?

And it's like, basically, which side of the keyboard do you want to use because, you know, what's your dominant hand? And I just, I find something so cute about that. It's like, oh, it's adorable. It's really thoughtful, too. I mean, it's actually kind of, I mean, what if we didn't default into the WASD universe, right? You know, we've gotten so used to things being standardized like that. I was watching Conan O'Brien play a game the other day and we was trying to understand WASD. And yes, he's a comedian.

He's making jokes. but he's like, why is W up? Why is U not up? You know, why is up arrow not up? No, it's W. Why is S back? And we have reasons for this now, but there was a time before we codified all the stuff that I just,

the fact that there's switchable hand controls, it's so thoughtful. It's an accessibility feature for God's sake. Again, in a 1984 game, it's incredible. So, yeah, basically, as you said, there's really no way to lose. The only thing that comes close is that the game sort of has a timer, a sort of timer, sort of timer, and, like, is a day counter that goes by? Yeah.

And if you get hurt, or if you just, you can also opt at any time to go back to your home. Like, if you're stuck somewhere, you can just go, you basically click Renew. And instead of going to Carousel, you just go directly back to your home. But it costs you one day. And apparently the game ends if you don't complete the quest

within 50 in-game days. But I don't know, according to, you know, all the stuff I've looked at, I don't think it, it would take you a long time and a lot of restarts to lose 50 games, 50 days in this game. I don't think a lot of players are going to take that long. Maybe you just really, really like walking into water over and over again. And again, kids, you know, 50 days is pretty forgiving.

But that's a very, I don't know why early developers were so darn drawn to this. I have a theory. A lot of early video games love time limits or turn limits. everything from this to Prince of Persia. Heck, even the first fallout had a time limit. And I think this is this thing that got into our heads all the way back from our arcade heritage. When video games were, you know, Pong was over, you know, very quickly when you, you know, you had two players playing, but you wanted to switch it out. So a game couldn't last too long if you wanted to keep getting quarters.

When Atari ported things home to the 2,600, most of the early games were competitive, and what decided the winner was not the highest, or was not who hit a high score first. It was two minutes and, I think, what, 44 seconds that so many of those first Atari games, like, timed out on. You're playing, you're playing video Olympics, you're playing combat, and the timer runs out, and whoever's highest at that point, that's who wins, and that made its way into games. And I think people just got this idea that games and racing games had time limits, and it just got built into people's minds that you had to have that. I can't prove that, but I think this is an example of like just early video game thinking

being a little flawed that you've always got to have an end some way to wrap it up besides just wandering around until you win. Otherwise, it's not challenging. But whatever, it's a small complaint on a vast game. And something this big, just wandering around and exploring is half the joy of it. You know, I really do wish I would have died playing this in 84. This is the most jarrid-ass video game. Like, and I was, here's the thing is, you know, I haven't really aged much in 40 years

except for, you know, my rotting bones, but interest in emotionally and largely there with the five-year-old, and there's a lot of childhood joy to this. I talked earlier about the love in it, and I don't think that's hyperbole. You can really just feel a lot of passion in the software and a sense of really wanted to take a kid and go, and I hate when people hold kids in contempt. And one of the things I love about good kid fiction, and yeah, the Goonies has plenty of problems, but it's by and large, one of the things I love about it is it doesn't talk down to children. It's just like, no, this is just who you are, man. Go to your thing. Be you.

It doesn't talk down to the... And that makes the movie feel sincere and childlike. This game doesn't talk down to the kids who are supposed to be playing it at all. It's like, kids, you love books. You want to get lost on a storybook Wonderland? You're the kind of kid that bought this game. You're the kind of kid that sits and reads the book of three in class instead of paying attention to mass. right? Okay. Get in here and get sucked into a giant world for a while. Avoid those snakes and spiders. Go solve the mystery. And I love that about it. It's really pretty touching.

So we should probably try to explain the gameplay as best we can. As you said, you're walking around this area with the joystick or keyboard and you basically have one button opens a menu. It can bring up all, you have a lot of options. in the menu. But basically what you're doing is you're walking around, you're looking for stuff. If you meet people, you can talk to them. But what's interesting is, and this is part where the spirit, like magic stuff comes in, one of the first spells you learn, or most people learn, is this pen spell where you basically read

people's minds. And that, to me, is fascinating because you can talk to people and they'll tell you something, but maybe you read their mind and they'll tell you something else. I think that's a really clever thing to put in a video game. Yeah, totally, especially, again, for a child who always knows that their parents are lying to them. Like, you know, the child is the audience.

So, like, children are, they can be gullible, but they can also be brightly suspicious. And I love the idea of giving them that power to see what's, you know, when you're a child, you never really know what's going on. Giving a child the power, what a, to know what's actually happening, what someone's actually thinking. What a wish fulfillment. Also, just while we're talking about walking around, I don't know, maybe we described it before, maybe we didn't. think like it's like think like

Faxanadu that's like the perspective it's a side scrolling flip screen I think Vuxander

XXX3 scrolls but this is a side scrolling flip screen so if you've got it in your head that it's like

first person or something you all know it's you're walking right and left you're jumping you're crouching

you're crawling under things you're going up and down ladders etc so and then you can just

bring up a menu that pops up and takes up part of the screen whenever you want to do something besides move

and I also I was impressed at the color work. You know, the game can only have so many colors on screen it once. So they really invested a lot of their energy into making the tree very big and very colorful, and parts of the tree have different colors.

So you as a character are basically one, it's almost like a spectrum. You're basically like just one solid, like white little figure. And some people you meet are maybe different colors, but it's basically like the people or animals you meet are basically one solid color, and they use the rest

of that energy to fill the screen with lots of other things to look at and leaves and branches. And I think it's, I think it looks really good. It's interesting. So this is, yeah, this is one of the hardest ones for me. So like below the route, to me, it looks like it was probably originally designed, I can't prove this. I think it was probably originally designed for the C-64 palette, or not I mean the Apple II palette, and then ported, because it is very fluid, but it's not as bright as soon 64 games can be, but it's really effective. You can tell where and what everything is, and it all moves well. C-64 games can be just mind-blazingly, but is it beautiful, like almost like

PC engine level graphics. This one obviously looks more like an early computer game. But what the stills don't get you is that everything's moving really, really smoothly. And I'm guessing that they started with the baseline Apple 2 that only has six colors. And then we're like, That's probably why you've got a single colored sprite for your main character, for example. Because the C64 could absolutely do multicolored sprites. And they didn't bother to do that because that would have required redrawing the entire game to have more depth. And they're like, no, let's not do that. Let's just add some more colors than the C64 can pull off.

But it does look very nice. And I said the texturing on the tree looks great. And some of the animals moving around, they all look really good. But it's a neat game, especially for 84. I think that's another part that's really striking. I keep forgetting how early this is. And one thing we absolutely didn't mention as far as moving around the game goes, if as long as you pick up a little item, you can basically glide?

Breath of the Wild, hello. Nintendo stole this. Look at this. Yeah. Yeah, they jump off a cliff and they're just like, whoof, off you go. It's great. And you're gliding kind of blind between screens, but since there's not a lot of danger, you don't feel bad in experimenting, and you can find all kinds of things.

And usually it's pretty good at being like, you know, here's a limb you might want to jump off, right? And, oh, it's really great. Yeah, and there's also items you can pick up. There's ropes you can pick up, which will stretch across certain gaps. There are a certain, there's a spell you learn later on that makes the tree branches grow that can sort of build a bridge to go somewhere you couldn't get before. Or what I think is kind of the most interesting spell, which you absolutely need to beat the game, is what they call Kinnaport. And Kinnaport, it starts off where you can basically move anything on the screen,

like any object, anywhere else. So if you see something behind a locked door, you can just teleport it right in front of you and pick it up. But eventually you just teleport yourself. And that's what you need to beat the game, because you meet someone and they're out of reach, and you have to teleport yourself up to get to them, which I thought was just funny as a way, that's how you beat the game is,

well, you just learn to teleport, and then that's how you cross all your obstacles. teleport things. Oh, I mean, think about, yeah, how great that would be in real life. Can you think of all the obstacles that would be solved by teleporting? Like, I want that. My lack of money could be solved by teleporting. I could teleport to places where there were money and then take it and then out of them.

I think that's a good plan. So the spells are basically, as you play the game and you get more spirit, you learn, you basically have access to more spells. And what else the thing is interesting is that, you know, we talked about spiders and snakes being hazardous. There are also animals that are just sort of benevolent, just sort of hanging out. and what's cute is you have to sort of walk up to them and pence with the animals and then you read the animal's mind and that gets you more spirit energy

and it's like a little music plays and it also describes it's kind of a very counselor-troy feeling like when you read someone's mind you see their emotional state so when you read an animal's mind you get like their emotional state too which it's like oh this monkey is happy

it's sweet Diamond I want a sequel to this game. I want monkey manager 2004, and I want it now. Okay? I want a game where I can read monkey minds. That's what, there's not enough games like that. Gosh, it's, I know we're talking it up, but folks, you really ought to check this out. It is worth your time.

It's just utterly charming. And I like the fact that you were talking about the spells earlier. How rare is it for a game? You know, adventure games kind of default to items. The idea that spells wouldn't be used for violence, but that these wonderful puzzle-solving tools, the fact that you can solve mysteries by looking to see people's truths and tensions.

And the fact that the game is ultimately largely, I mean, what you're doing is connecting. That's a big part of the game. The game is largely about connections. It's mostly about developing benevolent relationships with the people and animals and places in your environment. It's a non-violent, non-boring game. that might actually teach you something

that certainly doesn't feel like it's trying to. Again, pretty rare. I mean, I love the Oregon Trail, but I have murdered some buffalo and I killed my best friends. That game is so violent. And this one's not. And good job, good job folks

who did this for Spinnaker. It is a standout. I should also mention the fact that, so you have these five characters choose from, and because you're all living in this giant tree, there's actually different species who live in the tree. They're all, they all look like people, but some of them are different species. and what I think is interesting

that depending which character you're playing, some people may be nicer to you or less nice to you, depending if you are the same speech as them or, you know, so there's already some sort of like communication barriers at work. Also, depending on what race you are, you can maybe eat different food, which I think is interesting.

Some people are just hostile to you. At one point, you can get, you should get kidnapped if you're not careful. If you trust someone and you shouldn't, they can kidnap you and lock you somewhere, which is, I guess you have to just, you know, renew yourself to get back to your house, but that could cost you time, that could cost you progress. Plus, getting kidnapped is scary. Yeah, it's just another, just one more thing that's sort of like, wow, there's so much happening. There's just so

much happening here. And it really, I can see why, even though this is a game that you and I didn't know a lot about until we decided to do this episode, and a lot of people I approached to me on the episode, like, oh, I, you know, I love Commodore, I don't know this game, but if you go online, you look at the videos people playing this game, the people who know this game, they love it. They are through the moon when they watch people play it. And also, I should also add, if you know what to do, this is not a long game at all, you know?

I think the long plays on YouTube I saw were like 30 minutes. So if you know all the steps, I mean, it's literally a game for kids, you just finish it. But I think it's really telling how this is the kind of game where you could very easily spend hours exploring the giant tree and figuring out all the stuff you could be doing in the giant tree. But once you know what to do and you pick the right character and you know what's expected of you, it's not challenging.

It's just a matter of learning what to do. And I think that's really impressive, especially because it's not about, it's not about enemies. It's not about, it's also about, we shall stress, you don't take stuff. People give you things and you give stuff to people. You can't just take stuff. Yeah. Like, if someone has something for you to take, you have to basically get their permission first.

Otherwise, I don't think you're allowed to take it. So you can't hurt people. You can't steal things. It's just, it's so wild how many steps, how many sort of layers they put on this game to sort of make it, you know, quote unquote, kid friendly, but in a nice way. It's just, it's been very impressive looking at all the work that went into this game and what they came up with.

I'm really impressed by it. Yeah, this reminds me, honestly, of some of the best of modern adventure gaming. It's got, I don't know, I don't want to draw too many comparisons, but you can see a little bit of the early DNA of something like Spirit Fair in this, I think, not the boat management sections, but the interface, the side-scrolling,

emotion-based, quest-based, how do we make the people around us feel good, how do we interact benevolently with our environment kind of vibes or here, for example. And, all again, as you pointed out, that sense of beauty, that the game's not especially like layered in its color, but it makes good use of it in the drawing. It's just a really, it's just a nice game. Yeah. And I wonder, you know, I'm not familiar with the books in particular, but I just wonder what, you know, the books were all written in like in the mid-70s. So wonder what, if the author really had some ideas where she just, she wanted to go back to that

world. And so when this guy approached her to put it in a game, it's like, oh, yes, I've, I've wanted more character. I wanted to revisit this character after so much time. Because, you know, you meet a lot of people. And, you know, as we, as we sort of joked earlier, this game has a lot of proper nouns, and some of them are a little bit silly. But you also meet, you meet, you meet a lot of people in the game and they tell you, oh, go find this person, go find this person. And it can be a lot for kids. I must imagine that the manual must have a lot of space for people to write down notes. It seems like this is a big note game.

It's certainly a big map-making game because you've got, I mean, the world, like I said, the world is huge and there's no map other than what you make for yourself. Yeah, that was always pretty common then. And again, I think that was considered a feature, not a bug, for a while. Some of that's the D&D influence. People like to make their own maps in early D&D, and a lot of game developers were indented to dragons. Some of that is that that was just, you know,

people taking notes was a part of life then without recording apparatus available. We weren't used to having notes be automated for us, and we didn't have as much access to even things like photocopies to hand something out. Sometimes just to write something down if you're going to remember it. I think we were more used to that then, and therefore that expectation was built in. I also wanted to see one more thing about it, and that's that I played a lot of games based on books and stories. Rarely do they show this level of care. That's another thing about it that I think is important to point out, is that often big games, books based on books and stories are really loving.

I just kind of feel like this one in terms of its feature set, especially for the context of it's not. a cut above. This should have just been a graphical text adventure. This should have been like text on the bottom of the screen and little mystery house drawings on top and you type in some parser stuff and you do a thing and you get an item and you solve a puzzle and somebody said, no, what if we wanted a kid to play it? And then instead of just going the shortest route, instead of dumbing down the text adventure, they made something infinitely more complex and infinitely more interesting. So before we wrap up here, I just want to point out, so Spinnaker soft, what happened to Spinnaker Software, I should say. So it's very ironic to me.

I learned a lot about Spinnaker from a 1984 cover story. InfoWorld magazine, and one of the quotes in that magazine was saying, oh, Spinnaker may eventually sell out to a larger company. Right after the profile of Spinnaker, they have a story on the learning company, and that's exactly what happened. The learning company bought Spinnaker in 1994 and absorbed them into itself. So, you know, 10 years before that happened, just empty speculation by a writer predicted the future.

There we are. They're like, what may happen there? and they were eaten by a larger educational software company. And a lot of that was going on around that time. There was consolidation was at work. And, yeah, and there went Spinnaker. We barely knew ye. But, yeah, I think this game, you know, for those who knew it, I feel like I understand the passion.

And for those who have never seen it before, I invite you to go find it. Obviously, Spinnaker is defunct. No one is selling this game. so I don't think anyone is out there to stop you from just exploring it on your own. Obviously, you have to find some sort of emulator because it's a very old computer game, but if you want to mess around with something and, you know, really get lost in it, I feel like, you know, and I want to say this, this is the word gets a lot of traction and, you know, we're of returnotts, where is guilty of this anything.

A lot of people point to blow the root, and they say the word, Metroidvania. Jared, what do you think? Is that too much? Is there a root there of truth? Okay, so if we're going to define a Metroidvania as an exploratory platformer, then I'd say no, because I don't think below the route is primarily concerned with platforming challenges, which almost all Metroidvanias are to some degree.

I don't know. Well, that may not be, you know, I don't even know if I'm being fair there, because actually there's not much to fall on in Symphony of the Night. So, no, I mean, Symphony of Night's Savania and this, yeah, I'll buy it. Can we call it Donkey Kongavania here? Because there's some of the ladders. Triovania. Yeah, I think I'm actually being unfair there.

Thinking more about it. There's plenty of platformers where there's nothing to actually fall in and die. You just climb and then climb back up. So, sure, why not? Metroidmania, Metroid mania, even. And you do have to get items or spells to solve certain problems and come back to them. So why now? What about you, Diamond?

What do you think? What do you think? I mean, you can see the DNA there. You can see a lot of connective tissue. I made a joke about, you know, breath of wild. But yeah, you get this tool and it lets you safely fall down. Like, there's plenty of Castlevania games that have that as like a spell or something that lets you fall down slowly. And that extends your jump, you know?

Yeah, you're exploring your platform. So, I mean, it's definitely, I'd say it's more of a, you know, a Metroidvania than something like Turrican, for example. You know, I really do. Yeah, sure. Let's do it. There's shops. There's items. You, you know, there's this inventory. There's no, I mean, there's definitely leveling-ish. You know, like you talk to some animals and it gives you, like, more spirit power and you need to raise your spirit power to get certain spells to clear the game. So, well, maybe we just need to drop this whole Metroidvania designation and start calling things root. likes. Oh! Okay. Maybe that's it. That's the answer. There we go. All right, Jeremy. You can officially get rid of Metrovina.com and get rootlite.com. There we go. Get on the ground floor of that. All right. Well, it's getting late where I am, Jared. Thank you so much for joining us. You really went above and beyond here with your passion for Commodore and adventure games. And it was fun to talk about some of these things, you know, some of the games. You know, some of the

we thought about today I have not seen in 40 years and in revisiting them to prep for this podcast I got you know real real time machine vibes like oh my god I haven't seen this in forever what the hell I remember how this works or what the hell I don't remember how this works but those are both those are both valid feelings you know so thank you very much for for joining me on this episode thank you very much for having me this is an enormous amount of fun for me just just I mean I got a chance to wax a few so about old video games and that's always fun and rambling coherently, which is kind of my natural state of being. So, yeah.

And let's also extend thanks one more time to Patreon Ben Hamilton, who requests this episode. I hope you enjoyed it, Ben. Thank you very much. I think Jared and I both learned a lot in having this on our schedule. So, Jared, where on the Internet people find you? And also, what kind of things do you on the Internet? But please tell us more about the Jared life. The Jared like, huh?

All right. Well, let's see. Who the heck am I? I have left the Twitters mostly behind since Muscatan. So how about this? Look for me at limited run games where I work at Press Run. I make books about video games along with Retronauts host Jeremy Parrish. And we are making all kinds of fun stuff, including a wonderful Atari Archives book right now by Kevin Bunch. It is my favorite. favorite book about the Atari 2,600, and I've read most of them. So I really want to encourage you. If you want to enjoy a good book about Atari, if that's your thing, you can find that at Limited Run Games, where I work, Limited Run Games.com. And, you know, it's weird, but I guess I'm going to send you to Instagram. Oh, I don't even know what to do with that. So I am Petty-C-O-M-M-A-J-A-A-R-E-D.

at Instagram where I very rarely post pictures and usually just post screenshots of text using it like Twitter. So that's, yeah, I got problems. And again, thanks for having me. Yes, thank you. And, you know, speaking as press run, I will have a book in that environment eventually based on my retronauts column. So I don't know the timeline of that yet, but that's something that's coming in the future.

Yeah, there's some, thank you. I'm glad you brought that up. You know, we have some neat books, folks. I really do encourage you to go check them out. Jeremy's and the S-Work's books are there, but we've got some new stuff in the pipe. Like, the pipeline is awesome. There's some really neat books coming.

And you're coming sooner rather than later, a lot of them. So I encourage you to keep an eye out for those announcements. Followed press around. Oh, and, you know, if you want to check, theoretically I make a podcast called The Top 100 Games Podcast. I went to a mental hospital for a while and stopped making that, but I'm getting well enough to make more of them, and the legacy episodes are out there.

There's over 70 of those, if you want to get caught up, it's called the Top 100 Games Podcast, and I am going to go and do some more with that soon. So, yeah. Wow, that's good news. So before I get to myself, I'll talk about Retronauts. This is Retronauts. Thank you very much for listening to us.

I believe this is going on the free feed, so you should probably know that, well, of course, we have lots of free episodes, but, but, if you go to patreon.com slash retur nuts, like Ben Hamilton did, he was able to request episodes, but even if you don't go to that high tier, for $3 a month, you get all our episodes one week early, and you get them at a higher quality audio, but for $5 a month, I think that's where the magic happens, because you get exclusive episodes. We make two exclusive episodes every month. I record exclusive columns every week, and then I read them to you. We also have a

community podcast. That's a monthly podcast called This Month in Retronauts. I'm behind that one. We also have a Discord. We got a very friendly Discord. That's also $5. So $3? Not bad. Five dollars? There it is. I think everyone listen to this who would

enjoy some old games talk and sharing experiences like that. I think you want to go for that $5. I'm pensing right now. You want to subscribe at the $5 hour level. That's what I'm getting from our readers. Oh, I feel, wow. You read my thoughts. How'd you do that? As for me personally, I am Diamond Fight. You can find me on most services around

the internet if you look for Fight Club, F-E-I-T. That's my last name, C-L-U-B. That is a weapon, which you cannot find in below the route. Other than that, we're done here, so thank you very much, everyone. Good night. Honey Good times never felt so good on fail so good Fail on Sugar

Good times never felt so good.